Month: April 2024

The Planet Crafter

Ed Note: It would be much easier to just call the game Planet Crafter, but since the game’s title is The Planet Crafter, and SEO exists, I’ll be writing the full title each time.

I like The Planet Crafter. I’m saying that now because a lot of things I’m about to say might give an impression otherwise. So I want to get this out there: It’s a fun game.

It’s just kind of weird.

A lot of games describe themselves as offspring of other games, and you could do that for The Planet Crafter. You could say it’s descended from Cookie Clicker and Satisfactory.

But The Planet Crafter doesn’t come from a happy home. Instead, after the divorce Cookie Clicker got full custody until about the 13 hour mark, when Satisfactory finally got parental visitation rights back, and finally got to introduce The Planet Crafter to the idea of automation.

It’s a weird balance. Much of the play time is spent building structures to make numbers go up, so that you can unlock other structures to make numbers go up faster, in what feels at least like an idle game sort of structure. Eventually you get automation, and it’s possible to make some things automatic. But the game isn’t really about those systems.

For example, electricity generators don’t need to be connected to structures they’re powering, so the game doesn’t really lean into “Optimize the placements of inputs and outputs” the way Factorio and Satisfactory do. It sort of just trundles along. Even the structures that are dependent on placement don’t require too much effort to optimize. They each only boost up to eight nearby structures, and it’s pretty easy to just plop them in range.

General Funkiness

Undertale, one of my favorite games of all time, was made in GameMaker, a development choice that has big “In a cave, with a box of scraps” energy. It’s a good reminder that games are ultimately judged on if they are fun, and not much else.

It’s a thought that has stuck with me through most of my time with The Planet Crafter. The game is just kind of wonky, and there are a lot of funky decisions that make you wonder if the game works this way by design, or just because the developers couldn’t do something they wanted.

As an example, a large portion of The Planet Crafter is just walking around and grabbing stones, then running back to your space shack to refill on oxygen.

Sure, there’s also some building, but a lot of the early game is walking and picking up rocks by pointing your rock pickup beam at them until they are picked up. Somehow, an experience I could replicate in my driveway becomes absolutely thrilling the second I need some more iron to put up another wind turbine.

The thing is, this sort of functional design works here. The building is pretty much fine. Buildings don’t always go where you want, but because deconstructing anything gives a full resource refund, it’s pretty easy to fix any problems. The text on items isn’t always 100% accurate to what they actually do, but with the occasional exceptions of the rockets that cause asteroid storms, it mostly doesn’t matter. The units used on certain measurements aren’t correct, but only one person I played with noticed that.

That’s not to say everything functions. Some parts are just plain broken. The worst offender of this is the game’s mini map, which you can only move by clicking on in-game arrows. You can’t pan it by clicking and dragging, it doesn’t save your place, and the only overlay options available are basically useless. Also, it doesn’t really appear to be a minimap, just a camera that’s positioned up above the skybox that faces straight down.

And speaking of systems that mostly work…

Multiplayer

The Planet Crafter multiplayer is another example of “This system is functional, occasionally breaks, but is also just a bit weird.” Outside of a few times where I’ve disconnected, and some items disappearing it mostly works! But it also doesn’t let you join from the Steam menu, and doesn’t have dedicated servers.

The one big thing about multiplayer, though, is that it lets you really divide and conquer. One person can be out exploring while another is building more production, and a third is messing with the game’s somewhat weird systems for capturing butterflies and animals. It feels like it would be an exhausting game to play on my own.

Overall

As I said in the start, I like The Planet Crafter. It’s a bit wonky, and unpolished in areas. But it’s incredibly fun to play, and I can’t think of another game that gives quite the same sense of the world being changed as the result of your actions.

Turning a corner and seeing a forest where it was once completely barren, or seeing the sky change color is a oddly magical experience.

PAX East – The Card Game Post

Card games? Card games! One of the great things about PAX East is that there are an incredible variety of new card games and weird TCG’s to play. In this post, I’ll be quickly going over what I saw, and what I enjoyed, and also what I didn’t.

The Good

These are all the games I recommend at least trying if you get a chance. Am I going to collect them myself? Not necessarily, but I do enjoy playing them, and would play them again.

Here Be Monsters

Here There Be Monsters is a placement and ability-driven head-to-head battler with a sort of wacky pirate theme. It was in Unpub, and unfinished, but was fun enough for me to play 3 games of it—which is rare for something in Unpub. The core mechanics felt like they were almost where they needed to be, but the cards themselves did have some balance issues.

I’m hopeful that I’ll get to see more of this game, though I’m not sure when. There’s a lot of promise here, and the core mechanics are fun.

Altered

It feels like we’re in a bit of a TCG gold rush at the moment. Altered raised over $7 million kickstarter. I didn’t back it for various reasons, but mostly a distaste of said gold rush.

That said, I will absolutely not turn down a chance to try to play new card games, so I did play it. It’s neat, and doing some fairly different stuff. There’s no direct combat; instead it’s effectively a series of cost checks, where you and your opponent try to have the most of a given value present at one of two locations. While what I played didn’t sell me on buying a case, it did convince me that it might not just be an attempt to cash in.

Star Wars: Unlimited

I actually rather like Star Wars: Unlimited. It’s just unfortunate that I’m not a Star Wars person; I actually find the Star Wars theming a bit of a turn off. But I’ve found the gameplay of all the demos I’ve played quite enjoyable. They’ve got a nice tension to them, and that’s enough to put it into the good category.

PAX is also a great opportunity to grab all the promos.

The Bad

Despite the title of this section, these aren’t necessarily bad games. They are, however, (based on what I played) games I will never demo or touch again unless I am paid cash to do so.

Flesh and Blood

I’d heard a lot of good things about Flesh and Blood over the years, and it’s one of the mid-level TCG’s that seems to have clawed itself a spot at various local game stores. So I’ve been curious about it for a while, and at one point even thought about picking up a starter set.

Holy crap, am I glad I didn’t. I hate this game. I pretty much just quit halfway through, and didn’t even grab the simple starter deck.

The short version is that I just found Flesh and Blood both boring and frustrating, and it felt more akin to playing a fighting game than a card game.

UniVersus

The best thing I can say about playing UniVersus is: UniVersus made it clear that I just don’t like the alternating turns of attack and defense pattern that both it and Flesh and Blood seem to be using.

It just never clicked, and I never had fun. I’m sure I’ll get plastered for this, but both of these demos felt random. They felt like I was missing much of the critical information I needed to make meaningful strategic choices. And the remaining choices—the tactical ones—were boring to me.

The Ugly

Welcome to the bad vibes section. It’s not even the mechanics for this one.

Gem Blenders

I wrote a bit about Gem Blenders a while back, and I was pleased to see they were still around, and had a booth. But I was somewhat dismayed to learn that with their switch to a full TCG model, they also switched their card backs. Meaning that if you purchased their earlier base set, the game is no longer compatible.

It just doesn’t feel great, y’know? Anyway, that lands them in ugly.

Final Fantasy TCG

Not good, not bad, just sorta there. Maybe this would have landed better another year, but I just didn’t get anything out of this one. Honestly, I felt a bit bad for the enforcer and 3 other folks total I saw playing the game over the con. It follows a weird version of MTG’s resource system that I found both very slow, and not too fun.

The Eclipse Was Cool

So, I got to see the totality yesterday. In a fair world, this would have been something I planned for, and then executed that plan. Instead, a bunch of my friends were going to see it, so I kind of just grabbed a lawn chair, hopped in their car, and rode with them.

Traffic was pretty light on the way up. Dense, but it was still possible to drive the speed limit. It took maybe an hour and a half to get to Crystal Lake Park in Barton VT from our starting location. The place was pretty packed up, so we parked nearby, and carted stuff into the park.

The park itself was nice, but the recent snow melted off pretty quickly, so things rapidly went from damp to wet. At this point, it was maybe 11:00, so we sat down, waited, cracked jokes, and ate food and had soda. Not too much though.

It turns out that the real limiting reagent for staying at the park was access to bathrooms. There were 3 portable toilets, and what felt like 500-1000 people, if not more.

Outside of that, we had enough food, water, and other supplies to last quite a while.

And then the eclipse started.

The Eclipse

The eclipse is cool, but for me, it was mostly interesting because of the tension that arose from the impending totality. It’s fun to look up with your glasses and see the sun start to get covered up, but it’s more a “Hmm, neat” sort of experience. At least to start.

As things got closer, everything started to feel slight weird. It had been a very bright day, and all of sudden, it was not so bright, and I didn’t need the sunglasses I had been wearing. It had been a very warm day, and all of sudden it got a bit colder. That said, most of this didn’t feel super apparent until maybe 70-85% of the sun was covered, at which point things started to feel a bit weird.

And then we hit totality.

Totality

I’ve seen photos of totality before. They don’t capture the experience. I can tell you that the sun turned into a black hole in the sky surrounded by a white corona, but just saying it isn’t the same. I can tell you that at 3:00 PM, that everything went from feeling like a quiet afternoon, to a deep summer’s 7:00 PM. I can tell you that the temperature dropped; but instead of a creeping chill, all of a sudden it was just cold.

It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever witnessed. There are no photos or video I could take to do it justice, and the ones I did absolutely don’t. To look up, and see a hole in the sky, to be able to just stare at the sun is insane. For the light to just vanish mid-day is crazy.

It’s the sort of thing you witness, and you understand why you could found a religion on something like this.

And then it was over. It lasted just under 3 minutes. Shorter than it took me to write this paragraph.

Drive Back

We waited a few hours after it finished to head back home.

Remember how I mentioned that traffic was dense, but manageable on the way down? Yeah, absolutely not on the way back. A one hour trip easily became a four hour one. This (and some sunburn that I absolutely could have avoided) was the only real downside to this trip. There was a ridiculous number of cars on the road, and we slowed to a crawl. We were lucky to be able to go 20 MPH; mostly it was stop and go.

Worth It?

It’s tricky to assess the value of an experience. The costs to me were low.
I took a day off work, rode in a friend’s car, and ate other people’s food. Outside of the mild sun burn, I did not have a very difficult time. My costs were pretty much non-existent.

That wasn’t a universal experience though.

There was a family behind us who’d come up from Massachusetts. It’s a bit longer of a drive, but they were there because they’d tried to see the eclipse in 2017, but it had been cloudy. They’d then tried to schedule to see it in Texas, but after flying down to Texas, they realized it was looking like wasn’t gonna work out yet again, so they cut their trip short, flew back to the East Coast, and drove all the way up to the same park we were at.

They also seemed to think it was pretty cool, but they had a different set of
costs for the experience.

Why did I write this?

Gametrodon is technically my longest running project. In some ways, it’s not very successful. In other ways, it has done some of what I intended.

Ultimately, it’s a very abstract thing. It’s way of displaying text in a manner that could theoretically be seen by anyone in the world who wants to read it, to a world that doesn’t know or care that it exists.

All of that text is about self imposed little worlds; little places where we make up rules about how things work, and I write about how those rules feel.

Most days I’m okay with that.

The eclipse, and the totality was in some ways the opposite of that. It’s a reminder that what I actually am is a single lump of chemicals that lives on a small rock, surrounded by a slightly smaller rock, circling a ball of fire. And sometimes those rocks line up just right.

Those rocks will outlive the memory of anything I have ever written, anything anyone alive right now has written, and perhaps the idea of writing itself.

The next continental eclipse will apparently be happening in 2045 or so, by which point I’ll be over 50. Statistically, I’ll probably have lived most of my life by then.

Will this site still be up? I don’t know.

Will I remember seeing the last eclipse? I suspect the answer is no.

My memory isn’t very good. At some point, maybe in a week, maybe a month, maybe a year, I’ll forget.

I’ll forget what it’s like to look up at the sky, and see the sun with a hole punched through it, and a shimmering white crown around its edges. I’ll forget the quiet, the darkness, the cold, and all the little reminders that my existence is the result of good fortune whose odds are so incredibly low that I cannot perceive them. I’ll forget that I live on a rock, in the middle of infinite nothing, next to a ball of fire.

Hopefully when I do, I find this post.

And I’ll be briefly reminded.

PAX Report – Path of Exile 2

So, one of the coolest things I got to do at PAX was sit down and see the media demo for Path of Exile 2. I’d like to thank the folks Grinding Gear Games and Octavian0/Chris for showing me the game, since I’m obviously a much smaller outlet than a lot of other folks. If you’re curious about why you should care about my opinion click here.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a bunch of interesting small things, but as someone who previously played a bunch of PoE, two things stood out to me from the demo:

  1. A focus on making the game much more reactive than Path of Exile is.
  2. An intention to simplify the parts of the game that can be simplified.

Let’s go through them!

Increased Reactivity, Less Spamming

There were two big sets of changes I saw in the media demo of Path of Exile 2, and the demo I played. The first was that bosses felt and played differently than in the first game. I watched one boss fight thathad a sort of bullet hell sub-mechanic, and I fought against two bosses in the demo.

Of those bosses, the demo’s version of “Hillock” is a good example here. Hillock is the very first sort of mini-boss in the game, and he’s just a big chonky dude. In PoE, he just runs at the player, so you kite him back, and whack him down.

In Path of Exile 2, the boss has a much larger variety of attacks, including summoning packs of zombies, and a ground targeted panel that crosses a large portion of the screen and has to be dodged with the game’s new roll/dash. Plus, Hillock was just generally much more aggressive with its gap closers.

On the player’s side of the media demo, Octavian0 showed off a much larger level of interactivity between skills than I’ve seen previously in PoE. This included things like: throwing down clouds of poisonous gas and igniting them with fire; and setting up plants to grow over time, but that can be detonated early by casting another skill onto them. Instead of just having PoE’s synergy between skills, there was real interactivity between them.

Simplification

This might sound bad, but it really isn’t. In this case, I’m mostly talking about simplifying some of PoE’s internal systems, specifically mechanics around getting early game items.

I saw two big examples of this. The first was skill gems. Instead of single gems, gems now come as uncut gems that when dropped, and you use them to choose what skill you need.

The second was around…. GOLD. Yes, PoE has gold now, but it seems like it’s mostly to buy campaign items from vendors. And honestly, it feels like a really good change for onboarding. I’m someone who loves PoE’s economy, but asking a new player to understand the idea of alterations and chromas and vendor recipes, as well as the skill tree has always felt like a bit much when I try to get new friends into the game.

So yeah. Simplification of systems that can be simplified.

Some Other Notes, and Neat Stuff

I’m just gonna be rambling now, but there was a bunch of other cool stuff I saw. For example, there are gonna be mounts! And Rhoas have been been redesigned look more like Chocobos, and less like head-crabs with legs.

The WASD movement feels great, as does the dodge roll. It honestly feels better than right clicking. There are skills on weapons, so that seems neat. Also, many bosses seem to build up stun, giving them a much nicer sense of pacing than “dodge dodge dodge dodge pray flask dodge”.

Overall, after what I’ve seen, I’m really excited for Path of Exile 2. It’s gonna be a different game, and potentially a much harder one, but it looks incredibly fun. It’s trying to address a lot of the problems Path of Exile has, just as a result of 10 years of incremental updates.

My Background

I like Path of Exile. How much do I like Path of Exile? Well, here’s my Steam playtime.

And this before I switched over to the single player client, where a majority of my play time is.

For fellow PoE players, who are going “Yeah, but for all we know, that was spent farming tab cards in Blood Aqueducts,” I offer the following notes.

  • I killed Uber Elder when it was peak end game boss.
  • I almost exclusively play necro/summoners, but I’ve also played trappers/miners in a few leagues.
  • Most of my playtime was between Delve League, and Echos of the Atlas, with a smattering afterwards, so I am a bit out of date. That said, I tried to chat with some folks who have played more recently, and did a quick act 1 run for comparison with the demo I played at PAX East.

Legend of Mushroom

Legend of Mushroom confuses me. It is, technically, a video game. It is technically a video game that I have played a lot of. But in the grand scheme of things, if the average free to play game is a lure on a fishing line, Legend of Mushroom is made entirely out of hooks. It has no real bait aside from pretty graphics, and the most bare bones of dopamine reward loops. I’ve written about idle games before. Legend of Mushroom is different.

It looks like a game. It feels like a game. But much like John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the second the flesh peels back, it becomes apparent that what you are dealing with is not of this earth, and would terrify even the devil.

Mechanically, Legend of Mushroom is what you get when you set out to make a Skinner box game, and do the Skinner box part, but forget the game. Every mechanic in the game is accompanied by bells, whistles, and a complete absence of player agency.

There’s a battle system, but you can just have all your skills auto-cast. There’s a gear system, but all gear is from a random lootbox, and after 15 days, I’m still not at a point where anything matters for the gear other then bigger numbers. There’s a pet/skill system, but getting pets and skills is, again, a random lootbox. You can’t really make builds, and the better ones are so much better that there’s no reason to not just slot them in.

And yet, technically, I have “played” this game for 15 days. In that time, I don’t think I’ve made any meaningful decisions about gameplay. Instead, I have just clicked on the things to be clicked, and then watched ads. And then I have watched more ads, to get more things.

Why bother writing about it?

Two reasons. One is the fact that after writing about this sort of game, I tend to stop playing. Writing purges any desire I have to continue. The second is that, as always, these sorts of games have some weird shit going on.

The standard weird shit is that one of the events the game is currently running is an event for spending money. Not too uncommon. But the amounts of money are just plain bonkers, especially for a game with no game play.

The game has another weird system though. It’s referred to in-game as the “Employment” system.

Here’s the UI.

You might now understand why I put those quotes up there. It’s also not really thematically about employment, because I’m unaware of a system of employment in which someone just beats you up, chains you in a basement, and extracts wealth from you until you either break free, or someone else sets you free.

That’s just called slavery. I’m not sure why the cute mushroom game has a system for taking other players as slaves, but is does, so that’s neat.

Conclusion

There is no reason to ever play Legend of Mushroom, and with this post, I am free from its grip. If you for any reason, were tempted to play, don’t. If you were tempted to spend money in Legend of Mushroom, do something more productive with it, like buying drugs, or lottery tickets.

Or setting it on fire.

Or “investing” in crypto.