Coelacanth

Okay, good to know. Thanks for the writeup! I am also one of those players that like to keep resting to a minimum in order to maintain immersion, which punished me hard in BG3 as I missed out on like half the campfire scenes in Act 1. Silly me for actually taking the game seriously when it said things were urgent.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Rogue Trader so maybe I will check it out one day, but the 40k setting never really did it for me personally. I was actually into painting minis for a while in my youth, but it was always the fantasy setting that appealed to me. There were some guys who were into 40k around me back then, but those were all assholes who were incredibly demeaning towards fantasy and constantly denigrated the Warhammer Fantasy group for using a silly and “uncool” version of the game. I think that period has tainted my perception of 40k subconsciously.

Anyway I got wildly offtopic there, sorry 😅

Last third of Kingmaker really soured me on Owlcat and has made me postpone WotR indefinitely. Shame to hear some of the same issues appearing again in it. How does it compare otherwise? I am also somewhat hesitant about the epic setting and godslaying type of story compared to the more grounded Kingmaker. Is the writing good?

I’ve started playing Chrono Ark, a roguelike deckbuilder I’ve heard a lot of good things about. So far I’ve played something like 3 runs, so only just begun. It’s fun so far, it’s not completely reinventing the genre or anything but each run has been fun and the upgrades seem varied enough.

I’ve also heard good things about the story, and it does involve time travel to play into the looping roguelike nature in a seamless way, but that’s about all I’ve been able to glean from it so far. I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Come on GOG, I like you, don’t make me dislike you.

Is the Mastodon algorithm new? I could have sworn they used to pride themselves on the chronological-only feed.

But how many will actually do that, though? That doesn’t really sound like how regular people would react. Like, if regular people were capable of reading up and looking into things on their own accord as part of the sign-up process we wouldn’t need to have this conversation about a snappy and succinct summary sentence about Lemmy in the first place.

I get your point, but I agree with RobotToaster. We’re still at a point where the Fediverse is a very niche thing and a very niche term. For most regular people “Fediverse” is a nonsense word that tells them absolutely nothing, while “decentralised” (albeit a technical term) is at least a concept most people can grasp.

I’m not saying your sentence is inaccurate, but send that description to a regular person and it will either cause their eyes to glaze over or cause them to run in the other direction.

Has a look like you just caught it in the middle of making mischief!

Are you looking for story or gameplay? Chaos Zero Nightmare is relatively new and is a roguelike deckbuilder with really good gameplay. Lots of synergies, lots of combos, lots of variations of every card letting you craft very specific decks that can make almost anything work if you just get lucky with finding just the right pieces and upgrades during a run.

The story is ass though (but at least there is a fast forward button) and some of the character designs do make me roll my eyes with how absurdly gooner-baity they are.

That’s very interesting and sounds cool - though might be above my paygrade.

What kind of delay does the double prompting incur? I can’t imagine it would be nothing, especially for this use case of calling external LLMs via a proxy.

If anything a RAG for certain game related information might be a nice addition to the current system, rather than replacement. I think for a roleplay and storytelling focus there is a benefit of having a persistent character “life story” of long term memories fed into every prompt, creating character throughlines and potentially even character development.

I’d recommend both Dispatch and Blue Prince — I still haven’t completed the latter, but, yes, I’ve unlocked the secret elevator.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but… you’re not as deep into Blue Prince as you think you are.

Well, what I’m working on is a mod for STALKER Anomaly, and most large models already seem to have good enough awareness of the STALKER games setting. I can imagine it’s a much bigger challenge if you’re making your own game set in your own unique world. I still need to have some minor game information inserted into the prompt, but only like a paragraph detailing some important game mechanics.

Getting longer term interactions to work right is actually what I’ve been working on the last few weeks, implementing a long-term memory for game characters using LLM calls to condense raw events into summaries that can be fed back into future prompts to retain context. The basics of this system was actually already in place created by the original mod author, I just expanded it into a true full on hierarchical memory system with long- and mid-term memories.

But it turns out creating and refining the LLM prompts for memory management is harder than implementing the memory function itself!

I’m actually also working on a project using LLMs to talk to NPCs. Though this one doesn’t use local models but online models called through a proxy using API keys, which lets you use much larger and better models.

But yeah it’s been interesting digging deep into the exact and precise construction of the prompts to get the NPCs talking and behaving exactly like you want them, and be as real and lifelike as possible.

There are mods that implement it, don’t know about games. Skyrim has an AI driven follower mod and STALKER Anomaly has the TALKER mod.

They do have a publisher: Kepler Interactive. But so does Blue Prince in fairness, it was published by Raw Fury.

What constitutes an indie game will always be debated, because it’s almost impossible to define it through black and white rules. If Kojima created a game with a budget of $300m, a cast of Hollywood A-listers and a development team of 200 people and published it himself, would that be an appropriate nomination for the Indie Awards?

Larian self published BG3, should that have been nominated for Indie Awards?

This feels kind of more like finding a valid excuse after the indie-or-not debate and backlash, but fuck it. Blue Prince is a great Indie GOTY (the correct choice imo).

I don’t think E33 should have qualified as an indie game to begin with.

I don’t want any gifts, I just wanted to say you’re an amazing person and this is a great initiative ♥️

Enjoy your time with it! Those moments of seeing something in game and going “wait wait wait I know what this is!” *rifles through notes furiously* were my favourite part.

Without spoiling anything I will say this: I recommend taking actual notes. I did it in a physical notebook but digital has the benefit of being searchable. It’s possible to get by with only screenshots, but I really recommend both and I thought the note taking itself was so enjoyable. I find physical note taking helps with memorization too, and every time you make progress because of something you’ve taken notes of is such a dopamine rush.