janksmith.bsky.social
Game dev and Zine writer, it doesn't need to be pretty if it works.
She/Her, old enough to be someone's mom
Projects I remembered to publish: https://janksmith.itch.io/
142 posts
16 followers
36 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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They're so bad, I love them. Fable 1 I can max a character out after about an hour of gameplay or try to headshot every enemy in the game. It has such grand promise and live up to like 20% of that promise.
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My money is that it's a KPI thing. They're counting views on the embedded 5 second snippet pre-trailer and any extra views they pay for in online ads and claiming they're getting huge views on the tiny version for it's smaller marketing budget to justify spending more on the marketing department.
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Any build based game wants you to do that. Part of the fun is the little ah ha moments when you find a synergy and see how far you can push it. And looking up a build guide online won't give you that.
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Jank can be when a dev was just too enthusiastic to show you their game and all the polish has gone into design rather than beauty.
It can be when a Rube Goldberg series of mechanics lines up perfectly and you can extend your turn into infinity and kill the final boss without them getting to act.
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I just wish shiren 6 was still 2D sprite based. And also that Disgaea was also still 2D sprite based.
Why did my beloved 2D billboard sprite games have such terrible things done to them?
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deckstats.net/decks/235211...
I offer you a collection of alt win cards you give to other players to actually give them alt lose conditions that are much easier to meet.
And the commander is still a fairy and it's in theme for fairy trickery.
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Had a few months where if I sang the tune to the Bluey intro my 2 year old would shout the appropriate name for each pause (but I'd have to leave a really long pause).
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Famicom developers were true wizards of the craft. The insane things they jammed into such tiny memory allocation is always astounding.
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I love when we get to use fun words like sidereal (the transformation of stars movement from an apparently stationary viewpoint that vast distance offers)
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If you pick her it should just throw a "meanwhile" interlude showing what the unselected heroes are doing and then jump straight to the win screen as is her normal way to win battles: off-screen.
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The World Ends With You (DS 2007)
Unbelievable sounds to come out of DS speakers back in the day
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Then you're probably making a game about the Portland Polycule. Or one of the many games that are actually just educational tools to explain programming in a fun way.
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For sure. It doesn't help when you get a good idea mid-way through a day of non-dev work and have to try and crystallise that idea in your mind to keep it ready to act upon later in the day
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Yeah, you're not making a game about programming, classful data structures, or node graphs. To effectively simulate something you love you need deep understanding of it and the desire to share it with others.
You do also need game design skills to translate stuff into abstractions of themself though
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I don't remember if Bravely Default did this. Cause I found a class combo that could do solid damage and be invincible 100% of the time, so 2/3rds of my playthrough was slamming fast forward, turning off random encounters and racing to the next cutscene
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This was my thought too. SaGa 2 really wants you to make that call when you think a fight is essentially won already and just needs you to spam A to pick 0 cost skills and tank any damage that comes your way.
Gotta save that BP for when you need it.
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I'll only accept a FFTactics remake if you can still waste an in game year at the start of the game to learn Steal: Skill super early and steal everything that exists in that game with some serious diligence.
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The most recent victim of this paradigm is Romancing SaGa2. It has some cool ideas about class progression, money grinding, weapon unlocks, base upgrades, battle resources, moment to moment choices in battle, and interesting choices for character progression.
But I have like 80 unplayed games still.
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It sucks that loading and unloading texture maps which have different physics implications wasn't a gameplay mechanic once we got fast load times.
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Early Pokemon, early Mario, recent Kirby
They need the language of verbs that game inputs correspond to.
They don't need to hit credits. Just get to a point where they can guess what happens next.
If you can extrapolate the rest of the game, spending more time on it is just for fun, not learning
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The really long cut-scenes right before the two difficult bosses that you have to wash through any time you fail at the boss and reload. The true final JRPG boss is the cutscene
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I got this same model for my partner as a birthday gift and the instructions saying it'll take only a few hours are too optimistic for this world. She took several days to get it done also.
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And you could have a tamagotchi style raising of the kids where you can affect what major arcana they're represented by for the ones in your class and somehow that translates to stuff in the dungeon crawling part of the game.
The only thing you can do with the kids is help them improve.
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I really wanted a newer persona game where the cast were all high school teachers rather than high school students. Help push the narrative that people don't peak in high school.
It would give us whole new types of old man yaoi too.
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My playgroup: Duskmourne had no good cards
Me, a standard player and victim of so many turn 2 RDW games: I'm going to say something that might seem controversial...
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Big fan of analog time travel by waiting
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Bandit: "...and we all learned that when I ask you to do something, I'm trying to help you."
Bluey: "I didn't learn that."
Bingo: "Me neither."
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It's almost like you have some kind of trauma response that blocks out some of the memories and what's left seems dream-like and fantastical and, more importantly, untrustworthy
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There's gotta be some kind of fun design space to play with, like what to do with the kinda of puzzles where X's value no longer makes a valid sentence?
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Not where you add extra rules on completion of a run, but where tutorial text changes meaning based on the value of X
Like:
You can JUMP X=1 (Once)
Vs
You can JUMP X=2 (Too)
X=1 is a limited resources puzzle, X=2 is some kind of crazy precision platformer where everything is moving puzzle
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Make it bigger, like heart failure risk big
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When I envision this mechanism, this...game, i am at it's center. But if i finish it...I will be free and another will take my place. Cursed to play out the scenarios and mechanics i had inflicted upon me by a mind possibly not my own. These cruel ideas and inspirations some from somewhere beyond me
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I am cursed with ideas, visions of wheels within wheels. Of systems interconnected, and at its center is the player. Played like an instrument by the terrifyingly complex mechanism I have wrought. Made to feel and made to choose.
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If they were like the Sonic Advance or Sonic Rush era of 2D level design they'd be cool enough to work. But if you try to jam Sonic 1 and 2 design sensibilities into a boost mode style game it breaks the flow.
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The skill they need to learn is which places are the best to scream in the house and how to find them
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Ahh yes, Dragon and Onesies did that to my partner just to name two off the top of my head.
It's good writing.