Dragon Age 2

This game came out a year ago but I just finished it now, so here goes:

It’s like Dragon Age 1 except more boring, a worse story, a worse battle system, and worse characters. That basically sums up everything.

Story
You start the game running away from the Blight (a bunch of demons called Darkspawn) that has ravaged your homeland. Some tragedies happen and you somehow end up in a new city called Kirkwall, hoping to start a new life. Now in Dragon Age 1, you quickly learn from the start of the game that the Blight is coming, the world is in danger, and it’s your job to fight it. The evil force is clearly defined and constantly reinforced throughout every quest in the entire game. NPC’s constantly talk about the threat of Darkspawn. You fight hordes of Darkspawn at every corner. Even though there are unrelated side quests, you’re ultimate goal of stopping the Blight is always the main focus.

In DA2, the game is broken into 3 acts, each separated by multiple years. So what epic adventures do you encounter in DA2? Act 1 consists of you doing random jobs to make money so you can buy a nicer house for your mom and elevate your social status. I’m not even joking here. You literally get a bunch of letters of people asking you to help them collect goods, capture escaped criminals, retrieve an item in a cave, etc.

Act 2 begins after you’ve found some treasure and are now rich. Note that 1/3 of the game has passed (probably 10-20 hours of game play) and there still isn’t a clear, endgame goal or even any significant threats. The Blight (you know that thing that raped and pillaged your homeland) is never mentioned again and is apparently never going to reach Kirkwall. You still wander around doing unrelated fetch quests. The only real tension is some racism conflict between the humans and these stupid looking horned people called the Qunari. Eventually a revolt breaks out and lots of people die and you are tasked with settling the conflict and killing all the Qunari.


Who are you and why do I care?

Act 3 begins and now everyone refers to you as the “Champion” because you saved Kirkwall from the Qunari. There still isn’t a clear purpose to the game and nobody is really a true evil force you have to fight against. Once again, you wander around doing menial quests until another conflict between mages and templars breaks out and you’re forced to choose one side. Oh, by the way the head templar is possessed and wants to try and take control of the city. So you end up banding together and killing her. Game over…

How do you even put together this pile of crap? It’s not until Act 3 where the final boss is even introduced, and it turns out to just be some woman trying to use the revolt in Act 2 to cover her ascent to power. In Dragon Age 1, you’re fighting against an army of Darkspawn, led by a dragon, threatening to destroy the entire world and exterminate humanity. In DA2, you fight one corrupt woman yearning for political power, who just happens to be possessed by demons. Imagine Lord of the Rings where you learn about Sauron trying to take over Middle Earth. But then the book decides to ignore that and just talks about the steward in Gondor trying to unjustly take the throne.

There’s no impact or purpose to anything you do in DA2. In DA1, you travel across the world and make decisions that affect entire civilizations and cities of thousands. DA2 mostly involves individual people, and whether you should kill them or spare them. It completely lacks impact and purpose, and makes the entire game feel like a grind.

Characters
The characters in this game weren’t nearly as interesting as DA1. Anders is a whiny, annoying character who’s constantly asking for help and approval. Varric is just kind of annoying in general. Fenris and Carver are constantly just being asses. Merrill is constantly making mistakes and then being like “Oh! I didn’t mean for it to happen like this!” Isabela is only likable because she’s a selfish woman who wants to have sex all the time, but she’s really nothing more than a generic “I only care about myself but now I like you so I’ll come back and help!” The thing that was really good about Morrigan from DA1 is that even though she was a selfish woman, you also got to see her pragmatic, ends-justify-the means attitude which gave her more character. I think the only character I really liked in DA2 was Aveline. She tries to be a beacon of order, justic and discipline but ultimately she still falls in love with one of her guardsman and is reduced to being a shy, nervous girl. Her companion quests actually had character development to them, while everyone else’s companion quests were usually asking you to do some errand for them.


You’re all boring

Battle System
The battle system is pretty much the same as DA1, except for some unknown reason they actually increased the cooldowns of spells and reduced how many are available. Instead, now you just spam the X button to do auto-attacks while you wait for spells to cool down. For some reason, I prefer healing in Dragon Age as opposed to DPS or tanks. I think this is because I like managing my team with tactics and ensuring they all stay alive. So when I started DA2, I naturally went down the Spirit Healer path, thinking it might be similar to DA1.

The main strategy behind DA combat is similar to any MMO, where you have a tank, a healer, and some DPS. The tank draws aggro of all monsters, forcing them to attack them while the healer heals the tank and the DPS slowly kills everything. So I typically have one character who focuses solely on defense, one character solely focus on healing, and 2 characters focus solely on DPS. It’s generally better to highly specialize in one task, rather than build a bunch of balanced people. It’s basically exactly how you would setup a party in World of Warcraft or any other mmo.

The problem is there are only 2 true heal spells on long cooldowns, that heal a large percentage of health. In DA1, heals were weaker and on a much shorter cooldown, meaning you had to constantly spam them. In DA2, due to the lack of heals, they are not meant to be spammed but used only when a character is very low on health. It also means that characters don’t take nearly as much damage as they did in DA1. On normal trash mobs, I would kill everything before even needing to heal. So when I played my healer, I did nothing except spam X to autoattack, while waiting to heal a tank that never lost health. It got so boring that I just permanently switched to playing my rogue or mage, because it gave me more to do during the fights.

Now from a rogue or mage standpoint, the battle system is alright. Unfortunately, they failed big time by making the mana/stamina pools so small. As a mage, I would cast all my spells once and be out of mana, resorting to spamming X the rest of the fight. As a rogue, you literally don’t have enough spells to use, so they are always on cooldown and you’re stuck auto-attacking.


90% of my battles were just me staring at this ring

My guess is that they wanted to place more emphasis on the strategy of controlling all 4 characters, rather than just 1. I understand where they were going with this, but I think it’s a little too much for an RPG. Basically, when you open the radial menu to cast a spell, the entire game pauses. This let’s you slowly select and aim all your spells for optimal damage. I played on hard and some fights were literally impossible unless you controlled every action for all 4 characters. You would pause the game and assign an action for each character. Then immediately pause again to assign the next set of actions. It meant pausing every 1-2 seconds and while it did make it much more challenging and strategical, it became really tedious. Especially when you have to do this on trash mobs that you just want to pound your way through.

I think they needed to strike a better balance between the slow, menu driven combat of the radial menu and the fast, real-time combat where you just spam every spell and monsters die. I think there was a little too much emphasis on using the radial menu. The one really positive thing they added was the ability to set rally points for characters to run to. Nothing frustrated me more in DA1 than moving a ranged character far away, only to have the AI run them through fire to stand in front of the dragon. There was also 1 or 2 boss fights that were actually fun and reasonably well thought out (the elemental spirit in the Deep Roads).

Overall
I’m not even going to go into detail about the other problems with the game, like the constant copy/pasted level design, crashes, graphical bugs during dialogue, and other weird bugs like having to repeat the same dialogue scene multiple times. Overall this game just feels like BioWare had to pump out a sequel to DA1 before EA came knocking at their door. Everything about it just feels rushed and incomplete. While I won’t complain because I got it for only $20, it definitely doesn’t live up to such big names as Dragon Age or BioWare.

Chaos;Head

I’ve recently been hearing a lot of hype about Steins;Gate. Based on that, I figured I would first watch Chaos;Head because they both originate from the same visual novel publisher and they both use semi-colons in their names. In retrospect, it was probably a waste of my time considering Chaos;Head is basically a harem with sword wielding schoolgirls and Steins;Gate is (as far as I understand it) some sort of time traveling/warping thing. Anyway…

The main character of Chaos;Head is probably one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen. Typically the male protagonist of a harem is either extremely clueless, or passive and indecisive about choosing what girl he wants. I mean, that’s the only way you can get away with 13-26 episodes of filler episodes. Unfortunately, this character is just awkward at everything he does and constantly whines about his social problems. Instead of doing something about them, he just sits around waiting for someone to help him.

The girls cover pretty much every standard stereotype (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when voiced right). None of them were particularly annoying, but none of them left any substantial impact. Animation overall was clean and good looking and the actual character designs looked fine.

The plot was kind of boring and the ending was so anti-climatic that I can’t even remember what happened despite just watching it a few weeks ago. Something about a machine that can control what people perceive as reality, thus allowing you to control them. Of course the guy who designs it is trying to take over the world with it and our hero goes to fight him and rescue the princess, supported by the rest of them. Despite all the focus on the magical swords, fighting was pretty non-existent throughout the series. Any fighting that did occur was short and clumsy looking. There wasn’t a very good amount of character development as far as I’m concerned, which may have been due to the 13 episode limit. Everyone had some stupid, tragic back story explained in 5 minutes.

Overall, extremely mediocre and not worth the time to watch. Onward to Steins;Gate.

BaconFriedRice.com will be participating in Stop SOPA Day on January 18th

The SOPA Blackout site has a Javascript utility to pop up a message about SOPA on Stop SOPA Day, this Wednesday, January 18th.

The site has an interesting video about SOPA too.

Jack and I discussed taking BaconFriedRice down completely versus popping up the message, but decided not enough people visit the page for taking it down to matter… haha

Good reading: A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP

Node.js experiment part 1: Defining my experiment

I’ve decided that my technical project will revolve around Node.js.  And now I will start my long convoluted story about how I came up with my project…  I guess I will provide a table of contents again since I tend to ramble a lot :)

The back story
The idea
The goals
Future considerations
The plan

(I just want to say here that I accidentally deleted a whole bunch of stuff I wrote and WordPress didn’t auto-save a draft before it happened so now I am an extra sad panda.)

The back story

At work, I was working with part of our team in China, and right before the winter vacation they gave us the code to a web socket server in Node.  I’ve always been interested in web technologies – I taught myself HTML from a book in fourth grade and self-taught whatever PHP I needed in middle school for my embarrassing (and luckily now-nonexistent) EatenCheez.com – but I’ve never had any formal training.  After I moved to Virginia in high school, I stopped playing around with HTML and PHP in my free time, and since I focused on embedded systems in college, I don’t really have any idea what Node was.  I was curious, so I looked into it, and it’s so fascinating!  A web server written in 6 lines of code?  Awesome!

(Side note Easter egg – I found a snapshot of EatenCheez.com from 2003.  I don’t know what happened to the formatting but I thought it was a funny reminder of way back when.  Cliques, rings and clubs?  Guestbooks?!  At least this version of EatenCheez.com didn’t have a splash page with the obligatory hit counter!)

I started looking into Node, reading about what it’s best used for and following some cool tutorials.  I even installed Ubuntu on my Windows desktop just to be able to play with Node easier.  There are some really cool tutorials and projects out there – such as this Scrabble MMO written in 48 hours, this Twitter clone, or this awesome phone-controlled multi-player browser game written by an intern (try it out, it’s neat and cleaned up my rusty French) – but following someone else’s tutorial isn’t the same as creating your own project.  So I kept looking into Node to see if I could get any inspiration.

The thing that ended up really inspiring me ended up being… my laziness.  When I’m bored, I will lounge around on the couch or on the bed browsing the internet on my phone.  However, phone screens are tiny!  So when I find an interesting link, I will email it to myself to read later.  I like how mailing a link to myself from the iPhone will put the title of the page in the subject and the URL in the body of the email, because the title is obviously much more descriptive than the URL.  However, this means I end up with an inbox looking like this (I actually had 20 sitting in my inbox all day but I started moving them before I remembered to take a screenshot):

(I’ve been having insomnia for the last week, only getting 3-4 hours of sleep a day… hence the very early morning emails to myself)

I wanted to clean up my inbox, but I didn’t want to just have a big list of URLs and no descriptions, so I decided to just move things to a text document:

Now my email inbox was clean, but I had a list of titles and URLs on my desktop that I couldn’t access from anywhere else.  That is the same reason I don’t like to use browser bookmarks – I’ll put them there, then not be able to access them when I’m, say, at work and have some free time to read.  I started syncing my Chrome settings recently and they sync bookmarks, but I also use different browsers when I’m working, so I’d have random bookmarks saved across multiple browsers on multiple machines.  I tend to just avoid browser bookmarks in general.

On Saturday I was in the middle of this tutorial for a blogging system in Node when it hit me – I should make my own personal resource blog!

The idea

“Personal resource blog” doesn’t explain much.  I was formulating this idea while I was (yet again) lounging around on my phone, so my notes ended up like this:

Basically I want to make a “blog” where each post is a useful resource I found, so I guess a library of bookmarks.  Here is a cleaned up, better explained, and expanded version of this list of features I made.

  • Log in – Since it is a personal blog, only I can log in and post
  • Create category (can be nested) – Each resource is listed under a category, and there can be categories within categories
  • Select category (tree view) – If I already have the category I need, just select it
  • Input title, link, comments, tags – Each resource consists of a title, the link to the page, my comments about how useful I found it, and some tags.  I’ve also been thinking that maybe I could rate it.
  • Submit – submit the resource, obviously
  • Categories displayed in multiple ways (all on one page, each category level on one page, each resource on one page) – Now I’m getting into what the visitors see.  They could view all and see the resources listed under their categories, or they could select a category and view only those resources on a page.  I believe that in the last part I was referring to each resource having its own permanent link, so perhaps in the two previous views not all of the information would be shown, and the permanent page would be the full view.
  • Search by tags – Users can search by the tags on each resource
  • Tag cloud – Always nice to see a tag cloud
  • Can add comments to each resource – User can comment on resources about what they think
  • Can vote up – Or down too I guess.  Like stackoverflow or reddit
  • Need to link to database – I guess this wasn’t really a feature, I was writing a note to myself that I need to look into different databases
  • Sort by my score – Users can see what I liked best
  • Sort by date – See when I added resources
  • Sort by votes – See what everyone thinks is the best

Those are my ideas as of now.  I think that I could definitely expand it – for instance, if it actually works and I don’t code up a catastrophe maybe I could make it so users can make accounts to submit resources so it wouldn’t just be a personal library any more.  I don’t know, I’m mostly using this as an experiment to learn, so I don’t even know if people would be interested or find something like this useful.

The goals

The main goal is obviously to learn to use Node.  However as I was looking into it there are also many other useful tools to learn and utilize in the process.  Here are the ones I’ve discovered so far that I would have to learn, use, and become more familiar with (on top of polishing my very rough Javascript):

  • Node.js – server-side Javascript
  • Express – Node web framework
  • Jade – Node HTML template engine
  • Stylus – Node CSS template engine
  • JQuery – popular Javascript library
  • MongoDB or CouchDB (or both) – NoSQL database systems

And of course the end goal is to create my own CMS.

Future considerations

There are quite a few things I need to think some more about, which will come in future posts.

Full definition of features

I need to sit down and write down exactly what I want before I do any coding.  I think the list I have above is a good start, but I need to clean it up some more.

github and open source

I’ve never used github before, but I think that I should make use of it.  Of course this means that since I am cheap and will be using a free account, my project will need to be open source.  I want to learn more about the idea of open source and different open source licenses.  I’ve already done a bit of reading, and I think one thing I need to do is look at the different libraries and frameworks I’m using to see what open source licenses they use, then pick one for my project.  Or is it even that important?  I have no idea, I’ve never dealt with any of this before…

Hosting the project

BaconFriedRice is on a shared hosting plan on A Small Orange, so I probably shouldn’t put my app there since it’d be persistent.  I’ve been looking into different places I can host a Node app, but I realized there’s quite a bit to think about.  I want to start off writing it on my machine, then deploy it on some free hosting as I test it.  The only problem is that the databases for free hosting are either non-existent or very small, and there are also limited options – for instance, I was looking at Cloudnode, but they only use CouchDB (and you only get 25MB), while it seems like more people use MongoDB.  But then, if all goes well and I actually write this thing, maybe I would just pay for hosting in the future. It’s hard to say right now… but I’ve also been looking into Nodester, dotCloud, Webbynode, Joyent Cloud Services, and Cure.  Also database hosting at MongoHQ and Cloudant.

Picking a database

Like I mentioned, the two options I’ve been looking at are MongoDB and CouchDB.  They seem to be the most popular for Node.  However it really depends on where I end up hosting.  I actually think that after I finish the blog tutorial with MongoDB, I’ll do this blog tutorial with CouchDB and see which I like using better.  That’s probably a better way to decide after all!

Picking a name

This is my top priority right now.  I need a name for my project!

The plan

  1. Finish the MongoDB blog tutorial
  2. Do the CouchDB blog tutorial
  3. Pick a name!
  4. Flush out the features and put them in order to add one by one
  5. Pick a database
  6. Pick a free hosting to start with
  7. Start coding!
  8. Utilize github
  9. Keep coding
  10. Figure out the whole open source thing
  11. Don’t stop coding
  12. Sleep a bit
  13. Code some more
  14. If it actually works… Move it to paid hosting with more space!
  15. Celebrate

Sorry for the very long read :) Now it’s time for bed!

New temporary theme

I was bored of the last theme. I still want to make my own, but I’ve decided to focus on other technical projects for now, so I’ve just chosen a new pre-made theme for Bacon Fried Rice. One day I’ll make one.

Edit: I may change it again.  This may be too girly for Jack.

Edit2: I changed the theme again.  Jack was being picky and didn’t like the colors of the last one.  Now this one is almost the exact same colors as the one we had before…

Life update – auto-immune disease, resolutions, video games, projects, and kitties

I’ve been meaning to write this since Christmas, but I kept putting it off, so it’s a little late.  Haven’t posted in a long time, so it’s going to be long! Here’s a table of contents, just in case… Topics aren’t in any special order.  Also I was writing the end in a rush so it’s not as comprehensive as I’d like…

Auto-immune disease
Resolutions
Video games
Projects
Kitties

Auto-immune disease – pemphigus foliaceus

After many, many doctor visits, I’ve learned that I have this random auto-immune disease called pemphigus foliaceus.  My immune system basically attacks my skin, so if I don’t take medicine, I get blisters all over.  It’s not curable, but it’s controllable.

In September, I noticed that I randomly started getting open wounds on my stomach.  At first I thought it was the kitties accidentally clawing me when they slept on me at night, but as I paid more attention I discovered that I actually had blisters for a short amount of time, before my clothes rubbing against them would pop them.  At the beginning they only appeared under my t-shirt line, so I thought I might be sensitive to our detergent or something, so we changed it and waited a few weeks but I still got the blisters.  Around Thanksgiving I started getting a rash on my face too, so I finally went to the doctor.

Multiple visits, blood tests, and biopsies later, the dermatologist told me I had pemphigus foliaceus.  Here’s a site with a pretty good description of it (it’s about the more severe version pemphigus vulgaris, but everything is basically the same except I don’t get sores in my mouth – yay, I guess): Pemphigus Vulgaris Network.

Basically right now I am taking a steroid medicine that has been toning down the blisters and rashes a lot.  When I went down to the lowest dose I still got some new blisters, so I’m on a medium dose right now.  I’ve been feeling some of the side effects, so it’s kind of messing me up a bit.  I haven’t been able to sleep a lot lately as it gives me a bit of insomnia.  The doctor said it may make me anxious – so far the only thing I’ve noticed is that on my regular drives to and from work, I sometimes start to feel like all the cars around me are narrowing in and boxing me in, and it freaks me out as I’m driving.  Every once in a while the lanes just feel really really narrow and I feel like every car is inches from me.  Also the medicine makes me gain weight :(  I have to watch what I eat as it makes me really hungry, and even though I’ve been watching what I’m eating I’ve gained 10 pounds in the month since I’ve started the medicine.

However the steroid medicine is bad for you long-term, so I’ve also started a new medicine that takes 6-8 weeks to take effect.  Hopefully this one is better – in essence it is turning down my immune system so that it doesn’t attack my body.  I’ve always had a weak immune system so now I have to be really careful to eat healthier.  I’ve been taking iron, calcium, and vitamin D supplements – I take 7 different pills in one day :(  It’s interesting though, because apparently I had slight anemia due to low iron, so I was always tired and feeling faint.  Lately, though, I’ve been feeling so much more awake and energetic – I never realized that how I usually felt wasn’t normal!  I get up easier, have a lot more motivation to get things done, and feel so productive every day now.  The only thing I’m not sure about is if it’s a result of my iron level being normal, or the steroid medicine – hopefully I am still as energetic (but with no insomnia!) after I get off the steroid medicine!

My dermatologist referred me to a dermatology auto-immune specialist at Stanford, so I will be seeing him soon just to confirm my normal dermatologist’s diagnosis and treatment.  I have never appreciated health insurance before this.  My dermatologist told me that before he referred me he had already pre-authorized the visit with my insurance, so I already know that it will mostly be covered.  All the doctors I’ve seen so far (urgent care, normal family doctor, dermatologist, hematologist) have been in the Palo Alto Medical Foundation‘s network, and I am really impressed by how high-tech and efficient everything is.  I gave my information once at the Sunnyvale center, and since then every time I go I just tell them my name and show my ID.  The Mountain View center has just about every type of doctor in one building, and even the labs are there, so after my doctor visits if I need to get blood tests I just walk down to the lab.  The doctors immediately send prescriptions to your pharmacy during your appointment, so as soon as I get home I can pick them up.  They’ve also got this awesome online system where I can see all my upcoming appointments, send messages to doctors, see the results of all my blood tests, see all my prescriptions… Everything is so high-tech in Silicon Valley!

Resolutions

These resolutions are late, and I haven’t really started, but putting them here will push me to follow them:

  1. Health
    1. Eat healthier – more vegetables and fruits
    2. Exercise three times a week – Tuesdays and Thursdays at work, Sundays at the apartment complex gym
    3. Get back down to my normal weight (110 pounds)
  2. Money
    1. Eat out less – try to bring lunch to work more often
    2. Control my random bursts of spending sprees
    3. Be more aware of how much of my money goes to what
  3. Work
    1. Learn more – delve deeper into the new things I’m using rather than only dealing with the minimum
    2. Be more aware of user experience – it’s fascinating!
    3. Collaborate more with other people – talk in person rather than IM if possible
    4. Speak up more with my thoughts and ideas
    5. Take useful classes that become available
  4. Projects
    1. Work on projects more consistently! Don’t just start them and forget about them for a few years
    2. Keep up with crafts projects
    3. Start more technical projects, especially related to web development
    4. Keep track of project progress, optimally here on Bacon Fried Rice
  5. Miscellaneous
    1. Be more productive, do chores more willingly, resist the urge to just lay on the couch and read articles on my phone
    2. Follow a weekday schedule so I don’t get lazy and do nothing when I can’t decide what to do. Tentatively:
      1. Monday: Video games! EDIT: and reading
      2. Tuesday: Crafts project (probably finishing my cross-stitch projects)
      3. Wednesday: Technical project (discussed later)
      4. Thursday: Do something with Jack (play games or do a project or something)
      5. Friday: Free choice

Video games

I’m still playing Arkham City right now.  I like it, and it’s usually the type of game I really like to play, but for some reason I just can’t really get myself to finish it.  I think it’s because it disturbs me.  The villains are terrible.  I want to just get it over with so I can finally play Assassin’s Creed Revelations.

Uncharted 3 was awesome, but kind of short.  Also the ending was very anti-climactic.

I got a DOTA2 key, so I started learning it and playing with Jack.  I suck though.  Also Jack apparently logged into my Steam account and gave away my two extra keys without telling me -__-

I need to find other games to play with Jack too, I can’t see myself being able to play multiple DOTA2 games in a row without getting bored… We played the Uncharted 3 local multiplayer but now that we finished it it doesn’t have much re-playability.

Projects

I’ve been neglecting my projects a lot.  I have two categories: crafts and technical.

In terms of crafts, I usually do them with a purpose (cards for people’s birthdays, holidays, etc.) so I guess it makes sense that I haven’t been keeping up with them.  However when I was going through my boxes of junk I discovered more than five very large cross-stitch projects that I’ve either started very little of or haven’t started at all.  I’ve decided I’m going to focus on those, so my Tuesdays are going to just be cross-stitching.  Right now I’m working on one of kitties in a window that I started for Jack two years ago – I wonder how long it will take me to finally finish it!

For technical projects, I’ve decided to pick up web development again.  I’ve always been interested – taught myself HTML from a book in fourth grade – but it kind of died off once I got into high school, and all of the programming I did in college wasn’t related at all.  However due to some of the stuff I’ve been doing at work my interest has been rekindled – I’m going to write about this in a separate post later so I won’t go into detail here.

Kitties

I’m in a rush and have to leave so I will just leave with a short note about the kitties.  They are still awesome, Jokulhaups is big and heavy and too smart.  He figured out how to open all the cabinets so now we have to Velcro them shut.  Dragon is so much tinier than Jokulhaups!  She loves to snuggle now, every morning she comes up to Jack and asks to be let under the covers.  She used to sleep on my pillow every night but I guess snuggling with Jack in the morning was warmer :(  She loves sitting with me when I’m at the computer though, so I guess that makes up for it.  Here are two kitty photos before I go:

Jokulhaups would like a belly rub please

Dragon says Mini Panda is snuggly and warm

Renoki Version 2.0

Renoki has been on the market for a while and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the game. Here are some of the improvements I’ve made so far.

Improving the Shop

People didn’t know what the items did. In particular, nobody had any idea what the wings did (which is pretty understandable). Anyway, I added a pop up box when you select the item and you have to press “BUY” in order to actually make the purchase. The pop up box has a short description of what the item does, hopefully eliminating all question.

Improving StartScreens

Having the informative picture on the start screen tended to be completely ignored. I’m not sure if it’s because the picture itself is unintuitive, or people don’t even realize that it has information on it. Anyway, I added some text to the start screens to make it painfully obvious what you are supposed to do. I really wanted to avoid using text but I couldn’t see any better way of doing it with the limited space I had.

Improving Number Monsters

Nobody understands the number monsters (correction, one person from work understood it). Anyway, I added text explaining what to do and also the first level with number monsters have the numbers painted on the door. This “should” make it painfully obvious what the point of this monster is.

Adding More Feedback
Someone brought up a good point that if sound is off, there is no feedback on good or bad hits. At first I thought of using the vibration feedback that Android already has built in for keypresses, but realized this might be too intrusive for users. Plus, it requires an explicit permission and I’m trying to keep my app permission free right now. So instead I have the entire gameboard briefly flash red when a bad press occurs. I think this worked out very well as it clearly stands out and indicates that something went wrong.

Enclyopedia
From an early stage of development, I wanted to add a Renoki Encyclopedia where I could list every Renoki along with funny descriptions/flavor text. I stumbled upon ViewPager, a brilliant little thing for Android that allows you to automatically do horizontal swiping of pages (similar to the current Android market). All you need to do is drop in some images to each page, and the user can easily swipe through each one. Now I just need to think up funny back stories for each Renoki.

Balance Tweaks
I think the game is too hard for people. I toned down the speeds for Normal and lowered shop prices. I realized that people actually mess up a lot so they have to buy hearts quite frequently. Someone mentioned that they got far in the game but were never able to save up enough to buy a hammer. I needed to amend this, as the later levels get really hard without the upgrades.