Screenshot Saturday: Deshaan in ESO #ESO #Blapril2020

There’s not much to say about this. I just liked the view. The citizens rebuilding their village while there’s something brewing in the distance.

My templar is level 48 now, so she’s getting closer to max level. And so far, I don’t think the first thing I’ll want to do is switch to an alt when she gets there. By now, after choosing skills I like to use, I really like the class.

Screenshot Saturday: Level 46 in ESO #Blapril2020 #ESO

I’m slowly making my way to level 50 – which will lead towards the CP grind, apparently. But it’s still nice being able to just explore the game, do a few quests here or there and getting to know the world that way. I did play Skyrim, but not far into the story and I did give Morrowind a try, but an even shorter one. Something about the Elder Scrolls was always appealing to me, but I never quite…

The Real Neat Versatile Blogger Award #Blapril2020

I got tagged by Naithin from Time to Loot. Thank you for that and thank you for giving me something to write about during Blapril. 🙂

The Rules

Thank the person who tagged you for the award.

Answer the 7 questions set out by your nominator.

Tell everyone 7 things about yourself — you can spread them between answering the questions!

(Optional) Write another 7 questions to ask the people you tag.

(O…

I decided to give “Codemancer” a try. A game that is aimed at children and youths (aged 6 to 12). It’s a story-based game with the goal of teaching you how to code. The game costs $10, but at the time of writing this, it’s free. It is also available on Steam, but not on sale there at the moment.

“Codemancer brings the mystery of magic and the exhilaration of learning to code together in a fantasy universe that uses spell casting as a way to teach and learn programming skills.”

The surrounding story is about a girl who starts her first day at a wizard school where she’s learning how to become a codemancer. There, she gets a familiar (a choice between a cat, a dog or a bird) which she’ll give commands to in order to move through the map made of hexagonal fields. This is done by selecting commands in advance from start to end. At some point, her father gets abducted and she has to go save him.

You start by entering simple commands like “jump”, “turn right”, “jump” to get where you want to go. You can also repeat sequences (“jump”, “turn right”, “jump”, “turn right”) or repeat a single command several times (“jump” x5). For me as an adult, it’s very easy, of course. And then there’s repeat inside another repeat. I’d describe it as teaching kids how coding algorithms work. The debugging part works because you can see your character and her familiar move while the sequence is running on the right side of the screen. So you get a visual feedback where the sequence isn’t working – e. g., the character is jumping outside of the map because you forgot to turn her right again before letting her jump. You can do runs of your commands whenever you wish as there is no failure when it’s not working. This is good because it saves children from becoming too frustrated and giving up.

I assume it’s too difficult for your average 6-year old. Then again, the repeat sequences aren’t needed. A kid can just use one command after the other: Jump, jump, turn right, turn right,… – with some help, this should also work with younger children then. So, no matter the kid’s age, even if they juse every command one after the other, they will succeed.

The story is very kid-friendly as the things they attack aren’t living beings, but rather inanimate objects conjured by other codemancers. This is said at the very beginning and the character expresses her joy as she can then smash them without a bad conscience.

Being a psychologist in the educational sector, I always love finding educational games that don’t look or feel like an educational game immediately… the kind that seems to be educational first, game second. Everything here voiced, so the kids can listen and don’t need to read. The voice-over is very well done and the main character is quite loveable. It may become a bit too repetitive at some point, but the story keeps the player engaged. It’s definitely a game I would recommend to families with children in the appropriate age… or even to adults. I played it, too, after all!

Choosing the wrong class in MMOs #Blapril2020

I usually like the levelling process in MMOs. The amount of alts I have is proof enough! But it does get tedious at some point – both in MMOs with vertical as well as horizontal progression. While levelling per se is fun in Guild Wars 2, having to recollect enough Hero Points to unlock the elite specializations for each character over and over again isn’t my idea of fun, for example. So…

I’m jumping ahead a bit here when I say that it has also, after Project Gorgon and Chinatown Detective Agency, become the third PC game I backed on Kickstarter! The main reason wasn’t being able to play the early alpha build, though. It was rather the game’s description and the fact that they got funding from the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW (some kind of local German funding). Having such an official kind of funding makes me trust the project more, to be honest. But even though I had decided I wanted to back it, I still waited until after I tried out that build. I may easily get excited, but there’s at least some tiny little bit of rationality left. Their roadmap also seems to be rather rational and it shows just how early in the development process we are. Alpha will likely start in June this year. Beta won’t be before December. Steam Early Access is scheduled for April 2021. And release will probably happen in Q3 2021. Something that I find a bit weird is that the more money you back them with, the more votes you will get in their feature queries. I am not sure that’s a good idea. At least not when you want to have the game appealing to a lot of players as opposed to fewer people with more money to spend on games.

But let me now finally tell you about my impressions! First, a very important note: I got an early alpha build to look at! I am not going to write about bugs, weird behaviour that doesn’t seem intentional, missing features and so on. I am, however, going to tell you what’s already there, and my impressions of the game so far.

It’s a single-player game and you play as a God against up to four other Gods. There’ll be a campaign as well as individual skirmishes. The enemy Gods can focus on violence, deceit, pleasure or fertility. And of course, you want to be the mightiest God with the most followers. So you need to make the people in the different villages believe in you and your might, but you can decide how you want to achieve that. You can be nice to them, spread love, keep them happy with fireworks or you instill fear in them and make them follow you because they’re scared you may kill them off if they don’t! Choose your strategy wisely. The game features two different phases: During the day, you spread love and/or fear – basically, this is when you act. During the night, you plan. You choose if villagers should erect certain buildings, or you manipulate their dreams. As an example, you can tell a village to send off food to another village that way. All actions cost mana and it is more expensive the further away it is from your “base”, a huge orb. I was told that this orb is the representation of my godly self in the world!

The early alpha lets me play a match at the early stage (so basically the regular beginning of a match) and a later stage. The later stage still had me start with just a handful of followers, but the maximum amount was at 2000. At the beginning of a match, it’s 5. I started with a regular new game and got a mini tutorial which explained to me how to do wonders (spreading love or instilling fear), create fireworks and so on. I shouldn’t forget the imp: It let me give it a name, after all, and led me through the tutorial! After the tutorial, it’s basically a swirling light where my mouse cursor is and follows my mouse’s movements on the screen. I am not sure it serves any other purpose, but it was a nice touch in the tutorial.

There is also a little bit of music in the game already. It seems to have a good quality, but at the moment, you hear one song over and over again which is a bit repetitive and you can only change the volume of the sounds, but not turn off the music specifically at the moment. If the rest of the soundtrack is going to be like that, though, then it’ll be very nice to listen to while playing the game.

I am not sure if the villagers’ faces will stay like that. It’s creepy, to be honest. It looks like dead dolls and I don’t much care for the villagers that way. They all have individual names, at least, which makes it easier to identify them. Maybe at some point you even have your favourites that you spoil here and there with a bit of extra love and healing.

The developers decided to keep the user interface to a minimum and I like that. I think it’ll work very well with this kind of game, although I did wish to see more information. You can see how many followers you have at the top of the screen. For each village, you can get more information as well when hovering over them. I’d just like to have one screen of information, at least. A list of all villages and the percentages of followers I have in each of them and so on. Other than that, having the minimal UI is fine. It makes you focus on the screen and the villages themselves. Villages that mainly follow me have a certain kind of roof colour, by the way. Blue in this case – not sure it’ll always be blue for the player or if we will be able to choose the colour we want.

I also started a late game with a maximum of 2000 followers, but I quickly fell behind the AI. They had something like 190 followers while I dropped from 58 to 56. I was spreading wonders and inspired villagers to make them more productive, but there was no strategy behind my actions. I quit the game at that point. Quite obviously, I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I also figured that I don’t have to: There’ll be plenty of time to learn the game once it has all the features in – in about a year. At least, I already have one game to look forward to in 2021!

And since I only write about my experiences and I’m sure that there’ll be people here that would want to see a video of the game instead now, I’ll leave you with two recommendactions, an English and a German video. You can also hear the music there! It’s really atmospheric and calm.

  Please note: I did receive the early alpha version for free. I was not asked to write about the game! In other words: All opinions are my own. But as you may know, if I’ve got nothing nice to say, I usually prefer not to say anything at all. So if I didn’t like the game, you probably wouldn’t see a blog post about it.

Also: This is a Kickstarter project. As with any Kickstarter project, there is no guarantee to a) receive a finished product and b) that the finished product will be as described now because the game is still in development. Do not back any Kickstarter unless you’re certain that you still want to support the project even with these risks!

So, my templar has gained two levels already. I got another character ready to do crafting dailies and I have set my eyes on a house, Hunding’s Palatial Hall. It’s huge and even has a little swimming pool and access to the ocean. Perfect for my argonian!

I am not the person who plays the content in MMO together with other players all the time. In fact, I do most of the stuff solo or in open groups – in MMOs that allow for shared loot etc. without being in a party with the other players. ESO and Guild Wars 2 both do that very well. But I do need some connection. Only running into random other players in the world isn’t enough to keep me engaged. But having a guild that I like and now watching the streamer and again being part of the community in a sense makes me finally really enjoy ESO.

So, for the time being, I’m in WoW Classic, levelling a shaman and a mage when they have rested XP, and in ESO levelling my argonian templar. And maybe my necromancer or warden afterwards. Or my nightblade.

My fellow Blapril-bloggers #Blapril2020

Blaprilis in full swing and there are lots of fellow bloggers posting more than they usually do. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been able to follow them all and read their blog posts. Despite the current Corona situation, I am in Home Office and have full busy work days. However, I have been reading more blog posts lately, so I’m definitely not ignoring you out there! I also want to pay attention to…