itch.io

This is a typical example. 5 step UNLIMITED mission, the first of the life. I got to target almost exclusively skills I had heavily prioritized with rebirth job backgrounds and accessories and training and tools, but still ended up in combat.

First combat: 3x enemies with DMRs and Frontline Breacher Suits somewhere between levels 4 and 5 in armor value. I wailed on them with a level 3 Ripper, lvl 5 shock, for a good while while my kevlar sneak suit with lvl 5 noise reduction bought me time. They killed me in their first shot once they found me. I had managed less than ten points of damage to one of them.

I've tried the gun route too, but the noise reduction of silencers gets rapidly nerfed as ROF goes up, so the 'ambush window' is about one and a fifth attacks long... so anything short of a two stroke kill means getting perforated. With armor to soak all that (and we're getting in the 40k+ cash spent on guns and ammo point here) we're still looking at Alert levels in the hundreds even with max level silencers - I don't think you could get off three attack cycles with a high end high ROF gun and not be in the Reinforcement Death Loop.

It's rough out here, man! I'm looking at crawling up to that 2 TP tier and skipping the stamina boost in lieu of doubling my alert timer so I'm not spending 100+ Intel on looking for end run 4 stage missions. Abandon the idea of winning in combat at all. I'll do a combat focused build first to see if having something crazy high like 20 points could make these late game fights survivable, but I think it'll chew into my income potential so hard I'll end up paying for the skill boost with equipment limitations.

Plan related bug : Get Mentored can trigger if it's in a Plan before the player has hit the requirements for it to show up in the Education task list.

I was hesitant to mention this one. It's a very nice bug, that Skill Level 3 to 4 jump is my first time sink hurdle each life.

Image shows Mentor in active task bar but not yet available in task tab.

Having said all that .. it is possible to hit Legend. Took 20ish cycles, lots of luck, skin of teeth, etc.

Possible bug : 

Slot 2 in the image - is the PC supposed to be penalized for having Electronic tags in their kit like this? Intuitively it feels weird to have to mechanically defeat the lock, then spoof the handshake to get the lock to open as intended. Shouldn't the spoof hack x3 replace the lock defeat x4 instead of adding a step without removing another?

Difficulty report : This is more subjective than most of what I post, but I know you're (J Chance) working on balance, so I figured you should know.

I'm 19 retirement perks in. Some of my skills are in the mid-high teens in late game, and all are at least in the double digits. I've got a fully Shock modified, leveled Big One hammer, and fully Composited noise reduction armor, with a combat skill around 12.

It seems impossible to go through a Rep 120 or Rep 200 or Rep Infinite mission task without at least a single Security Sweep hitting. Because of cost increases, keeping player character skill over double the threat level becomes untenable at this point. Post Legacy I could probably do it - doubling my effective time, or income, could let me boost skills or tools/cyborgification up there. But on the first pre Legacy, post Incorporation cycle, it's either 20+ perks deep or borderline impossible. Occasionally I can just squeak one out if the Mercenary list has been kind and a prioritized skill is where the enemy happens to be weak.

At 5+ steps to a mission, combat seems inevitable, given the above. Again, post Legacy that might be different, and with the benefit of the Community tab it might be possible.

At Rep 200, I'm seeing multiple combatants at a time with one-shot-kill armor penetrating weapons or Frontline Breach armor, which is bulky enough to overwhelm even armor-defeating weapon builds. I'm spending multiple stamina-boosting Perks on modding my weapons and armor to perfection, and maybe a third of the cash I'm pulling in on upgrading them, and I'm barely scratching Rep 200 combatants. This is probably too hard.

Feature request - If the backalley doc is always going to heal 100% of a player's health, it should probably idle out after triggering once. No point in running it multiple sequential times.

Possible bug : If this Task has been fully removed from the Hack list, it's still in the Planning list as an option. This is probably not a bug if it still exists pre-incorporation, which is hard for me to check.

User created plan names can mess up screen width. Truncation or multi-line buttons to control the button widths might be in order.

UI issue : In the Corp tab/subtabs, I'm unable to discern either my actual goods production rate or sales (the estimate I do see doesn't account for increased production or sales by virtue of player Task completions). Additionally, I'm overproducing at the moment with extra storage purchased, but can't find anything about that surplus stock - the warehouses could be empty or full, which makes it hard to know whether I should be prioritizing sales rate or production rate increases.

That would be great! A simultaneous layer that interacts with the main might make climbing the prestige system and REP later again easier and different enough to feel engaging.

But no, I incorporated with zero dollars. I've dumped seven prestige bonuses into Corpo and done some REP/Mission free money making dives, caching 10k at a time until I could afford an office, warehouse, sales staff member, two production machines, and a pair of line workers. So I think I'm around the intended start point now!

Bug : Confirming one wants to retire, then leaving the game and returning while the prestige bonus selection is still active leads to all the tabs being unlocked on reload, with prestige management still open. I was able to dump a bunch of upgrades into Corpo background, run some Hack based money making schemes with my +7 bonus, then readjust the prestige benefits to something more realistic for a whole cycle. Presumably the same could be done for bulking up on Schmooze Intel and Tech Scrap right off the bat.

Confirming my selections reset the lifespan but not my money. I didn't do a full run to test to see what did and didn't reset.

On a positive note - still loving the word choice and tight, descriptive terms. It's fun to read over the new 'fluff' text and proper nouns, looking for references.

I think I miss most of them, but I've noticed at least one Snowcrash in the new batch.

Implicit in your question is the idea that the corporation can be active immediately or in short order. Is the corp supposed to start with some/all of the Incorporate fee? That would be enough to get off the ground. For my prestige, though, it starts with $0. (ie the Incorporate cost was all licensing fees and red tape)

Ditto tutor/training - lost most of a run to idle training, but didn't get the benefits of having run the training (no stat boost, no expenses incurred)

I lost almost 50 min to a scrap tool upgrade. Probably needs a catch for these only-fires-once tasks so they don't burn most of a run during offline time.

I must be missing something huge - it looks like to get any income from the Corporation I need real estate, a production line, a sales desk, and employees. All those are an arm and a leg, seemingly outside the pre-Legendary cycle potential. So I haven't been working on my corpo skills, since the one I did had no apparent effect (since I had no production) and the theoretical boost listed had disappeared in two lifetimes from attrition.

With no way to build a Network since I've been ostracized from the Community, I'm spending a lot more time each life Schmoozing so I can hit baseline Intel needs. It's slow going, about 1 Retirement boost every other life.

I take it half back - green merchant boosts do affect the actual math, but don't show up in the negotiation popup. It displays the player's Trained Merchant skill but uses their Total Merchant skill.

So not broken mechanically, but confusing to view.

Possible bug : "green" boosts to Merchant skill (corpo prestige training, AVENT Market Analysis tool) are not being factored into mission reward negotiations.

It's possible this is by intent. I'm noticing much slower grinding this incorporated cycle vs my first playthrough, despite accumulated player knowledge, but that might also be attributable to the elimination of community resources and non merc allies. 

Every other prestige cycle gave better yields / efficiency right away. This one seems like it could aid in the mid to late game, while curb stomping me in the early game. I might be underutilizing incorporated powers, but this feels like a full reset on hard mode. Incorporated bonuses have a huge paywall to start taking advantage of, coupled to maintenance fees that preclude assembling that capital piecemeal, and building back up from scratch without all of my previous tools is pretty punishing.

I'll keep chipping away at it, but the grind feels much less engaging this time around. Hoping that changes once I have enough cash to snag some real estate and plop down production equipment.

There are a couple of Nash-esque plays, coupon combinations that remove any challenge or threat from the game... but it's super fun until reaching that point! Great choice of audio, wonderful animation juice, enough interplay between coupons to have emergent strategies without becoming more complicated than it's 'accessible' aestetics suggest. Great stuff!

(Breaking the game after the ... er... break.)

# 1 - 2x $10 off, 1x Double Down, 1x +1 Round, 2x 20% off, 1x Flat Rate Multiplier. I quit shortly after this one - my remaining rounds are growing over time, and the rate of cost growth v my income suggests this is sustainable another 45 rounds or so... which is too long for me to keep doing the exact same thing over and over.

# 2 - "Bulk Repackaging" + "Flash Sale" = 2 coupon win on the first round. Add a +1 Infinity Round coupon and even the round counter is foiled, leaving two coupons free for whatever. I'll eventually pick up a second +1 "Infinity Round" so I can boost income AND remaining rounds, but I'm already to the point where it's +$20 a transaction and infinite transactions remaining, regardless of anything the game throws at me.

The implicit beauty of this game is in finding ways to work in conjunction with strangers you can barely communicate with. Having said that, there's a Nash for a single player to reliably manage things nearly by themselves.

Pick a wall, left or right. Purifier it, top to bottom, and start walking to the far side. Slightly more complex, pick the least contaminated corner and purge it so as to build a diagonal wall of purifiers. Additional users divide the time to completion, so it scales, but one player interested enough to stay in the grind can eventually handle everything outside of the hearts themselves.

Where we're at now, the contamination is essentially everywhere, and a phalanx of purifiers is the only reasonable and intuitive tactic. We probably need more emergent behavior from the enemy to overcome this One True Way playstyle.

(I'm having fun, but I can see it getting old since I always feel at this point like I know exactly what to do.)

Fix confirmed! Thank you.

You've done good work with this game thus far. Extremely impressive, right out of the gate.

Note that on a phone the widening communication options, now including the rank board button, are cutting off the player's access to info on their energy and XP. See the bottom left corner of the image.

Nope. Still no scrolling. No descending, upgrades, or restarting. (Android, Duckduckgo browser)

You may want to include some explanations of what's going on as well. I understand minesweeper, but it's confusing that some revealed numbers are traditional proximity indicators, some are ore counts, Xs are different colors but it's unclear why, some boxes get outlines while some don't, etc. Maybe the intent is for a player to discover the meanings over time, in which case ignore my suggestion, but if this is supposed to be intuitive from the start then there is still some UI work or clarifications to be done.

Be aware, on a phone browser there's no scrolling enabled and at least some critical elements are offscreen. I was able to score enough to win the first layer but unable to progress, and was able to lose but unable to restart.

Unrelated to the new Corporation mechanics, but I've found that if I make a Task list of training events (get tutored for each skill, run once then progress, 12 entries on the list) when that Task List gets executed it just cycles the first two items over and over.

This feels familiar, I think it was an issue at one point in the pre-Corpo world too?

Very touching, and insightful about the human experience. It made me think of whales and whaling in the era where sustaining the cultural hubs of Western civilization relied on keeping lamps lit at night, of the moments in Viktor Frankles camp memoirs where broken inmates or calloused guards still managed to cling to fragments of their humanity, of Stan Rogers's heartbreaking song "Last Watch" wherein a night guard says goodbye to the ship he loves and sees as a mirror to himself the night before she is scrapped... particularly the prayer at the end, "When men with torches come for her, let angels come for me."

Thoughtfully and tightly written. Hard stuff. Good stuff, though. Thank you for this.

The Incorporate X / Y cost tracker shows X as how much cash on hand I had when I imported my save file and Y as the huge intimidating but probably obtainable amount the business would presumably cost. X hasn't changed for me, however, despite earning some cash street fighting and via merc work and losing it all in a Become Legend cycle. 

At this point I don't know if it's only displaying the old value, if it's not updating the variable checked against the Incorporate option, or if I'm misunderstanding the display altogether since I'm new to this version.

Stoked to try this out! I may have to ask you for an unlisted itch page with 1.0.0 running on it if I can't get the durn thing working locally on Android (presuming you still want phone centric playtesting).

The Last Hand is a TTRPG hack for poker that turns it into a framing device for a Stephen King esque Western.

The rulebook is a very well put together piece of art, easily in the top 10% of what you can find on Itch. The rules seem well structured for pushing play forward while allowing time to reflect and detail what has happened within the narrative. PC motivations and attributes are cleverly handled through a kind of question lottery at the game's beginning, the sort of round robin on-the-fly exposition session that can suddenly give a Player's character nuance and set up unexpected decisions to emerge later. While narration is handled in a distributed manner around the table, outcomes are directed by the cards and the Player's use of their limited resources. A bunch of D6 and 2D6 lists provide evocative guidance for when a player is having a hard time weaving a particular moment of the story together, and are largely framed as genre appropriate ominous art pieces rather than dull charts. The way some Player plays can have consequences, and those can be somewhat mitigated with proper timing, add a neat emergent element to the relatively simple rules. In totality, it's clear that a lot of thought, playtesting, and mindful editing went into this.

While it's going up directly against Fiasco in many ways, which is a tall order, the easy to remember mechanics (for anyone who has played Texas Holdem) make this a prime contender for game night when regulars have to drop out or newbies show up. I'll be keeping it on hand for just such an occasion.

Problems? There are a few. These are in rough order from nitpicks to potentially game ruining.

- Some images don't load with some PDF readers, rendering as semitransparent outlines instead. This only seems to affect a handful of cosmetic images though, nothing vital is lost. (Skull on cover, pg 8, 15, 22, and 25)

- Scene Steps on page 13 list the players playing their cards in reaction to The Flop as a distinct step, but don't make mention of them playing cards during The Turn or The River. A potential point of confusion, having the same action both specified and unspecified-but-implied on the same list.

- "The Last Hand" serves double duty as a proper noun/term of art here. It's clear from context which TLH is being referred to at any point, but it's still playing with fire.

- Do Jokers still trigger their effect if in a Fold-ed hand? How about face cards? My intuition says Yes and No, but I couldn't tell you why exactly, and it's not clear from the text.

- The Quickstart download is an excellent reference piece for inspirational material, but doesn't have rules summary or rules references or the like in it. It's more like a creativity assisting document than what you'd hand the Player who never reads the rulebook for a new game.

- I don't know that this is likely to be an issue with anyone who shows up to play a Cooperatively Run Narrative Horror game, but putting my Munchkin hat on... the Nash, the ideal play under all circumstances, is to just hold all your cards until the very last hand that isn't The Last Hand, right? Maybe play your 2s through 5s so they work into It's draw deck. Maximum player data, maximum control over the allocation of limited resources, no (mechanical) penalties or costs.

- Shuffling? A literal read of the rules doesn't include it, unless I missed something. With three or more players it'll be a necessity at some point, but whether that happens between every hand ala poker or when the draw deck is empty ala most card driven TTRPGs is up in the air and would have massive effects on the probabilities involved.

- This may be a matter of taste, but because of how Jokers work it's entirely possible to be fated to lose, TPK style, from the moment the deck is cut. That may align with authorial intent, to have It be such a danger that there's a real possibility that nothing the Players do could possibly save anyone or defeat it, and have that baked in to an unknowable-until-the-moment draw during the penultimate poker hand? Too oppressive for my tastes, but reasonable folk can disagree.

- The math is very, very, very different depending on how many Players show up. With two it is certain that they'll both die or be subverted to Its cause, having 4 cards per hand to deal with 5 emerging threats. Because of how It wins ties, how face cards work, Jokers, etc, a group of three players honestly wouldn't be much better off with their 6 to 5 card ratio, given the six hands they have to play through without falling 3 behind. Five might have an honest to goodness fighting chance. Six, with their 12 to 5 ratio, could very nearly Strongman their way through anything with (almost) constant Folds.

A lot of gripes above, but I did enjoy reading it, and unless I happen to have exactly the four players needed for Warrior Poet, this'll be my next "Well, we're here but we can't play the campaign tonight because of X... what else can we do?" game.

Globinpunch had a good expoundation on ghouls and paralysis on their blog, ifn you want to see a better articulation of my brief suggestion : https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/10/scraps-of-undeath.html?m=1

I feel like my review was a bit criticism heavy, but I was impressed by the pick up and play ease of use and the room layout in particular. You're like two review/edit cycles from a "Man, this is awesome!" minidungeon. Thanks for putting this out there!

Paced at roughly a single session, EotBS is a three page mini-dungeon for D&D/Pathfinder/OSR type games. It concretizes the atmosphere and environmental expectations for a buried tomb in a way that would allow a GM to rapidly insert it into an ongoing campaign with minimal prep time.

Interconnectivity between rooms is great for such a small map! There are a bunch of different ways the party could progress, depending on how much time they're willing to spend digging around or searching. 

A few elements could be improved upon. Qitar the summoner knight seems underdeveloped, as are the three assassins who have agreed to hang out in his underground lair with a bunch of ghouls, hiding in coffins and the like. (Both boil down to stat blocks and basic battle tactics.)  There are a handful of different 'groups' present, but they seem to exist without friction given the map layout and text. There's no level recommendation, which would be hard, given how swingy the final fight would be if executed as written. (One lose-your-turn Magic Save per round, or four? It's all up to a die roll early in the conflict.) Qitar is listed as having 60 Hit Die, which is hopefully a typo. The exits listed in room 9 don't align with the map itself. Combat seems to be predicated on stunlocking the PCs, which is usually not much fun at the table. (I recommend letting paralysed PCs choose to act, if they take 1d4 damage for doing so.) Traps, as written, don't have tells or interesting choices for the players to make so much as existing to do damage based on luck.

Gripes aside, I think fun could easily be had with this one, and it'd be quicker to flesh it out and adjust it to your liking than to improvise or spin up your own deadly crypt. If I had an ongoing hack-and-slash, I'd print this out and keep it in my last-minute binder.

It's working now - I had to go through the debug options and force a hard reset, my save game must have been carrying the legacy issue forward into the new updates.

I can lock on top of or next to an asteroid, but either way holding down (or clicking) on the asteroid doesn't do any mining.

I agree that precision clicking on a phone/tablet with a game running in real time can get irritating, and auto lasers sound like a good way around that, but at present screen visibility is a moot issue. No mining is possible, at all, in the OS/Browser combination I'm working with.

Did you test mobile functioning with a computer via a compatibility mode? Most languages have different calls for different HID inputs, it's possible the mining function(s) are looking for mouse input specifically, which a test on the computer might miss.

Android/DuckDuckGo browser - game only occupies about 5/8th of the screen, from the bottom left corner up. UI ignores touchscreen after closing the initial popup, making the game unplayable.

A fun concept, and I think the setting could make an interesting TRRPG scenario somewhere in the Last Days of Angelkite or Mork Borg territory.

However! As you can see in the screenshot, for some phones it's impossible to get past attribute selection. The confirmation button is off the edge of the screen, and whole the faded out background / deactivated interface scrolls around the pop-up attribute window doesn't.

I've been a huge fan of BGBye for a while now - it was a pleasant surprise to find that a programmer I respect so highly is also "The Enemy" in the competition to make the best free / open licensed plotting tool for fiction writers!

That's partially in jest. PlotBunni's use of AI is wildly different from ours with StoryCAD, so we're kind of apples and oranges, since you (Fyrean) have got AI focusing on text and we're using it more to focus on making suggestions related to plot structure. 

Anyway, massive props. I played around with structuring a story, churning the AI over a few times, messing with the export function and the UI theming... good work here! I'm obviously biased towards what we're doing over at storybuilder dot org (and welcome you to check it out, for Opposition Research if nothing else), but I have to admit to being jealous of PlotBunni's theming flexibility and how easy it makes API integration look. 5 Stars.

Fixed.

New issue : The sponge icon no longer follows the user's input, just resting where they initially touch the screen now.