#(that's my tag for in game customization/cosmetics for whatever i'm playing)

[parasitefun]

putting sam in terrorist green because i am fujoing out so hard rn...😫 🙏

[maxthommusic]

Halo Infinite Beta Discourse

I'm often very good at keeping to myself these days. The thoughts and feelings in my head don't need an outlet like they used to. When I was younger I thought I would explode if I didn't write everything down. But as time grows on and I either grow weary of the art form or just simply become more content sitting with my thoughts instead of expressing them, I don't feel the need to jump on the bullhorn and make a proclamation. However, sometimes a good piece of discussion rolls along and I feel awesomely compelled to share my opinion so that the discourse can hopefully steer in a certain direction. Sometimes when the trolls are out in full force you just gotta try and balance the scales. A certain type of discourse, when it gains too much steam, absolutely needs to be de-railed because it's damaging and counter productive to the industry in question. Today's transgression is with Halo Infinite.

At first I didn't pay it much mind -- new players griping about the Battle Pass system. Essentially, the issue is that how FREE players get cosmetics takes too much grinding. In Halo you play as Spartans and these Spartans can be customized with armor plates, battle charms, graffiti tags and more. Last week, 343 Industries released the BETA for Halo Infinite's multiplayer. Last week, players also began complaining how it takes too long to earn anything of consequence.

Now let's stop right there. We need to address the first elephant in the room: The game is FREE. As far as I'm concerned, Halo Infinite's free mode owes you nothing but the game itself. And I'm here to tell you: The game is awesome. It's polished, servers work, and I'm having tons of fun with the Halo formula -- something no other game has done, really, since Halo...

Now that we've established the game is FREE and it WORKS, we can get more nuanced with this Battle Pass discussion. So, okay, you don't like how it takes so long to grind -- but it's free? I just can't help but feel like that's a non-issue here. Yes, is it annoying? Do I wish I could have a cooler, unique Spartan sooner? Easier? Sure. But the game is FREE. Again, I say, FREE. Where do I get a right to complain? But okay, it's the Internet. I'm allowed to complain about whatever I please. I have the right to express my dissatisfaction, right? But here's where I take umbrage with the current line of conversation around Halo Infinite: It's all about the Battle Pass. I hardly see anyone talking about how GOOD Halo the GAME is. It's all vitriol about this Battle Pass. And it's been going on since "launch." Mind you, we're still just in Beta form. So if ever there was a time to complain, it's in the Beta time. But I say again: The core game is excellent. Shouldn't your dissatisfaction with the Battle Pass be a passing, "Man, wish this were better!" and move on? Why does my Twitter timeline continue to fill up with these threads?

Taking it further, the Battle Pass argument has escalated since a full roster of cosmetics has leaked. Someone crunched the numbers and said you can pay over $80 and still not get good gear. First of all: Biased. I think there are sweet Spartans in the store right now I can buy for like $5. So this line of thinking absolutely should not be getting as much attention as is. Next: That's probably what you deserve for buying $80 in cosmetics. The real question here should be: How is the gameplay? How are the game modes? How are the servers?

If Halo Infinite launches officially on December 8th with the same customizability as is found in the current beta, I will have no problem with that if it's the F2P version. If I buy Halo Infinite and don't get my Duos, Trios, etc. and a handful of more maps? Then yes, I think it's time to start feeling a bit jilted.

Everything is expectation and right now I can't help but feel like there is a subset of gamers who are way too entitled that are dominating the conversation online because they're the only ones who want to race to the Internet to share their crappy hot takes. So beautiful games like Halo get a bunch of bad press and new players might not take the plunge because the game seems greedy.

Let me reiterate: How is a F2P game greedy when the CORE GAME is near flawless? Of course I have gripes about Infinite, but they're all SO minor. Things Halo 3 did... differently. Yes, some guns don't feel like they used to and some game mechanics are a little different. But is the overall experience the same? In terms of my overall happiness playing with the crew, YES, it is. And if the product I'm receiving right now for FREE doesn't change, I can't help but think every other gripe about a FREE experience should not even be acknowledged. Because it is FREE. FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE. I cannot overstate that enough because what we expect for FREE has gotten so wildly out of control and Halo Infinite is breaking me in this regard.

All the cosmetics are so tangential to the Halo experience. To have this much conversation revolving around the Battle Pass just seems like a major head scratcher, like we won't be able to have nice things if people continue to get carried away with this line of thinking.

But the silver lining is exactly as I've stated above: My hope is that the people loving and enjoying Halo are all too busy playing Halo to have any thoughts about it for the Internet. In fact, I've dumped a bunch of hours on it and have had a blast and haven't even said a peep online yet. Why? Because I'm too busy texting the homies trying to get them to download and get online with me.

It's like Jim Ryan said a while back. "If there was any dissatisfaction with The Last Of Us 2, we didn't know about it." I'm paraphrasing... but the idea is that the Internet is fake. Internet vitriol is fake. Even though right now it feels like everyone is upset at Halo's Battle Pass, they probably aren't. I'm hoping Halo is charting big numbers and will make big dollars and have a bright, happy future. I want more maps, more characters, more improvements. And if people buy the game, buy the cosmetics and enjoy it, we will get all that. And I hope the jokers online who are all upset about this Battle Pass are just a super minority. But I do really hope that anyone seeing the Battle Pass discourse doesn't become discouraged. I hope people see through the thin veil that is Internet outrage. Consider what you are getting for FREE. Remember that! Expectations are everything... And I hope we don't lose sight of the game that is at the core experience here.

[luckiusdev]

Making an RTS Game - Part 2

Hello again!

I'm here again to share some progress about my untitled cute little real-time strategy game. Before starting, if you want more info on that I redirect you to my first post and the itch.io page for the game :

1. Code Refactoring

First order of business, I did some code refactoring. "So soon?" you might ask, well yes because it was MESSY. I deleted and cleaned up a few scripts, and you know I'm thinking "whatever, the game was far from playable anyway", because it is.

There's no real gameplay yet, just snippets of gameplay elements. And that's okay for now. I know what I've already done works.

As seen in the previous post, there is a functional system of building on a grid. I also have a unit selection system but I'll talk about that later. I have removed all unnecessary code and the vast majority of the interface.

2. New Cursor

Nothing major, but I started coding something to add custom mouse cursors using the Cursor class from Unity. It's extremely barebones and I'll come back to it later to make it more flexible but it does the job for now. I took inspiration from CodeMonkey's Mouse Cursor System PRO asset and from there I'm going to build my own script to come up with a flexible system that I can use later elsewhere, because unfortunately I can't afford the $40 price tag.

3. Character Customization

One of the gameplay mechanics that I like the most in this project is the possibility to customize your character or leader as I call him. For the moment, in theory, most of the customization is purely cosmetic except for the character's body, which also corresponds to the character's class (among 4 main classes that are shared with the other units: barbarian, knight, mage and ranger). This choice will have some importance because choosing a class will grant buffs to some units, debuffs to others and will change the attacks and abilities of your leader, which will allow the player to choose his own play style or encourage replayability by encouraging to try all classes and creating unique heroes/leaders for each game. For now and until the initial release of the game, there will only be these 4 classes for two reasons:

It allows to lighten the implementation of everything around this mechanic.

The Kay Lousberg asset pack that I use (Dungeon Pack) only had these 4 characters.

With that said, I can present you the temporary menu to test this famous character customization.

For the moment, it has no effect on the gameplay (obviously, nothing is implemented yet) and the character is not saved, but I'm quite satisfied with the result. I still need to add the possibility to remove the hat and the hair, as well as to manage some edge cases like the fact that the knight's head model is directly provided with hair unlike the other heads.

4. World Generation Overhaul

The biggest thing I did (while writing this devlog post) is overhauling the terrain generation. For that, I followed IndividualKex's "how to make a procedural grid world in under 2 minutes in unity" series.

(Side note, he's a very fun guy, check out his channel)

The generation work, I had a little trouble with the generation of the edges of the island for a moment but that's fixed now. The system also generates trees and I also plan to generate the rest of the resources afterwards, of course.

5. Conclusion

The next step will be to re-import everything on a new Unity project to be able to use the Universal Render Pipeline (I want to die) to make the game more beautiful afterwards. As I didn't implement a lot of stuff, I don't find it extremely problematic even if obviously Unity projects take a lot of space (I really don't understand why). I think I could have used Godot, since it is my engine of choice for my projects. However, I'm going to continue to code this game in Unity because I find that it's more suited to my needs for this project, and one of the goals is to show what I can do to a school that I want to join (and that by extension "focuses" on, or at least uses the Unity game engine as a main tool for learning). I'll make a new devlog in a few days to show you the progress of the project, porting to a URP project shouldn't take too long.

This is all I have for today folks, thank you for passing by…

~ Luckius 🌼👑