The Lobby

hellerphant

Welcome to the new home for the Pixels for Breakfast community. Hope that we turn this place into a treasure trove of awesome discussions, and many game nights and memories.

pyxel

helloooo

hellerphant

pyxel I am sorry you will have to copy your new discussion items over, I was just getting ready to respond to them too haha. Happy to see you here.

pyxel

hellerphant It's alright, once you setup the tags, I'll copy them over here

Mesmaa

hello again

Blu

@hellerphant reminder to change the links and pins and stuff in the discord to point here I guess

hellerphant

HotRice

what the dickens!<

RowaseCarmihara

I am here once more.

Today is good, I finally posted a new blog post about the Sailor Moon JRPG on snes.
https://rinowase.pika.page/posts/sailor-moon-another-story-magical-madness

hellerphant

RowaseCarmihara nice write up. All the math was where it lost me, you kinda had me intrigued before that though. Were all SNES JRPGs filled with complex systems like this? I never really touched the genre back then, and I've been scared to go back and take a look. Earthbound is the only one I have checked out, and it seems fairly simple, just horrible obtuse when it comes to what items do.

RowaseCarmihara

I mean it’s a single equation. I hope that wasn’t the make or break of it for you.

But two things
1) earthbound sucks. Like, it has some very cool ideas with the rolling hp, visual encounters and auto beating trivial encounters. But I recently gave it one more go and while it’s got charm for days I’m just not into it.

2) I would say in general a lot of games have a lot more complexity going on in them than people tend to see. But mostly it’s not pushed. Sailor moon has a lot of weirdness going on I had to understand because it was unclear but it does boil down to “use cluster formation and put your damage dealer in the middle.” So for all that complexity the actual play is extremely simple.

I think if you play one of these without the manual you are being set up for failure. That might be a fault of the game or not but I think the earthbound manual might help with some of those clarity issues.

But at its core earthbound is a simple dragon quest clone with a fun setting twist.

hellerphant

@john did you see Arknights: Endfield? Just exploded into my feeds on the App Store. Looks pretty nice. I want to play more Arknights but I can only download the JP version here.

john

hellerphant i've been waiting for endfield for a few years and it feels very surreal that it actually has released, i've played a few hours and i think i like the combat, i feel like they aped a bit too much from genshin and other open world gachas where it feels like the game refuses to let go of your hand and will repeat basic tutorials multiple times. i also feel like the writing isn't up to par with arknights. i don't want to be only negative, i have hopes that the story will improve the further i get in and the combat is genuinely very fun.

hellerphant

john that’s a shame that the initial impressions are mid. I hope the story picks up. Does the soundtrack still have bangers at least?

john

hellerphant the music that has played so far has been pleasant but i haven't had a boss fight yet which is where some of the biggest arknights bangers came from, i love this bring me the horizon sounding ass song
https://youtu.be/saOnB_CRG9Y

hellerphant

Hope everyone survived their Friday. I’m just leaving the office now, 10:30 at night with a beta travelling across the internet to the folks at Microsoft.

I’m tired. So tired.

pyxel

hellerphant I feel ya. I am overhauling the entire economy of our game. It needs to be done by the end of the week so that testers can go wild, and it is really sucking the soul out of me.

I am happy to do it, I get to create tons of excel spreadsheets and I love meself some spreadsheets, it's just the sheer volume of it and the need to keep everything in mind. I feel like a damned Rainman trying to calculate loot drop chances and average gains per item.

hellerphant

pyxel my dude please take care! Sounds like you have been on the death march for a while now. Thankfully I am not pulling insane hours often but there is a lot of shit that is on my plate that is critical and I don’t have the support, so it feels like I’m drowning a bit.

All of the art, right?!

How’s everyone else going? I’m spending family time today but hoping to get some games in late tonight. Also @Johnniewalker and I have been cooking up a little something that MIGHT go up tonight in a very basic form if the kiddo sleeps at a reasonable hour.

pyxel

pyxel Months now, with the brief pause over the holidays. And I still feel kinda guilty for putting in "just" my contract hours while others are going overtime. But then I remind myself that I'm working with one hand tied behind my back at all times and I feel better.

hellerphant

pyxel never feel bad. @Johnniewalker is having the same thing at our studio where he is on a set of contract hours while the rest of us are employees. I know he feels bad about it, but they should hire him full time and then they get the full-time worker.

Although, it kinda sounds like you are just working all the time... and that concerns me. How are you coping?

pyxel

hellerphant I am full-time too, but with the kids I had to keep taking time off, and now with the pre-release crunch there's too many things hinging on me that no one else can do or has the capacity to do. It is creating some tension for sure, both within me and at home, but there's the carrot of a release bonus. And I want that carrot to be as fat as possible.

I'm not working all the time, though it does seem like it. I have a lot of breaks throughout the day - mostly to help out with the kids, cook, literally take a nap, or play something for 30 minutes. But it adds up fairly quickly so I on same days end up working late to just meet the basic hour quota. For example this month I've done only 4 hours of overtime so far.