Messages

Last night's playthrough, with a newly adaptable Cassandra Classic. After many cycles, this new Cassie ended up being too nice to me, and so I decided to voluntarily declare my colony a success, rather than go the usual route of surrendering it to pirate destruction after failing at tactics. Cassie's behavior has been tightened up again since.

The album, with captions, is right here: http://goo.gl/r9fyWG

What I'm mainly learning is that I like my wall+sandbag defenses. Used well, they confer a big advantage without being/looking excessively min-maxey.

What should I do next? Any suggestions for build styles, particular storytellers and so forth?

As long as you link me to the result, sure!

Yes, I suck at naming things. Suggestions welcome

Here's the album: http://goo.gl/fOYfCb

Sadly, my screenshotting script crashed minutes before the final cataclysmic pirate attacks, so I have no record of how they destroyed me . The caption on the last few images describes what happened.

Great pictures and story!  How long did this game last?

In real time, 3.5 hours or so. I have no idea where that time went, it was like playing Civ5, whole days just vanish . In game time, I almost made it to the second cycle of the moon around its planet, which I guess would be two "years" ?

I also spent another 30min after losing just watching the raiders ransack my colony. That was also fun, though a more bittersweet kind.

I liked the format. I think it provided a good synopsis that showed a nice, understandable progression. Not a bad run, I'd say. At least it's a mistake you could learn from, right?

Definitely. I suspect my next playthrough will actually try to emulate the setup that killed me, but with me in the winning spot. About to dive in now, we'll see how it goes.

Another day, another playthrough. It didn't get owned quite as badly as last time, but... Well, let's just say some tactical errors were made.

For bug reporting purposes, I run a script that takes screenshots at regular intervals, so that I can refer back to them for illustrative purposes. Then I went back and picked out some to illustrate the rise and fall of my little corner of the rim.

So, here's my story of Paradise Falls: http://goo.gl/A5Em41 . Be sure to also read the captions, they explain what you're looking at, and what eventually caused my downfall.

On a meta-note: is this format interesting to folks? I don't have a good video recording rig, so this is about as multimedia as I can get.

As they say on TV, "And now, the conclusion..."

Day 7 dawns. The harvest is going well, we should have enough food to sell soon. A weapons ship passes by, and I spend most of my money on a single lee-enfield. I can't afford anything else, not until the harvest is over. Out of nowhere, my autoturrets open fire. It's a lone guy, and oh yeah, there's a notification that someone is passing through.

(Suggestion: any chance of an IFF? It seems like he was no threat, but I didn't have the option to just talk to him, or welcome him)

After a couple of solid hits, the stranger collapses. I hastily construct a prison cell, and start nursing him back to health with a view to recruit him. Fortunately, the cell doesn't have a view on the fresh grave, so he might be tricked into thinking that this is a well-run colony. While my warden plies him with food and words, my scientist goes to work on improving food yield.

Day 8, the harvest is complete, and Archer has agreed to join our little world! He's a trained soldier, so I gear him up with the rifle and put him on construction detail. It's high time we split the dormitory into individual bedrooms. Things are looking up again!

(Suggestion: any way to move items of furniture without selling them? Seems that selling only partially refunds the object, so it's a net loss if I just want to scooch the bed to the right a bit)

Midway through construction, pirates land and start planning an attack. There are only two of them, against my three turrets and a soldier. Pah, easy, let them come!

When they do come, I realize I've slightly overlooked something: they have masses of cover that they're using to safely get closer, while my turrets are out in the open. The turrets can still get some hits, but it's very slow going, and the pirates have a much better hit rate. Soon, one of the turrets is heavily damaged. I try sending my miner in to fix it, and of course it blows up in his face. One turret and one colonist down .

Okay, time to send my soldier in. Unfortunately, in my rush to get things sorted out, I order him to melee attack, and shouldering his rifle, he charges out of cover and across the plains. That works about as well as you'd expect against two pirates with rifles, and we're down to just the scientist, armed with a pistol she doesn't know how to use. The other turrets hold the pirates off a little longer, but eventually they also blow (taking the power out with them), and my colony breathes its last, overrun by the raiding scum.


So yeah, that was a short and terrible playthrough. Major lesson learned: Rimworld is descended from a tactical shooter, and as such it is really important to secure a tactical advantage. Numerical superiority means nothing if you don't know what to do with it.

I only took one screenshot this playthrough, fairly early on. It looks like I got my early story muddled: the muffalo attack was during the construction of the common room (laid out in the screenshot), not during the lab's construction. Pace doesn't make it into the next day.

I'll try to take more shots in future, though it's quite hard to remember that while trying to also run a colony .

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

You can manually bypass the priority system by selecting a colonist and right-clicking on the task, it should show "Prioritize [what you want him to do]" and he'll do it no matter what.

Nice story

Yeah, I discovered that after the first guy bled out, when trying to convince the survivors that they should really build a grave now plz. Lesson learned for future mayhem .

(some suggestions inlined, which I'll cross-post to the suggestions forum. I realize that some of the suggestions involve either player model or implementation complexity; they're just things that I think I would like, not things that I'm convinced are necessary.)

First game! I went with the initial character roll rather than try to min-max the abilities, let's see how that went. I ended up with an expert miner, a scientist, and a silver-tongued salesman (aka "dirt hauler").

We made planetfall in a nice enough area: some soil for crops, a geyser a short walk away, and enough food and metals to be getting on with. The first few days went as you'd expect: building walls around the sleeping mats; a solar array for doors and lights; some batteries after that embarrassing first night when the power went out at sunset; and a few farm plots and a paste dispenser to keep starvation at bay.

By day 5, I was feeling good about this planet. It seemed placid and welcoming. Then, as my scientist was building her research and comms lab, I noticed that my salesman wasn't planting crops as he should have been. A little scrolling later, I find him engaged in hand to hand combat with an enraged muffalo. Just as I found him, he collapsed from blood loss, and the muffalo thankfully went off to bother some other nearby critter.

Well, just in the nick of time! I send my miner to haul Mr. Rodeo to a bed before he bleeds out completely. Oh, remember that critter the enraged muffalo was after? Yeah, it was a boomrat. Fire in the homestead! My two conscious colonists drop everything, including the bleeding-out third colonist, to go fight the fire. Eventually they beat it down, and come home to find that their friend has died, a mere two tiles from the safety of a bed.

(Suggestion: make hauling wounded colonists to safety separate from generic hauling, and give it the highest priority. Firefighting is important and all, but I'd rather spend a few more hours fighting the fire than end up with one fewer colonists because he was dropped and left to die.)

(Suggestion: this is one of the several times that I struggled with the static job priority order. While I realize that it introduces additional complexity to allow reordering, I believe it would make the colony easier to manage. If you want to keep things simple to start with, how about a research item to unlock it, e.g. "Colony administration" or somesuch? Blah, that sounds like even more cognitive load. I dunno.)

On the dawn of the sixth day, the rim is looking distinctly less welcoming. I let my guard down for a moment, and it took one of my people. After a quick spot of grave-digging and burial, I build three auto-turrets on the exposed flank of my colony. Can nasties smash through walls? I sure hope not, I want them to charge around the buildings and into machine gun fire. With my insurance policy firmly in place, I let the pair of survivors return to farming. The harvest is upon us, and without it they'll run out of food in a few days.

The rim had more in store for me (hint: it's mostly not good things ), which I'll post in a followup.

I'd love to playtest/break Rimworld. It's a game I've wanted for a while, and I'd love to help make sure that it works well on my OS of choice.

• What's your experience with testing systems? Ever used a bug tracker before? Does the Ludeon bugtracker look foreign to you or familiar?

I write software for a living, and as a result do a lot of testing. Most relevant to being a game tester is doing manual whole-system testing, troubleshooting when it goes wrong, and boiling symptoms down to a root cause. I've spent my entire student and professional life hacking on linux systems, so I'm quite comfortable tracking down strange problems (not so much with Windows, but I'd muddle along if asked). I also do a ton of automated testing, but without source code access that's less relevant .

Ludeon's bug tracker looks like home. It looks similar in featureset to the tracker I use at work.

• What OSes do you have?

On my desktop, I dual-boot Arch Linux and Windows 7, and spend most of my time in the former. I also have an Ubuntu 13.04 system on my laptop, and routinely run a bunch of others in VMs (notably Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and a bit of Fedora). Depending on the graphics requirements, running in VMs may not work, in which case I have a second sacrificial laptop that I can image to arbitrary linux distros for testing.

• How much time do you have to test?

I have a day job, so evenings and weekends, essentially. I spend quite a bit of my free time gaming, and Rimworld is the exact kind of game I've always wanted, so I suspect I'd playtest it quite a bit.

• Ever recorded and uploaded video before? E.g. with FRAPS.

I've recorded video and done some light post-processing before (transcoding and some basic cropping). I haven't done so recently, but I was able to figure out Arch linux, how hard can video recording be? . As for video upload, I've uploaded a couple things to youtube just fine.

Thanks for your consideration!