So, what are you playing?

by: Randy - posted: 7/6/2020 12:01:00 AM

Eric Hauter

I can't stop messing with Crayta – Stadia's new Free-with-Pro game about making games. I work in software for my day job, and I have been known at times by developers as "the guy who tells us why we can't do things." I poke holes when I see them, and it's difficult to turn that part of my brain off. Now I'm neck deep in creating my own game, and my hole-poking brain is going insane pointing out flaws in my own work. I've been waking up at night with dire realizations about my game. But instead of just dumping the problems on a dev team, I am having to go in and fix them myself, and I find that I am woefully unprepared.

My latest problem? My entire level is made out of glass. This means that players can shoot it away, voxel by voxel. The initial plan was that players could create traps for others, shooting holes in platforms and such. But now I realize that I haven't built in a method to rebuild my map after the rabble has damaged it. I don't have the concept of "rounds" in my game, which means that I don't have a method to reset/rebuild the map. I haven't been able to figure it out yet, but my hope is that now that the game went live on July 1, I might recruit some of my fellow GN-types with deeper skills than my own to help me repair the thing. Help me, John Yan! I have spent too much time on Transector to just let it be shot into oblivion!

Randy Kalista

I naturally gravitate towards hunting in video games. Not the sprinting-around-unloading-fully-automatic-gunfire kind of hunting. I mean taking long walks in open worlds, scoping the terrain with slow, panning binocular shots, and not even reloading my nearly empty clip because this'll only take one hit to the vitals. I've scoffed at hunting games because my only experience with them was playing, like, putting quarters into Big Buck Hunter at a pizza joint in the early '00s. But now I'm grown and sophisticated and a genius so I'm playing Hunting Simulator 2.

That and Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Want to chip away at a mountain of debt, cutting up one squarey spaceship at a time, and whipping their pieces and parts into either the furnace, further processing, or a component barge? Me, too! As a blue collar cutter with country music piped into my helmet, it feels like I'm in the spiritual prequel to Dead Space, if Captain Malcolm Reynolds were to swing by the shipyard to drop off some scrap.

Rob Larkin

I'm away from my PC and PS4 Until August, so it's all Switch and mobile gaming for me these days. I'm still playing The Elder Scrolls: Legends daily on my iPad. Just had a nine-win run in the last gauntlet I was especially proud of then somehow with the exact same deck managed to go 0-3 in my next run. RNG giveth and RNG taketh away. I also made a run and hit Legend rank for the first time this month. Being a F2P player isn't the easiest route there but I have a goblin control deck that is cheap, very much in the meta and can go head to head with just about anything. Inside Legend rank I've been having even more success with a Crusader deck that is a little more outside the meta that I don't want to talk about too much.

For Switch I am playing through Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech while I wait on a few review codes. It's cute and fun and so far has been a joy to play. If you haven't caught on to the whole CCG theme I'm on right now, then let the last game bring it home, on deck for the Switch I have Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales loaded up for when Steamworld comes to an end. It's actually nice to have some quest based CCGs to balance out the endless war of attrition that a game like TESL can become.

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