Hello Tildes, I wanted to share with you a project that I have been working on for quite some time and have finally released.

63 is a modern version of the classic public domain party game known by many names, but listed on wikipedia as Celebrity. (Some people might know it as Hat Game, Fishbowl or by some of its commercial versions such as Time's Up or Monikers)

The game works exactly like all these other games except you only need your phone to play it, no pen and paper or decks of cards required. The game is pass-and-play so only one phone is needed for a any size group.

For this initial release, the english version of the game only has 2 packs of cards available to choose from (General and Celebrities) but my goal is to add more packs and create a platform where anyone can create and share their own packs of cards.

You can download the game now on Android or on iOS.

For those not familiar with the rules I'll leave a brief explanation below but inside the game there's a more comprehensive rule section and tutorial.

GAME RULES:

A random deck of cards is generated for each game based on the packs chosen. Each card represents a concept and the objective of the game is for teams to guess as many cards as possible.

Two teams take it in turns to guess cards. Each turn is 63 seconds long and the player from the active team holds the phone and gives clues to their teammates.

There are three rounds, each with different rules for giving clues:

ROUND 1 - Forbidden words
You can’t use words from the card’s title

ROUND 2 - Only one word!
You can't make sounds or gestures nor use any word in the card title

ROUND 3 - Charades!
Words are forbidden, only gestures and sounds are allowed

At the end of the three rounds the team with the most points wins!

This is one of the first places I've shared the project in, especially for a global audience (since the game is also fully in portuguese), so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hope you enjoy 63!

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Sorry for the delay in posting this month.

December's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Well, a few minutes ago I finally pushed the button, the game is released. So I wanted to write a short write up of some things that I had to do to release the game. I won't really talk about making the game itself too much, more about the part of actually releasing the game, if you are interested in more of that you can see my posts from Timasomo (1, 2, 3, 4, showcase).

Steam

I have already created many games in the past, I've been making games for more than 5 years, but always as a hobbyist. So I never experienced releasing a game on a platform like Steam. I have to say working with Steam and Steamworks is very pleasant and streamlined, but it is still much more complex than for example releasing a game on itch.io, which is what I did before for all my other games. I'll try to summarize how the process looks like.

First, before you can even get on Steam, you have to register, fill out a ton of paperwork, wait some time for it to be manually approved. Afterwards, you have to pay the 100 dollars for Steam Direct. At this point you finally get a Steam app id, which you can use to start integrating Steam features into your game. For example, having achievements, Steam cloud integration (so the saves get synced between devices), leaderboards and potentially more, especially if you are making a multiplayer game. To make my game I am using Godot, and I found a C# library called Facepunch.Steamworks which made this all quite easy, I'd definitely recommend it if you are using Unity or Godot with C# and want to release your game on Steam.

Before releasing a game on Steam you also have to finish everything on a gigantic checklist, including things like: uploading 10 various header, capsule and other images which are used on the store page and Steam library. An icon for the game. What are the minimum requirements required to run the game, whether the game has adult content, whether it supports controllers, how much the game will cost, screenshots, a trailer, there are just so many things to do! And when you complete parts of this checklist you have to have your game go through manual reviews. Each review could take about 3 days to get done. I failed one review first so I had to resubmit it too and wait again. Let me tell you, if you plan to release a game on Steam, reserve at least a month to do it, and start going through the reviews as soon as possible -- actually I think there even is a minimum of a month before you can release the game from the day you get an app id.

Trailer

Creating a good trailer is super hard. I am not a video creator/editor at all, but luckily I at least own a solid program for creating videos -- Vegas 14 pro, that I got for super cheap in some Humble bundle about 8 or something years ago, so I at least had a good start there. I ended up with not that complex of a project and Vegas still kept crashing when rendering, so I am not sure if I'd recommend it though.

The hardest thing for a trailer is deciding what to put in it for me. I know that a trailer should be super short, should showcase how the gameplay looks, what are the features and so on, but when I got to actually making it, it was still super hard to decide what to put there. How do I even start? I watched a ton of other indie game trailers to get some inspiration and that also didn't help that much. There are some trailers which are really just gameplay, some trailers which are actually just incredible with editing I could never do as a pleb... So I started with something that I know a bit more. I created a very short music track, and decided that I will just edit the trailer to fit the music.

The music track basically splits the trailer into 4/5 very short sections:

• Basic gameplay, how the game looks when you start playing it
• Explaining the roguelite part of the game, selecting spells and items
• More complex gameplay, how some combinations of spells and items can look later in a run
• List of features
• Special bonus ending section showing a "Legendary" spell, which should show how insane spells can get, followed by the logo of the game

I think the trailer ended up being not too bad, but I still had some feedback that it isn't flashy enough. And it's true, but I am not really sure how to improve it easily. When watching the Vampire Survivors trailer for example I can see that they did a much better job: it's so much more dynamic, the music really pumps you up, it's overall better edited, it has cool transitions, camera movement and so on.

End

Releasing a game on Steam was a great experience. I learned so much! I basically made this game over weekends and evenings, since I also have a job. To try maintain my productivity I tried to do at least some work on the game every single day. I have to say that towards the end I started losing some steam (haha), some days scrambling to do at least something late in the evening before I went to sleep. But, if at least someone plays the game I think I want to keep updating it more, I still do really like the game!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask me anything about the game, or the game dev process, or about anything basically haha.

Here's the Steam store page, the game costs 5 dollars, I'd love it if you checked it out. If you want to play the game but can't afford it PM me and I'll send you a key for the game (at least once I get the keys I requested -- did you know that Steam has to approve the creation of keys manually? Edit: the keys are now ready)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2682910/The_Spellswapper/

Howdy, citizens!

So, after begging, borrowing and stealing, I've managed to piece together what I believe to be a barely capable rig so that I can get into playing this incredible looking game, but I'm running into a performance issue that makes it pretty unplayable.

Here's my rig:
AMD A-10 6800k @ 4.1 GHz
32 GB Ram
128 GB SanDisk SSD (for the game only, OS is on a similar size Kingston)
GTX 960 for the graphics.

Last night I tried running the game from my normal HD, which is a 1tb platter. This did not go well. Just moving my character around in the initial apartment was torture, and using anything in the room was an exercise in frustration to the point that the room ended up looking like a brawl had happened in it before I made it out, with coffee cups and water bottles all over the floor.

So, after I read a few pointers online, I salvaged the SanDisk from a different PC and began reinstalling on that. Today I hope to be able to move around smoothly enough to actually play, but aside from setting every option to its lowest, are there any other little tricks I can use to get it more playable?

November is coming to a close, and the Backlog Burner with it!

Post your final updates, your completed Bingo cards, and any closing thoughts you have.

• What were the best games you found from digging through your backlog?
• What surprised you?
• What disappointed you?

Also, another HUGE thank you to @Wes for his incredible bingo card generator.

I just posted this as a comment to someone who mentioned Horizon Zero Dawn, but figured there might be more discussion if I made a new post for it, so here goes:


Are there any games that you have enjoyed playing without the HUD or mini-map? If so, which ones and why?


One of my favorite gaming experiences was playing Zelda BOTW in its entirety without any HUD elements, just using the game's scenery and story to guide me. I loved it so much that I tried doing the same in other massive open-world games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, and Assassin's Creed Origins, but found that they relied too much on small details or markers in the minimap. So instead of feeling more immersed and in-tune with the game world, I just felt more frustrated at not knowing exactly where to go or which specific person or item to click on without the game explicitly telling me. I'm sure it can be done, but I found it nowhere near as pleasing as BOTW.

I just recently picked up Horizon Zero Dawn and wondered if it could be played in a similar manner, without the map or other HUD elements, or if I'll end up needing some of them to know where to go or who to talk to.

I'd love to hear any other recommendations or thoughts on this matter.

Hello tabletop community,

I am designing my first ever boss fight, meant to really challenge my players. I don't want to kill any of them off since we're all new and it feels weird to lose a character, but I also want it to feel threatening. I could use some advice about how to execute this situation:

Boss is a big mimic disguised as a blood fountain with 6 long tentacle arms, each of which will be it's own figure on the board that can be up to 3 tiles from the 3x3 mimic figure.

Four of the tentacles have weapons that can deal 2d6 damage and have 30hp AC11 (roughly making it in line with a Brown Bear for threat and HP). They can grapple (squeeze the target) instead for 1d8 damage per turn, escapable on DC13 strength.

Two of the tentacles have shield-like hard points that defend neighboring enemies by giving disadvantage on attack rolls against them. AC14 HP30. I couldn't find anything to base these on for an encounter designer app.

Main body has low movement (10ft), and has 200hp AC19, and loses 20hp per tentacle lost. It has a bite attack +6 to hit 2d8. It also floods blood through sections of the room, forcing player movement and dealing 2d8 poison damage. I based it on a Roper for difficulty and attacks.

I think this combination creature would provide a very interesting and movement focused fight, but I'm very new to DM'ing and I'm afraid of accidentally killing the players.

My questions are: (1) How do I avoid accidentally killing everyone? (2) Is this fight too hard for a newbie group of 5 new players? (3) Any other cool ideas I didn't think of?

I guess this is just a thing I like to do lol. I got an OLED Steam Deck and have been playing around with it for about a week, so I wanted to share what all I got.

TL;DR: OLED is the definitive version of this product. If you're at all interested, whether or not budget is a concern this model is worth looking at, especially if you can actually get your hands on one to try for a bit. Words aren't quite what they need to be to get across how it looks and feels.

The long of it:

Valve wasn't kidding about stuff like a little performance improvement and better battery life. It feels like someone took the LCD deck and made a checklist of every single thing that could be improved, and then did it. The result is just about the best refresh of a product I've ever seen.

The screen is the most obvious upgrade and it really is great to look at. It is a big jump to go from an LCD at 60hz, to OLED at 90hz with HDR available. As great as VibrantDeck is, no amount of color fuckery can really reproduce what is happening when you have these features. For games that support HDR, it can feel like you've actually made an upgrade, because of how differently it can handle things like bright flashes of light and particle effects on top of the color differences. The refresh rate is tied to the frame limiter by default, so when you drop the frame limit the refresh rate tends to stay double whatever that is. 40fps/80hz feels better than 40/40 to me, like stuttering just isn't as bothersome.

Be aware it's on developers to implement HDR, which means sometimes you run into a game with a shitty implementation. FFVII R comes to mind. Just know that if you run across a game where this feature seems to make the game look terrible, it's not the device doing it.

The improvements to the battery do mean something like a ~40% increase. Games like Armored Core VI and Elden Ring tended to last about 1.5-2 hours on the LCD model, on OLED it's more like 2.5-3, and this is the sweet spot imo. Rare that I'm gonna sit down and play for that long in the first place, so having this much power available means being able to play here and there with much less concern. Games that already played well in a low power state just get that much more time. One thing to know if you're coming from an LCD - it doesn't save your power profiles. Input profiles yes (if you saved them), but power settings need to be redone game-to-game.

The device itself is a little lighter, and it feels like it sits in my hands a little better. The difference is minute, but noticeable, and nice. All of the buttons feel good, the sticks have slightly more resistance to them, and the trackpads are much nicer to use. In particular, the way you click the trackpads is more forgiving by default, so while it is a little easier to mis-click it feels more like using a "real" trackpad. The deck in general is the only device I find doesn't really aggravate my carpal tunnel, and the OLED model keeps that up.

On the software side there isn't really a difference - SteamOS is more or less exactly the same with a few OLED-specific settings. Most of your info gets saved and loaded up when you log in. Cloud saves are one piece of course, but too, any controller profiles you saved will come back, and the SD card can just be freely transferred/there isn't really any setup to it. From boot to play I mostly just waited on the game to download - setting up the device was as simple as waiting for it to do an update, then log in, and that's it. It doesn't pester you to register for anything/no ads.

Things like sleep/wake and transitioning to desktop mode are faster and more consistent. Pretty regularly, my LCD model would fail to sleep/wake correctly - I'd put it to sleep and upon waking it, it would reboot. Inconsistent but often enough to get annoyed with. With the OLED model, i notice this doesn't happen as often. It still does, but much less frequently. The improvements to the trackpads means I use desktop mode more often, it feels much nicer to navigate. All of the stuff I had before was simple to install and restore - emudeck, decky, cryoutilities all installed without any issues and worked fine after I moved over all my stuff from the first deck. Haven't hit any issues with decky plugins either.

Even the carrying case got a pass. It's been redesigned a little, with an extra velcro fastener bit and tighter mold inside, black instead of white.

Transferring my information was about as easy as you could do. There are several options - I mostly used KDE connect, but there's also Warpinator, and a deck plugin called DeckMTP that can let you do a direct USB connection. Literally just copy/paste, once I installed all the stuff I had before I could just drop in the old device's things and be good to go. One thing to be aware of, is that for games which don't support Steam Cloud, you need to copy their save data over. That's gonna mostly be in a folder in /steamapps called CompatData. Takes a little doing but it's not hard to figure out. The hardest thing to set up was STALKER Anomaly, and all that was was about a five step process of clicking things in Wine. By the way, if you make a custom controller profile for a non-steam game, when you add that game to the library make sure it has the same name as before and your controller profile will be saved!

Overall I'm impressed to the point I intend to hold off buying any more PC hardware until a Deck 2 appears. If that product gets the same kind of attention this one did there's no doubt in my mind it will be fantastic. Considering too, the ability to dock and use peripherals, I think I'd feel safe recommending an OLED steam deck as a replacement for a gaming machine + non-work computer to just about anybody. $399 as a base price for PC Gaming is fucking awesome, and $549 for this improved model, at least I feel is very much worth it. $150 for an OLED screen, more storage, bigger battery is not bad. The deck is a hugely popular product, which means you get the added benefit of folks constantly tinkering and messing with stuff to make it work, on top of the odd developer specifically targeting it (such as in Cyberpunk, or how Bannerlord reworked its control scheme). Those kinds of communities exist around other devices, but not nearly to the same extent, and they'll die fast as those products come and go.

So that's what I got. I hope this was informative and helpful. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer as best I can. I'm super happy with the deck as a product, it feels a lot like getting to see what it looks like when someone goes the distance and throws their full weight behind this kind of product.

Edit: I don't know how well this will come through looking on different screens, but here are a few screenshots from AC VI and Morrowind that made use of HDR. Even if it doesn't come through - if you've never owned a deck and were considering one, yeah stuff can look this good on it! It's amazing.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.