The Return of the Zeph!

[Draco18s]

As long as only 1 "wild pool" item shows up at any given time, I'd be happy with it.
Already I ignore robot shops on Floor 1 as it is, due to the very low amount of currency.  Even post balance tweaks I probably won't hit a robot shop until I've got about 40-45 credits, as most drones are a minimum of 30 and I'd rather be able to go "oh sweet, I have enough for that one!" than get stuck with a less than stellar 30 credit familiar.

That isn't to say that I wouldn't pick up a 10-cost drone, just that the current selection of cheap drones tends to be very lackluster for the price (I'd rather save up 15 more credits for next time than spend 30 now).

[windlesszephyr]

Sorry for not existing here lately, folks. Been caught in a work/sleep cycle since the last run went live and haven't had a chance to check back in here for more than a few moments at a time. So, I've done one other run since the one with the Tri crash thing, so I'll link the relevant files, far as I can tell, and just hope that they're still useful. The ones there are the only files I found that have a timestamp matching the date of the run. Also, in the run I did between that one and now, there was another crash that might be in those logs somewhere, where the game froze on a black screen just after I hit the start run button. I'll have that one live tomorrow in its entirety, since it was mostly just for fun, so if y'all want to see what happened it'll be there at the usual time.

Anything else you need from me?

Also also, if there were a cheap drone or two available early on, I would probably invest in them pretty often; I'm a fan of drones after all.

[ptarth]

Error logs don't show anything beyond noting there was a crash.

Floor 1 items are priced so, on average, you should be able to buy 1 good (not cheap shop) item  on Floor 1.

Drone shop populations are messed up for some reason. I haven't had a chance to look into that. I'll try to do that today.

[Pepisolo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUPqs0uwgrA

Episode 45: Purchase

SPOILERS



Interesting, Zeph does a Very Easy run in order to get  the don't buy anything from shops achievement. The run only lasts 20 minutes. To preserve a slight air of mystery I won't say whether the run ends in success or failure... Couple of problems I noticed, certain bosses don't have any knockback resistance, Periphery and Metal Legion. I was about to add these changes myself, but then I thought I'd better leave it to Misery, just in case I put resistance on a wrong entity or something. There was one entity called Chain which I wasn't sure about. It's possible a few of the other bosses might also have this problem, too. WZ also hit on some kind of problem with the math of certain power ups. For example, Conductive Hull is supposed to reduce your health by 2, but because of some multiplicaton weirdness due to being on Very Easy, your health is actually reduced by 6 on this mode.

[Misery]

Bah, I thought the stupid knockback thing had been taken care of already... feh.  I'll set those two. 

Chain is inactive.

[Pepisolo]

Just thought I'd necro this thread in honour of the Zeph's re-return to Starward Rogue!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NgEIFAI0xw

Episode 52: Oxidized

SPOILERS



Humble Mech run that seemed to be going pretty well, but Zeph seems to really like sacrifice shop items, taking Battery Harvester, Grin and Bear It, and Repo Van which is really going to bring your HP down a bit. Zeph also traded 1 Shield for 6HP thinking that it was pretty much free HP given that the Humble Mech doesn't start with shields -- which apparently it isn't! I wasn't sure how this actually worked, but it looks like if you grab Shield Transfer while you have no shields, your shield count gets set to -1, so if you then try to grab an extra shield from perks then the game effectively treats that as you repaying what you owe, setting the count to 0 again. Reasonable behaviour? Given the unexpected lack of a shield, and the low health due to all those sacrifice shop purchases, survival proved difficult. A nice warm up run, though. Welcome back Zeph!

[Misery]

Just thought I'd necro this thread in honour of the Zeph's re-return to Starward Rogue!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NgEIFAI0xw

Episode 52: Oxidized

SPOILERS



Humble Mech run that seemed to be going pretty well, but Zeph seems to really like sacrifice shop items, taking Battery Harvester, Grin and Bear It, and Repo Van which is really going to bring your HP down a bit. Zeph also traded 1 Shield for 6HP thinking that it was pretty much free HP given that the Humble Mech doesn't start with shields -- which apparently it isn't! I wasn't sure how this actually worked, but it looks like if you grab Shield Transfer while you have no shields, your shield count gets set to -1, so if you then try to grab an extra shield from perks then the game effectively treats that as you repaying what you owe, setting the count to 0 again. Reasonable behaviour? Given the unexpected lack of a shield, and the low health due to all those sacrifice shop purchases, survival proved difficult. A nice warm up run, though. Welcome back Zeph!

Huh.... I didn't know that item did that. 

It sounds a little glitchy, but not actually a bad thing... feel free to change it if you'd like, but it's fine if you'd prefer to keep it as it is.

On a side note, a potential upcoming problem suddenly occurs to me... the Popcorn enemies are about ready to go, and will be appearing in large groups (often very large) while being easy to kill; they have a tendancy to clump up if allowed to chase you long enough, and a single missile or two is likely to be enough to flatten all/most of them at once.  So, with the Humble missiles, well... yeah, you can probably see the problem there.   Not sure what might be done about that.   One thing I did do though is set them to not give any EXP.  They aren't a super frequent enemy though, only so many rooms have these guys in them.

[ptarth]

• Shield behavior seems reasonable to me.
• popcorn enemies give just a little xp perhaps (i.e., 1-5 xp)?
• Don't remember offhand, but did we make it so the humble missile launcher doesn't do the mining effect? If so, making them debris should work out.

[Chthon]

Shield behavior mimics Max HP behavior if you pick up the incredibilities that "drop you to 1 hp" One of them gives you -50 max hp, the other gives -25 max hp. I suppose that if you somehow managed to get enough max HP back you would have more than 1 hp after that.

[Pepisolo]

Don't remember offhand, but did we make it so the humble missile launcher doesn't do the mining effect? If so, making them debris should work out.

I did sit down and try to find a solution, but couldn't find one. I'll probably take another look but if not, then I'm not sure how to fix the issue. For better flexibility with stuff like this we probably need some way in the engine to exclude certain categories from triggering the EntitiesMyShotsHit modifier. Might be useful to have this feature if it's easy enough to implement. Something worth asking Keith about? I think this would have add a decent amount of flexibility. We could then create the asteroid mining item quite easily, for example. So, something like affects_entity_category="AntigravitateBlock" and doesn't_affect_entity_category="Popcorn".

Shield behavior mimics Max HP behavior if you pick up the incredibilities that "drop you to 1 hp" One of them gives you -50 max hp, the other gives -25 max hp. I suppose that if you somehow managed to get enough max HP back you would have more than 1 hp after that.

Yeah, overall I think the Shield Transfer behaviour seems fine, although maybe we could clarify how it works in the description a bit more.

[Pepisolo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ic84Y92OPM

Episode 53: Retrain

SPOILERS


Not feeling confident after how the last run went, this time Zeph goes for a run on Easy to get back into the swing of things. Predictably, Zeph steamrollers this run with the Flame Tank, stacking DPS and grabbing a few good power ups along the way. Misery, you probably shouldn't watch the Terminus "fight" as it might make you sad, heh. Bit of a chill run this, with Zeph not really being tested. Note to self: remove the friendly fire from the Gravity Cannon.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

Spoiler for Zeph's video:

SPOILERS


Not feeling confident after how the last run went, this time Zeph goes for a run on Easy to get back into the swing of things. Predictably, Zeph steamrollers this run with the Flame Tank, stacking DPS and grabbing a few good power ups along the way. Misery, you probably shouldn't watch the Terminus "fight" as it might make you sad, heh. Bit of a chill run this, with Zeph not really being tested. Note to self: remove the friendly fire from the Gravity Cannon.

You know there is a spoilers tag right?

[Misery]

Spoiler for Zeph's video:

SPOILERS


Not feeling confident after how the last run went, this time Zeph goes for a run on Easy to get back into the swing of things. Predictably, Zeph steamrollers this run with the Flame Tank, stacking DPS and grabbing a few good power ups along the way. Misery, you probably shouldn't watch the Terminus "fight" as it might make you sad, heh. Bit of a chill run this, with Zeph not really being tested. Note to self: remove the friendly fire from the Gravity Cannon.

You know there is a spoilers tag right?

That takes effort though.   I dunno about everyone else, but I always say that effort is the enemy.

There, I've added my sarcasm to all this, you're all welcome.

[Pepisolo]

Spoiler for Zeph's video:

SPOILERS


Not feeling confident after how the last run went, this time Zeph goes for a run on Easy to get back into the swing of things. Predictably, Zeph steamrollers this run with the Flame Tank, stacking DPS and grabbing a few good power ups along the way. Misery, you probably shouldn't watch the Terminus "fight" as it might make you sad, heh. Bit of a chill run this, with Zeph not really being tested. Note to self: remove the friendly fire from the Gravity Cannon.

You know there is a spoilers tag right?

Yeah, I think that's too strong, though, heh. This is my version of a very very soft spoiler warning.......or something! (Hey, it kind of makes sense in my brain, at least!)

[Pepisolo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L10noVzT8nw

Episode 54: Sunder

SPOILERS



Quite an interesting, but unusual episode this. Choosing a random mech results in a Red Shift run. Ram Launcher is taken as the preferred early energy weapon, which I haven't seen used very often. There are a few tense moments on the road to Sunder. Then the episode becomes all about Sunder as Zeph struggles with the boss, and so wanting more practise decides to hit the test chamber for while, going for a perfect. Misery should enjoy watching this video for all the Sunder feedback. I'll leave you guys to find out if Zeph gets the perfect or not. Bug note: there's a mysterious circuit that kind of reveals itself before using it due to the text description referencing its energy usage...we'll have to look into that to see if we can fix it.