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Game Ramblings #205 – SteamWorld: Build

More Info from The Station / Thunderful

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch

I know it may seem weird to play a city builder on console and I can’t say I really disagree. However, one of the things that I’ve been poking around with as UE5 R&D is a set of gameplay systems around top-down grid-based gameplay, so this kind of fit the bill as something I should at least give a look. What this turned out to be was a wonderfully compact city builder that may be a bit on the simple side, but also made sure it was complete before it wore out its welcome.

This has all the pieces to make a fun city builder, but admittedly the city building is the part that I probably spent the least time in. It has some interest in that housing is upgradeable. You go from workers to engineers to aristocrats to scientists in tiers, and each one is its own class of employee for specific buildings. However, it’s all simple. You kind of just do it in order. You have a ton of different building types that generate different resources that leads up to the final resource to shoot a rocket into space. But again, it’s all simple. You place them down, location isn’t really important, and they are all necessary to get to the end game. You again kind of just do it in order.

The real interest of the game for me was the mining section. This isn’t really all that different from the city building in that you’re placing down workers and buildings to achieve a goal but it feels much more nuanced in a positive way. For one thing, placement does end up mattering.

This is a bit of a long-term change over a play session, but placement of where you put things changes pretty drastically over the course of a play through. At first you’re placing down workers wherever they fit and making it work. They all mine manually, they collect resources manually, and you push through. By the second mine level you start getting enemies, so now placement of defenses matters. The ultimate goal is to be efficient with your outgoing money, so catching as many enemies as possible with weapons means fewer costs to defense bots and a better run city. You also get access to conveyor belts at this level. This allowed me to basically automate resource gathering, but with the caveat that conveyors cannot run through pillars supporting the mine ceilings or camps supporting the workers. Again, placement gets more important as does the general efficiency of building the conveyors. By the third mine level you earn teleporters, which now had me min-maxing where I’m placing camps. Camps were far away from resources with a teleport network connecting important spots, then conveyors linked resources automatically to the surface. Maxing the resource gathering let me maximize trading, allowing me to then maximize money generation.

Admittedly part of the interest here is also that you are to some extent directly manipulating your citizens. You’re sending your miners or prospectors or defense robots to the locations that you want them to be investigating. It’s again pretty simple, but even that small bit of interaction is a lot to add some variety and direct presence to how you’re interacting with the game.

The mine section of the game is where I got it. I just wish there was more tying this to the surface game. I want the surface gameplay to make me also efficiently move resources out of the mine and to both workplaces and housing that need them. Right now it’s just kind of too simple. There’s technically resource movers from warehouses to work sites, but the layer of mine to warehouses is automatic. This level brings to mind possibilities from games like Pharaoh or Timberborn where efficient movement of goods isn’t just there but is crucial to a well run city, and I think this is where the general gameplay has the most chance of growth in a sequel.

However, the main reason I was playing was to check out the gamepad integration and this was surprisingly elegant and far more useable than I imagined a game of this type would be. There’s basically two places you can be interacting with at any time – build menus or the world. You switch between them with the press of a button, which served as a really consistent and clean way in both the city and mine segments to quickly change your mindset. This is helped by the build UI going away when you’re in city mode to reinforce the change.

The other thing that surprised me in its simplicity was that they just totally did away with a virtual mouse cursor when interacting with the city. You are just locked to the center of the screen, and whatever is there is what you can select. I honestly expected this to be really restricting, but it generally just worked. There’s definitely some oddities around the edge of cells where you can get stuck quickly swapping between adjacent cells, but the game largely just worked well with screen center selection. I suspect that this is a combination of buildings generally being large in screen, but you can scroll around the world visually pretty quickly and lock in one what you need easily so it easily exceeded my expectations.

It’s not necessarily what they appear to have been going for but there’s definitely a good city builder within the mechanics of this game. It just needs to have a bit more breadth to everything. Resource gathering needs to be less easy to just max out while resource movement needs to be more important. Building new things need to be a more impactful decision making moment instead of just build in order. The location of housing relative to goods could stand to be more important. Growth through worker types could stand to be a little less rigid – instead of requiring everything, let it be some combination of a list of things with the player steering the direction of city growth. Maps could have resource restrictions, allowing for the trade system to have more importance. Mechanically the pieces are all there for a sequel to push further into the genre, rather than being what feels like a starter entry to the genre.

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Game Ramblings #204 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

More Info from Sandfall Interactive

  • Genre: Turn-Based RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows

All this game really needs to be an all timer for me is more granular gameplay settings.

….ok lemme back up a bit, but this is truly going to be full on rambling today.

This game is simply exhausting. That isn’t necessarily as negative as it sounds. Really what it comes down to is a need to be focused at all times, and that ultimately leads into both the things that really burned me out on the combat in this game, as well as where I think they are a couple tweaks away from being simply a very good game into something that is truly timeless.

This game’s combat is really focused around actively avoiding damage. That’s something that’s been done before in JRPG-style combat, but it’s incredibly present here. Being hit in boss battles is often 20+% in one hit, and bosses often have entire attack chains, and later bosses in particular have multiple turns of entire attack chains, so you are always in a condition where screwing up your dodge/parry timing at the start of a chain is potentially immediately deadly. The problem for me is in how precise this all needs to be, and that’s totally a me problem.

Being extremely precise in this combat is a factor of a few things:

  • Learning the attack tells is part of it.
  • Leaning the specific timing is then part of it.
  • Quickly processing what type of defense you need to do is then part of it – is it a dodge, jump, or parry? You’ve got 4 buttons to choose from very quickly.
  • Consistently achieving that so you aren’t wasting your turns on healing is then part of it.

To some extent I just generally don’t think their combat tells are that well telegraphed. A lot of the animations do this thing where they run incredibly slow to start, then speed up without notice to do the attack. When you combine inherent input latency, frame latency to the screen, and inherent fatigue this can really quickly get to a point where I was just always a couple frames late on attacks. This is something that I think they got a better handle on later in development because later bosses particularly start making much better use of sound as part of the tells instead of pure animation, but it felt somewhat like too little too late. However, that really was not my core problem.

The issue that I consistently ran into was that whether or not I actually enjoyed combat or whether or not I wanted to spike my controller was generally based on how much sleep my 1 and 3 year olds let me get the night before. The very precise timing here both required very good focus, but also good memorization and reflexes. Those go away quickly with weird sleep patterns. That focus then causes me to mentally get exhausted quickly especially when I am already tired, leading to further degradation of my experience. Normally my instinct is to then reduce difficulty a bit, but this game simply has one setting – story mode difficulty. This does a few things, one of which is aggressively increase the dodge/parry timing window. The other is that it basically cuts damage by what felt like 90%. This is not what I want.

I see an opportunity here for the game to very quickly allow the player to tune combat to what their comfort level is:

  • They clearly have the tech to change incoming damage, so rather than being a core nuke on story mode why not allow the player to tune this a bit more? Frankly this isn’t something I wanted to change at all, but being able to tune this separate from timing would allow for more granular tweaks to my gameplay. This also then inherently opens up an opportunity for players that want a harder base level experience to take more damage without necessarily having to go to expert mode.
  • They also clearly have the tech to change the timing window on dodges and parries. I don’t want to tune the timing window all the way to where story mode landed. Really what I wanted was just a couple frames more to account for what felt to me like local latency that I was constantly fighting against.

Ultimately I suppose I think that timing-based gameplay that the user can’t tweak is bad design. It completely ignores the reality that there is a huge disparity in people’s setups that can add a lot of latency. TV screens are wildly different from each other. Adding amps can add latency. Even just the difference between the development environment on low latency PC screens can wildly throw off balance when moving over to a console. It’s pretty frustrating to not be able to modify this a little more specifically when this is not an entirely new thing. Hell, this is entirely why Guitar Hero has their timing configuration screen!

This is something that I really fight for in games I develop. I really hate on/off settings. If I’m putting tech in to modify settings then sure – have a set of easy values that players can just poke at for preconfigured settings. However, the tech is there to give more granularity so use it. It’s such an easy accessibility win that really lets players find the game that they want to play. My vision of where difficulty should land for me? Same damage as normal difficulty, 3 or 4 frames extra window for dodge/parry. Other players may want low damage but precise timing. Other players may just want to really ramp it beyond where even expert difficulty is. The tech is there, so use it.

The entire reason these ramblings came together like this for me was that as the game went on the fights clearly got longer and the rewards relative to time spent in combat clearly got worse. It turned into a grind where the game in its early stages was not. This even extended into boss fights where I was spending 3 or 4 turns effectively waiting while the bosses just got chains of attacks off that I had to be perfect on or wipe before I could have a chance at healing. It was just too much focus required for me outside of very short periods of time, which under normal circumstances is not a great way to even play a game where skill via repetition and remembering is important.

The reason why this is all so frustrating is because this is a game that is absolutely worth playing for the setting alone. This is such a good game from the story to the characters to the world. When the combat works for me it is simply world class in terms of JRPG-style combat. All of that makes it just incredibly frustrating when the difficulty choice for me is so easy I’m bored or maybe I got enough sleep today? The thing that gives me some hope is that they are clearly already tweaking difficulty. A recent patch made story mode even more forgiving on timing, so they are at least poking at it still. I just hope that they take it a step further and really allow players to refine their experience with tech that is already underlying the existing difficulties.

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Game Ramblings #203 – Garden Story

More Info from Rose City Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox

There’s some games that I finish and I’m really not sure why. This is one of those. It’s totally a small indie experience where it pulls a lot of things from existing titles at a smaller scope so a lot of the systems don’t feel quite up to scratch. However, it’s got a certain charm that just kept me in the game and it has such low user friction that nothing is ever really stopping me from moving forward. As a result, I just hammered straight through and before I knew it I was done.

Given the similarities to 2D Zelda games combat will obviously be a big focus. If I look at this from a purely combat perspective it really isn’t doing much special. It has a bunch of weapons but in a lot of cases I found them to all be a little off. The first weapon you get is a sword analogue, but if I put it up against a Link’s Awakening sword the hit boxes feel inconsistent, causing a lot of misses. Later in the game you get a sickle that hits twice, but the speed of attacks with it always felt slow enough to not be valuable over other choices. The weapon I ended up using a lot was a parasol due to its rapid attack speed, but it had such a narrow hit box that I was constantly missing smaller enemies by literal pixels.

It was always little things like that that made it feel off compared to the more traditionally AAA titles in this style of game. It wasn’t helped by the lack of secondary items in combat, so for the most part combat was attack spam and dodge. That said, it being a compact indie meant that this was over before it became a problem for me. I was simply finished.

This also extended to the metagame systems in place. There’s a day-night cycle that allows you to do daily missions, but the daily missions are so simple that I was often finishing them before the morning segment of the day. That let me just move the plot forward regularly. There’s a building/crafting system, but it so infrequently required me to build something story-related that I simply skipped it under most circumstances. There are weapon upgrades that require you to farm items, but they often require so few resources and the resources are so easy to get that I never really felt held back in progress. There are side quests that exist and give rewards, but again they are so easy to complete that they might as well just get done but the rewards are so low impact that skipping them is irrelevant.

Again, this is typical of small indie. The systems are there and not damaging to the experience but if they weren’t there they also would not hurt the experience.

So then why do I play indie games like this? Because they’re charming as all hell. The entire premise of the game is that you play as a young grape working as a guardian of a realm of other fruits and vegetables by killing living rot. It’s such a complete theming package from the level of characters all the way up to the world and it all just feels right. You’re helping heal towns so they can get cleaner water or grow plants and ultimately so new plant people can be born on the literal vine. This is the charm that you get from small budget indies. Yes the games may be shorter, but in doing so they are limiting their content scope and allowing themselves to do unique things with theming that you just won’t see at higher budgets.

I suppose ultimately this isn’t really a rambling about much. The game itself could have been any indie game. It probably feels like I’m picking on this specific one but it just happened to be what I pulled at the time. I don’t know that I’ll ever be in a position to make indie games because frankly I enjoy working on larger things. I just love that these things exist in general. I can pull good indies off the shelf and just play them and just finish them. There’s rough edges, there’s missing content, but they’re charming and fun. They’re finishable, and that’s huge.