I know you’re thinking the same thing I am: “About f-ing time!” You won’t even have to fake an illness to take the day off to play because your boss will be spending the day playing Death by Scrolling and won’t notice you’re gone. Coming soon to Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. We’re working as fast as we can.
Who doesn’t enjoy a good history lesson? I know I do. Oh please let there be a test at the end. Let me take you back to 2018. We had just released Thimbleweed Park, finished all the ports, done an update, and I am thinking about something new. I was regularly going to Daniel Cook’s Seattle prototyping meet-up and trying to come with a new game to show every two weeks. It was my personal game jam. I created a lot of odd games, one was a huge multi-screen breakout game, the other was a narrative game about someone being lost in a cave. The cave was procedurally generated and there was literately no way out. It also included a procedural swearing engine. I was also working on a little top down pixel art rpg game, but is was missing something. I went dinner with some other game designers at PAX that year and buried in a conversation someone said something to how they try and come up with wacky ideas for their new games. The next morning I woke thinking about the screen always scrolling, never stopping and the player needs to keep up. I hurriedly made those changes but it still didn’t feel right. Trying to aim and run while the screen scrolled felt like cognitive overload. I switched it so the firing and targeting was all automatic and the player just had to run, avoid enemies, and grab things for upgrades. There was a frantic energy to the game. The perfect party or steaming game. I finished up the prototype and took it to the prototyping meet-up and it was a big hit. Lots of laughing as the death was narrowly avoided and the screen never stopped moving. I was feeling pretty good about the game and decided to move it from a prototype to a real game. I knew I needed an artist but didn’t have the money to afford one. By pure coincidence I was talking to a new steam-like platform just coming on a scene about Thimbleweed Park and figured I’d ask about this game. I put together a quick video and a pitch email. You can see the video below. To my surprise they said yes, gave me some money and I was off. Side note: I recently did an interview for Death by Scrolling and they wanted to know if I was inspired to make Death by Scrolling after playing Vampire Survivors. Except for the auto-fire this game isn’t much like Vampire Survivors and I have to been working on it since 2018. So… I love Vampire Survivors, but no. I worked on the game for about 9 months and really struggled with progression. The core game was still a lot of fun but everything I put onto it to make it a deeper game wasn’t working. It was round this time that the possibility to make Return to Monkey Island came up and it seemed like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I was struggling with the game I called simply called “Runner” and it made sense to returned the money I had taken and move to Return to Monkey Island. I took all the engine improvements Derek and I had made and built Delores in prep for Return to Monkey Island all based on the Runner engine (but without the tile rendering). «INSERT MAKING RETURN TO MONKEY ISLAND MONTAGE HERE» Return to Monkey Island wrapped and I was once again thinking about something new. I had the idea of taking the pixel art tile engine from Runner and making an old school Zelda game (the only Zelda games I like). I hired an artist, brought on Elissa as a designer and we were off. A year into the game it became obvious that making an open world RPG was a lot of work and we didn’t have the resources (money) for that. I thought about Runner, dug up the video and sent it to Elissa and said “What if we made this? We could have it done in a less than a year.” She loved it and her epiphany was to forget about deep progression and just make it like an arcade game. In and out quickly and retain all the frantic fun of the original. As I was thinking about the game’s name Elissa died from the scrolling and the text “Death by Scrolling” appeared and she said that should be the name of the game. Perfect. A quick name change and Death by Scrolling was (re-)born. The theme of the game being about stuck in purgatory and purgatory being taken over by investment bankers and corporations for profit took hold and provided a nice framework for narration. A lot came together at the end and it all just made sense. It’s a game about greed and the never ending grind in life and death for more and more. The absurdity of social media even make an appearance when you die. The game is mirror into the world we live (and die) in. Death by Scrolling What was the original name of Death by Scrolling? What city was the prototype meet-up in? Who did I bring on to help with design? What game did I make between the prototype and Return to Monkey Island.
I want to talk about three things that has fundamentally changed my dev-life. There are a lot of things, like ImGUI, that are very amazing and useful but they don’t provide a general solution across many problems. In no particular order… I’ve been using Git since 2010 and it really has changed my dev-life. I’d used version control before that, mainly Perform, SVN and PVSC, but Git felt nice and unobtrusive and I like that everything was local until I pushed to the server. It’s both nice and annoying that you can’t lock files (like art). You can (kind of) with LFS but that feels tacked on and not ready for primetime. Don’t think so? Try explaining installing and using it to a non-technical artist sometime. Git can be frustrating if you’re trying to do anything but the basics. Accidentally check in a secret file months ago and need to scrub it? Good luck with that. There are ways but it requires a lot of Git-Fu. I mainly use a GUI for git ( Fork ) and that takes most of the pain away. I do use the command line, but mostly in automation scripts. Before Markdown became the de-facto standard, I used my own custom format. It worked but wasn’t great and only I understood it. Markdown has it’s issues when you start using the more esoteric features. I’m also annoyed at bold and italics notation. Why is italics and bold is ? Why not and . That would make a lot more sense to me. I also have issue with it’s creator, John Gruber. He is a highly annoying smug Apple Fanboy. His writing was fine in the early days when Apple was #3, but got intolerable as Apple became the 800lb gorilla. It’s changed recently as Apple has snubbed him but I still can’t read anything he writes. But, I like his Markdown. I use JSON for just about every data file format in my games. JSON was created by Douglas Crockford as a notation for Javascript objects. I worked with Doug Crockford at Lucasfilm for several years. I always had a lot of respect for Doug and was somewhat intimidated (in a good way) by him. Doug was also the producer for the Nintendo Maniac Mansion. As much as I love JSON, there are some things about it that annoy me. I dislike that trailing commas are not allowed There is no need for this and it makes writing out valid JSON more complex. I also don’t like you that have to wrap keys names in quotes if they are simple ascii. I wrote a custom JSON parser I use in all my games that relaxes these, but then general JSON readers fail on my data.
Hi there! I’m Elissa, and I’m the other designer on Death by Scrolling and doing a guest post this week. It’s technically my second project with Ron now, and when I’m not designing my own Roguelike (Dungeons of Freeport), or other games such as Deck & Conn, I’m drinking coffee and fighting drop-bears here here in the sunbaked land of Australia. If you want to follow me on social media, I’m on Mastodon primarily at @[email protected] and on Bluesky sometimes at @elissablack.com A confession to make. I started writing this blog post, got a ways in, and then realized there was a critical problem with it: almost nobody reading the post would have any idea just how Death by Scrolling actually plays, so it’d probably wash right on over them producing a painted-on polite smile. So here I am, back at the start, suddenly finding myself giving the elevator pitch and basic game play description of the game. It’s also easier now that some game play footage as been released. Death by Scrolling is a vertically scrolling action-roguelike game. TesterTron3000 playing Death by Scrolling You select one of several different characters and progress through increasingly long and densely populated levels full of villainous nasties, treasures, gold coins, traps, collectables, and simple puzzles. At the end of each level you get a brief moment of respite at a camp where you can pick up and buy powerups, take or turn in quests, and go make another tea in the kitchen before returning to your computer before venturing ever-further into the fantastical worlds of Purgatory. At first glance, the game doesn’t look like a Roguelike. Even in the most loose definition of the term - it’s vertically scrolling and action-driven. If anything, it seems to have more in common with something like River Raid or 1942 than a dungeon crawler. But to me, where it starts to show its lineage is when it comes to do level design in the game. In terms of my work on the project, I’m designing & writing the game with Ron, but probably the majority of my time is spent doing the level design. As such, I felt like that was a good place to start when writing a guest blog post - I could focus on one of the only things I actually do more than Ron on the game. In the most superficial sense, the game’s levels are top-down 2d level prefabs designed in Tiled , a very useful open-source tile-based map editor, and stitched together at run-time by the game. The individual pieces (we refer to them as prefabs) each have different bits of meta data attached to them such as their Land (or biome), what kind of prefab they are, what other prefabs they can attach to and what the probability is that they might appear, what mobs can spawn, etc. For instance, a very simple, short bit of green grass with a small hill and some simple decorations might be pretty common, and appear regardless of what level you’re at, where-as a more complex prefab featuring a maze may be rare, limited to higher levels only, and might be flagged to only appear once in a level. Using this metadata we can set it up so that early levels are shorter, simpler, and contain fewer ‘puzzle’ prefabs (what we call the more complex prefabs that have optional mazes, gates or enemy ambushes in them). If a new player starts on the first level of a run (which is always in the grassy Land), the prefabs that get chosen to assemble the level are different to, say, the 15th level for a player who’s unlocked lots of upgrades and is currently in the Swamp land. So, to create a single Land means designing the aesthetics, the enemies that occupy its levels, the basic gameplay style, and then, finally, a good hundred or more prefabs that make it up. Doing those first bits isn’t easy, but it isn’t as time consuming as the weeks and months spent making up all the prefabs. This process usually has three steps. First step: drinking coffee. Second step: coming up with basic shapes and paths. This I tend to do in batches, doodling in a notepad or on my tablet, sometimes at a cafe, on a train, or really anywhere that isn’t my work desk (for a change). With enough of these basic shapes figured out in varying levels of detail, it’s then time for- Third step: spend days in Tiled, creating first at first the basic layouts, then adding more aesthetic detail. I usually alternate between doing all three of these critical steps - a few hours in Tiled, then going for a walk to clear my head, get a coffee, and come up with some more prefab ideas. It’s this design process that to me really drives home how much the game is a Roguelike (or is at least related to them - ask two fans of roguelikes what makes something a roguelike and you will get five different answers). Just like designing most any other Rogue-adjacent game, it also means that staring at prefabs and their metadata until your eyes go square won’t truly tell if what you’ve built plays well. Great ideas on paper don’t always work. Or maybe they do, but with a few powerups they become too easy (or too hard). In Tiled, shown above, we have data layers that exist along with aesthetic ones. Different data types (each a unique colour for easy recognition) can be painted on that layer to allow the prefab designer to, for instance, stop a player jumping onto that square, stop power-ups from randomly spawning there, or forcing a square to be non-passible. Which means built into this prefab design cycle is also a crap-ton of testing. From almost the very start we’ve had regular QA and play-testing done at least a few hours a week. What puzzles are too hard when you’re moving at speed? What other forms end up being fun and should be put into more prefabs? Even the simple act of adding more prefabs can unbalance the game if we aren’t careful. Add 20 more prefabs to a given Land, and suddenly those rare ones you made might occur less frequently than you’d like. In the end, it’s meant that designing this game has been a massively cyclic process. Adding features, prefabs, or puzzles, tinkering with them, experimenting, and even removing some if they turn out to have been better left on that scrap of napkin at the cafe down the road from my place.
“But? Wait?” I can hear you saying, “Isn’t grumpygamer.com a static site built by Hugo? What dark magic did you use to get comments on the static site?” No dark magic. But it does involve a small php script. You can embed php in a hugo page and since grumpygamer.com is hosted on my server and it’s running php it wasn’t that hard. No tricky javascript and since it’s all hosted by me, no privacy issues. All your comments stay on my server and don’t feed Big Comment. Comments are stored in flat files so no pesky SQL databases. It only took me about a day, so all in all not bad. I may regret this. I’m only turning on comments for future posts. P.S. I will post the code and a small guide in a few days, so you too can invite the masses to critic and criticize your every word. Good times.
Have I mentioned that you should Wish List Death by Scrolling now, before you finish reading this? Here is the code the runs TesterTron3000 in Death by Scrolling. There is some code not listed that does set up, but the following runs the level. It’s written in Dinky, a custom language I wrote for Delores based on what we used for Thimbleweeed Park and then used in Return to Monkey Island . TesterTron3000 is as dumb as a box of rocks, but in some ways that’s what makes it fun to watch. Before we get into code, here is another sample run. It’s not the best code I’ve written but far from the worst and it gets the job done. TesterTron3000 has run for over 48 hours and not found a serious bug, so I’m happy. Source code follows, you’ve been warned…
I first created TesterTron3000 during Thimbleweed Park (hence the name). It was a simple automated tester that randomly clicked on the screen. It couldn’t play the game because it has no knowledge of inventory or puzzles. It did find the odd errors, but was of little real value. Fast forward to the futuristic year of 2025 and I’m working on Death by Scrolling and need a new automated game play tester. Death by Scrolling, not being an adventure game, comes along and I need a whole new program to test with, but I like the name so I keep that. TesterTron3000 is pretty simple, it just runs through the level, looks for power-ups and if its health is low, it looks for hearts. It’s not rocket science. I could make it a lot smarter, but what I really need is tool that stress tests the game so smarts of low on the list. I can leave it running overnight and it plays thousands of levels and in the morning I see if any errors occurred or if there are memory leaks. None so far. Its been a great tool for consoles because we can only do limited testing before sending it to outside testers due to limited dev kits 1 , so running TesterTron3000 on it for 24 hours is good piece of mind. There are little animation glitches because it’s not running through the normal controller code and I’ve spotted some missing sfx. TesterTron3000 is written 100% in Dinky and only about 100 lines of code. I might ship it with the final game as an attract mode, but it’s kind of buggy, has bad path finding, and really stupid so I worry players would fixate on what it’s not doing right. It’s not a tool for playing the game with any degree is skill, it’s a stress tester and a dev tool. But, it’s fun to watch. Something a lot of people don’t know is for consoles you need special dev kits to test with, it’s not like the PC (or even the SteamDeck) where you can use any device. You have to buy (often very expensive) special dev kits, even just to test. It’s really annoying. ↩︎ Something a lot of people don’t know is for consoles you need special dev kits to test with, it’s not like the PC (or even the SteamDeck) where you can use any device. You have to buy (often very expensive) special dev kits, even just to test. It’s really annoying. ↩︎
It is with great pleasure, relief and waiting that we can finally announce Death By Scrolling, one of the most anticipated games of 2025. Wish List now , coming soon.
I was having a discussion with someone on Mastodon about unit testing games and how it is a next to impossible job. Once clarified, I think we saw eye-to-eye on it, but I do hear about it a lot, mostly from programmers that don’t live in game dev. Testing games is hard. So much of what fails during testing is due to random behavior by the player. Them doing something you didn’t anticipate. I break testing down to three groups. 1 - Unit testing This is what I hear about the most and how this would be a good way to test games. It is not. Unit testing will test code components of your game, but not the game. If you have a sorting routine, this will test that, but it has little effect on testing your game. I do unit testing, mostly on the engine commands. This get run once a week or when I add a new feature. It’s testing that all the command or functions return correct values, but has little to do with “testing the game”. It’s also something that would be very hard to run from the build process since the entire engine needs to start up. This is why I run it by hand every so often. If it’s not being run in a real engine environment, it’s not accurate. 2 - Automation I’ve been using automation since Thimbleweed Park. I called it TesterTron 3000 it ran through the game and randomly simulated clicks and tried to follow some logic. It found a few things, mostly bugs that would only happen if you clicked very fast. It was fun to watch and gave mostly peace of mind testing. It often broke because we changed the games logic and it could no longer follow along. If I had a team that did nothing but keep TesterTron 3000 working, it would be more useful but given the limited resources of an indie team, I’m not sure it would have been worth it. I have something similar in Death By Scrolling, it runs through the levels and randomly picks up things and try to attack enemies. I could have it follow a set sequence of key strokes, but then it’s only testing what you know works, not the goofy stuff that real bugs are make of. I’ve run into programmers that build something like this and at first it feels good but as the game changes it falls apart and doesn’t get used much after that. Maybe if you had a simple puzzle game, this might be useful. TesterTron 3000 a good stress tester and it needs to run overnight to be truly useful. 3 - Human Tester The most important testing we do is with testers who play the game all day long. They look at the Git history and see what has changed and beat on that. 99% of our bugs are found this way and I can’t emphasis enough how important it is. Players do odd things that automation never will. While it is important to test your own code, you will never find the “good” bugs. Programmers are lousy testers because they test what they know, you need to be testing what you don’t know. Be afraid if management that says they don’t need testers because the programmer should test their own code. I grew up in a world where a bug meant you have to remake a million floppy disks and it would take months to get the change out to players, if they ever got it.
We just got Death By Scrolling running on the Switch. We had to do some optimization because we were doing stupid stuff with rendering the tile map. Modern PC machines are so fast these days that you can do a lot of stupid stuff and it doesn’t matter. Back in the day (queue angry old man) I had to count cpu cycles and every byte of memory was precious. Nowadays memory is basically infinite. But it’s different for consoles, they do have a limited amount of memory and you do have to pay attention to performance. One thing that really bothers me when I play Switch games ported from PC or other consoles is the lack of care over font size. Things that look good on a big monitor or TV are unreadable on the Switch (and the Steamdeck). We’ve taken great care to make everything big enough to be readable on handhelds, but it’s a real pain. As a designer you want to cram enough information on each screen, especially for RPG-ish games. People get used to html/css rendering and how good it is at flowing to fill space and around images. Games often don’t have text rendering engines that are that complex (using a html/css engine internally is overkill). One of the big upgrades I want to do to my engine is better text flow rendering, it will never be as good as html/css in the browser, but it could be a lot better/easier. It’s one of the things I’m envious of Godot.
If you haven’t read my previous post about Death By Scrolling way back in February, I suggest you do. Of course this is my lazy way of doing the 2nd promised blog post for Death By Scrolling. In all fairness, I started to write it and it seem awfully familiar so I went back and checked and sure enough I had already written about it. But, I’ll do another real post… I asked for beta testers on Mastodon and got close to 300 sign-ups. I didn’t want to invite everyone all at once. There is an old saying that you can only make a first impression once. Every time I make a new beta version I invite 25 more people. Couple of stats: About 25% of the people never redeem the steam key. Or they redeem it weeks later. This is a little surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. People are busy. Of the people who did redeem the key a third play the game once or twice and never again. This is not surprising. Death By Scrolling is a rogue-like and you die a lot. I do mean a lot, it’s right in the title. Some people do not like this type of game, and I’m OK with that. Maybe half the people who play the game never visit the Discord. We can get only so much info from analytics. Having a conversation about what you like and don’t like is very helpful. Again, this isn’t too unexpected. The players that do play more than a few times play a lot and that is good to see. It’s nice to see strategies emerge that we, as the designers, didn’t think of. That is always a good sign. This is the first time I’ve done large-ish beta test for one of my games and it’s been fascinating and very insightful. I’m about to invite the next group of 25 testers. If you’re among this group, please visit the Discord. – Ron
I miss the Kickstarter days of Thimbleweed Park where each week I would write a blog post about how things were going and we’d to a podcast. If we were doing Thimbleweed Park today we’d have a video podcast on YouTube. I watch a lot of YouTube videos from indie game devs where they document everything they are doing on their game with a fancy video and my first thought is: “Where do you find the time to make this”. I barely have enough time to work on my game. Now that Death By Scrolling is getting close to releasing, I really should start blogging again about the game. There are a lot of interesting things happening and there is no reason I should keep those to myself. I have found that as I get older I enjoy pontificating less and less. I’ve stopped doing talks, doing interviews and podcasts. I really enjoy Tim Cain YouTube channel but I could never do that. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s that I have become self-conscious that I’m just pontificating for no reason and don’t have anything deep and interesting to say. Now that I’ve got you all primed and ready, starting next week you can plan your day around the Death By Scrolling blog update. Or maybe I’ll delete this post like it never happened.
When I build my game for testing, it’s a completely automated process from the command line. I type on the command line and a long chain of events is started. The script pushes to git, which starts the cloud based CI machine (Azure) building the Mac, Windows and Linux executables. When they are done, my local script is notified and they are download locally. Game files are added and they are signed and packaged up. The script then logs into Steam and uploads the game. A change list is built from the git log and uploaded to a private website. When that is complete, a message is sent to Discord to notify testers that the build is done. This is all done with no interaction on my part. It makes doing test builds quick, easy, and painless. But more important is there is no human interaction, so there is less chance of a mistake being made. To upload to Steam you need to authenticate, which usually involves getting an email and typing in a code or doing the same with their authentication app. It’s not very conducive to automated builds. Fortunately Steam has an process where you authenticate once and then pass a token from the command line and that logs you in without a password. Wonderful. This worked fine for what seem like years, then on Jan 1, 2025 I got a error saying my token was expired. OK, makes some sense. I re-ran the process to get a new token and everything was fine for a day or so, then it failed again saying the token was expired. Then it happened again. And again. Frustrated, I reached out to the friend who works at Valve and was put in contact with a programmer there. He watched the back-end and said everything was fine for the first few auths and then the old expired token as submitted. Rebuilding the token worked for a while and then the old token was submitted again. We began to suspect the token file on my machine was being overwritten but I couldn’t see it happening and didn’t know how it was happening. It not like the whole directory was being restored from a backup, it was just that one file sitting in an obscure Steam folder. We tried everything and never solved the problem. The solution I finally arrive at – and has worked fine for the past three months – was to get an auth token and then save that file away. Just before my script uploads to Steam it copies that good file over the current one and uploads. This is what Steam recommends for full CI builds, but until Jan 1, I never had to do this locally. I’m still mystified who is overwriting that file but I guess it’s moot now.
Going on n+1 years, I proclaim grumpygamer.com to be 100% April Fools’ Day joke free. I realized that I lost a large chunk of the early April Fools’ posts due to moving content from one back-end to another over time. It pains me as I’m sure they are seen as culturally significant and worth preserving for future generations. “Grandpa! Tell us the story of when the web used be be April Fools’ joke free!” I might have to go track them down on the Wayback Machine and pretend it all never happened and I have perfect back-up and archiving practices.
First screen shot from my new game called Death by Scrolling. I started working on this game back in 2019. It started out great and everybody I showed it to loved it, but it was simple. Everyone asked for progression and “game” stuff and over the next six months I proceeded to ruin it. Then a little game called Return to Monkeys island came along and I took the next two years to build that with Dave Grossman and a wonderful team. Monkey Island ended and I started working on a new game I dubbed “RPGTBD”. It was a classic Zelda-like pixel art RPG and was a lot of fun. I brought on an artist (Craig) and a designer ( Elissa ) to help. When I first started RPGTBD everyone told me that it’s unrealistic to do a open world RPG with a small team. Morons. What do they know? Well, a lot actually. It became obvious that my vision for the game was never going to get done and on top of that I was spending a lot of money so something had to give. I could pay off the contracts for Craig and Elissa and call it a day. But I had all this wonderful art and a nice quest and exploration system from RPGTBD it felt odd to let them go to waste. Then I remembered Death By Scrolling. I shared the prototype with Elissa and she really liked it. There is something about the game that I could never let go of. I rebuilt the whole project, stripping out all the stupid stuff and returned it to the core of the game back when it was fun. Over the next 3 months Elissa and I added back pieces bit-by-bit with a nice progression system, story, quests and challenges. It’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but Elissa and I get lost in playing it when we should be testing a new feature, so I guess that’s good. ELissa and Craig leave the project on March 1 then it’s just me for a few months and then release it in 2025. This time for sure.
I recently asked on Mastodon how a player would expect damage to be computed in an RPG. General consensus is there was no consensus. The one thing people did agree on was that the skill/weapon description should say what the order of operation is. Fair enough. I am worried about the amount of information that needs to be conveyed to players. The game needs to work well on the Switch and the Steam Deck with limited screen size. I play a lot of games where the 20-something devs with perfect eyesight spent too much time looking at the game on a large monitor. I’ve purposely kept the text large enough to read on a small screen. It means I need to be succinct. Some people suggested that players should be able to order the weapons/skills as they wanted. This is problematic since weapons/skills come in a very random order and a UI to reorder them seems like a lot of work and not really what the game is about. It also doesn’t matter what order the weapons/skills are evaluated. I compute damage_buff then compute damage_extra when the weapon/skill is acquired. Later on those are used to compute damage and that is where the order matters. It’s also basically an action game and players shouldn’t get too deep into stat management for a character that is going to last a few minutes. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I think I will opt for the 1st method since it allows for bigger numbers and that is something players do want.
I’m a big fan of Tim Cane’s YouTube channel . If I was going to have a YouTube channel, I would want it to be like his but talking about adventure games, not RPGs. Maybe someday. So imagine my delight when he posted this: Clayton and I wrote this poem many years ago, but not much as changed. I’ve never met Tim Cane but hope to someday. Maybe he will come to New Zealand.
!! P.S. Static site is now live on grumpygamer.com !! I spent the last weekend converting grumpygamer.com to a static website using Hugo . I don’t really know why. The old dynamic site was working fine. It’s still hosted it on my server but there is no php, etc. I may move it to a static site hosting platform. If your reading this, you’re on the new static site. So far Hugo has been great. It’s Go mark-up language is a little odd, but I’m used to it now. The old site used markdown but I added some odd new rules and porting all the posts over was kind of a pain. Wrote a php script that pulled down all the posts and wrote them out as json. I then wrote a Python script to find all my odd markdown hacks and convert them to the standard markdown that Hugo uses. All in all, it only took a few hours and now it render 90% right. There are still a few goofy tags I need to fix by hand. The images were hosted on a CDN and I moved them locally. I’ve become concerned with the complexity of software. I’m getting to the point where I want everything under my control and simple. The Thimbleweed Park dev blog was a complicated mess of databases and servers. Something went wrong and the whole thing collapsed. I ending up rendering the whole site out as static html and just hosting that since it wasn’t changing. I would have been better off with a static site from the beginning, hence this move to Hugo. One of the reasons I haven’t posted much was the complexity to writing an article I’m hoping this will be easier. The one big issue is comments. I shut down comments after the Return to Monkey Island shit storm and I’ve been reluctant to turn them back on. Can’t we all just get along. Comments on a static site are an tricky issue. There are some third party solutions like Disqus but I worry about Big Comment sucking up personal information of anyone who comments on my site. I did watch a YouTube video about how to add comments to a Hugo site and it just requires a little javascript and I can hook it into my existing comment system. The good news if that system goes down all I lose are the comments, not the whole site. I might give that a try at some point. Things I still need to do: I’d also like the site to be built with CI when I push it. P.S. I decided not to do this. A simple and quick rsync command gets it to my server and it’s one less thing I need to worry about. Remember, this was about keeping it simple. If you notice anything odd or broken, let me know on Mastodon P.S. I work on my website on the weekends, weekdays are for working on my game. See you next Sat. Make the site responsive to changes in window size (i.e. mobile) Fix up the missing markdown. Get rss working again so the old url still works. Clean up my crappy css. Get social media cards working again. Write some new posts that makes this all worth it.
As the world spins into chaos, the one constant that brings stability into your world is knowing that grumpygamer.com will always remains April Fools’ joke free.
I recently asked on Mastodon about favorite quests. I’ve collected some of the responses here. I apologize that I can’t credit the individuals who posted, but you can find them there. I need to update grumpygamer so I can post rich Mastodon links. If you have a favorite, post it on Mastodon and @ me. Baldur’s Gate 3 quest to safe Arabella on the druid’s grove is a turning point for me. (1) You have options on how to act and what to do after you acted, (2) these choices impact the game and future choices, both in the near future and far future; and (3) when playing for the first time I didn’t feel like I had a choice, there was only thing my character would have done. I like sidequest with “treasure hunt” like the maps in Red Dead Redemption I like tiny quests about interpersonal relationships, like resolving a conflict between a mortician and his gravedigger employee in Ultima 6, or babysitting a dock worker’s daughter in Citizen Sleeper. the Tarrey Town quest arc from Zelda Breath of the Wild is one of my all time favorites. It’s really just a series of supply fetch quests and “find yet another character whose name rhymes with ‘son’ (in this big huge open world)” but it feels like you are helping establish an entire new town in the wilderness - leaves you with a genuine “I helped people” feeling. After which it becomes a real town that is quite a useful outpost with lots of new quests it opens up in turn. I like quests where you have to run around between a few characters, doing small tasks for them or delivering messages between them to get them to work together eventually. Like with getting Olga and Boris to make up in Quest for Glory 4, or the Chinese hitmen quest in VtM: Bloodlines. quests that leave lasting impact on the game world (like rebuilding a village, changing the landscape, that sort of thing) one that comes to mind is having to sneakily follow someone to find out what they’re up to without them noticing I’ll have to come back to this, but I think scenarios are important. Why you are doing the quest isn’t always as important as what you do during the quest. I’m currently playing through Baldurs Gate 3 and in one instance i began fighting one group of enemies, only for another to show up that distracted them. Essentially you have to use this distraction effectively to win the fight because it collects the enemies in a group and the interjecting enemy eventually leaves. If you didn’t do enough with it, you are left with an army of enemies. I also like murder mysteries. Locked in a house or something, talk to people, figure out who is the killer. There was another game where during a fight a fire is spreading, so you have to manage the fight while getting distance from the fire. If you move too quick the enemies are able to surround you, too slow or let someone get knocked down, the fire gets them. I don’t think it’s super important for a game to be incredibly hard or easy or whatever. I think the sweet spot for video games is ‘hard enough that I need to pay attention, and no harder.’ different outcomes for people or places. For example, depending on your efficiency on solving the quest (or on decisions), you save a family or they get killed; or someone gets in debt with you and will help you later or he will hire killers to slay you; you may save a town from evil wizards or it may be cursed with fatal consequences I like quests with options. Say I need to get inside the castle. Is my only option stealth? Or could I bribe the guard, or seduce the guard, or distract the guard, or find an old tunnel from the monastery? Quests that do world building. I loved all the side quests in The Witcher 3 for example. They were all unique little stories in the Witcher universe, making the game more immersive as you played it. There was one in Neverwinter Nights with a glass sphere that contained a parallel world? And One in Dragon Age with a mouse hole. - Can´t remember exactly.Generally ones that are less predictable but logical to solve. I always liked questions where I brought NPCs back together or highly political strategic ones ;) I love it when quests are smaller pieces of bigger quests. For example in GTA when you do heists, a few missions set up the heist then you perform the actual heist which makes use of the earlier things you did. I love ones that involve mystery. The Dark Brotherhood questline in TES: Oblivion comes to mind. Specifically “Whodunit”, where you participate in a murder mystery party where you are the murderer. first thing that came to mind was the spell book in King’s Quest 6. Travel around gathering ingredients (which didn’t feel tedious as you needed to Island-hop for other story & puzzle reasons) then cast spells that advance the story. Not all spells were required due to different ways to win the game. Helping a NPC gets you a pet/sidekick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloody_Baron may I chime in? I like quests which turn out to be something completely different than you expect, and where the good writing/setup makes you forget that its a scripted event. RPG or adventure, makes no difference. Most memorable quest: Warhead on Amiga, where you eatch Constrictor annihilate the entire Sirius fleet with single missile (while going la-de-da), and then you get mission from your headquarters to go and attack it I’m fine with them being tiny impacts on the world. if I’m fetching an hat for the person, the person wears it after. If I fetch an item for a shopkeeper, it increases stock If there’s a side quest where I need to make medicine because someone is sick, I need to do it immediately The quests where we need to make choices (maybe moral ones) with consequences hard to predict. Hag quest in Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of my favourite quests, for example. Legend of Mana, the lamp selling quest: https://mana.fandom.com/wiki/Lumina_(location)#Faeries’_Light You had to learn the Dudbears’ language and answer their questions. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/25652 I like the help korok to reach his friend in Tears of the Kingdom. (Although many seem to prefer to torture them) Most of it because of the sound. The koroks really sound sad and distressed but when you put them together you hear the sound of relief. “Helping them” is a good theme by itself but the sound really adds to the feeling and role play. I like quest for adding new team members That was old chaps from the original once quests that affect the ending for sure, even if it’s an extra sprite in the lineup. It blew my child mind they you can save Luca’s mom from losing her legs in Chrono Trigger and it affected that particular line of endings (game has over a dozen). It’s a thing you end up having to do regardless, a little action sequence, but it’s hard enough to not telegraph in any way that it’s actually possible to win and save your mom. Like it seems as if you’re supposed to simply relive trauma. i like the ones that get initiated by the player - technically, it’s you who just walked up to a random person and tried to ask what’s up. one I did yesterday while playing Mario rpg. The quest triggers when you arrive in a town and you meet a trio of characters that tell you they hid something around the world, and they give you clues like “it’s genuine a wooden flower” or “under a green bed”. You have to revisit and find these things. I liked it, solving the clues made me feel smart, and the places I revisited felt deeper now. The “small favor” ones, where you start with a very simple task but it slowly unfurls into an endless quest. I really like the quests that seem simple at first but reveal a lot of world behind them. Like, the initial quest is “get me some widgets” but you start looking into why there’s a widget shortage and you discover the frobnicator is down due to sabotage because there are warring factions of frobnicator builders and their disagreements are deep-seated, sensible, and not trivially solvable. Then the wish fulfillment part is that you solve them. The ones where, just when you have everything ready to turn in for a reward, you suddenly get new information casting doubt on whether you should do so, and have to make a choice about which side to take. It’s that moment of player agency right after a stretch of non-agency, doing stuff because someone else told you to. I like quests where you’ve been manipulated to side with someone. You do their quest, and then they destroy the town, kill the king, release the kraken etc..setting you up for quests to undo what you did. The ones that stick with me involve making choices that seem unconnected until later (e.g. the treatment of specific monsters in Witcher 3 affecting the fates of characters you may or may not meet) or that build connections with people and places (like how completing a fetch quest or taking care of a problem aids in reconstructing a colony in Xenoblade Chronicles). Mass Effect 2 - been a while but I recall caring enough about the party members that doing their personal quests seemed like an intrinsically motivated thing to do. Basically either give me a good enough motivation to do the quest, or keep the downside/extra effort low. And please don’t try to abuse my FOMO. Witcher 3 - Practicum quest. Funny, and builds NPC character (which they don’t do much with after). I also enjoy the simpler contracts as “go there, kill huge thing” fits the game. The hunted hotel from Vampire Bloodlines is one quest I will always remember. Not because is a brilliant quest, but because the twist of the mood of the game. Suddenly, I’m in a horror game and still it uses the mechanics from the general game. I love that quest. I just did a quest* in GuildWars2 where I collected bits of a renowned family’s tapestry from all over the world, starting in the previous big expac. Like the Snargle Goldclaw achievements (look him up), I liked how this connected to the changing world of the story, but on the fringes. It connected to NPCs I’d heard arguing about mass-producing artisan blankets now that borders were open and… “signs of the sojourner” has beautifully done quests. there’s an overarching quest to learn about your mom, and progress comes naturally through conversation games (the game’s main mechanic). you receive additional tasks, like to bring back vinegar or a musical instrument, and if you don’t complete these, the outcome of your game is changed. then there are fetch quests for individual characters and exit ramps through certain characters. it’s very artfully put together, to me. Some memorable quests: In “Dragon’s Dogma,” breaking into the Duke’s castle to rescue a princess. Also, stealing a ring for the Duke, forging it, giving him the forgery, and using the original to rob him dry. Anything which has a lasting effect on the Gameworld. Megaton in Fallout 3 being an easy example. The Purification quest in Oblivion at the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline, when you have to kill al the NPCs of the brotherhood you have been getting quests from and interacting with. It felt so weird.
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