Sandbox Archives - Page 10 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bathtubs and Nonsense

February 27, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve been partaking in some serious nonsense of late, not the least of which has been Dragon Quest Builders… and streaming me playing Dragon Quest Builders. I figured I would lead off with this screenshot because it is absolutely amazing. My townsfolk decided to build me a bath tub… which I immediately installed in my private master suite. So the funny thing about Twitch in its most modern incarnation is… it makes it silly easy to be an Affiliate. From the moment you start streaming it starts ticking off little achievements, which in some bizarro world way made me want to get them. One of them is called “Path to Affiliate” and it shows up as a little quest of sorts in the sidebar of the achievements page. It includes…

Stream 8 hours in the last 30 days
Stream for 7 unique days in the last 30 days
Reach 3 average viewers in the last 30 days
Reach 50 followers

The last one was easy because I have had my account so damned long that I have more than 50 pity follows at this point if nothing else. In theory once you qualify and get that achievement checkmark… you are done. Lately I have been dabbling around with streaming, and one by one each of the boxes got checked… and now I am apparently an affiliate. I am not entirely certain why I did this thing, but it happened. Now I actually sorta want to try and come up with a proper schedule, which is super difficult because with my managerial duties my arrive home time is super variable, as is whether or not I feel like playing any games in “live” mode.

This did force me to contemplate what would happen if someone actually subbed to me. As a result I named them appropriately to attempt to encourage people that this is not a thing that they should actually do. I keep expecting Twitch to lower some hammer on me for discouraging people from giving them money. Basically I would feel super awkward to actually take any money from anyone. This is mostly a thing I did for myself… and in part because it will allow me to create a spiffy twitch emojii if I so choose. I am not even sure what else Affiliate includes otherwise, mostly it was just… a thing I felt like doing because it was available.

Now however I find myself involved in all sorts of other nonsense as a result. I talked yesterday a bit about StreamLabs OBS… or SLOBS as apparently people are calling it… why people why. I’ve also been dabbling with their custom Chatbot that is apparently what happened when they gobbled up Ankhbot. As a result I now have the beginnings of a custom channel bot named MrAggroBot that will do some of the basic functionality you see in chat bots… and at least in theory also works on Discord.

Similarly I have set up a “BelStreamTime” Discord with the sole purpose of joining it while streaming, and as a result allowing anyone else who cares to hang out with me join as well. I realize no one actually needs a new discord to join… but I also did not want to dirty up any of the other discords I am part of with my streaming nonsense. The highlight of the night had to be getting everything actually working so that the Chatbot joined my quickie Twitch test stream, accepted commands and also announced that I went live through the Discord. It was more proof of concept than anything useful but I sorta felt like Doctor Frankenstein bringing life into the world… if that life was complete and utter nonsense.

As far as doing actual gaming stuff… I grouped up with Grace and took down some low rank monsters. I never really reached the point where I farmed Low Rank content the way I now do High Rank, and as a result I am missing a ton of parts to make lower level items required to make the higher level versions. I’ve been working slowly on building a Tobi Kadachi Longsword for its lightning damage, and we wound up farming Tobi a bunch of times for parts. From there we started doing more esoteric hunts, like an Anjanath and a Pukei Pukei with a 30 minute timer in which I tried to hammer. I am not exactly completely effective as hammer, but it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I apparently completely phased out the fact that Tam was trying to invite me to a party and wound up heading to bed around 9:20. It was a fun night, but also one where I did a bunch of silly things with minimal use to anyone. So yeah… I am apparently a Twitch Affiliate now and am starting to build up the infrastructure needed to do “stuff and things” on that platform.

Dragon Quest Builders Thoughts

February 20, 2018 by Belghast

I thought I would take a bit of a break from the constant stream of Monster Hunter World posts to talk about something else that I’ve been playing. Dragon Quest Builders was originally released on the PS4 and Vita back in October 2016 in the United States. There is apparently also a version that runs on the PS3 in Japan, but seemingly that copy never made it over here. I remember being super interested when I first saw the trailer, but by the time it was released was deeply distracted by other things. Just scrolling back through my blog… on the month it released I seemed to be dabbling in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Destiny 1, Diablo 3 and a little bit of Skyrim. Basically it released while I was distracted by other things… and as a result I never actually got around to picking it up.

Scroll forward to February, a month where I am mostly in a Monster Hunter Shaped hole… and I notice that it officially releases on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve not really had any builder games in my life over the last few months, so in theory it was maybe a good time to dig into a new one. It is really hard to describe what Dragon Quest Builders is because it is this sort of beautiful amalgam of a bunch of different games. At times it feels like a Legend of Zelda game especially when you don a sword and shield and go out into the world to whack monsters. There are times when it feels like Minecraft because you are absolutely collecting resources and building up your base. Then there are times when it feels a bit like Actraiser where you are intervening in the lives of the NPCs that populate your village.

The story of the game is pretty simple at face value. The game world itself is that of Alefgard the world of the original Dragon Quest, and is essentially what would have happened… if we had failed and the Dragonlord won. It is also a world where over time the fledgling human populace has lost hope and forgotten the power of creation. You as a builder are granted the ability to look at a set of raw resources and gain inspiration in how they might be shaped into useful objects. As a result it is your place as the new hero… to start reclaiming the world through combat and creativity and push back the forces of the Dragonlord.

The world itself is divided up into a series of islands, and through the course of gameplay you can learn how to make teleporters allowing you to traverse between them for different resources. All the while you continue running quests for the NPCs that start showing up in the town you are slowly piecing back together. Placing blocks together in certain ways creates rooms that then the NPCs can inhabit, and you begin to create machines that they can then utilize giving you resources that then can be used as you go out venturing the “save the world”.

I’ve loved Minecraft since the moment I first watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of the game. The problem with Minecraft however is that it is awesome to go out and create things in… but it also doesn’t really have a point. Sure there is the whole Ender Dragon nonsense that was placed in game late… but really there is no sequence of events that you need to complete to “beat” the game. For me “beating” Minecraft is amassing enough Diamonds to be able to use full Diamond everything and not give a crap about it. However regardless of how cool you build your world out… it feels hollow because there are no NPCs inhabiting it.

Dragon Quest solves this problem by allowing you to build a world… that then comes to life as various types of NPCs come live in it. Sure you can get this sort of functionality with modding, but it always feels tacked on to the side of the game and not really part of it. Dragon Quest gives you a reason for your wanderlust and harvesting and allows you to keep coming back to a place you call home and in doing so help out the people surrounding you. This might be a subtle difference but it is the one that is the most important and is why I have been playing the heck out of this game each night before falling to sleep. I like that I can pick it up, do a few things and feel like I have accomplished something. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly suggest checking it out.

Four Screenshots

February 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was another fairly anxiety fraught night, and I simply didn’t feel capable of tanking a World of Warcraft progression raid. I feel bad about it, but by the time I got home… my mind was spent racing through all of the possible things that could fail today. This is it.. the day we launch the new website and I am terrified. In the grand scheme of things I know that we will deal with everything that comes down the pipe and triage issues as they arise. However on the eve of the event I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that could go catastrophically wrong. I need this to launch and I need it to go successful… because honestly I need a few days to simply fall apart. I have been functionally working sick for over two weeks because I knew things had to get done. Granted I have not been running a fever, so I didn’t think I was likely contagious… but that didn’t necessarily stop me from feeling downright miserable. One thing I did do last night was get my little Random Shots project out on GitHub since Scopique mentioned I should do this thing. Since I don’t really have a whole lot that I feel like talking about this morning, I am going to try one out of these random screenshot posts and see what happens.

I have this weird relationship with Rift. I love it or at least I really want to love it… but I have issues playing it. I talked a little bit about my issues with combat over on Syp’s blog yesterday in the comment section, but another huge issue I have is that I simply cannot bring myself to purge things from my vault. I love their housing system… but I also cannot seem to be bothered to actually spend time building a proper house. However I have this long term desire to do so… and because of that my vault is horrible. With Nightmare Tide they introduced the Minion system and for months I logged in dutifully every day hoping to get housing caches with the thought of putting all of this cool stuff to work in building a really great dimension. However what actually happened is it filled up both my vault and inventory with a bunch of items that I never could quite bring myself to part with. I could bring myself to part with the deluge of crafting materials that my minions kept bringing back, but those housing items were just too rare feeling. Sure most of them go on the auction house for a few silver…. but that doesn’t actually seem to alleviate the problem. What I wish is that Rift had a housing system that worked similar to Wildstar in that you chuck items in a sort of housing inventory that you can then place items from. I would happy wander the world collecting housing items, knowing that one day I might actually sit down and devote the hours to building a proper home.

I had honestly forgotten about the events that happened during this screenshot. Back in 2014 the Halloween event included the ability to transform into one of the various signature characters in the game. There were a bunch of different clones running around in Uldah, and I wound up as Nanamo Ul Namo. It was a lot of fun but largely was just an occasion to take funny photos… like there is one floating around of like nine Minfilia’s on a bench sitting beside one Merlwyb who is looking exasperated. That is one of the really cool and frustrating things about Final Fantasy XIV is that each holiday event is unique and will never be repeated. They sometimes put the rewards you could have earned on the cash shop for a pretty cheap price… but each year and each holiday offers something truly unique. Over the years I have missed several, and there will always be a small bit of me that feels a slightly sense of loss over not getting to see whatever content that was.

This is one of those screenshots where I know what it is and what it is showing… but can’t be terribly certain of the sequence of events. Essentially I know that this is a beta test build of Elder Scrolls Online, during one of the most public test weekends and not one of the Psijic Order/Team Akatosh weekends. The screenshot is somewhere in the middle of Stonefalls, because I spent so much time in Stonefalls. By the time the game launched I was pretty sick of both the Daggerfall Covenant starter area and the Ebonheart Pact starter area. The reason why I know it is a public beta client, is because there is no obnoxious watermark that says my email address over and over across the screen. I still have plenty of alpha screenshots floating around that are watermarked to hell and back and this is obviously not one of them. I also know this is not a live screenshot… in part because of the time stamp on the image and also because I have yet to make it to Ebonheart Pact on my main character. The funny part about this shot is that I had been in alpha/beta testing on the game roughly a full year when we reached this point back in February of 2014. I was an extremely dutiful tester, repeatedly reporting bugs every time I played. To the best of my knowledge I never missed a weekend testing event, even if it simply meant that I popped in for a few hours somewhere during it. It just seems shocking that in April we will be coming up on the third anniversary of the Elder Scrolls Online.

This is a screenshot from one of the early alpha builds of Skysaga, a minecraftian sort of voxel building game. The game had a really awesome style to it, in everything other than the character models… and their weird floating arms and legs that were detached from the torso bothered me. I realize that was part style decision and part that they simply didn’t want to have to properly animate arms and legs. I mean if it worked for Rayman… why not for a construction/exploration game? I cannot really tell you why I checked out of this game, but I did… I think in part because it was the sort of experience that handheld you through the process of building by continually throwing new crafting achievements in front of you. Then each time a new build was released… we would get wiped back to square one. I am sure the game has changed massively given that this is a screenshot from February of 2015 and I am still actively getting emails talking about alpha builds of the game. When I just checked the website they list that they are in Alpha 9… and this screenshot is from what I can only term as a 0 alpha build given the version number. If you are still in alpha after two years… something tells me you are using the nomenclature completely wrong. If you are selling a product… you aren’t in alpha. You are just in a buggy release mode.

Tunneling Addiction

December 28, 2016 by Belghast

I think we need to talk. I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft. What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night. I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one. I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground… and in truth that is happening again in a big way. The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land. I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night. However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas. Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something. Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean. I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built. As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland… and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot. Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost. One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock. That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction. It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains. So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it. There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor. The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”. This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me. However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.