It's self explanatory, complete with a moving train, and I wonder how much effort is placed into making these life size houses. I would guess this is a popular thing to have a picture of, as there's a reminder sign to share on Instagram / Facebook.
Anyways, this seems to be here during the wintertime, changes every year or so and... there's free hot chocolate nearby.
Country Club Plaza - probably one of those malls in Sacramento that looks almost abandoned, seeing a lot of empty space (the directory only lists 21 active stores, though it seems like a lot less). If it closes, this would be the third mall in the area that I've been in to do so.
A review on BigMallRat had good reviews on this place so maybe I'm a bit late...
Brief Summary:
Americana Dawn is a role playing game that takes place in Colonial America inspired from the Suikoden series of games. It emphasizes more on tactics (instead of level grinding), exploration, and a variety of large scale battles.
Almost after two years of developing a custom game engine for Americana Dawn, the Kickstarter is ready to go.
Although the Kickstarter has ended unsuccessfully, it has been Greenlit on Steam so there's a good chance it will be made available there in the near future.
On the DRKBTC orderbook on Bitfinex. For the first time I have seen a bid price which is below zero. I guess when it goes that low people are willing to give coins to you for selling.
Speaking of that the value of DRK has nearly doubled recently. Dunno whether it will keep rising (due to new privacy features on the coin) or drop sharply (due to people selling when they bought at sub 1.70s last week), so I should probably get a few at this point but have a larger buy order near the bottom just in case.
If Foster barely has enough HP to survive one, I wonder how he can take on two of them. (The Ruffian needs to be nerfed slightly.)
The previous post on this series can be found here.
There were many different design considerations on how the battle system should work, and eventually the second iteration of the battle system was designed, this time in a video format as well, since videos are worth a lot more than words.
The first video is to test 1v1 combat and to see if everything works. The beta next week or so will have more.
A few major changes that are in this system that wasn't present in the first:
Note on Unlisted: There's a lot of internal debate about whether to keep videos unlisted or not. They have been made unlisted due to a request from KY, however I will keep them here to show proof that the game is progressing quickly towards a playable demo. (As of November 5, a battle simulator has been released to beta testers.)
What appears in its place when this is cleaned up? A large outdoor area.
Around four years have passed since I first saw the construction of the new SCMA building. Now I see the original Cunningham starting to be torn down. With SCMA having its own designation for rooms, I'm not sure what remains of Cunningham after this. Only significant things I remember about this place was the Clever Planetarium (which will be rebuilt, I think), and the Computer Lab (before it was moved to Danner).
How the endgame looks like, where any basic resource you had at the start is largely irrelevant.
Helixteus is a strategy / idle space game where pretty much everything is procedurally generated (an area which I support). Except that the strategy is more like ensuring you have more powerful ships to conquer (more in reality be able to explore) planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc., and idle doesn't occur until a ways in, when research allows you to get stuff passively as long as resource generators aren't full (though the game also runs when you're not playing).
The game's over there. Review's over here based on beta v1.30, but it's still in development, so I'll give it a month to see if new things are introduced and update from there.
A sequel, Helixteus 2, was released a year later, and its appropriate walkthrough is available on this page.
A larger canvas size might be needed since all the gui elements makes the game a bit tiny, even though you can zoom out. Some elements are a bit misleading, particularly on DirectMax (which you had to max a certain amount of that building manually before you can DM them). I don't review graphics unless there's clear flaws in them, which there aren't. And then there's the collect all (next to the blue I), where it's not even clear what it is until you click it after you researched that.
And there's some clunky mechanics regarding planet selection, naming (I see lots of Planet 0's, Planet 1's, etc. on Global Planets as more are captured, where it takes a lot of clicks to find out where each one's at in the universe. Or maybe it isn't that important) and retreating in a battle (it involves having to move a fleet to another planet first before sending that + more units to attack the planet again). They'll probably be fixed soon.
Some settings, such as time between saves, should not be set to low values, such as .5 second; should it take longer than that to save the game (and late game it will) the game will lock up and you'll probably lose the savefile.
Resource generation now tends to fall in these categories now using these methods (assumes you maxed out your science tree):
GTG's shop in AD: Foundations Tech Demo, design board. Jelly returns.
Almost a year after the menu pages were added, they were revamped in order to take advantage of the higher resolution of the game. The shop GUI was modified to look a bit more 'colorful', and to actually show an item description instead of requiring a keypress to switch between your inventory / compare screens. The former is used for selling items, and there's now a separate tab for that. Only things now on the right is item information, what characters can use that item, and how many is in their inventory, as well as their carrying capacity.
There has been debate between the team regarding item information; the one used in the base game only shows charge / recoil with three speed values, apparently damage is irrelevant on their end because I don't know. Might be informative enough for action RPGs when you're sending so many attacks their way you don't need to know exact values, but in a turn-based RPG, each of your moves count, and a couple of mistakes almost certainly ends with a party wipe, sending you back to your last save (although I've heard the game would be a bit more forgiving than this).
For the latter, the comparison feature was removed. In other RPG games a simple up/down was used since the only main feature of weapons and armor is increased attack / defense later in the game. But there's really no way to determine if certain effects are better or not, since average damage does not increase significantly over the course of the game. It's the player's job to determine those tradeoffs.
Inventory space is not really an issue anymore, since it is set to an arbitrarily high value (such as 1000), and item usage in battle is limited to what your party can hold, so you can only bring a handful of items with you into battle.
Item Description: Four lines should be enough to display stuff about the item. Maybe not enough for witty humor, however. (The description itself may change since it breaks the fourth wall and makes a reference to the fact that Jelly could be bought in only two colors when it was listed in the Etsy store seven months ago, despite screenshots showing them in other colors. I attempted to buy them via other means, without success.)
The fourth year of Chinese Culture Camp. Same as usual, with the addition of female lion dancers and a new buiding available for classes. Unlike other years, I was only present in the morning, so I didn't make the end of camp slideshow.
I feel like the camp needs to be longer (both time-wise and length-wise), as 40 mins seems a bit short, and no Lion Dance classes past Beginner level are taught... there are repeat students. And they should also raise the grade level up a bit (right now it's K-6), because there's more counselors (Grade 7+) than campers, they could offer more advanced courses, and those lions are... quite heavy.
No article about this year's camp on The Record, though it was mentioned a month prior.
The San Diego Model Railroad Museum is imo one of the more interesting exhibits in Balboa Park for its cost ($3 for students, and up to $8 for others). The exhibits are actually pretty large and detailed, considering it takes around a minute to walk from one end of the train exhibit to another. And there's six of them...
There's a second floor that is accessible on busier days, when more volunteers are around. It wasn't open when I was there, though.
Turning away from it, for the last time.
According to a news article, the Asparagus Festival will no longer be occurring.
Except on two occassions (this year included), I have personally attended the asparagus festival each year since 2004. Admission prices were raised 60% during those years, and I have seen most of the booths / things had to offer there (including running the Spear-It run and volunteering in the deep fried asparagus booth). Only thing I didn't do, however, was the zipline, which was introduced this year.
Over the past six months at Delta College, Cunningham center closed down... and went through a process of being fenced, scaffolds around it, covered up, and eventually torn down. They're expected to finish by this Fall. A new building takes its place instead.
I didn't get a last look at the place before it did, but I did manage to see the planetarium during the few times it was actually open, and went to the computer labs during HS (which those computers were large, had CRT monitors, and computers had floppy drives). And took classes in this area. And where I notably met KY at.
A Staresque Ring on Foster could've brought him back up, but they're quite expensive early on.
A Microbattle in AD is the game's battle system and the main way to resolve conflicts. From a distance and from screenshots, just like ordinary battles you see in other JRPGs: Turn based combat, characters using skills and items on the field, etc.
Beyond that, the similarities end here. Other than a few functions which handle battle related units (such as stats, learned skills, and equipment), what exactly occurs in the battle is based on map implementation. Want to have a simple skirmish vs a few soldiers? That works. But for those who demand more creativity (like me) I focus on a few other mechanics it can have:
Note on Commands: Attack / Defend are not simple one-off commands, since characters usually have more than one attack type available. Example: If Foster has a musket, he can either fire (at reduced accuracy) or engage in close quarters combat and use it as a melee weapon.
The two gems do a max of 1k damage (0 on these swarmlings), but it's the orb that cleans them up.
Note: The damage boost on the orb was removed a day after it was released but I'll still leave this post up here for historical purposes.
The new Gemcraft Chasing Shadows is finally out, and after a few hours found a viable strategy to power level early game. They added quite a bit of new features, including dropping gems on your orb to increase its damage done to monsters (before being banished). Which is specifically what this post will cover here - turtling.
It works wonders on levels with lots of swarmlings (B3 being a notable example), where they have low hp and you can anger them a lot to jack up their XP. And even more if you spend shadow cores to up traits Haste and Beacon Storm (the latter giving you free XP if the map doesn't spawn any).
Angering them enough times gives enormous amounts of XP and causes their armor to go through the roof (several thousand when angered enough), but as long as your minimum damage is a bit under their HP, it's no bother since the orb usually one shots them. If they don't they get another pass but it's not like they'll survive the second time through. The number of beacons on the field don't matter, as it doesn't stop this strategy from working.
Considering that it nets tons of XP (as in tens or hundreds of thousands) in the first few map tiles, and that it detracts heavily from its intended purpose of the game (it allows you to complete maps without placing any gems in towers at all), it might be nerfed in the future.
One of the many whiteboard graphics on this whiteboard that appear in the Goleman Library. The other whiteboard, however, has a simple notice (that changes from time to time) about the fact that whiteboard markers are no longer issued to tutors. They're just for these boards, I guess. (And updating the tutor availability board)
Just another day this semester where I do tutoring sessions three days a week in the morning related to Computer Science. It's 8am and it's about to open... except it's cloudy, I see this view, and took this image after giving it a second thought.
(The original Goleman Library's entrace was in this direction, the new one seen here is on the left side)
Foster's team defends against a infantry rush.*
The distinguishing feature of Americana Dawn is the focus on large scale battles, also known as macrobattles. These battles are similar to most turn-based tactical games, such as Advance Wars and army battles in Suikoden 2. Although most large battles are based on historical battles, there are some minor skirmishes using this system that can take place during the game during missions and side quests.
Players control a variety of units, historical figures and officers known as 'Elites', who are both customizable and have a diverse set of skills to handle various situations on the battlefield. Units fall under eight general unit classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses:
The key element in these large wars is using the environment or the enemy's weaknesses to your advantage, whether it is ambushing cannoneers and using infantry to steal their artillery, or using cover to recon and find a weak spot in the enemy's defenses. There is no 'right' way to win a battle, but you have a limited number of troops at your disposal.
All skirmishes take place on the world map, and decisions from battles are persistent; Your choices on the field determines how the story unfolds. Any elite character killed in battle is permanent and may affect dialogue and future missions. Similarly, collateral damage can directly harm towns and establishments for the duration of the game, so if a shop is destroyed when retaking a city, you deny yourself the goods and any sidequests it has to offer.
The animation loop generated in Americana Dawn while trying to script the Braddock Scene. It's done with a custom scripting system in the game, particularly since I didn't want to put the effort into using another preset scripting language (such as lua) and getting it to work properly with what's already in the game, including how it's stored when the script is saved into a map file.
I've decided to change the way things are displayed on the blog; sometimes a picture isn't enough to describe things, so a short video clip (without sound) might be used instead if the browser supports HTML5. If not, it will load a still image instead.
Cutscene Update: The finished cutscene was rebuilt a month later with a slightly different tileset and is viewable here.
The sign celebrating Chinese New Year at Red Hawk. I'm a day late on saying this, since it occurred yesterday, but I couldn't make it to the Thunder Valley one, which occurred on a Friday. The lion dance was quite short but there were three performances that day (with some slight differences between each of them).
Also, there was no greeter at the entrance, contrary to what it said online.
Note: The lion dance group is different from the one that performs in Thunder Valley / Cache Creek this year.
It's still complicated, though not as much as the first game.
Brief crafting guide summary for Glean 2, most crafting data pulled from Glean 2 Guide Wiki, which is actually more like a guide than a walkthrough. But a few notes on on the above diagram:
The tips below are general strategies for maxing upgrades in under 50 planets (the time limitation of the preview):