Would you like a question answered in the New Year? Well, then ask it here!
Rhyme unintended. Oh, god, I feel like Roadblock.
You can check out an example questions thread here or listen to a billion podcasts on the devblog.
There's also a post on balance in game design if you're interested in such things. (If you want to chat about it with everyone, rather than just ask me questions, feel free to create a new thread.)
Cheers!
Kinak
Thanks for the podcast Kinak!
How was your Christmas? Any new books/etc. to share with us?
Any hints at mysterious snake snowmen we seem to have missed this year? Or will we just have to try again next time?
The Snowmonstrosity and Intertwined Serpents make you wait a round or two before you can start attacking them in earnest. Is that intentionally designed so we can set up some good chains in our hand, or just happen to be the way those puzzles turned out?
Now that we are getting a lot more weapon subtypes in the game (knife, needlers, parasols, etc.), how would you feel about labeling them, for example "Type: Weapon (Needler)"? (Melee early in runs seems a lot more interesting now, by the way, with the new knife content.)
Was there anything specific that inspired the pictures of the four runes from the tablet shard?
Is is significant that the script Techniques are chains 4, 5, 5 and 6? Why not all 5?
And more questions about the official names for things:
Art museum questions:
Does the Warehouse supervisor drop a Midgard hardhat now that it exists, and if not, can she?
Do any of the following avatars exist: Punk, Cyberbowl player (Rams/Wildcats), Construction Worker or Mummy? That would be pretty neat!
Thanks!
I hope you had a happy holiday season, and did/will have a happy new year. Thanks for another year of gaming!
A new year is upon us, and you know what that means… Yes! It's time for the traditional New Year's Unearthly Item Spading Roundup!
The year kicked off with the dancing hut figure. I feel like we're still missing something big here, and I dearly hope it's a Baba Yaga boss fight. Any hints on where to look?
Next up is the designer vines. Seems like we got most of the way there on this, but there doesn't seem to be any reward for fighting the mold golems, which seems … suspicious.
April brought us the Book of Common Dreams. Is there a way to influence which dreams you get? The carnivorous beetle would be a handy thing in-run if you could ensure you had a good chance of getting it. I feel like we got all the content on this, but now's the time to say otherwise if I'm wrong.
The anniversary of the game brought us the suitably momentous anniversary pocket mirror. It's cool because it's alive with possibilities as new weapons get added. But do you worry about the very open-ended nature of the reflection power crimping design space later on?
With more Novos content came the coat of mysterious circuitry. You have already said there's another tier of this yet to be found. Any hints on how to get Roy to reveal his secrets?
Just in time for Halloween was the abstract domino mask. It seems like we have all the content from this, but the underlying mechanics are still opaque. Is it possible to guarantee a particular mask technique if you know what you are doing, or is there some randomness involved?
Finally we have the black tablet shard. Did this item begin life as a spin-off of the granddaddy of all unearthly items, the also-runic mysterious puzzle box? Either way, this one is new enough that spading is still ongoing. Don't let that stop you from dropping a hint if the spirit moves you, though. :) Cryptodynamic really went to town spading this. Is there anything left?
By the time you read this you may already have complained, as you have in past years, that you made the older items so long ago that you don't remember details about them. Is there a better way to do a periodic unearthly item spading roundup than on the podcast?
What was causing the lag spikes we had been having before and for a little while after the new servers came online? How are the new servers working out now?
Way back on podcast 14 (September 28th, 2010) you said there was no Stealth Power equivalent of the Gunslinger, Pugilism, Third Eye Technique, and Pyro skills, but that you might add one eventually. Did you ever do that? Is it gettable now?
Speaking of ancient history, a long time ago (February, 2009) Vholes reported learning the recipes for liquified Eclipse and Slags antidote from the Testing Lab in Midgard Biotech. Subsequent attempts to find them have not met with success. Were those recipes put there before you coded up Experimental Chemistry and then removed later? What's the story here?
I was reading the newspaper recently and did a double-take when I realized that the "Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX Metropolitan Statistical Area" is informally known as "The Metroplex". Did you know there was a real-life Metroplex already?
In other disturbing reality/Metroplexity crossover news, there has been a lot of hoopla recently about the possibility that Amazon will use drones to deliver orders in the near-ish future. Amazon = Omnitech?
Unless something drastic happens between me writing this question and the end of the year, no major city has been destroyed by fire in 2013. Are you planning to revise the description of the holocaust coat, or is Metroplexity set in an alternate universe that diverges from our timeline during (or before) 2013?
Hey Kinak, I've only got a couple questions this time around:
Happy New Year!
In the beginning, men were mortal.
Writing for the long-neglected GOC Casefiles canon.
Happy New Year, Kinak! Hope you had a good Christmas.
He waits for a moment, staring past your shoulder at something going on in the kitchen. "Those trash things man, I tell you. Not sanitary."
Perhaps piggybacking off Crypto here, the Apple Pie was not supposed to be a rare item, but it's slowly turning into one. Any news on how far down the line Cookery is? (Novos, Old Town, possibly some new weapons updates…)
Also, happy new year (T-minus 6 hours on this end).
I forget if I asked this before, but is there a way into the second warehouse on the docks? We seem to have access through the sewers for the third and fourth, so it seems odd there's no access to the second.
-Does it matter if we use the sewer maps instead of exploring the sewers manually? It seems like it shouldn't 'really', but at the same time, a map is a lot more conclusive than a glance, even a handmade map. Ie, is there a hidden variable set for using the maps, and can we trigger it later?
We still haven't figured out the cycle in the art gallery. Any advice? Beyond cycles. If you tell us our cycle needs a cycle there's going to be rioting. On bicycles.
As for things triggering later, we've tried a lot of things for triggering the Spider Nest. Fire doesn't do it, binding it doesn't do it, doing overwhelming damage doesn't do it, nothing obvious seems to contribute. Can we get a hint as to how we're looking at spider extermination from the wrong direction?
You mentioned that some kind of flag is set when you actually check the building before climbing it, but we've never found anything that contributes to. Is it secret, hidden, or are we just missing it blatantly?
The spiderwebbed building in the slags is still suspicious. It's almost strange that we can't find any way into the wreckage. Comments?
I am disappointed to say the Squatter King's Son doesn't respond to holding him down while holding the kingly blade, nor when encountering him after freeing him. Shouldn't he recognize it? (Might try talking to him after next run, see if there's anything like Boris' response to the lab PDA)
Why do we need to learn a copy of Evil Eye in order to finish the southside evil quest? (Noticed that for Boundless Patience) Are we missing any other skills, hidden artifacts in the art gallery or something? No sign of the spooked man from opening doors in the Southside Lab, but that could just be RNG.
Finally, what can we do to spread the ghouls? We've got the mirror ghoul, which seems like a non-sequitur, we've got the Squatter's Refuge of ghouls, but I can't duplicate the encounter I had in the Midgard Warehouse with ghouls. (Seemed to involved blowing out the windows (Explosives/Jumping out the windows), and then a lot of collateral deaths, but still no other progress.) Advice?
