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Feldherren
Feb 21, 2011
You could just change the Ship Data header to 'Equipped' or 'Piloted', or something like that, for the current ship, and 'Selected' or 'Comparing' for the ship you're comparing. You could also change the background colour of each panel (though I'm not sure what colours would indicate 'in use' and 'not in use').

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Feldherren
Feb 21, 2011
I dabble in game design, but you've actually produced something so that puts you quite ahead of me. Unless I see something obvious to point out, I generally think you know better what you're doing than I do; it's your game, after all. So far it's all been pretty interesting to me, and the problem-solving is something I can appreciate both as a programmer in my actual job and regarding that dabbling of mine.

Everyone's point about needing something to discuss seems pretty accurate, given I only chipped in when you mentioned an issue and I had something to suggest.
I think one of the things other LPs have that your one doesn't, and that may be reducing the likelihood of readers participating, is ... for 99.9% of the rest of the LPs out there, someone else will have played the game in question and hence have their own experiences with the game to relate to and go 'wow, I didn't know you could do that' or 'you missed X' about. Since you're making the game in question, this obviously isn't possible to that degree yet, but when you have something of a game to play, making that available to readers might lead to more input.

Feldherren
Feb 21, 2011
As a not-terribly-good programmer who uses notepad more often than something with actual debug tools, my first thought would be to just litter everything with debug output to the console. In this case, whatever you're passing to the routines that draw the bullets, and whatever the routines are drawing. I'm not familiar with how you've written it, but if it jumps or stops I'd guess that the first bullet isn't getting its position updated along with its neighbours or something.

Is it every line when it approaches the top of the screen, or just every few lines?

Feldherren
Feb 21, 2011
The problem with procedurally-generated descriptions of that sort is you need to do a lot of work to prevent them from looking very samey. With the example given, players are going to very quickly notice that the general structure is the same, probably as soon as the second time they see it.
It is possible to also vary the overall structure, by using multiple levels of randomisation (randomly pick the structure, then fill in the smaller random elements), but it's a lot of work to make something look unique, and it's spoiled as soon as one general structure repeats itself if the player has a functioning memory. It's easier to spot repetition in structure the longer the framing structure is, mind you, so for short things (like [adjective] [noun] structure), it takes longer to look samey, because it's such a common structure in general.
Just look at Dwarf Fortress' semi-randomly generated artefacts, or dwarf descriptions; they're all fill-in-blank segments slotted together as appropriate, and they're all very recognisable as what they are because the structure doesn't change.

That said, weapons and stuff...

Peacemaker (Primary/Secondary Weapon?)
I've made his peace with myself.
A weapon for pacifists. Does short-lived bad things to the target's weapon systems, preventing them from shooting as often (or at all) for a while, but doesn't deal any damage itself. It's probably relatively-easy to harden a ship's systems against this kind of thing, so this may be less effective, or not effective at all, against more powerful enemies.

Ace in the Hole (Active Weapon)
Short range, single projectile, but high power. Not sure if this would be balanced on bosses, but the idea is it's a pretty-much-melee thing that you can't do too often, and is risky to use, but has a high payoff.

Dilly Dally (Active Weapon)
Doesn't deal much damage, but causes the enemy to move and/or fire slower for a bit when used (and maybe bullets, too?). Reduced effect on bosses.

Big Guns (Trinket)
The designer of this weapon system augmentation clearly believed that bigger was resoundingly better. You're not too sure; certainly your projectiles are larger, but they also seem more diffuse.
Makes your bullets bigger. Maybe comically bigger. Reduces overall power in accordance with how much larger it makes the bullets, though.

Fair Shake (Trinket)
Every time your ship or shields gets hit (or grazes?), this retaliates with a shot of its own - a basic bullet, not too powerful, but a free shot. Something about harvesting and redirecting energy or material from what people shoot at you.

Piecemaker (Trinket)
Makes your weapons break bits of gribble off of the target when they hit. Maybe gradually debuffs the target. Maybe serves as an indicator of total target health, if it's not displayed. I don't know, the idea just sounds fun, but it also sounds like a pain to animate and an annoying change to make.

Feldherren fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Feb 12, 2018

Feldherren
Feb 21, 2011

Elentor posted:

4b) Even if you can in theory go anywhere, it's still possible, theoretically, if your stats are impossibly bad and your stage selection poor, that you run into a very, very bad situation.

To a degree, this is a very key part of the roguelike and roguelite genres. Luck is always going to be a factor when any part of your progression, including the enemies you need to fight to progress, are randomly determined (I've been watching a friend try out a few randomizers lately with random map options, and they've had a run where the first or second room had a pretty tough set of enemies right out of the gate). What makes the luck based nature of these games workable (and enjoyable) is usually one or more of the following factors to ameliorate bad luck:

1. Player skill. The game is set up such that even with poor stats/equipment, the player's knowledge and skill attained over however many runs they've had to date is a huge asset just by itself. Though sometimes this comes down to knowing when to run away or knowing to keep ahold of literally everything you find early on because you know how it can be useful against randomly-spawned threatening things, or just to keep it out of the hands of gnomes.

2. Gradual accruing bonuses that carry over from playthrough to playthrough. Building up a town and/or depositing items in a persistent storage for use on future runs.

3. Quick turnover, and making it easy to get back to where you were. Usually accomplished by a game being short, sometimes accomplished by shortcuts.

Heroes of Hammerwatch relies on all three. Spelunky mostly uses 1, but as the player dies and plays again, they can spend money inside a game to unlock shortcuts available outside of that particular run, so points 2 and 3 are valid here, too. Console roguelikes (probably most notably the Mysterious Dungeon series and any roguelike based on that series) tend to lean heavily on 2, as do the Digimon-raising Digimon World games, come to think of it, with inheritance, and completely sidestep 3 because you usually can't get game-overs. Tales of Maj'Eyal relies on 1 and 2 (progress far enough in one playthrough and you permanently get access to storage in all future playthroughs, complete certain conditions or quests and you get access to new classes, et cetera), but it can be pretty slow getting back to where you were in terms of progress.

In this case I imagine it's mostly going to be 1, player skill, making progress easier as the player grows more familiar with the enemy AI, stage elements, and learns to recognise particular bullets, for possible examples.

What situations do you think a player will get stuck in? Should they die, how much time will it take to get back to where they were previously? If the game ends up generating enemies that are impossible for the player to damage, or have a counter-type weapon that'll murder the player, can they just circumvent the issue by playing pacifist for the entire stage, or something slightly counter-intuitive but viable like that?

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