January 2018 – My Blog

FFXIV: Easing into Patch 4.2

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Aywren

Sometimes you just need to take some time to organize and clean out the old MMO inventory.

You know what I mean?

I’ve been playing FFXIV for over 4 years now. This means that things have been piling up, mostly on my main character. I’m one of those folks who refuses to buy extra retainers, so I’m constantly struggling with storage.

This patch fixes all of that struggle.

Revitalize. Reorganize.

Syn is out of town on a work trip until Thursday, and I always play story/dungeons with her for the first time. So, that gave me a few days to really ease into the patch… somewhat backwards.

Usually, I’m rushing right into the story and Expert roulette because that’s what everyone else is doing. And this time around, there’s new Omega Raids, including Savage tier.

But you know what? It was kinda nice to take some time to just sit down and reorganize everything. And I mean EVERYTHING.

The new Glamour Dresser (Commode) allowed me to toss in all those random pieces of gear I’ve held on to for years for whatever reason. Some of this was second tier AF armor from level 50. Some of it was just cool looking weapons or neat individual pieces I’ve been hoarding away forever.

Since you can’t pull anything out of the Commode once it goes in (yet), I didn’t put important things in there, such as Mogstation items. Or Amon’s Hat.

But that cleared a significant amount of space for me.

ffxiv_01302018_134038 — Crafting Glamour Prisms!

Then, a bunch of sets, such as the Maid outfit, the Far East outfit, the random Amazon hats and the Yuna gear were finally able to go into our Armoire with this patch. This was close to, if not more than, 20 slots of inventory by itself. For every character on my account.

Then, we got Chocobo Saddlebags. This quickly became my fishing tackle storage and place for random things like Anima weapon crystals. Yeah, I still have a bunch of those crystals, and I’m not sure why.

Not to mention the game now allows things to stack to 999. I have incentive to go out gathering again!

So, I went through and just cleaned major house. This took a LONG time on my main character. But when I was done, it was so refreshing to have all my crafting mats organized and soooooo much storage space open.

I haven’t had this much space since I started playing. I’m not kidding.

Glamour Prism Problem

So, in order to put gear into the Glamour Commode, you have to spend one Glamour Prism per item. Considering you’d have to spend a Prism every time you changed your glamour with the previous system, this is actually saving resources. You just spend one up front and can apply the glamour as much as you want after that with no extra cost.

This was no sweat on my main, who can easily craft Prisms or just buy Prisms from the Grand Company. But, this was a roadblock for my significantly less-leveled group of alts in my private <<Alts>> Free Company.

Going through each alt inventory, I quickly realized that no one was at a proper rank in their Grand Company to buy Prisms. And I’d not leveled anyone’s crafting/gathering at all.

Since there’s still no way to transfer items to alts in this game (boo!), especially if they’re not in your FC, I had to decide on how to approach this. As always, I wanted to be able to do this on my own. So, crafting/gathering it was!

After mulling about it for a bit, I chose an alt – Zuri – and decided to put my nose to the grindstone. The Glamour Prism recipe unlocks at crafting level 15. And that’s not too terrible to get to. This required me to also level a gatherer in order to gather the materials required, since I wanted to be self-sufficient.

So, I made it my project last night to level Zuri’s Goldsmith to 15 and Miner to 21 (the level it takes to mine the Silver ore required for ingot). She didn’t have a lot of money on her (under 20k gil), but I found it easy enough to use materials she had on her retainer plus some she bought from the supplier to level her crafting.

ffxiv_01302018_191843 — This low level crafting gear looks nice on Zuri.

Mining took a bit longer. But unlocking leves in Drybone shot me up from 15 to 21 pretty fast.

After I unlocked the recipe at 15, I realized there was a problem.

You see, the Glamour Prism recipe used to unlock at level 30 crafter. They recently moved it to level 15. But they never actually changed anything about the recipe. If you’re coming into the game brand new, you can’t craft it at 15. At least for Goldsmith. I can’t speak for others.

Not only do you have to craft Silver Ingot (level 23), but if you are gathering your own materials, Silver Ore is a level 25 gather.

On top of that, it requires Fire and Wind crystals. Not shards. Full crystals. These are mined from level 30 nodes, and the earliest you can access them is level 26.

So, after all that time spent leveling and gathering, I plunked down to start making the prism and realized I had no crystals. Ugh!

I was able to grab a few stacks cheap from the AH (Someone put up a stack of Wind Crystals for 1 gil each!! Thank you!). I usually don’t like buying crystals on the AH, but at that point, I wasn’t going to be making anything if I didn’t.

During all this, I was watching Zuri’s meager gil reserve drop further and further with the cost of upgrading gear from 1-20 for crafting and gathering jobs, buying mats, and then buying the clear glamour prisms on top of it.

So, I decided to throw a few prisms up on the AH. And what do you know? They were selling like crazy last night.

ffxiv_01302018_224415 — Making that money back!

Makes sense. Everyone needs them right now. I also realized that the demand will drop once people finish filling out their Commode.

So, I rushed out to gather more silver and make more prisms to sell. In the end, I’m pretty sure I made back all the money I spent to level her, which makes me happy. I know that it’s not technically a lot of gil, but for a character who has very little, it was exciting to sell stuff on the market.

Not to mention, I also sold the stack of iron ore I mined up while I was grinding to level.

Zuri’s still not level 26 miner, so she can’t get her own crystals yet, but I’m going to work on that. I’m also leveling a retainer who can hopefully, eventually, bring resources back, since she’s going to become the sole source of glamour prisms for my whole personal Alt Brigade.

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun. It was random. It was relaxing. I threw on an audio book and just leveled.

I need to do this more often.

ffxiv_01302018_225213 — Zuri graduated into the yellow version of the crafting outfit by the end of the night. 🙂

Nefol: We’re Walking!

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Aywren

Last weekend, I continued to work on the Zento sprite, mostly in finishing up his side walking animations. But before I did that, I did something even more important….

The Man Braid Remade

That’s right. I had to remake the man braid. I actually took the artwork from the RPG Maker sprite and increased the size many-fold.

Then I added some more animation to to it. Putting it all together, I had a new behind-Zento walking sprite!

To the Right, To the Left

Once I had the front and back walking animations down, it was time to work on the side sprites. I expected this to take a whole lot longer than it did. Interestingly enough, the Spriter pack only gave the template for walking to the right, so those were the only pieces and animations I had to make. After exporting, I just took and batch flipped the frames in Photoshop, and this worked just fine to make a left-walking Zento.

I still might touch a few things up, but overall, this is a working first sprite for our game! Now, we just have to make the sprites actually walk!

Learning to Walk

As I noted before, GameMaker Studio is a lot different from RPG Maker. In RPG Maker, the basics of walking and collision are already there in your system. All you have to be concerned with is creating the game itself.

GameMaker is a blank slate. If you want something to move, you have to code it to move.

Syn spent a past weekend working through a walking and collision tutorial. She imported our old Jin sprite from RPG Maker, and actually got it to work!

The green box is a collision point object

When it comes to collision with a larger, non-square shaped sprite, it gets more complicated. I’ve been looking through tilemap based collision, but I haven’t had success in making it work yet. I’ll probably continue that this weekend.

But, what I did get working this weekend was directional walking with W, A, S, D keys, including an idle animation!

While I don’t fully understand the things we’re coding, I could figure out enough to pull in someone’s snippet and make it work for switching sprites depending on which key you’re pressing.

Success!

Syn, in the meantime, is working through tutorials on making text boxes. Then, we’ll need to figure out how to fold all this into events that make cutscenes play out.

Oh, and we’ll need to figure out a player camera system, too.

This is taking us a whole lot longer to do, but we’re also learning a lot about barebones game making!

Nintendo Switch: Cat Quest

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Aywren

Cute cats + fantasy RPG + Nintendo Switch = Win!

(Also on Steam and mobile devices if you don’t have a Switch.)

Yeah, I knew I was going to get Cat Quest the moment I saw the preview video. Sure, it has the look of a mobile game (and it somewhat is — it released on iOS right after releasing on PC/Mac), but don’t let that turn you off.

Cat Quest is a solid little action fantasy RPG where cats are the dominant race. This doesn’t stray into furry country though, so don’t worry. There are plenty of cat puns and Internet humor to go around.

While it has a few neat systems that feel fresh and new, it generally sticks to the classic RPG formula. This isn’t a bad thing, because the game is quite aware of this, and smartly never takes itself seriously. Instead, it heaps a bunch of charm, cat humor and pop culture references that make for many moments of lighthearted fun. The saving-at-an-inn animation is hilarious! 🙂

The game itself has one main quest – which is rather cliche (and the game is happy to point this out from the very beginning, and laugh at itself in doing so). But, add to that a colorful world with lots of short-story-based quests, dungeon-caves, and an interesting action battle system, and there’s more than enough here for it to stand on its own.

The simplicity of the game works for itself, especially in a time of overly complex RPGS. You have two buttons – attack and dodge. You also can find and level up magic spells, which you assign to your top L, R, LZ, and RZ triggers. That’s all you need to know.

Even the weapon/armor system is easy. You find a base piece of gear. Then you find multiples of that piece, which levels the original up. There might be more to it (I’m still learning this game), but that’s the overall gist of it. Depending on what you equip, you can choose to play a more melee-based or magic-based character. So, there’s some flexibility there.

2018010300462600-7A5825B6334E63AF2B3C3BE850F1F62C — These hungry NPC cats are kinda scary…

A few cons to mention: I’ve heard the overall game is somewhat short (about 8-10 hours), but there is a Mew Game + mode after you beat it. I’m only a few hours in, but I feel like there’s still lots to see and do.

Also, the NPC artwork is heavily reused for all villagers, which I’ve heard as a complaint. But I can’t think of too many classic RPGs that didn’t reuse their NPC sprites.

Neither of these are really sticking points for the cost of the game ($12.99). You can find it on sale from time to time in the eShop, too.

Overall, Cat Quest was exactly what I hoped it would be – a fun pick-up-and-play adventure RPG with cute cats and lots of humor. Two paws up! <3

FFXIV: Preliminary Patch 4.2 Notes Highlights

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Aywren

Preliminary patch notes for FFXIV Patch 4.2, which is releasing next Tuesday (Jan 30), were posted today. So it’s time for me to dive into them and give my thoughts on the “important” things. Like the fact they changed “glamour commode” to “glamour dresser.” Booooooo!

Continue reading “FFXIV: Preliminary Patch 4.2 Notes Highlights”

Nefol: Zento Sprite Remade

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Aywren

Now that I’d finally found a good style for our background artwork, I turned my attention back to the Zento sprite again. While the background art would have been fine for a pixel sprite, I still felt we needed something larger.

So I started to do some research and looking through available Spriter Pro assets. I wanted to find something to use as a foundation that was larger and had better animation.

There’s actually quite a number of these out there to choose from. But if you look at that page, you’ll see that the number of 4-directional assets is much lower.

It’s far easier to create animations for sprites that run only in two directions – left to right. If you want something that moves up, down, left and right, it’s much more involved.

In the end, I chose the Witch assets. This turned out to be a good move in several ways. Not only did this pack include two differently animated characters (witch and skeleton), but the witch actually has animations for casting spells and swinging a weapon that I can build upon.

While the style is a bit more cutsey and minimal than I’d like, the assets included full Spriter animations as well as vector graphics I could alter in Illustrator.

So I got to work modifying the base files, and after working on a few of the pieces, had something like this:

I showed this to Syn and she felt like the head was too large. She didn’t know I’d already shrunk it down significantly from what it originally was. XD

Anyhow, I really wanted to keep this sprite as the base, so I edited it down some more. I think she’s okay with how the sprite came out.

There are a few things I’d like to fix on this, but overall, it’s a good sprite to start with. Keep in mind, this is only the front-facing sprite. I haven’t started on the sides yet! That’s going to be at least another weekend of work.

Some animations:

Steam Challenge: What Remains of Edith Finch

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Aywren

Game: What Remains of Edith Finch
Time: 3 hours

I received this game as a Christmas gift, and finished back over Christmas holiday. I’d heard of this game before, and had wanted to try it out, so this gave me the excuse I needed to get that done.

I don’t want to say too much about it, because this is a game that’s very easy to spoil. I went in pretty blind, and suggest that if you’re interested in trying it out, you do the same.

What is It?

The Steam store page describes it as:

What Remains of Edith Finch is a collection of strange tales about a family in Washington state. As Edith, you’ll explore the colossal Finch house, searching for stories as she explores her family history and tries to figure out why she’s the last one in her family left alive.

This is pretty much all you need to know to play.

The environment is very atmospheric, and while I thought at first this might be a spooky game, it didn’t turn out to be. Now, that being said, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that unsettle or make you feel uneasy. There’s plenty of that to be found in these stories.

Generations of the Finch family have lived and died in this strange, winding house. Edith comes here as a young adult to revisit her childhood home and to find answers for herself. Almost every member of the family has a story about who they were and what led them to their demise.

As you experience these stories, you fill out a Finch family tree.

Once you complete the game, and fill in the entire tree, you can come back here anytime to replay specific scenarios based on the family members. Some of these were disturbing enough the first time, however.

Some might call this a walking simulator. I feel the variations in the style of storytelling and mechanics you encounter between family members’ stories help to break up the feeling of the traditional walking simulator.

Again, I can’t really say a whole lot without giving much away. But there was a particular sequence that involved someone who worked in a fish factory that was especially brilliant. The overlap of gameplay and story really put me right in that character’s mindset in a frightening way.

Anyhow, if there’s a nit to pick, it’s that the game is fairly short. While you can go back and replay stories, it only took me 3 hours of slow exploration to get through the game. For some people, this might be too short.

Looking back on it, I think forcing the game to be longer would have been detrimental. The game is compact for a purpose. It told the stories it wanted to tell, and left the rest to the player to figure out.

Also, the ending may not sit well with everyone. But that’s a call you’ll have to make for yourself.

Recommended?

Nefol: The 2D Environment Solution

Posted on January 24, 2018 by Aywren

In my previous post, I talked about how I struggled to find a way to mesh our character art with background assets. I used character sprites I created in Spriter Pro with backgrounds make from screenshots of assets arranged in Unity and this just wasn’t working out.

I threw around all kinds of ideas on how to make this work — from possible 3D character models to exporting sprite animations from Blender to… well… it was a consuming question for days.

Then, for some strange reason, I visited a part of the Unity assets store I’d been ignoring: the 2D section. It was here I found my answer.

Going 2D

I discovered this absolutely beautiful set of winter assets – 2D Snow Forest Pack. It can make scenes such as this:

Pretty amazing!

Only thing was, I didn’t know how to use 2D assets in Unity.

So I logged in and learned about how to make a sprite object, and attached a flat image to that object. I investigated the creator’s demo scene. These images are created by layering lots and lots of these flat objects in front of and behind to create depth.

This is fantastic! It’s also… super time consuming. Getting 2D objects to line up perfectly in a 3D environment made me want to cry. But… there was something that I noticed about the assets as I was making sprites. Each object was part of a larger PNG. Like this:

Very pixelated to protect the asset creator, but you get the point.

Wait a sec.

If these are merely PNGs…

I realized that I could go through, crop each individual piece, and use them to layer in the same way… in Photoshop! I didn’t need to work in a 3D environment… I had a 2D environment for 2D assets that I was much more familiar with!

And even better, I could resize the image to fit our character size however we needed it! Not to mention, I could add any customization I needed to the images in Photoshop as well.

I’ve yet to actually sit down and make a background, but yes. This will probably work!

Nintendo Switch: Lost Sphear (Demo)

Posted on January 24, 2018 by Aywren

Lost Sphear just released on Nintendo Switch yesterday. It’s an RPG by Tokyo RPG Factory, the same folks who created I am Setsuna, which I own for the Switch, but haven’t played yet.

This game was on my radar based on the overall plot hook, which sounded very cool. You have a fantasy world where huge chunks are just vanishing, turning bright white. Cities. Mountains. People. All just gone.

And then there’s a character who can harness the memories of the world and can re-create those missing things. It has something to do with the moon. That’s all I know about it.

It sounded neat, so I picked up the demo.

Demo Impressions

The demo just tosses the player on an overworld map with no real idea of what the story of the world is. Who are these characters? What are they up to?

It kinda tries to explain these things, but I was not satisfied. If I didn’t have the knowledge of the backstory that I do, I’d probably have no clue why huge chunks of the map were white. Is it snow?

The graphics and musical style are beautiful, as you can see. But I struggled with the feeling that everything, including the characters and their personalities, were so distant to the player.

Above, you can see how tiny the overworld characters are. I can understand that.

You get into an area and the characters are still really small and distant. The sprites don’t convey much emotion at all.

When characters speak, there’s no character portraits to let you know who is who. In fact, the only place you can go to see what your characters look like is the menu during battle and on the menu screen. And even there, the images are super tiny!

The translation was a bit wonky. The dialogue that I saw was a bit stiff. The characters who seemed to have the most personality were often the NPCs — including a “mwahahah” general from the Empire.

Yeah. There’s even an evil Empire trope.

Check out that talk box above. See how it’s just flopped near the character speaking it (can you tell which one? … I hardly can)? It’s just covering over all the other characters in your party.

Look at all the rest of the open screen this box could have used. Why is it right on top of the character sprites?

This really bugged me as a design choice. I kept wanting to click on the text box and move it somewhere else (though you couldn’t) because every time there was a conversation, the boxes just flopped right over top of people in your party… while the rest of the screen was vast open space.

Maybe if this had been a talk bubble shape, this would have been more acceptable. But even then, there was plenty of room to put it above the characters, rather than plaster it over the party.

Oh, and when the game started, it asked if you wanted to use voice overs. I was happy to see this, and clicked YES!

What do you know… they’re all in Japanese… and only during battle sequences (that I saw). I have nothing against the Japanese language! But the issue here is that the one thing that could have given me a better sense of who these characters were as individuals – what they say in battle – is completely lost since I don’t understand what they’re saying!

So, opportunity missed.

Oh, and I know this isn’t a demo-only thing because I’ve watched the full release play-through videos, and none of this was addressed.

So, the battle system. It seems like the devs put a lot of attention into it. It had some interesting options, like moving around the screen and setting up places where your characters could attack for hits on multiple enemies. It has a bit of RTS feel to it.

And then there’s the mecha element of Vulcosuits. So the demo drops the suit mechanic on you out of nowhere. You can use it to blow up rocks in your path. It also suggested that you use them for battle because cool combos!

…but to beware not to use up all your VP points or you couldn’t battle anymore. They weren’t joking.

Well, I used all the VP up in the very first battle without really knowing it. I thought surely this would replenish between fights, right? Nope.

The suits were useless aside from blasting rocks for the rest of the demo.

And then, I get to what was sorta a boss encounter. I’d had no trouble fighting enemies up until this point. Heck, most the time, I killed them before they got a hit on me. Well, this boss just obliterated me.

She had an attack that charmed my characters, if she didn’t one-shot killed them… They weren’t that low on life, either. If she didn’t slaughter them, her pets did instead. They hit like a truck and had just as much HP. It wasn’t fun at all.

“And then all hope was lost from the world…”

Wow. Okay.

That’s where my time with this demo ended.

I’m sure there’s probably more story to it (I watched the beginning in play-through videos, and still wasn’t impressed). I just couldn’t get a feel for any of the characters, so I found it hard to care what was going on. It’s a real shame.

Even the reviews have been pretty lukewarm for it. So I’m not the only one wishing this had more to offer:

Lost Sphear’s classically-styled RPG bones can scarcely bear the weight of its uninspired narrative.

–CGM

Tokyo RPG Factory clearly wanted to build on every classic RPG all at once.

–IGN

The writing is uneven, the music is generic, and the combat, even with a few new flourishes, just feels like I Am Setsuna redux. The characters are flat and boring, best described with archetypes like “heroic guy who lost his mother” and “spunky, irritating kid with a heart of gold.”

–Kotaku

Have you tried this game and found it more engaging than I did? Let me know!

Nefol: Zento Sprite Horror

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Aywren

In my previous post, I talked about how I was trying to use the RPG Hero pack of Spriter Pro as a foundation of sprite art for our game. I spent many hours of trial and error with this program, working to figure out how it worked.

So, you start with a guy that looks like this:

Basically, the default has all the possible items and layers. You can use what’s called Character Maps to remove items, or to overwrite pieces with your own. Just about every body part on this sprite is its own piece, which means everything is customizable… but also everything needs to be animated separately.

Here’s what the character map section looks like:

So, you can see here that I told the program to remove certain things (facial hair, headgear, shields, wings, etc). Also, I created a custom character map named Zento. So far, the Zento character map has added two custom pieces to this sprite — green eyes and white eyebrows!

Alright! Now, we’re making progress!

So, over a number of hours of the weekend, the progress looked like this:

Keep in mind, these are only the assets for the front view. Arms and legs had several sprites to represent the walking animation. This is not even starting on the side view or side walk animations.

But hey, it’s a start, right?

Making it Mesh

It’s a pretty cute Zento sprite. Not bad for my first try.

In the meantime, we’d picked up some Unity assets, which I spent hours looking for. The thing is, we needed winter and snowy assets, because Nefol. We needed something that wasn’t super cartoony, but something stylized enough to mesh with sprites.

I ended up choosing this Hand Painted Winter Pack, which looks amazing, btw. I wanted to use it so much, because the assets are lovely, and the artist has several other themed packs that we could look at in the future. I might still get the Hand Painted Interior Pack.

While these assets look fantastic in a 3d sense, I immediately found issues with trying to mesh with our sprites.

First, the sprites were just too small. I tried for hours to find a way to make the camera perspective in Unity match the perspective I wanted the sprites to have, but the grass was taller than my original Zento sprite!

So, then, I used Spriter to output the Zento sprite at twice the size. While this was better… the sprite looked a lot more pixelated.

My next try was to redraw the Zento sprite at twice the size. This gave it a stronger outline and made it larger. It also took a whole day…

But I still wasn’t happy with it.

And the real problem came with the animation. I had to re-work every frame because I had increased the size of the sprite two-fold. This led to some interesting issues like…

Uh oops…

And…

Yikes!

Ok. So this wasn’t working.

My spriting was a fail, the animations were awful, and the backgrounds weren’t meshing. I’d spent hours looking for alternatives in the 3D assets.

I was getting pretty discouraged.

That’s when I ran across something that changed everything. Stay tuned! 🙂

Nintendo Switch: Dragon Quest Builders (Demo)

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Aywren

Like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) is one of those series that started for me on my NES… with the very first game. I remember as a kid, owning that little Nintendo Power extra Dragon Warrior pull-out guide. It looked like this:

Dragonwarrior-strategyguide — Credit to Nintendo Wiki for an image from my childhood.

Dang. That was released 1989. Did I just date myself?

Anyhow, with its help, I made it all the way to the end of the game. That’s probably the only Dragon Warrior game I’ve finished, though I’ve played a few of the other NES games. I haven’t played any of the newer games in the series, however.

Fast forward.

I’ve heard about Dragon Quest Builders, and it sounded right up my alley. But seeing it’s only been released for Playstation systems, I couldn’t play it. That is, until now!

Dragon Quest Builders is coming to the Nintendo Switch on February 9th, and I couldn’t be more pleased! However, I wanted to make certain the game was really going to be what I hoped. From my understanding, it’s similar to Minecraft, but with a Dragon Quest bent and a guided city building aspect.

I downloaded the demo and got to dive into it last night for the first time.

Soon after, I stopped playing it.

Because… it’s so much fun, I didn’t want to spoil the actual release!

All That Dragon Quest!

DQ Builders (is that the proper way to shorten the name?) isn’t just a Minecraft game with a Dragon Quest skin over top. It’s got all the old skool vibes I was hoping to see. From the music on the intro screen, the menu screen, the overworld… I was instantly transported back to Dragon Warrior of my youth.

The art style oozes stylistic charm. You’ve got all the standard Dragon Quest monsters you know and love to beat up – especially the Slimes.

What’s It About?

You come to Alefgard, where something dark has blighted the land, to figure out what’s going on… and rebuild it. Apparently, you’re a rare person who has remembered the old ways of Building. With a little guidance from an overly-patient goddess, you are sent out to put things right.

What actually surprised me was how much humor there is. It’s not always laugh out loud humor, but a kind of quirky out-of-the blue thing. It’s often poking fun at your character, and that was totally fine with me.

The game does a lot of hand-holding for someone who is familiar with the mechanics of a Minecraft game. But for someone new, or someone who needs that kind of guidance in their sandboxes, I feel it had a good balance between exploration and questing.

DQ Builders puts a very clear purpose there for you — you want to rebuild your base as a town and attract people to it. The NPCs you attract appear to be a driving force for how the game unfolds.

Like Minecraft, there is a day and night cycle where night becomes more dangerous. The game leads you to building a house and furnishing it with beds that you can sleep in to skip that dangerous time. It has a very exact definition of what makes up certain types of buildings – for example, complete walls of two blocks high, a door and a light source make up a room.

What I thought was especially cool was the blueprint system. The NPCs sometimes give you a blueprint that you can place on the ground and use as a guide to build over. Once you meet all the requirements for that blueprint, it becomes a specialized location!

I don’t have that much more to share, because I stopped playing the game the moment it gave me an exploration quest to do. I didn’t want to spoil what I can foresee as being a game that’s going to suck me in soon enough!