BEEP BOOP!
That's, 'hello there' in machine language. It's me, the number 346,741 youtuber (according to social blade), Offy D, here to tell you about what happened this month at Offy D corp. Summary:
My money... my growth... All shattered in the bitter cold of winter... Well it happens to everyone, eh? Shoutout to kings and generals for giving me more work than usual this month, which made up for the youtube losses. But will youtube bother to recover this time?!
With both of my main series being in awkward please-can-it-end states, not all that much is happening on the channel right now. Having trouble with Recs Romanum in particular, as an upcoming series of glitches, mod issues and the worst parts of Mount and Blades design will combine to frustrate me greatly. Planning to actually rerecord some gameplay to try and improve it, which I would normally never bother with. Whose idea was this anyway? Didn't the audience vote for this series? YOU FOOLS!
Once one of them is done I'll be making a series of my own volition. It's going to be a 100% narrative thing (like The Promised Crown) in the despair-themed city builder, Frostpunk. It's not a very long game, but I think some kind of diary-like narrative about what actually happens in the game could be interesting. Main difficultly is overcoming how the premise of the game is generally insane (PUT A GODDAMNED ROOF OVER YOUR HOT AIR GENERATOR AND YOU'LL BE IN A TROPICAL PARADISE IN A DAY YOU IDIOTS), but I guess that means I can expand the lore myself! Hard to explain my thoughts here if you haven't actually seen the game and general lore of it, so let's just save it for the big day. Hopefully I can make it while it's still actually winter (in the world's most popular hemisphere that is), to add to the meta-pathetic-fallacy.
Also starting in a mere one day is a new abridged campaign commentary in Oriental Empires, the civilisation-like game with a chinese history theme. I've actually played about 2/3rds of the campaign now, most of yesterday, since it goes very quickly. I think it will be a very short series (I'd guess ~6-8 parts), but what I may just do is go on and also play the Ghengis Khan DLC as well. I got it for free from the developers, and I DID say I'd make videos on it (like months ago), so that would be quite appropriate I think.
Anyway, it's a fun game, still held back by the fact that doing battles with other factions is really frustrating and hands-off - I almost prefer the Civ "here's the probability that you'll win aaaaannnnd it's over" approach, since it doesn't make you watch your men going into battle in a single file line and getting killed while your reserve faces the wrong way and shuffles around- look, might as well save the rants for the videos, since we'll see plenty of all that.
Now, let's transition into what I've been doing a lot of recently: making my own sensational video game! In particular over the last couple of days I've been working on the dreaded optimisation, since the frame rate dropped by about 50 whenever you scrolled the map, had lag spikes you zoomed in or out too much, and big spikes at the start of each new turn. Well, after much labour, I solved the first two! Have been spending days analyzing things, and I am getting very close to finding the cause of the third spike. Might even try my latest genius idea to solve it today.
There's something addictive about hunting for optimisations in my big messy code. On friday and saturday I ended up accidentally spending 90% of the day doing it, in both cases giving myself plenty of headache and eye strain. There's some old programming wisdom that is something like "never optimise", since it tends to waste a lot of time. But in the case of my game, I want a smooth experience, especially given that I'm running it on a powerful machine and still got drops to 20fps (or 1 fps in the case of the start turn lag spike).
THAT SAID, literally guys, in Oriental Empires, which is also developed in Unity like my game, the stutter and lag when scrolling or zooming is HORRENDOUS. The guy that made that was like a seasoned pro who was the lead dev on medieval total war 2 or something, so clearly it's just a thing that happens. And if you've ever played a total war before warhammer 2, you'll know the end-turn lag is also horrendous there, especially as their AI lags a lot as well. I have higher standards, not only because I am superior to those poxy studios, but because in my game the turns are very rapid, with the player potentially just taking a few seconds to do all they need to do. So I'd like it if the end turn sequences weren't so long to keep the flow going. Wish me luck huh?
If anyone is wandering what on earth this game I'm talking about is, or when they will see it, then I'm afraid it's still a secret until the graphics are done. OH ALL RIGHT here's a shot of my current position on the world map in my testing save.
Lots going on in there, but hey, look at that frame rate! I capped it at 90 to avoid stupid problems that are too difficult to explain here, so sorry to the 144Hz monitor master race.
Will be working on version 0.88 alpha starting today. Version 1 alpha will then become version 0.5 beta (at which point I'll be looking for testers :D), then version 1 beta will be the full release! It's done when it's done etc. Racing that FF7 remake.
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Now it's time for: WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH!
I won't actually write all that much because the answer is:
Nier Automata - and talking about why it's good and interesting pretty much constitutes spoilers for everything. It's got big flashy sword explosions and shiny bits, AND it makes you want to die, the perfect combo!
Oh yeah I was also playing the tail end of Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain. More like the phantom ending, amirite?! It was good, but coulda held back on the old rolling the credits trick, since I absolutely would have stopped playing the first time it did that if it didn't then come back up and explicitly tell you there was like another third of the game after that. Not that I ever really knew what was going on, as the game appears to be a sequel to the PSP games, and Ground Zeroes, which I haven't played, plus it apparently contains references to things in the first game, which I haven't played, and even the old pre-playstation games, which I haven't played. Look, I've played 2 and 3, which is actually enough to NEARLY understand it.
Overall though, a barg at £5 second hand. Not as good value as Nier though, which was FREE thanks to ps4's nice no DRM game sharing policy. Got a free copy of Ass Creed Unity, Massive Effect Andrombad and Prey to play as well. Too much really, especially with my steam backlog after the christmas sale. Ugh, I hate video games so much!
AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH!
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Oh man it's sunny outside right now. I haven't been outside since I discovered that allocating memory inside functions that run in loops is a cause of lag spikes. Might give it a look, just for old time's sake...
By the way, I followed animememes on twitter so now all my memes are animememes.
