Diego

Thought this was pretty interesting. It's amazing how extraordinary this company was. I had no idea ECS was created in Looking Glass, as it's such a well known design for games nowadays.

It's looking better and better. I played what was done a few years ago and left it alone. I'm going to wait for it to be completely done to dive back in.

Hah every now and then I get emails from this thread and watch fun random videos. Here's my contribution.

For absolute beginners it might be a challenge, but the game overall shows too much technical competence to convince me that was the case here. And I'm also complaining about it. I think it lacks follow-through.

Hah I knew I would find a thread about Filcher here. I just played for a couple of hours. What I really liked about it is that it addressed the elephant in the room when it comes to this flavor of stealth games: the fuckup cascade issue. This gameplay shines when we are in the flow, exploring cautiously, making progress, etc. Then we make a mistake, go back in time a few minutes, and the satisfaction and reward of the experience diminishes because we know what lies ahead. It's the kind of incongruent design that's difficult to tackle. Like Sonic games, where you have to go fast, then get punished for going fast with spikes. I say they tackled this by removing saves and making the levels shorter and a little easier. But then as the campaign progresses, the levels start to get longer and harder and we end up having both the original problem of Thief compounded with the frustration of having to restart from the beginning every time. But it was fun.

It's an AI image generator, but the latest version is more sophisticated and can work from starting images. It's very much an AI generated image that resembles the original, with added things from a prompt. It also allows for continuous iteration. Like, usually these models start from random values and denoise it slowly using a transformer until it looks like a thing. And the only way to adjust small things is to start from scratch. But this model actually allows for adjustments midway. (EDIT: so I could say, after that generation, "make the shadows a bit darker" and it would continue from this image instead of starting anew) I'm just giving you the basic idea I read somewhere though. I'm not an expert on this thing.

Asked ChatGPT to take this random screenshot from the metal age and "turn RTX on". just for giggles. Looks nice.

Something about clean water too. Put a little alcohol in your water and it's safer. I don't know if they knew what was happening. Surely they didn't know about microbes but they might have noticed the correlation of getting sick less often when they put a bit of alcohol in the water.

2020 too? haha I have a four year old as well. It's a whole different life. It gets easier, and we get a little more efficient too. EDIT: just released a playable prototype, if anyone wants to check it out https://diegzumillo.itch.io/the-eldritch-monarch

There's a pretty active dev scene for retro consoles. And they can sell well, as long as you also offer them on modern platforms. Personally, I like the console and I like the self imposed limitations. I find them creatively stimulating. Work on the demo has been soul crushing. I wasn't going to make one, because I thought it wouldn't need it. But seeing the launch flop I decided I had to make one. But it's a lot of work for such small amount of time. Implemented a bunch of new systems while designing the thing and I didn't even get to make the tilesets yet. (I have some half done I can use)

Guys. Turns out having a kid is a lot more work than I anticipated. And I anticipated it would be the most exhaustive thing in my life, just to give you an idea. I'm a little thrown off by the fact I created this topic almost 5 years ago. I missed five seasonal visits to this forum! That megadrive project actually became a kickstarter campaign. Which is struggling, and probably won't succeed. I'm not throwing the towel yet. Currently working on a demo to spruce up the campaign. I'm quite proud of the trailer! Anyway, I'm just taking a look at all your projects and updates!

So sad to learn about this.