Video Games and BINGO!

A while ago, I got into speedrunning with one of the most popular games, Super Mario 64. Aside from the usual x-star categories, having watched some, you might have stumbled upon bingo. If you haven't, let me explain.

Video Game Bingo

Example Bingo Field for Super Mario 64 generated on
https://www.speedrunslive.com/tools/sm64-bingo/

In a video game bingo, you complete random mini-challenges. These include  100% completing a level, getting a certain amount of lives, or doing something optional. Whether it's for fun, to beat a specific time or battle other people.^[1] You place the challenges in a 5x5 grid, and as usual, you win by getting a bingo, which is a completed row, column, or diagonal.^[2] Though variants of this requiring you to achieve multiple winning conditions like double or triple bingo exist. You might as well do the whole board, but that defeats the purpose of choice. You could also split into teams and work towards a goal together.^[3] And you can do this with any game!

Bingo field created by
GreenyNeko on bingobaker.com

Can You Make Your Game Bingo Friendly!?

Comparing games like Super Mario 64 and Tetris, we notice a limit during brainstorming mini-challenges for Tetris. Thus certain games, are better suited. But why? A noticeable element is the increased optional content. However, in a rhythm game like Osu!, we have lots of options on what songs to play. We notice a lack of diversity when looking at the bingo I made for this game.^[4] Therefore variety in the optional content of a game is key to make a game Bingo friendly.

Conclusion

Regardless of you trying this for yourself or making your next Bingo-friendly-game. It's a fun way to spice up old completed games or having more fun with friends. You can make your own Bingo card, check out others on Bingosync or SpeedRunsLive, or check out videos on people doing those runs.

Have fun and until next time. :P

^[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQF3AyVlNq0

^[2] https://www.speedrunslive.com/tools/sm64-bingo/

^[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3DuqbqpSaY

^[4] https://bingobaker.com#cfa78ff4d69fc7ed

Among Us Meets Hide-n-Seek Meets Survival Horror

Imposter vision hide-n-seek
by GreenyNeko

Halloween is around the corner, and Corona won't ruin the festive spirit. Even if we may not go outside, we can still celebrate other aspects of Halloween. I also plan to celebrate it. First, I planned to stream VR horror games. However, to appeal to all ages, I decided to go with Among Us instead. But it's not a horror game? Well, not if you play it ordinarily.

Classic Versus Other Game Modes

Voting in normal game
by GreenyNeko

You probably know the classic game mode. Players report dead bodies and call emergency meetings. The crewmates find the imposters and vote them off or complete all tasks. Imposters need to kill enough crewmates, blend in, and sabotage the ship. That is not the only way to play the game, though. People are creative and come up with their own rules, just like when we were young. Hide-n-Seek is one of these made from custom rules. The ability to change those also supports this to a certain degree. Now, how does Hide n Seek work?

Hide-n-Seek Mode

Hide-n-Seek plays with only one imposter. With their view and kill distance set to a minimum, they have to find the crewmates and kill them. Crewmates get a head start and hide on the map. Players don't report bodies, don't call sabotages, and don't press the emergency button.  The last person alive wins when the game ends. A variant of this has the players finish all tasks to win. Another changes the game's settings just a little bit to create a scarier atmosphere.^[1]

Barely outside of imposter vision
by GreenyNeko

Survival Horror Mode

For this mode, the same rules as in Hide-n-Seek apply, but with some changes. First of all, sabotaging communications is allowed. Second, the player view distance now should be below x0.75 to improve the atmosphere. However, it should also be higher than the imposters' view to allow playing around them. I've noticed, when the view distance of the imposter and player is the same, it sometimes feels random to die. If imposter and crewmate view is equal, death seems random. Next up, players who die should stop talking, which helps the atmosphere to make you feel more alone as the game goes on. Switching off common-tasks is recommended since these encourage the imposter to wait for players on these. And lastly, I recommend playing on Skeld.^[2]

Atmosphere & Future Steps

We have a small map with narrow hallways and a maniac running around. Players with a limited field of vision going from crowded to alone filled with dead bodies. The gameplay is comparable to Dead by Daylight, where you need to do tasks to win while avoiding the murderer. Due to the increased view distance, you can outsmart them, saving you with a fast-beating heart. Best of all, this is a spooky experience for all ages! Though, this is honestly just a theory. I'll find it out on Halloween 2020 at 3 pm UTC on my stream. Let's see if I can get this post out before, haha. Happy Halloween!

^[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmongUs/comments/gsm9mu/hide_and_seek_custom_mode/

^[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HryURpJSN4o&t=1h11m14s

Discord Game Bots: From Video Back To Text?

So, I've sort of managed to switch from playing MMORPGs to... discord bot games. Honestly, I didn't even know these existed until now. And no, I'm not talking about the games you play on discord like counting to infinity.

Why Discord

Discord has grown to be a favorite software for many gamers and non-gamers. It combines the ability to talk to people on a server like on Teamspeak, with the ability to share and post information and have private chats like on Skype. With features, such as reactions, embedded audio, images, and videos, and more, I can't deny that I love it myself. The developer interface makes it easy to create your own bots and connect them to your application. This allows for all kinds of abilities such as news, user commands, easier moderating, administration, or... games. With gamers on discord, is it far fetched to have discord bots that feature games?

My Experience With The Bots

So, the three bots I looked at are called OwO, Yui, and Tatsumaki. Each provides some similar, some different, and some completely different commands. I'm not gonna focus on the other ones besides anything related to the game. This means currency commands, game commands, and quests or dailies. The order in which I'm going through these will be from the lowest to highest content.

Yui

Screenshot of the Yui
 Profession Commands
 on Nyaa Langs/kiss Lingo Discord

Yui is a Discord bot written in Java. It features a daily giving you currency as well as commands to level up different professions such as mining, fishing, and chopping. Using it is pretty straight forward actually. Unfortunately, the currency has no use except for a leaderboard. The profession commands give you some respective "Experience" as well as money. Leveling up a skill, thereby increases experience and currency gained by 1%. After a while, the word "Depleted" will be contained in the bot's message, which decreases the chance for higher experience gain and seems to make it impossible to get currency. As much as I would like to get into more detail... this is pretty much it. So, let's move on to something more complete.

Screenshot of the Tatsumaki
Tamagotchi like game
 on Nyaa Langs/Kiss Lingo Discord

Tatsumaki

Tatsumaki is a Discord bot written in Javascript. It contains a lot of features such as experience and leveling by chatting, reputation, searching on the internet, and managing roles. Most prominently, it has a Tamagotchi like game called Tatsugotchi. You start off by entering the  " t!tg " command. This will give you the next command to buy your first one. If you repeat the last command now, you will see the room some status bars and your pet. Thanks to the hint you're shown then, you will know that you have to feed, play, and clean it. It's not necessarily intuitive that the command is the same but with the respective words behind it. (e.g. "t!tg play"). From here on out, it's pretty much just take care of it and train it to level up. You can use the daily currency you get to buy a new one, with the chance of it being rarer. Or use it to have your Tatsugotchi being taken care of automatically. There are also quests you can do each day but are really simplistic. At first, I assumed it would be necessary to have a scale on those bars. Later on, I found out entering the commands takes care of the whole bar making a scale unnecessary. That's quite nice, but let's look at something bigger.

OwO

Screenshot of an on-going
 battle from OwO
on the Nyaa Langs/Kiss
Lingo Discord

Now we're entering the RPG category. Do you like Pokemon? What about RPG? You might love this. The premise is quite simple. You hunt for animals that are put into your zoo. From there on out, you can create a team, sacrifice, or sell them. There are six stats, multiple items, different roles, different weapon bonuses, and - of course - leveling. I'm not going into the detail oh how to play it because that would be worth its own blog post. I have noticed myself, however, that playing this game is tedious if you don't know all the commands. Figuring them out is difficult, and there's no introduction. The website doesn't mention all and how to use them. It actually feels like a step back from what we have learned about game design over the years. This gives OwO a high entry curve. And yet it is still a full-fledged round-based Discord RPG. As there isn't much information about this one, it seems like a good topic for a future theorycrafting post.

Conclusion

So, through the Discord API and interface, we can have players interact with these bots. This is quite interesting and asks questions like, in which ways can the user interact? How can we show information? Which stimuli can we give the user? Where are the limits? And much much more. For now, I'm gonna leave this as is.

Guide to New Raid Bosses

Quite a long title, huh? Well, I've been working mostly on my games homework from university and I'm kinda sick of it right now, haha. xD Anyways, lately I've been asked by a person how we find out so fast on how bosses work so I want to give the people who have no idea some tips.

Brute Force Way

Before I give you some tips let's go most easily: brute force. It basically means, doesn't think too much about keep trying and every time your group wipes try to figure out why and solve the issues at hand. Of course, if you keep this up at some point you survive long enough to kill the boss. Bam, you made it! This doesn't sound too efficient though.

The Basics

Most of the bosses in raids, regardless of the game - yes, you heard right in all games - basically, work with the same mechanics. I mean think about what a game designer can do in a game. Since nearly all MMORPGs work with similar systems like buffs, debuffs, stuns, stun breaks, healing, tanking, collecting, moving and more. Additionally, they inspire each other. Well, since the mechanics reappear throughout different games but mechanics also usually don't change in the game itself and raids are build using the tools already in the game what you have will mostly suit what is needed for a boss.

Just check out the abilities you have and what they do:

• "Deals damage"
• "Stuns the enemy"
• "Breaks a stun"
• "Heals allies"
• "Taunts the enemy"
• "Leaps"
• "Teleports"
• etc.

Boss fights are not designed to be impossible. They're basically a combination of challenge and puzzle. Solve the puzzle, overcome the challenge and they're dead. So, familiarize yourself with bosses, the more you see the easier it becomes for you to figure things out. Especially if you know your class or even other classes. The more you know about what the players can do the more easy it becomes for you to figure out what the developers intended. Know the limits within which you have to work!

Survive, Deal Damage, But Most Important Analyze

The hardest part next to solving the puzzle is the ability to analyze the fight while still doing your job. The less stressful a boss is the easier this is. Basically what you want to look out is the mechanics of the boss. Here you want to answer the following questions:

Buffs & Debuffs

•  Does he have buffs? Does the group have debuffs?
•  Do the boss or the group get these during the fight?
• Where do they come from? What do they do*? 

* Note: It is often wise to post buffs and debuffs to chat or screenshot them in the old-fashioned way to discuss after the try.

Attacks

• What can the boss do? When does he do what?
• Is it time-based? Is it health based? (at 75% or 66%.)*
• Which attack hurts how much?
• Does he have mechanics that instantly kill?
• Are there scripted events? What happens?
• Does he have an attack pattern?

* Note: Game developers love to use these numbers like every 5% every 10% every 20% every 25% or every 33%.

Map Awareness

• Does the map mark something? Does it mark something throughout the fight?
• What symbol is used? What could it mean?

Surroundings

• What's in the boss arena? What is on the ground?
• Is there a pattern matching the fight?
• Are there AoE fields? Does the arena change?*
• Are there minions or adds spawning? Are they bound to an important mechanic?
• Are there visual effects? What do they do?
• Are there sound effects? Where do they come from? What do they mean? Are they important?

* Note: Developers seem to love to destroy the platform or decrease the area the player works with.

Boss Itself

• Is the boss attackable? Is there something that needs to be done first?
• How does aggro work? Does he need CC? When does he need CC? 
• What happens if you don't CC?
• What works/doesn't work well on him?

Grouping

• How many people need to do what?

Achievements

• What achievements are there? What happens if you fail them*?

* Note: Sometimes failing an achievement triggers mechanics that deal with group damage or do otherwise bad things.

Answering these questions together in your group should give you a good idea about the encounter and boost your speed of killing it. I mean you can always leave this to other people but.. hey. Now you have a good idea of how to do it yourself for the next boss you come across or if you wanna faster with your group on a new boss without waiting for a guide.

While this sounds like the end of the post I've got one more thing for you.

Good Game Design & Boss Mechanics

In a game with good game design coming across a new mechanic in a boss fight that hasn't been explained yet often has an explanation of the mechanic beforehand. In the best case, you will have the mechanic or a similar mechanic be played before the boss with some miniboss or enemy that shares this. It could also be possible that the players are told this by an NPC or have to read it which is sloppy, but at least it's explained.

From a game design perspective, you don't want your players to go into a fight completely empty-handed. You always want to at least hint to the solution so that it is technically possible to figure out the fight first try. (Which is rarely the case).

Just look out on whether or not you've seen similar mechanics somewhere else.

There You Go: A Guide to New Raid Bosses

This all should be enough to get you started on having an easier time learning new raid bosses. I'm actually gonna create a quick google form for one simple question. Just wanna know if you'd be interested in me giving examples for this or actually explaining primarily WildStar and Guild Wars 2 raid bosses from a mechanics and/or player guide perspective.

So there you go: >> Towards the questionnaire!

Fortune Telling: Using Magic the Gathering Cards [3/3]

In the first two posts, I mentioned some issues while explaining how fortune-telling, specifically card reading works. Now as promised I'm gonna explain how, why and that using Magic the Gathering cards works too.

It Shows Again and Again

You can literally use anything for magick. As ridiculous as it sounds, I've already made a post about using the Guild Wars 2 gods in rituals. It isn't any different here. Again anything we use is just a tool and as long as it helps us achieve the goal it's good.

So, How And Why Do Magic the Gathering Cards Work?

In the previous post, I explained how to make your own positioning and how it works. The idea behind everything is that your unconscious knows what each card and position means. So all you have to do is assign meaning to the cards in Magic the Gathering that is not too obvious (we don't want your consciousness to instantly know the meaning. It needs to be vague enough but so that your unconsciousness knows it). I really need to get into the kabbalistic model as soon as possible to not have to beat the corn around the bushes. 

Let's start off with color. The Magic the Gathering Cards or cut into five different colors:

• Black - Swamp, Death
• Red - Mountain, Fire, Lava, Magma, Goblin, Dwarf
• White - Light, Sun, Field, Human
• Blue - Island, Water, Sea, Ocean
• Green - Wood, Forest

Each color has an element assigned to it as well as a landscape (mana) and creatures, spells, etc.. This means that each color brings forth certain feelings and interpretations of it. We can even elaborate on the meanings of each. For example, the blue cards are assigned to water and water stands for calmness or for flow. Technically you could even go as far as to say it stands for the flow of time. Additionally, it could mean sadness, etc..

Once you've elaborate on each card you are pretty much good with the basics. Next up you could specialize on the card type, like working with the lifetime of a card. For example, something with an instant could be immediate, standing in front of the door so to speak, while a creature represents something that is going on for a longer time. Mana or land could be compared to something for the whole life. You can get creative with this. (I do have to admit I didn't go so deep into it.)

Next Up The Positioning

The positioning allows infinite possibilities. You can literally think about anything you want. When I went for it I wanted to read my future grades. Thus I simply went for order from left to right with the most important one being to the left, so: math, German, physics, English, technology. You can go with anything, as complex as you want or as simple as you want. Just familiarize yourself with it enough not learning it in and out though.

The Result

Well, the result was the worst one could expect. I got black on three to four of the subjects one some water too. The weirdest part, though to be expected. I barely passed with multiple fives or E's. Luckily the grades were combined with the ones I got over the year and the oral exam in physics was a one or A. (five/E on written exam one/A on oral exam.. interesting). Well, maybe it's a coincidence, stay skeptical, it seems very odd nonetheless though. 

Merge Dragons: Recursive Merging!

PC-master race, am I right? I usually don't play mobile games but there was a time when I did. There was also a time when I was playing mobile games to earn cash. It works, but extremely inefficient. (it's more efficient than my blog right now..) Anyways instead of playing Diablo Immortal, if you like puzzle games and build-up games, you can play Merge Dragons instead!

Merge Dragons

This is a mobile game that I came across using recommendations from an app that suggests you other apps and gives you points when you play them, which you can swap for gift cards or PayPal payment. Anyways Merge Dragons is a puzzle game that allows you to - as the name says it - merge objects of the same type to create new objects. You then travel through different levels that are so far extremely easy to play and challenges which timed levels that are hard enough that even I have my problems with some. So, the goal is to finish the main objective of these levels.

The levels reset every time you go into them, however, there's a camp that works similar to the levels except it doesn't reset. This means you can pretty much build up everything there. Hence I said puzzle and build-up games.

Merging Stuff

Let's get to the real deal. In this game there are two ways to merge things:

a) Merge three objects, which will return a higher level object.
b) Merge five objects, which will return two higher level objects.

Objects can be leveled up to a certain point, the level cap or maximum level of an object. This differs from the object category to the object category. Due to the rules and confinements of the levels, you will have a few issues given by the different types of objects. These issues are mainly:

1. space, it takes to combine objects
2. the object count, it takes to get the maximum
3. the  time, this game can really eat your time, be careful

Under these circumstances, I am wondering... how much do you save by going for five instead of three objects and how much more space do you need?

Using Math :D

Have I mentioned that I wrote a math exam yesterday? Fun! Anyways let's get into it right away.

Merging With Three

First up, the basic merge contains three objects of your liking that are the same (but not exact!) to get out one of the higher ones. For example, we need 3x level one to get 1x level two. Then we need 3x level two to get one level three. Needing 3x level two for one level three means we need 3 * 3 = 9 levels one. If we follow this thought further we might notice that the numbers will go like this:

3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729, ...

These are equal to the exponents of three:

3¹, 3², 3³, 3⁴, 3⁵, 3⁶, ... 

Notice that the exponent is equal to the level - 1 of the object. If we assume n is the level of the object we want to produce we need 3ⁿ objects of the lowest level (level one):

f(lvl) = 3^{(lvl - 1)}     for lvl ∈ N and lvl > 1

Now for space... we need three-space to create the next higher one. This means we need at most three times each previous level. That gives us this function:

f(lvl) = (lvl - 1) * 3   for lvl ∈ N and lvl > 1

So, for a level five object we need 35 = 243 level one objects and a maximum of f(5) = (5 - 1) * 3 = 12 fields of space.

Merging With Five

Now we merge 5x level one and get 2x level two. This is not an efficient way to only get one of the next higher ones. However, it speeds things up. Ignoring the rest if we have 10x level one we get 4x level two giving us 1x level three. So respective to whether or not we end up with 1x level three or 2x level three we had five or less than five before. 

Technically the algorithm is:

1. divide five: 10 / 5 = 2
2. increase the level by one: level one -> level two
3. multiply by two: 2 * 2 = 4
4. round down: floor(4) = 4
5. if the number is equal or greater than five go to 1. else go to 6.: 4 < 5: go to 6.
6. if the number is greater or equal to three increase level by one: level two -> level three
7. if the number is greater or equal to three, divide by three: 4 / 3 = 1.333...
8. round down and done: floor(1.333...) = 1

Here's the python code:

import math

#algorithm

def algo1(amount):

    level = 1

    while amount >= 5:

        amount /= 5

        level += 1

        amount *= 2

        amount = math.floor(amount)

    if amount >= 3:

        amount /= 3

        level += 1

        amount = math.floor(amount)

    return amount,level

We can't reverse this algorithm due to the rounding. If we do it most efficient (only five-merges) we will have some leftovers. The motivation behind this is that we get the maximum at the end. If you want to get only one at the end you have to round everything off with three-merges. To reverse it we start off by either one or two (if it's higher you could merge it to a higher as well and calculate with that). If it's one it is equal to a merge of three. If it's two it's a merge of five. In each of the cases, we multiply with the respective value. We decrease the level and then we get into the loop. In the loop, we need to make sure that our number is always even as we can't get odd results when always doing five-merges if we do have an odd one we will add one to it. This is going to be one of the leftovers.
After that, we divide by two (as we always create two), next up we multiply by five (since we always need five to make a higher-level one) which results in the level decreasing again. Once we reach level one we stop.

If we wanted to make 1x level five object, for example, it would go like this:

1. if equal to two: set to five else set to three: 1, set 3
2. decrease the level by one: level five -> level four
3. if it's odd add one to it: 3 + 1 = 4
4. divide by 2: 4 / 2 = 4
5. decrease the level by one: level five -> level four
6. multiply with five: 4 * 5 = 20
7. if it's level one, then stop, else go to 3.

Here's the respective python code:

import math

#algorithm

def algo2(amount, level):

    if amount == 2:

        amount = 5

    else:

        amount = 3

    level -= 1

    while level > 1:

        if amount % 2 == 1:
            amount += 1

        amount /= 2
        level -= 1

        amount = math.ceil(amount)

        amount *= 5

    return amount

The result is 65. If we use our function and iterate over the level increasing it we get the following numbers:

3, 10, 25, 65, 165, 415, 1040, 2600, 6500
vs
3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729, 2187, 6561, 19683

Well... merging five saves us a lot of work, haha. Unfortunately, there's a downside.

Merging five takes a lot more space. How much? Well.. in the camp there's a setting to disallow merges unless you actively move one object onto a set of 2+ of the same type. If we assume we have this setting on it takes similarly to our merge three functions:

f(level) = (level - 1) * 5

Finish!

Well, is there a simpler way to calculate it? I don't know or have found one. You can basically use an approximate but I've checked the numbers and I haven't seen a simple relation between them to calculate them easier. I'm not sure if I make another post on the Formula for a five merge outside the camp. I guess it depends on how many views this post gets. Let's say.. a hundred views are enough to be worthy.

Oh and on a side note: Upgrading the dragons do not provide more work power, it only increases your dragon power for unlocking more area in the camp. Thus it actually decreases the actions your dragons can do. Decide for yourself which you prefer.

Elder Futhark Runes - A Comparison With Binding of Isaac

The beauty of being interested in multiple topics sometimes there may be an overlap. There's not a better game that has this much religious or superstitious content. As such it is a great option to take a look at how the game implemented them and how far they jump from what you may call the "real deal" as well as going through them 'cause if you do magick you would want to know about them. Though there are a ton of pages explaining these things.. meh whatever.

Binding of Isaac

It is a roguelike game that features a character called Isaac who flees from his mother who heard God's voice tell her to use her son as a sacrifice. Finding a trap door below his room he jumps down into the depths. You explore different levels literally cry yourself through them (your tears are your weapon in this game) get passive and active items as well as consumables. At some point, you have to decide to go to heaven or hell and so on and so forth.

This game includes a ton of references to religion, god, magick and more. Including nun-items, blessings, curses, tarot cards, runes, devil rooms and devil deals, angel rooms as well as character names such as "Isaac", "Lazarus" and "Cain" for example.

Well enough about the game. Let's get to the less game and more magick related part.

The Runes

The runes that Binding of Isaac implements are some of the runes of the Elder Futhark rune alphabet. To list the one's features in the game alphabetically^[1]:

• Algiz
• Ansuz
• Berkano
• Dagaz
• Ehwaz
• Hagalaz
• Jera
• Perthro

The meaning of runes depends on many factors. Each rune has a transcript (a Latin letter) assigned to it as well as a symbol, a name, different meanings depending on the context as well as gemstones, weekdays, plants, giants, gods, elements, metals, planets, colors a picture and translations assigned to them.

ᛉ - Algiz (Eolh, Elhaz, Yr)

In Binding of Isaac this rune grants a shield that lasts for 30 seconds. This can be compared to the modern meaning of protection that is given to this rune. It also means that it's worth taking risks when prepared. It represents physical and spiritual power.

ᚨ - Ansuz

This rune reveals the whole map, including secret and super-secret rooms in the game. This rune means communication, meaning, creativity and creation. There are also some interpretations about "revealing" I haven't noted that down though. Well, it could've been something that was forgotten during the transfer of information via presentation. Even without that meaning it sort of makes sense, I guess.

ᛒ - Berkano (Berkanan, Beorc, Bjarken, Bjarkan)

This one summons 3 friendly blue flies and 3 friendly blue spiders. In the game, it represents companionship versus growing strength, the becoming, rebirth, fruitfulness, conceiving, creativity and therefore success. Er... is getting 3 flies and 3 blue spiders comparable to.. nevermind! Let's move on! this one's getting awkward.

ᛞ - Dagaz (Dag Daeg)

Dagas removes any active curses and grants extra health, as such, it shows the theme of purity. The rune means sudden change, unexpected situational change, still or faltering progress and guides to the light. Well given these meanings that are quite open the said function would definitely fall into that category.

ᛖ - Ehwaz (E(o)h)

This one creates a trapdoor that allows you to move on to the next level. Compare this to teamwork, trust, harmony, working together, symbiosis, friends and bringing work further together. While it does match the progressing further part the rest is pretty much left out.

ᚺ - Hagalaz (Heagl, Hagall)

The rune destroys all breakable objects in the room in the game while it is representing a breakthrough, huge change, dissolving, blessing, wisdom, "all-one", becoming complete and positive interruption of outer powers. Yeah, this one seems quite fine in its representation in-game.

ᛃ - Jera (Jeraz, Ger, Ior, Ar)

Jera is the rune that doubles any items in the current room. This does match up with the meaning of it quite well. Jera represents reward, a good time and safety. It does, however, only promise what you deserve. Assuming you didn't deserve any of the items the rune doesn't do anything. However, if you work for the items it will increase the outcome. Pretty nifty, isn't it?

ᛈ - Perthro (Peord, Pertho, Perthaz)

Last but not least we've got perthro. It rerolls all items in the room giving you a new chance on something different. This also fits very well since Perthro is the rune of destiny and of chance. Additionally, it represents the role of luck in the evolutionary process of all.

For Your Information

I have 25 runes noted down, which I probably will write about at some point but for now, these eight will do. I'll probably make a post about transcription of runes and using the transcription of once name to interpret my own. This is something not many people have done (to my knowledge) which makes it even more interesting for those fascinated in these topics.

Also interesting is that runes are supposed to have a very strong reaction. So, if you use a rune in your ritual it would probably empower it by a lot. Such a small simple symbol, so much power.

^[1] https://bindingofisaacrebirth.gamepedia.com/Cards_and_Runes

Guild Wars 2: Which Height is Deadly?

A few days ago I somehow ended up talking about falling damage with someone. He mentioned that it is known at which falling height (in-game units) it is deadly. What a snarky little detail. Wouldn't it be interesting to know how much it is in a more common unit? Well, let's do that and see what we can deduct from it!

In-Game Falling Death Data

On the page, for falling damage on the official Guild Wars 2 wiki, we can find a nice little graphic that shows how much %-health you lose respectively to which height you fall from. Due to copyright, I can't post it here so I have to describe it. It shows the %-health loss in a step of 10 starting from 0% and going to 180% and the distance in in-game units with a step of 100 going from 0 to 1500. It marks anything starting with 1500 as deadly even with fall damage reduction trade and 1250 units or higher as deadly without falling damage trait.^[1]

Conversion

A long time ago I already did a conversion from units to meters and feet. I'll leave this link to the post so you can check on it if you don't remember.

The conversion was 1 Unit is equal to 2.52cm or 0.083ft.

Now we just have to put in the numbers and do the calculation...

a) with falling damage reduction: 1500units * 2.52cm/unit = 3780cm or 37.8m.For feet it's 1500units * 0.083ft/unit = 124.5ft

b) without falling damage reduction: 1250units * 2.52cm/unit = 31.5m.For feet it's 1250units * 0.083ft/unit = 103.75ft

Well... that sounds ridiculous. I don't have anything to compare it to though. So let's see for a real-life equivalent to compare.

Most Reliable Resource

Looking through the interwebs there are a lot of stories about huge falls and indecisiveness of accurate numbers. Though according to a paper of NASA the fatal speed seems to be 16m/s on hard surfaces.^[2] Assuming the acceleration due to gravitation a to be 9.81m/s² and the formula being V = a * t. The total time of the fall would be t = V / a, thereby 16m/s / 9.81m/s² = 1.63s. 

To calculate the distance of the fall we have to put this into the following formula: d = 1/2 * g * t²

Thus our falling distance is 1/2 * 9.81m/s² * (1.63s)² = 13.03m. (14.75ft)

Can We Calculate the Gravity on Tyria?

To do that we would need to know how long it takes to fall a certain distance or how long it takes to fall 1250, additionally it wouldn't be accurate enough compared to simply calculating the falling speed and acceleration between reaching two points during a free fall.

Nonetheless, it's still interesting to see that it takes twice the height in Guild Wars 2 to die compared to real life. Float away Sapient Beings, float away! 

^[1] https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage#Falling_damage

^[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930020462.pdf

Balancing in Terraria: The Is-State (Part 2)

A few days ago I made a blog post where I went through the mind and thoughts that go and might have gone through the discussion of balancing. We came up with how we wanna put our classes. Now it would be interesting how far we are off. To determine this we have to analyze Terraria's balance.

Analyzing the Balancing

The factors we looked at when balancing were

• How is the class played
• How much defense should it have
• How much damage should it have

So let's look at the defense and damage that Terraria provides us.

PyPlot of Terraria's defense per tier per class

To do this I looked at the defense of each armor for each of the four implemented classes and plotted these numbers using Python and the MatPlotLib module. It does not seem to plot but the x-axis shows the tiers I used. These tiers are: 0 - fresh game; 1 - brain of Cthulu / eater of worlds defeated; 2 - Hell reached; 3 - cobalt mined; 4 - Mythril anvil; 5 - Adamantite forge; 6 - mechanical bosses defeated; 7 - chlorophyte farmed; 8 - Plantera defeated; 9 - golem defeated; 10 - lunar event + Moonlord defeated. To run a little over the numbers the end-game armors that are craftable using Luminate once the end boss the "Moonlord" has been defeated have 78 defense on the melee armor, 68 defense on the range armor, 46 defense on the magic armor and 38 defense on the summon armor. generally, you can see the trend to be that the relation melee > range > magic > summon can be found here again. Which goes perfectly with what we assumed to be the case.

The next information we need to look into would be the damage. Now calculation the damage is a bit tough due to the following reason:

• Weapon damage numbers are affected by weapons bonuses
• We have to calculate in critical strike damage and critical strike chance
• Some items hit multiple times
• There are buffs provided by the armor set bonus that affects the values
• Items may deal a lot of damage but have a huge use time or cooldown

Due to all these factors, we need to sit down and actually test the items. Though this has proven to be difficult too due to these reasons:

• Attacking a target dummy may not provide buffs
• Target dummies are not affected by homing attacks
• Target dummies are not attacked by minions

And yet this is our best bet.

Preparing and Running the DPS Test

To prepare the DPS tests I downloaded a mod called CheatSheet, to allow me to get any item in the game without farming it first. I've created a new character and a new map and gave myself the best items available at that moment to my knowledge. I must also admit that I used the star cannon and the coin gun (with gold ammunition). Tests that can be done on a target dummy were done so. I'm assuming only one target dummy that is hit with no rebound. We're assuming a single target flying boss for these. I know technically there should be extra tests for multiple target and etc. but this should do for a simple comparison since single target DPS is required for the most bosses. any other tests for minion masters and magic buffs were done on bosses with only one hitbox. Additionally, I only changed armor and weapons as well as specific ammunition and necessary accessories like the mana flower or multiple worm scarfs (to negate boss damage). The damage number was guessed given the number shown by the in-game item "DPS meter". An approximate number should not do well then comparing the exact math but for a graph to look at it's enough.

PyPlot of Terraria's damage done by classes per tier

Thus due to the circumstances, the damage numbers may run wild if you try it yourself but it should be near with a few exceptions. Anyways as you can see in the graph we have a relation of magic > range > melee = summon.

In comparison our idea of balancing was magic > summon > range > melee. Now we were right with magic being top, though summon damage is much lower than range or melee in the actual game. I must say that I did not calculate any other items. This was just the plain minion damage. If the minion master would use the other classes items his damage would increase but even then it would not be higher than range damage.

Generally, though all the classes seem to be very similar during the progress for the tiers only splitting significantly after the Moonlord. The only difference is the range class which has a huge damage boost when using the star cannon, which requires farming stars during the night and the coin gun which in the damage tests consumes your gold. both these resources should be easily achievable when the time is put into it. Honestly, I am disappointed by the early mage damage and the overall summoner damage in comparison to the survivability.

Conclusion

So, in the end, it turns out we were right with the defense but wrong with the damage.

Now due to the lack of defense on some classes and the low damage output of them, it doesn't surprise me anymore that I preferred to play tanky melee all the time. You deal almost the same amount of damage compared to the others. Of course, there's no 20% more damage potion for melee or there is less damage increasing accessories for melee, but with that defense difference, I don't know.

I guess in our modding plan we need to mush the damage of a few classes. :P

Game Genre: Metroidvania

Metroidvania what a weird name for a genre. Well, at least if you're not familiar with it as it all makes sense once you understand it.

So We Call It Metroidvania

The name of this genre originated from the  NES game Metroid and the Playstation game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. By taking the name of the first game and the removing the castle part from the latter we get our genre name. Similar to how the name of this genre is created the genre categorizes games.

Features In Metroid

Metroid games are jump 'n' run games that include inspiration from adventure games. They consist of a big interconnected world with abilities and power-ups or upgrades as well as bosses lying around. The abilities, power-ups, and upgrades allow you to progress further in the game and it's not uncommon that you need to backtrack. Additionally, bosses and standard enemies require you to have certain abilities to defeat them easier or at all.

Features In Castlevania

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has you explore Dracula's castle, a big interconnected world as well. There are items, power-ups, upgrades, and abilities here as well, same with bosses. The upgrades and abilities are required to progress further in the game as well. Backtracking is part of this game as well. So, basically, this version of Castlevania is the same as Metroid... except there's more. Compared to Metroid, Castlevania includes RPG elements, such as stats and leveling.

The Fusion

So, the combination of both, the Metroidvania, is a jump 'n' run adventure game that consists of big interconnected worlds that allow you to semi-freely explore it, but require you to backtrack once you get a new ability to find new paths or secrets that will lead to new abilities. Additionally, several bosses are scattered around that either halt your progress by being in your way or defeating them gives you an item that is required.

Modern Game Example

One of the modern Metroidvanias is Hollow Knight. It was nominated four times and its rating is between 86%-100%, depending on the reviewer. Hollow Knight, like the other two games mentioned here, uses a big interconnected world map with abilities, power-ups, and bosses scattered around. Backtracking is not uncommon in Hollow Knight either and while none of the abilities are required for the bosses they do indeed make it easier. Compared to it's Castlevania counterpart it does not contain RPG elements such as leveling and multiple stats though.

Is Banjo & Tooie a Metroidvania or a Collect-a-thon?

When searching for 3D Metroidvanias (since typically Metroidvanias are 2D games) I came upon a post where people called Banjo & Tooie a 3D Metroidvania. With the earlier post about Collect-a-thons and this post about Metroidvanias, we should be able to answer that question.

Does It Have a Big Connected Map?

Banjo & Tooie has multiple hub worlds that are connected with each other and they are connected to single levels with each having its own theme. These single levels are however partially connected to each other as well. Now it depends on where you draw the line for big interconnected worlds since there is a difference here compared to the other games I've mentioned.

Does It Contain Backtracking?

This question I can definitely answer with a yes.  Something I loved about Banjo & Kazooie was, if you go into a world you can 100% it. This is not the case in Banjo & Tooie. There were collectibles you couldn't reach without having been in another world or having unlocked a certain ability.

Are Abilities Scattered Throughout the World With Different Means?

What I mean by this is... if you can buy some abilities, find some lying around, find some in a chest or get some from a boss then this matches the other Metroidvanias. This is not the case in Banjo & Tooie all abilities are unlocked by buying or using collectibles. Which makes sense for Collect-a-thons.

What's the Primary Objective For Progress?

Metroidvanias primary objective consists of challenging the player having him rise with the challenge and explore the world. Collect-a-thons sole purpose consists of finding and collecting objects and progress is tied to it. Now, of course, you might end up exploring the world in a Collect-a-thon but the purpose is different. You're exploring in hope to find some kind of collectible. In Metroidvanias you explore to find new paths and abilities. In Banjo & Tooie the only way to progress through the game is by getting jigsaw pieces to unlock new levels to get more jigsaw pieces to get more levels until the last boss.

Conclusion

As I mentioned whether or not you consider Banjo & Tooie as a Metroidvania depends on where you draw the line, however going through these questions I personally would say, it is not.

MMORPGs and Replayability

I love playing WildStar and I really enjoy playing it, but let's face the truth. It won't run forever. Without it accumulating thousand of players that also spent money there's no future.

Power Creep

Like many multi massive online role play games, WildStar too started off as a game with gear grind. Don't worry gear grind is still in it. The problem with these games is that there's something called power creep. Power creep is when the player gains strength throughout their journey in the game without the gain being balanced. This means that you get more strength, abilities, powers, damage and you're overpowered in the earlier content you're through with already.

So, what's the problem here? Well, since you're done with the old content, nothing interesting drops there anymore and it provides no challenge.

Content Is Live - Content Is Love

Thus, to keep the player entertained new content needs to be added constantly. A good example of this is World of Warcraft. There have been so many add-ons already and for a good reason.  The way the game is designed if there's no more content the game will die. At some point, you have reached the end of the chain of content. You get the best gear and highest item level and the only content that is still relevant to you is the last content that has been added.

Fighting Power Creep 

So if you want older content to stay interesting we need to implement some way to keep the earlier content challenging.

Horizontal Progression

Guild Wars 2 did this by having no gear progression (also known as vertical progression). With vertical progression, the player needs to play content to gain power which is required to progress through the content. Horizontal progression, however, challenges the player's pure skill. Every additional content adds new mechanics or combines old mechanics requiring the player to always improve themselves throughout the content. The good thing about horizontal progression is that you reach the best gear quite early in the game and yet all content stays equally challenging.

Scaling Difficulty

Another way would be to provide different difficulties. In Diablo III the content won't ever get too easy. Well, at least the greater rifts. You can keep increasing the difficulty to compensate for the damage increase you gain.

Downscaling

Downscaling is the progress to lower the player's stats to the point they're equal to another player that plays on this level. The biggest problem with downscaling is getting it right. Most often decreasing stats isn't everything. Unlocking abilities, skills, passive effects and much more make it hard for simple downscaling to work. However, if you're getting it right, this is a good way to go.

Loss of Interest

Thanks to our procedure(s) the content is now always equally challenging regardless of your gear. Yet, having done all the content and gotten everything from it, why bother running it? Just for the fun enjoying it? That might go well a few times but in the long run, that won't work.

When I was brainstorming and discussing this with other fellow WildStar guildmates it has shown to be the hardest step to reach the goal of replayable content. Of course, people do something just for the fun, but if you want to keep them engaged you need to implement a goal for them.

The problem with most goals is that they're either short term or long term but not for infinity. Well, at least attempts of long term goals resulted in grinding.

Skins and Unique Items

If you have several players who like skins, implementing these as dungeon rewards is a good way for people to keep running it. Same with achievements. Both of these only apply to a certain handful of players who are interested in said content. There's a problem with this though. Even if you tell an achievement hunter to run a dungeon 100 times or add 50 item skins to a dungeon, at some point the player will be done with these leaving them without a goal.

Backtracking

Another option would be to say, every time you find an item in a later content you have to rerun the older one to imbue or improve this item. This will most likely increase the number of people running the older content assuming they didn't quit the game yet. This will probably tick players off having to redo over and over again. The other problem here is that there will be players running it when it came out and stop until the next content update comes.

Renewing Special Effects

During the brainstorming, I had this idea of implementing special effects like auras and armor or weapons looking different but running out of energy over time requiring you to run the content again to keep the effects up. Apparently some game developer I don't know the name of (sorry D:) already had this idea. I don't see much wrong with this except it only applies to a portion of the player base that is interested in their looks.

Unique Materials

I'm doing a game design course right now and I read through a game design document of someone else that was about making a game with its focus on mining and fishing. This brought me another idea. If the instances have unique materials that are required not for gear but consumables, chances are high that people will keep on running the content to craft those. Also, a good option would be soul-bound or account bound crafting using those materials. Keep in mind traders might not be able to run those dungeons for those materials then.

Instance Bonuses

Just like Guild Wars 2 giving away gold for running 8 different dungeons (paths), giving a bonus to gold gained from a certain raid wing or WildStar providing bonus essences to certain dungeons having these bonuses switch through. If the bonus is worth the time, it will most certainly attract all kinds of people. Sometimes certain currencies are not as interesting to the player however there might always be one primary currency that the player will need for all their goals. Whether it's better skins, equipment, achievements or building something.

Conclusion

I hope this brainstorm and discussing, I did, helped some people develop their own opinion and ideas. Whether or not it is possible to add replay-ability to content from MMORPGs is a question I cannot answer as of yet. Aside from all this, it's your choice to leave power creep in or to compensate for it. Yet, it would be cool to see an alternative game. I know I called Guild Wars 2 out for having a horizontal progression but technically it doesn't. I guess I could make that another topic for another time.

Speedrunning Friendly Game Design

Speedrunning is a great thing. It takes a lot of dedication, experience, practice, and knowledge to do fast speed runs with record times and it's always enjoyable to watch the GDQ (Games Done Quick) or AGDQ (Awesome Games Done Quick) there are tons of people who view them. Additionally, some speedrunners upload Youtube videos or stream the games they speed run.

Speed Running For Publicity

So with no doubt tons of people watch speed runs, which in return means if there are speed runs for your games more people will see it and maybe more people will play it. So having speed runners pick it up is a good thing. However, without paying speedrunners to pick up the game and speed run it you need to motivate them passively. The best way to do this would be to make your own speed run yourself. Unfortunately in most cases even if it's your own game you might not have what it takes to make a speed run. So we need to motivate other people to do it.

Preferred Games

Speedrunners prefer certain games to others for speedrunning. Watching speedrunners, taking a short look and using some common sense you can determine the factors that are needed for this and you can implement them to a certain degree into your game. So let's look at those factors from a speed runners point of view. Now I must say I'm not a speedrunner myself, I'm just a speedrunning enthusiast who tried back in the old days. Though the self-doubt of playing perfectly for up to hours to get the best times is quite discouraging. I know there are segmented runs too but getting near world record times. I doubt I'll be able to manage that without giving up something else.

Important Factors For Speed Running

As the name is saying it already: Speedrunning includes speed and running. It's about beating the game as quickly as possible. This means that situations where you have to wait for the game to continue to halt your progress and slow the runs down some times even immensely. Examples for this would be 

• levels that scroll without allowing the player to leave the area. 
• cut scenes that can't be skipped

Speed runs are often about the feel. If someone does a speed run they're not sneaking around slowly and carefully. Speedrunning is all about fast-paced progress. It's about running if.. you can call the fastest way to move through the game running as this most often does not describe whatever's the player character doing. Anyways what I want to get to next is the capability of movement. The more capability and maybe even combo's there is, the better. A good example of this is the Super Mario 64 series. In Super Mario 64 you could

jump, double jump, triple jump, dive, long jump, kick jump which also produces negative momentum when done against a wall side jump and wall jump

In Super Mario Sunshine the basic abilities weren't as good but you now got

jump, double jump, triple jump, dive, long jump, kick jump which also produces negative momentum when done against a wall, side jump, wall jump, spin jump, hover and tummy sliding

In Super Mario Galaxy we can now spin in air to keep us in the air by a little longer but therefor we lose a little of our arsenal. We're now left with

jump, double jump, triple jump, dive, long jump, kick jump which also produces negative momentum when done against a wall, side jump, spin in air and wall jump

With Mario Odyssey, we now can roll as well and some more tricks thanks to cappy

jump, double jump, triple jump, dive, long jump, kick jump, which also produces negative momentum when done against a wall, side jump, wall jump, throw and dive on cappy, jump off of cappy, dive again

If you give people an arsenal of movement abilities for all kinds of situations, speedrunners will most likely love it. So we've got movement and halts in games. With these both, you're pretty safe already. Though there's one more thing you can't account for.

Bugs & Glitches

 Sometimes it happens, that a wall or collision isn't set correctly or a loading zone can be triggered from somewhere else. Some times even heavier mistakes happen, like building nearly infinite momentum, wrong warping, and overflowing and storage. Let's go through these names as you should know what they mean as a game designer but as a gamer too.

INFINITE MOMENTUM Usually when stopping any motion or actions through controls the character should return to zero momentum relatively fast. However, sometimes there's an unintended way to gain more momentum when you lose, allowing you to build infinitely much of it. This can be used to accumulate a speed that ignores the collision of walls allowing you to skip parts of the game.

LOADING ZONE Describes an area that triggers the loading of another level or scene when the player enters it.

WRONG WARPING Wrong warping describes the technique to teleport or load a certain area of the game that was not intended to be loaded by the respective loading zone. For example, if you enter the level 1-2 warp zone from Super Mario Brothers by bugging yourself through the bricks instead of jumping over the pipe you can load the level -1 which is not supposed to be in the game. Not really helpful but I think you get the idea behind this.

OVERFLOWING Overflowing, as well as underflowing for that matter, describe the numbers to jump to their opposite counterparts. For example, if we say we have 2000000 points and we continue to get points we end up with -2000000 points. What happens here is numbers - especially in older games - are capped to a certain degree. This cap is defined by the variable type used. For example, an 8-bit Integer holds the numbers from almost -2^7 to nearly 2^7. Why exactly this much? The Integer has 8-bits the first one is used to define whether it's a positive or negative Integer. This means the Integer is described as signed Integer, the opposite would be unsigned Integer which has 8 bits to represent the number and thus goes from 0 to 2^8-1 = 255. Our signed Integer, however, goes from -127 to 127. If we happen to count up in an 8-bit Integer variable once we reach 127 one more count will make it turn to -127, an overflow. If we count down to -127 one more step would make us go to 127, an underflow.

STORAGE Storage can describe many things, obviously since the name is no generic. In the end, it comes down to the same thing. You're trying to create a situation where the game takes a game object or something else as a placeholder ending up to implement this stored object once the placeholder is called. It sounds complicated and it's hard to explain trying to stay generic. There are two strategies for storage I know in speed runs or games. One of them is the storage of items in Super Mario World. This is most famous for the videos where people literally rewrite the game code while playing or simply store yourself another feather in case of need. Er.. yes. The other one is scene storage. The idea behind this is that you want to trigger a scene at the same moment another option could be possible, like triggering an object to move your character, triggering another scene, leaving the area or something like that. What happens here is that the scene hasn't finished playing to my knowledge the next scene you see now is going to be stored. For example, some games allow you to watch all the scenes of the game, as well as the final boss scene. So if you watch the final boss scene it's now stored. Once you get back to your normal game and you continue where the normal next scene would've played it might get overwritten by the stored one placing you wherever that one plays. In our example at the final boss fight. I might not have explained it 100% correctly but I'm assuming you get the point.

That's Nice And All

Yeah, it is, but the point I want to make here is, don't patch certain glitches and bugs out. People love certain bugs and glitches and they make for their own category in speedrunning. Most commonly known as any% run. Not to be confused with any% glitchless runs.

Random Number Generators

RNG or RNGesus as people call it describes something in games people can't influence. If you can't plan for a situation that makes it hard to predict and work within games. This means that games with a lot of random number generators and luck - especially if needed in the late game - are less likely to be picked for a speed run. This does, however, not count for roguelikes. Since roguelikes are all about generated content and feeling unique with each run speedrunners know what to kind of expect from these. Though the option to allow the player to pick a seed will be most likely preferred.

So How Should I Design My Game?

Well, it's simple. If you want it to be speedrunning friendly, make sure scenes, talking and such can be skipped either completely or after the first run through. Make sure the player has a set of tools at hand that allows him to move from point A to point B, even vertically if your game is about that. Try to avoid too much RNG in the late game if possible and leave certain glitches in if they bring value to the speedrunning community without breaking your game too much. Just look at games that have been a speed run before and at speed runners commentary to certain speed runs. I mean why wouldn't one wanna watch these? They're awesome too much. TAS (tool-assisted speed run) or not TAS doesn't matter.