#four quarters

Updated the Patreon with some spiel about finishing up a second script for the Oni/EC Catacomb of Torment anthology, along with some background on my first encountering EC comics as a kid in the early 70s, meeting some of the EC/MAD contributors, and some other fan nonsense that somehow tied into the EC conversation. More or less.

Post unlocked to all paying backers, starting at the low, low $1 a month tier. Four quarters, you can't buy a candy bar for that these days unless it's pre-chewed. These four quarters gets you hundreds of posts with lots of exclusive art and writing about comics, animation, my projects, my career, even my failures. Plenty of those.

Calling-In

"We turn now to face the East, the direction of Air" (everyone turns to face East) "Air, cleanse us, clear our minds" (bell is rung)

"We turn now to face the South, the direction of Fire" (everyone turns to face the South) "Fire, inspire us, ignite our will" (bell is rung)

"We turn now to face the West, the direction of Water" (everyone turns to face the West) "Water, soothe us, heal our hearts" (bell is rung)

"We turn now to face the North, the direction of Earth" (everyone turns to face the North) "Earth, hold us, steady us on our path" (bell is rung)

Releasing

"We turn now to face the East, the direction of Air" (everyone turns to face the East) "Thank you and farewell" (everyone repeats and bell is rung)

"We turn now to face the South, the direction of Fire" (everyone turns to face the South) "Thank you and farewell" (everyone repeats and bell is rung)

"We turn now to face the West, the direction of Water" (everyone turns to face the West) "Thank you and farewell" (everyone repeats and bell is rung)

Four Quartets audience held in rapt silence

"A dark-suited, woollen-scarved man with startling eyes stands on the bare stage and looks into the distance. Stephen Dillane speaks to us in a voice of meditative calm, all extraneous emotion drained from it. He rarely moves. His hands weave no distracting patterns, make no flamboyant gestures."

—T.S.Eliot Festival: Four Quartets, Donmar Warehouse. 10th April 2012.

Draw a circle. Create four equal quarters inside it and here's what you'll write inside each of these quarters:

1st quarter: Earning Habits

2nd quarter: Spending Habits

3rd quarter: Saving Habits

4th quarter: Investment Habits

Here are then four basic rules to keep in mind with regards to these four quarters:

Rule no 1: Your earning must always exceed your spending. If the proportion is reversed, you'll create debt, instead of wealth.

Rule no 2: Your spending must never match your earning, a fixed percentage must always be kept aside as savings, as trivial as it may sound to be and the golden rule is to never touch them except for next rule.

Rule no 3: once the savings have reached a considerable amount, it must only be taken for investment and only invest in something which is measurable and the returns are under your control, not on some speculated market factors that are beyond your control.

Rule no 4: the returns on investment must grow so big as would match with your initial monthly earnings. At this point of time, you no longer have to work. It will be your wealth that will work for you. Investment is that phase of human activity in which the wealth reaches that pinnacle after which there's only upward projection just like a tree, the branches will only go upwards and never shrink back to become a seed again.

So from where does one begin? Begin from where you are, with what you have. There are two very important things to consider when it comes to the first quarter of the circle which is the Habit of Earning:

1.) How much is your need?

2.) How much of time & effort are you willing to put in for wealth creation?

Hard work is not what pays in this age. Smart work is the magic mantra. Luxury is not the goal but minimalism is how you win the game. Find what you're passionate about and look how the world will pay you for it. And finally there's no point in acquisition of wealth if your soul isn't aligned with your craftsmanship.

Loop Hero (PC)

Developed/Published by: Four Quarters / Devolver Digital Released: 4/3/2021 Completed: 24/05/2022 Completion: Beat the final boss after a bit of jiggery-pokery. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Loop Hero is a genuinely good game with a design that is exactly the kind of thing I like.

And yet I found it completely and utterly boring and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

*sigh*

Let’s start again. You’re probably familiar with Loop Hero! It was quite a big indie success: Russian-developed, published by Devolver Digital, a big seller on Steam and a solid release on Switch. It’s close to an idle game, but not actually an idle game: a level, composed of a simple loop is spawned; your hero starts at a campfire and walks in a loop back to it. As he walks, you place obstacles and features in the level from a hand of cards; when he defeats enemies or terrain combos or the like happen, you earn equipment that can empower your hero, new cards for your hand, and resources materials that you can use to upgrade your base between expeditions. Each loop gets harder; your goal is to simply add enough to the map and survive long enough that the level’s boss spawns at which point you can kill them. If you die, you lose 70% of the resources you’ve picked up, so you can retreat when at the campfire (or anywhere, but lose 30%.) When you retreat, or die, the next expedition you start at zero.

It’s a really, really good design. It’s got all the play “loops” that you want for this kind of thing, over and above the literal loop in the game; the classic “cumulative roguelike” design where the longer you play the more support you have for the next run (via base upgrades and other unlocks) joined with a very concrete “push-your-luck” system: after a loop you have to gamble that your hero won’t die on the next loop or lose some resources when they inevitably do. And you’re constantly getting new equipment while placing terrain (which often have interesting combo effects you’re working towards) so you’ve basically always got something to do, even if your wee hero is technically dealing with it himself.

Plus it looks beautiful, with a really dense pixel-art style that is kind of like a dark fantasy take on the likes of Master of Magic, doing that thing where it looks like what you remember something looking like (rather than what it does look like) as it’s significantly more detailed.

But somehow… it never clicked. There’s a few reasons, really. One is the game lacks clarity. I’m well aware that a lot of the joys of rogue-likes (and like-likes) is the discovery–of unknown combinations, of unusual events–but Loop Hero has an issue where it’s actually not super clear why you’re placing one card over another in your deck, or why you’re actually playing them–outside of that you need to do so to make the boss show up. I never worked out why, for example, I should place one enemy generator over another (spider webs or cemeteries? idk); why I would ever place swamps (which reverse healing effects for apparently no actual benefit) and so on. 

Now, there is an encyclopaedia which (absurdly) you have to gain enough resources to build, but it came so late in the game for me that almost my entire play-through of this I relied on some early combos that I found worked for me (build mountains and treasuries; build vampire villages and wheatfields, the rest, whatever.) It has the bad outcome, sadly, that the game starts to feel very samey very early.

It’s not helped, to be honest, by how slow everything is. I said above that there’s always something to do–and there is–but the game is not only running at a speed that feels about half as fast as something that basically runs automatically should (especially as you’ll certainly pause whenever doing something matters) but gaining resources takes countless runs–and it’s even worse if you’re the kind of player that pushes your luck too far. There are technically four levels in this, which increase in enemy power, the boss, and how much terrain you need to place, but by the time you’re into the third one you’ll be close to seeing all of the content in the game, making the last two levels (which push the amount of loops needed to get to the boss to a pretty absurd degree) honestly really rather tedious. The loop stops feeling like you’re riding a rollercoaster around and more like you’re working on a factory assembly line, doing the same task over, and over, and over (and sometimes you go home with only 30% of your pay.)

It’s a shame, really, and I’m actually not sure why the game is this way. It makes me think about what a genius Michael Brough is again [“oh here we go”--Ed.] sure I get tired of his games after a while, but there’s that mania I have for a while because each run is so perfectly bite-sized. Part of me wonders–what if the maps in this were half the size, and full levels half as long–and they never got longer, just more challenging? The thing is though, I’m pretty certain they spent a lot of time tuning this and it’s probably very much to their taste. It’s just it isn’t to mine.

Will I ever play it again? I won’t, I think, though I’m looking forward to whatever the team does next.

Final Thought: Isn’t interesting, however, that the team left pretty much every setting in the game easily changeable in a ini file that’s literally just sitting in the main folder? Now, this can be used to make your hero invincible, make every enemy have 1 hp, etc, but I wonder if they actually did it intentionally because they knew there would be enough players like me who would be like “well, what if I can just finish the last level in 45 tiles rather than 95” and who think “what if I half the amount of resource fragments needed to get a full resource” and so on.

It turns out… I like it a lot more! Unfortunately I only found this out when I was pretty scunnered with the game, but it made my last few hours of it a lot more fun. I’m sure some people are absolutely aghast by this, but why should I deny myself enjoying a really lovely game design just because it isn’t balanced to my taste? Don’t just play games the way you want to play them, make them the games you want to play, I say.

Developer: Four Quarters Publisher: Devolver Digital Rrp: £12.49 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam) Released: 4th March 2021 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 30 Hours

Darkness has come. No worse, nothingness has come. It is the end of all things, not even darkness remains, just an infinite void where reality used to be. Except this one stretch of road, this road exists, and you, you also exist. There's only one thing you can do, walk the road to where ever it leads.

Loop Hero is a strange cross between an autorunner, a deck builder and a roguelite. You play as an unnamed warrior who awakens to find the world, nay the universe is just... gone. All except for one looped path upon which your hero will automatically walk along.

As he walks along this path monsters will appear and your hero will automatically fight them with no involvement from you... well almost none, you do get to swap out the items etc they have on and can swap out mid-combat but other than that you have no control. As your hero defeats enemies he will gain a cards, items and experience (although not every time for the items and cards as sometimes monsters don't drop either and some classes don't collect items upon killing an enemy). Any cards that you gain can be placed on the world to change the terrain. But they not only add to the world but also have a tangible effect, such as Grove cards which create a grove which will provide sticks to bring back to camp (which I will cover later) but it also spawns an enemy called a ratwolf every two days.

Ah yes, the days. So, even though the universe and the Sun itself have ceased to exist time still passes on or at least it seems to. On the top left side of the screen are two meters, the upper one is the day meter, every time the meter if full (or empties, I forget which) a new day begins. For you, this means certain monsters will respawn, you'll gain a bit of health and certain terrain that you've placed may come into effect. The one below is the map completion meter, each time you place a card down in the world this meter goes up. Once it's completely full the boss of the chapter you're on will appear. You can continue to put down cards upon the world after they've appeared and after you've defeated them, should you choose to remain.

As I mentioned walking around the loop and defeating enemies accrues resources which you ideally want to take back to your camp, such as sticks from groves or memory fragments from cemeteries. How much you take back to your camp is based upon how confident you feel in your heroes skills and equipment. You see if you fall in battle your body will be brought back to the camp but you'll only keep 30% of the resources you found. If you retreat at any point that isn't at the camp you keep 60%, however the ideal is to choose to retreat when you pass through the camp because doing set nets 100%.

Every time you start back on the loop the world resets including your equipment. Of course it doesn't take long to accrue new equipment. Like everything in this new uhh, lack of world, nearly everything is ephemeral which includes your weapons. The moment you swap out a piece of equipment for another the old one is destroyed. You also can't stock pile equipment for too long as you only have 12 spaces in your inventory, if your inventory is full and you collect another item the item at the bottom of the pile will be destroyed. This isn't entirely a bad thing though because the act of destroying the item gives your hero scrap metal to take back to camp.

hat I find interesting is that its very tempting to go around the loop as many times as you can to collect more and more resources, however there is a problem with doing that. Each loop increases the enemies you face's level making them that little bit more challenging. To combat this your hero gains experience with each kill and gets to pick one of three perks with each level. Of course, since the monsters level up each time you go around the loop and the loop is usually not all that big the monsters will eventually out class you no matter how much you level up.

My thoughts... I really liked this game, I played it through to completion and then started all over again. It's definitely an odd one though, its not an idle game even though at first glance it seems like one but its also not super intensive. After playing this for a few days I found myself playing it as I was listening to youtube videos and podcasts. Odd to think of that as a selling point.