Flash Games – Page 2 – Kill Ten Rats

Anticlimax

I accidentally beat GemCraft: Chasing Shadows last week. “Accidentally” in that I was pursuing my new playstyle of sprinting through levels in search of all abilities when it turned out that one of them was the official end of the story. I’m not sure how much I can spoil a story that fits on one page or how much the story of a tower defense game matters; it ends with the same tone as the first game.

The story-ending level does combine a few mechanics we’ve seen across the game, rather than being a standard level. So that was kind of interesting. Something seems wrong with being able to beat a game on accident, especially given how this series makes beating the game a loss.

There are epilogue levels, plus all the levels you didn’t play or can play again for more waves and at higher difficulty. For tower defense, like FPS, the play is the thing, so it’s a matter of for how long the gameplay stays interesting (and you still have a sense of achievement). And then there’s Iron Wizard mode, beat the game again without being able to out-level the difficulty curve.

: Zubon

Breakthrough

I had the realization that I am playing GemCraft: Chasing Shadows the wrong way. I have been carefully ratcheting up difficulty and consistently playing at the most challenging difficulty I can reliably overcome. This has kept me above the xp curve, usually playing at 400%xp to keep getting further ahead. With the levels from that xp, I have been consistently pushing levels to the 150 wave range, which makes for the very long games I have mentioned.

This is silly. I do not have all the resources yet, so there will be more reward for sprinting to get all the skills and going back to get mad xp if I need it. I got a huge effectiveness boost when I got the critical hit gem skill, and I have mentioned in the comments that I needed the chain hit gem kill to round out my effectiveness.

Last night I ran through a series of levels as quickly as I could and found my way to the one where I could unlock the chain hit gem skill. I then went back to re-try an early level and see how it raised my effectiveness. My score on that level went from about 200,000 to about 950,000,000. One level, on my first time trying out a real mana trap farm, did not just give me more xp than all the hours carefully working through levels — it nearly tripled my level. I set another one of those up and went to bed, and it went on to farm into nine digits, bringing my level above 1000.

It’s kind of like that scene in a book or movie where the protagonist finds out the real scale of the conflict and looks back with wonder on the struggle that seemed so important five minutes ago. It is Ender talking to children still back a level or Neo looking around the Matrix where he used to live. It is as if Gandalf said, “Now that you mention it, Frodo, the eagles would totally have flown us in at the beginning if we’d asked.”

I suddenly got a lot of sympathy for the impatient players who want to be accelerated to the end game. Why kill monsters for coppers when you could do the same actions for gold? I remember joining WoW at the end of the WotLK era and making that jump from the vanilla lategame to the first Burning Crusade map. “So you guys farmed that for a couple of years, and I’m getting stronger gear from green boars?”

: Zubon

Bottlenecks

I am still playing GemCraft: Chasing Shadows. There are a lot of levels, and when you start going past wave 100 every time, a level or two is an evening’s gaming.

What with more than 100 levels, the map is large and sprawling. There are, however, bottlenecks through which you must pass. At some point, your next level must be X. There are probably more of these than I realized; if you happen to go the way that is required, you probably did not notice it was required, whereas crashing into the wall in the other direction sends you back this way.

There are several points at which unlocking the next hex requires a particular skill. The game is nice enough to very explicitly say that you need skill Y from field Z1, and it will not let you start a level you cannot complete. I should note that you really cannot complete some maps without particular skills, not that it’s just really hard, although that comes from the arbitrary difficulty of the wizard towers. You must unlock the tower by using up some resources, either tower attacks or spells, effectively a handicap on the level.

These chokepoints also tend to serve as story units. There is a tale of The Forgotten going through GemCraft, and you follow it across the map. It is not the world’s strongest story, but you can retrace the ruins of previous battles fought, which gives the game a bit of mystique and an aura of doom. When you look up from your shiny gems that are blowing up monsters by the dozen.

: Zubon

Restricted Difficulty

The GemCraft thoughts come from trying to ride the bleeding edge of difficulty. Sometimes we look for greater challenge because easy is boring, but the leveling system in GemCraft also encourages you to push yourself as hard as you can. You cannot grind the same map repeatedly to level up. Instead, your experience point total is the sum of your highest score on each map. You can go back and repeat a level, but unless you up the difficulty and therefore your score, it will not contribute to progress.

So add more difficulty modifiers, add more waves, boost the waves, and summon them early: anything to up your score, because if you go easy this time, you’re probably coming back to re-do the level for a higher score (for more levels, to do better in the late game). And who wants to re-do 40 waves of defense when you don’t have to? Only now you’ve dialed it up to 50 waves and are trying to keep boosting that difficulty mid-level, eek out a little more and keep things interesting. Of course, if you overshoot the difficulty, you’ll probably find out all at once, and now you’re starting those 50 levels over. I have several times ended levels because I boosted several waves of difficulty without noticing their different speeds, so they all reached the critical point at the exact same time. Hurts.

GemCraft: Chasing Shadows also comes with “Iron Wizard Mode.” No xp, no levels, no shadow cores, no talismans, no difficulty dials: just 5 skill points per completed map and that is your total advancement. There is no way to lower your difficulty by re-completing levels with higher difficulty. There is no benefit to increasing your difficulty, unless making one part of a map harder makes another part easier. There is no bonus for completing the level quickly, well, or with perfect defense: just win at all. This is remarkably freeing. Making the whole thing pass/fail takes a lot of pressure off, even if the fixed difficulty can be a challenge to re-adapt to after having lots of levels in the main game. Also, I am now seeing the first levels again, with their few waves, rather than the 50+ wave maps I am seeing 80+ maps in. The simpler game is soothing. I can choose to have fewer choices.

: Zubon

GC:CS Thoughts

What happens in your brain as you play GemCraft: Chasing Shadows:

Okay, what gems do I get this time? That looks like a nice chokepoint. They’re coming from HOW MANY directions?

Okay, I’ll just put this tower here and … crap, reset, I’ll just put this tower here…

Easy waves to start, I’ll just enrage a couple of times, the extra hit points won’t matter … but that extra armor will, crap crap…

All right, settling into a rhythm. Let’s build up some mana, level up that mana pool. Very nice. Enrage a few waves. That was easy, let’s enrage a bit more. Yeah, just pour those swarmlings into the meat grinder.

I have 20 more waves of this. *sigh* No problem. Let’s speed that up a bit. Quintuple enrage the next five waves…

Wait, that one was a giant wave. Crap. Okay, no problem, just stop enraging a bit… although I already enraged the waves before and after it…

There are reavers everywhere! Freeze! Curse! Bolt! Zap, boom! Ha ha, getting ahead again, all right, all ri — crap, that wave’s still going and I’m out of spells. That’s okay, I can leak a few.

Freeze the giant, make him blow up on the other monsters… Come on, 2 seconds left on that freeze spell. Come on come on come on crap. Well, he’s dead now anyway.

Okay, whew, made it through that. No problem. Let’s take it easy for a few waves, catch back up. Okay, maybe not that easy. Oops, okay, maybe that was one too many enrages. Just one enrage for the wave after.

Pew pew pew. Freeze the swarmlings. It’s fun to watch them explode in clumps. Ooh, shrine’s full, let’s pop that.

And just the giants left… and done. Hey, three achievements, nice.

You then vary between “I wonder how far I can go in endurance mode” and “Oh god, endurance mode, I already went through 50 waves.”

: Zubon

Fine Tuning

I have been playing GemCraft: Chasing Shadows, a tower defense game. A great thing about the game is the ability to fine tune your difficulty. You can unlock three levels of difficulty. You can unlock nine different “battle traits” that add enemy traits and waves. You can select talisman fragments that give xp instead of bonuses that help you in the fight. During the round, you can on a per-wave basis choose to “enrage” enemy waves, spending mana/gems to boost monsters, and you can spend many small gems for high numbers of enemies or a few larger gems for bigger enemy boosts (or both). Rewards scale accordingly; I went back to an early map with some difficulty sliders turned up and got a score 20,000 times as high. Oh, and then there are achievements for other self-imposed difficulties, usually not using part of your arsenal or doing something very quickly on a particular map.

The base difficulty of the game is fairly low, at least in the paid version. (The paid version is easier than the flash version without the “magician’s pouch” mainly because it unlocks “endurance mode,” continuing the map after beating it to keep racking up xp. Xp in GC:CS is your highest score on the map, so going back and getting a few levels with your new skills and difficulty sliders makes everything else easier.) With many ways to tune the difficulty, you can dial it up to exactly the sort you want. Just want to run through the game and see everything? Keep it at the minimum. Like fighting big targets? Dial up “Giant Domination.” You prefer crushing swarms of foes? You can enrage swarmling waves into the hundreds. Hardcore elite gamer? Turn all the dials all the way up and go for it.

Oh, and there is “Iron Wizard Mode,” which eliminates most of your ability to level grind away the difficulty. Steam says that less than 1% of players have beaten that.

: Zubon

Steam also says that 13.6% of players do not have the “kill a monster” achievement. I like Steam games to have that “have you even played?” achievement. It’s informative.

Kitchen Sink

Realm Grinder‘s development path reminds me of WildStar, in that it is gradually coming to an approach of “just throw everything in and hope it works together.”

One of my first impressions of WildStar was that it decided to use all the systems and hope for synergy. It has races, classes, specializations, paths, factions, and more, most of which have advancement systems built in. It has static quest NPCs, quests that appear in the field, challenges specific to your path, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few types and their names. There are achievements and unlocks and multiple parallel and overlapping advancement systems, the way other games staple them on between expansions but here building them in from the start. There is crafting and PvP and raids and city upgrades, and any sub-system you can think of from any other game probably exists in WildStar in some form.

For me, those never really gelled into something coherent, but maybe it did for you, and they have had a year or two of development time since I last looked in on them.

Realm Grinder did not have the pre-release development time that WildStar did, but it seems to be following the same path in terms of sub-systems. I mentioned initially that it launched with six factions, so you could range from clicker play to idling to offline. Then heritages let you keep a feature from each faction. Then the unlockable neutral factions launched. Then you could unlock a good or evil prestige faction that stacked on top of the original factions. Then Mercenaries let you combine upgrades from various factions. Then bloodlines let you take a bit of any faction and include it in your current build. The latest major release added research, which has six paths of trait trees themed around the six original factions, where most of it is accessible to all factions but there are faction-specific upgrades in each tree, and it is only available to the original six without using the prestige add-ons. A small update added challenges for the original six factions, which are mostly faction-specific but can provide bonuses across factions. And I might be missing a few in this kluge of limited, general, specific, overlapping, and mutually exclusive upgrade trees. The menus now have sub-menus to store all these buttons. And they are actively adding more, as research for neutral prestige factions is under development.

Despite all that, at any given time, your options are relatively limited and clear. If an option is not available for your faction, it is grayed out or not visible. Once you have chosen a faction and a bloodline, there are no other choices to make until you get to the late game of Mercenaries and research. Other than that, no, you just take everything available. Even the new research system offers more upgrades but not more choices until you get a few reincarnations in, because “select 4 of 4” is not really a dilemma.

If you are not sure which tier of the game you should be in, “the latest one you got access to” is usually the right answer, and failing that look at the order things were added. Each reincarnation you start with one of the base factions, move to a prestige neutral faction, go back for a prestige good faction, switch to Mercenaries, then go on to the research system. It is a lot like playing an MMO, where you go through the expansions in the order they were released. Realm Grinder lacks explicit levels, but it does have lots of numbers measuring your progress, and the major question is when to switch between progress methods (and which one fits your playstyle/time).

: Zubon

Shop Heroes: Portable Pro-Sociality

At Tobold’s suggestion, I have been trying Shop Heroes, and I think Recettear converts to a mobile/social media game nicely. Why be an adventurer when you can be a shop owner selling things to adventurers? In the inverse of normal MMO mechanics, it is the adventurers who buy random crap, and they buy a lot of it because most of it has a 5-10% chance to break every adventure. Strangely, they do not actually use equipment you sell them, but rather you sponsor their adventures by equipping them with goods from your shop. Those items they break.

I would like to highlight the game’s City upgrade mechanics. I am not high enough level to see what it does in the late game, but it immediately seems to encourage players to be pro-social in a variety of good ways, while also making the high-level players’ drive for advancement subsidize the low-level players’ development. It does undermine the permanence of social bonds, which may be a good or bad thing depending on your view of this sort of thing.

The City is the equivalent of a guild hall, and it starts with a few buildings. Some of them help you get resources, like a mine for iron. Upgrading it increases the rate of iron provided. Upgrading your town hall expands your City, both in terms of population and getting new buildings. New buildings provide bonuses like new adventurers, bonuses to them, crafting bonuses, and raising the level cap on your crafters and adventurers. Those bonuses are effective for a limited time after anyone invests in building upgrades, 30 minutes for a minimal contribution up to 24 hours for a full upgrade bar. City members’ contributions are broadcast to all members, with an overall contribution rating on the member screen.

While there is an obvious anti-social incentive just to leech off others’ contributions, there are a variety of pro-social incentives here. If you want to raise the level cap for yourself, you contribute to the team. If you want to activate bonuses for yourself, you contribute to the team (even minimal contributions add up). Beyond mechanics, there is the social incentive of receiving public credit for contributions, along with the implicit social obligation to contribute to the team embodied in that members screen. That can turn nasty, in the way some MMO players consider a low gearscore to be leeching, although it also promotes reasonable stratification by player type if hardcore players who contribute a lot end up in cities with other hardcore players who contribute a lot. I would also expect to see social cities, where a few workhorses power their casual friends.

The last detail: your contributions go with you if you change to a new city. Wow, that’s big. Have you ever contributed to a guild only to be the last surviving member? Given it your all and had to abandon your sunk costs? Shop Heroes has no guild sunk costs. If you want greener pastures or to switch to a friend’s guild, you bring your investments with you. If you kick someone out, s/he takes her/his investments too. That might make someone hesitant to kick a toxic but rich person from the city, but I have yet to find how to be toxic in this game. Chat is hidden by default, and we are all off in our own shops.

: Zubon

Realm Grinder: Catching Back Up

Realm Grinder‘s reset mechanic has the important effect of speeding the player back to where s/he left off. In MMO terms, think of this as letting your alt quickly play where you main just was. There are drawbacks, but this seems generally a good thing that could be adopted elsewhere in some form.

For those who have not played this sort of game: after a slow first run while you are learning the game, you reset and advance steadily until you hit a wall in terms of progress, when you run out of new multipliers and abilities; you then reset, which gives you a bigger bonus and pushes the wall further out. Realm Grinder accelerates you towards that wall, which sounds bad to phrase it that way so let’s instead say that it brings you back to your personal late game. You are banking progress and continuing, not starting a long journey over.

This will not be to everyone’s liking because some people really love the early game. Alts! New characters! A simpler game in a purer spirit! Let’s say that incremental games do not have the early game feel that The Shire does. And games recognize that you have played the early game enough, hence boosts to near-max level or GW2’s birthday gifts of scrolls to skip the early game. To the extent that the early game is exactly the same whenever you start over, you want to accelerate/skip it; in a game like Civilization, the early game is often more interesting than a same-ish late game.

In Realm Grinder, this works out very well because you explore the early game diversity pretty completely the first time you play a faction. After that, your new multipliers quickly get you back to where you were. If you are going ten or a thousand times as fast, there is no more early game. You go through it as quickly as you can click. As you accummulate gems, you skip the early game and get back to prestige races in minutes rather than days. As you accummulate reincarnations, you zip back to the Mercenary stage in hours rather than weeks. In the late game, these bonuses just push The Wall out a little further, but they are ridiculously effective in burning through the early game, which you already know, to the late game, which might have something new for you.

If you are a “the real game starts at the level cap” player, really trying something new involves getting back to the level cap.

: Zubon