Coelacanth

Last third of Kingmaker really soured me on Owlcat and has made me postpone WotR indefinitely. Shame to hear some of the same issues appearing again in it. How does it compare otherwise? I am also somewhat hesitant about the epic setting and godslaying type of story compared to the more grounded Kingmaker. Is the writing good?

I’ve started playing Chrono Ark, a roguelike deckbuilder I’ve heard a lot of good things about. So far I’ve played something like 3 runs, so only just begun. It’s fun so far, it’s not completely reinventing the genre or anything but each run has been fun and the upgrades seem varied enough.

I’ve also heard good things about the story, and it does involve time travel to play into the looping roguelike nature in a seamless way, but that’s about all I’ve been able to glean from it so far. I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Come on GOG, I like you, don’t make me dislike you.

Are you looking for story or gameplay? Chaos Zero Nightmare is relatively new and is a roguelike deckbuilder with really good gameplay. Lots of synergies, lots of combos, lots of variations of every card letting you craft very specific decks that can make almost anything work if you just get lucky with finding just the right pieces and upgrades during a run.

The story is ass though (but at least there is a fast forward button) and some of the character designs do make me roll my eyes with how absurdly gooner-baity they are.

That’s very interesting and sounds cool - though might be above my paygrade.

What kind of delay does the double prompting incur? I can’t imagine it would be nothing, especially for this use case of calling external LLMs via a proxy.

If anything a RAG for certain game related information might be a nice addition to the current system, rather than replacement. I think for a roleplay and storytelling focus there is a benefit of having a persistent character “life story” of long term memories fed into every prompt, creating character throughlines and potentially even character development.

I’d recommend both Dispatch and Blue Prince — I still haven’t completed the latter, but, yes, I’ve unlocked the secret elevator.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but… you’re not as deep into Blue Prince as you think you are.

Well, what I’m working on is a mod for STALKER Anomaly, and most large models already seem to have good enough awareness of the STALKER games setting. I can imagine it’s a much bigger challenge if you’re making your own game set in your own unique world. I still need to have some minor game information inserted into the prompt, but only like a paragraph detailing some important game mechanics.

Getting longer term interactions to work right is actually what I’ve been working on the last few weeks, implementing a long-term memory for game characters using LLM calls to condense raw events into summaries that can be fed back into future prompts to retain context. The basics of this system was actually already in place created by the original mod author, I just expanded it into a true full on hierarchical memory system with long- and mid-term memories.

But it turns out creating and refining the LLM prompts for memory management is harder than implementing the memory function itself!

I’m actually also working on a project using LLMs to talk to NPCs. Though this one doesn’t use local models but online models called through a proxy using API keys, which lets you use much larger and better models.

But yeah it’s been interesting digging deep into the exact and precise construction of the prompts to get the NPCs talking and behaving exactly like you want them, and be as real and lifelike as possible.

There are mods that implement it, don’t know about games. Skyrim has an AI driven follower mod and STALKER Anomaly has the TALKER mod.

They do have a publisher: Kepler Interactive. But so does Blue Prince in fairness, it was published by Raw Fury.

What constitutes an indie game will always be debated, because it’s almost impossible to define it through black and white rules. If Kojima created a game with a budget of $300m, a cast of Hollywood A-listers and a development team of 200 people and published it himself, would that be an appropriate nomination for the Indie Awards?

Larian self published BG3, should that have been nominated for Indie Awards?

This feels kind of more like finding a valid excuse after the indie-or-not debate and backlash, but fuck it. Blue Prince is a great Indie GOTY (the correct choice imo).

I don’t think E33 should have qualified as an indie game to begin with.

I don’t want any gifts, I just wanted to say you’re an amazing person and this is a great initiative ♥️

Enjoy your time with it! Those moments of seeing something in game and going “wait wait wait I know what this is!” *rifles through notes furiously* were my favourite part.

Without spoiling anything I will say this: I recommend taking actual notes. I did it in a physical notebook but digital has the benefit of being searchable. It’s possible to get by with only screenshots, but I really recommend both and I thought the note taking itself was so enjoyable. I find physical note taking helps with memorization too, and every time you make progress because of something you’ve taken notes of is such a dopamine rush.

I absolutely love Blue Prince! Such an amazing experience and a unique and innovative game. I hope you’re enjoying the note taking and progressively losing your mind!

I haven’t really played anything the past week, beyond playtesting changes I’m making to the TALKER mod for STALKER: Anomaly (the mod using AI to let you talk to NPCs). This little project has grown considerably and I have a lot of writing left to do before it’s fully ready I think. But early signs are positive. I also have some more prompt engineering to do. I’m getting much better and more interesting responses from NPCs now than with the base mod - which had extremely basic and barebones instructions for the LLM.

For me in general I think FPS games have aged the worst. There is such a big part of the pleasure that comes from animations, gunplay, recoil implementation, enemy AI, ragdolls, hit effects… I have a much easier time playing something like Fallout 1&2 - which are even older but have mechanics that are more timeless.

But yeah it was definitely a time in gaming where technological advancements felt like they were happening at an exponentially increasing pace. Comparing games from 2000 with just a few years later is like night and day. Splinter Cell came out only two years after NOLF and that’s a stealth game that’s aged spectacularly. And even Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. came out in 2005 and feels like one of the first truly modern shooters - one that still really holds up well.

The writing, setting and concept were charming and the art direction is good which means despite being polygonally challenged I don’t mind the way it looks. Great soundtrack too. That being said I tried playing it earlier this year for the first time and it just struck me as one of those games that have aged like fine milk mechanically. It really really wants you to be a stealthy spy sneaking around and being non-lethal yet the stealth gameplay felt terrible, and going guns blazing wasn’t particularly fun either as gunplay in these old games is hard for me to enjoy having gotten used to modern FPSes. And it doesn’t help that the guns blazing approach forces you to listen to a constant soundtrack of blaring alarms, which frankly was hard for me to deal with.

I couldn’t make myself finish it despite really wanting to be able to say I’ve played it, but maybe I’ll give it another go some day. At least I don’t think it’s all that long.

I know it was very original and different back in the day, but is it really one of the “best game ever”?

Ah. I guess of the Sigmas it’s the least offensive version. It’s a shame still though as NGB is the perfect version. But yeah I momentarily forgot about it being an Xbox exclusive.

Great game though!