perfectly spherical

There’s a certain kind of character who is very popular in League of Legends. It’s not characters with huge mobility powers, like Akshan or Yone. It’s not characters with intricate mechanics and interesting conditions for getting their damage, like Vel’Koz or Irelia. It’s not even characters like Vayne who get massive damage in the lategame if they can survive long enough. No, there’s one kind of character with persistent power, one kind of build that is always popular, and one kind of playstyle that I just fucking hate so much.

So about that modpack thing DevOps for Minecraft is absolute hell. Let me regale you with some tales of the shit I’ve gone through in the past day: Mob spawn rates are dramatically different on multiplayer servers. I have a mod in this pack called Scape & Run: Parasites. It adds freaky biological horrors, a la the Flood. It’s actually quite well designed and I like the concepts behind it, with the parasites getting stronger as they consume more biomass.

Have you ever wanted to watch me, my new boss, and a bunch of other nerds play Minecraft? No? Too bad. Announcing The Perfectly Spherical LP, a project in which I attempt to shepherd the people I now live with through my own insane modpack. Be amazed by our incompetence! Be shocked by the terrible monsters! Watch in awe as I demonstrate exactly why I’m not a popular indie dev yet!

The move is pretty much done! And there’s a specific thing I mean by “pretty much”. I have most of my shit together at this point, but there’s more Ikea trips planned to acquire things like a non-cardtable desk and the obligatory shark plushie. I’ve gotten settled in, mostly unpacked, and everything’s already going according to–well, not the plan, so much as the kind of rapid-fire decisions that happen when you get four nerds under one roof and they start pitching ideas at each other.

Bullets Per Minute is a fun game. In the vein of Crypt of the NecroDancer, it’s a mixture of a rhythm game and another genre–in this case, it’s a rhythm FPS. Your actions must occur on the beat–shooting, reloading, dashing, jumping, everything (except maybe your ultimate ability, if you find one). It feels fun as hell. The soundtrack is, fittingly, metal as fuck. The gun designs are visually appealing–but more than that, each gun has its own unique feel, because of how their firing and reloading styles differ.

All Quiet On The Monstrous Front. I haven’t got anything pretty or graphical to show you this week, because A) I had a lot of cleaning to do this week and B) what I did get done was nonvisual. See, part of good programming practices is laying out the groundwork to make the fun parts work well. I could just slap together something that works right now, and–well, it’d work right now–but it’d be hard to build off of, like a shack that was built without a foundation and thus struggles to hold much weight.

Let’s make this simple. Visual effects–AKA the “look” part of “look and feel”, the stuff that flies around the screen to tell you that Things are Happening–should be at least sort of obvious. Enemies leak blood when they’re shot, rock walls make sparks when your pickaxe hits them, bombs have a big cloud of fire and smoke when they go off, your mage’s spell creates a lightshow when it’s finished casting.

Nobody is building Akshan right. Akshan, as a character, has a very complex set of abilities. One could easily argue that he has the most overloaded kit in the game, right now. He has on-hit effects that can be triggered rapidly with clever skill usage, he has stealth for getting in and movement speed boosts to get out again, he has a movement ability that lets him do all sorts of weird jukes while hosing down enemies with bullets (and which refreshes its cooldown on kill or assist), and he has an ultimate that automatically homes in on its target and does increased damage against enemies with low health.

Back In The Saddle. The past week or two has been spent mostly working on getting ready for the move, but I’ve gotten back into working on HWRK. This time around, I prototyped the Sharpgun: Finally getting some more work done for Hellwave Roadkill. Placeholder graphics for now, but this is the functionality for the Syringe Shotgun, AKA the Sharpgun. Plug someone with a syringe, and they'll slowly bleed serum for you, and won't move as fast.

Diamond is powerful. Everyone knows this. The diamond sword and pick are as iconic as Steve and the Creeper. Efforts to cosplay as Steve inevitably involve some diamond armor. The game is practically built around diamond as the god-tier equipment. Let’s talk about why this sucks. (This is a continuation of part 1.) It Made Sense At The Time because, when Minecraft was first developed, three important things were true: