#tinkerhouse

Zen: An approach to an activity, skill, or subject that emphasizes simplicity and intuition rather than conventional thinking or fixation on goals.

The other day I was playing through Inkle’s great little interactive adventure  Sorcery 3 and, without spoiling anything, I can safely say it has that old-school charm in which you pretty much have to accept a constant, low-grade beatdown all the way through. Things never really go entirely your way. It’s fun though.

But after I’d lost yet another one of my prized possessions to capricious circumstance and had another sub-optimal interaction with an NPC that left me worse for the wear, I said screw it. I’m looking at a walkthrough.

At the same time, I realized I’ve done that with a lot of games recently, where the going gets hard and I’m clearly losing out on better results or I simply can’t accept the aggregate losses to my inventory or stats any longer.

But that’s the thing about the old school style; you accept loss and suboptimal results as part of the journey. Before walkthroughs, you had to rely on the oral tradition of your friends, little tidbits of advice passed from couch to couch along the way.

The fact that there was an optimal play through was vaguely known to us but we accepted (back then) that it was bloody hard to achieve. And we rarely did.

Nowadays, I know that there’s an optimal play through and I know how to get it. It’s trivially easy.

On the one hand, I defend my use of walkthroughs because I don’t have as much time to replay my treasured games like I used to. Time is money and all that. So if I’m only going to play a game once, then I sure as hell want to make I count.

I want all the toys, baby. I want every piece of mission content and NPC interaction I’m due.

But the interesting side effect of this has been, at least in my case, an eradication of my acceptance of any result that is less than perfect. If you know there’s a dialogue option that will give you more experience, or open up a new mission, or give you access to better equipment, but that option can *only* be accessed through a very specific set of actions, what do you do?

Part of the problem lies in the fact that missing out on extra XP or bonus content has a direct impact on your ability to succeed at the base play experience. Real failure is on the line nowadays, in that missing out on that extra whatever can mean the difference between a happy ending and a really bleak one.

And that’s not fun. (Not to me anyway.)

So it’s not just about sub-optimal play but abject failure. And I have to believe game designers nowadays sometimes play to the walkthrough crowd.

Because sometimes that obtuse chain of actions—nearly impossible to imagine most casual players stumbling upon on their own—is needed to win.

So I guess what I would wish for, is more games that employ the old school dynamic of “Adventure is hard and you will lose a little bit along the way. But those losses, and the possibility of unexpected gains, will still bring you to an acceptable conclusion.” “Assuming you don’t totally suck, of course.”

That I would accept. And that would allow me to enjoy the Zen of Gaming again, in which I respect the journey—good and bad—as the entirety of the play experience.

But as long as perfection is out there and easily attainable, why would you ever settle for less?

We are...currently formulating our optimal Twitch content strategy because, c’mon! ARE YOU A DEVELOPER OR A NEANDERTHAL?

In our case, perhaps we were too long in Neanderthalia but to our credit, we didn’t really have a game ready to demo and being yet two *more* dudes playing random vids didn’t seem like our best play.

So we’ve kept making Dwarven Descent, our charming indie dungeon crawler we’re calling “The World’s First Action Puzzle Crawl.”

And when not making up clever little marketing niches for our game, we’re making the game. Or now, making videos of us playing our game.

There may be something we’re missing, but we experienced a lot of lag with our Twitch streams. Both as we were streaming and on playback. I hope that doesn’t continue.

Looking on Reddit and other forums, it seems to be a semi-persistent challenge to endure and/or overcome. 

by: Iain McGregor

Warmachine/Hordes Army app delayed because TinkerHouse didn’t follow guidelines.

Privateer Press have issued a statement that their iOS app, War Room, that acts as a digital army builder and damage counter has been delayed because Apple refused to approve it for the App Store. TinkerHouse, the coders, have said that Apple requested them to conform to proper temporary file store on the device that is inline with iCloud functionality, even though War Room doesn’t use iCloud. There is no word on a release date due to the delay.

The base War Room app will be free and include all the cards from the Warmachine Prime, Hordes Prime, the two-player starter box, some select mercenaries and some Retribution models. Additional decks will be available for $6.99 per faction and include lifetime updates for the current version of the game.

War Room: First Look