• 114 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Frankly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a game appealing to a specific audience and deciding not to let its experience be substantially changed in the name of inclusivity. There are SO many games out there and I think it’s fine for a game to not try to appeal to as many people as possible.

    I’m not going to take this to the extreme of actively trying to fight save file editing on more open systems though (windows, rooted android, etc.) There’s no real way for me to do that without a system that would be overly awkward for regular users. The game already compresses save files, which makes them not editable as plaintext, and that’s good enough.

    IMO if a game offers save/load (even optionally) it isn’t a roguelike. Permadeath is a core part of the genre. It’s like calling a game such as Call of Duty a ‘first person adventure with added guns’. There’s nothing wrong with a game offering choices if that’s what it wants to do, but it changes what that game is, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.





  • I think you’re misunderstanding me a bit, what I meant was that you have already gotten a legitimate win AND you just want mistap insurance. I don’t ever plan to put cheats into the game because there’s no way to verify the player is only using them for things like recovering from a crash or mistap. I’d rather not let players cheat generally as I suspect it will damage the experience of playing the game normally.




  • Hey there, my thoughts on it are that it’s… well… cheating. Obviously Shattered is a single player game so it’s not like cheating ruins the experience for others, but I’d rather not make it easy to do or expose any functionality within the game itself to enable people to cheat.

    I’m not super familiar with how shizuku works, but generally apps don’t expose data in their private folder at all to other apps without tools like root. Shattered does support Android’s backup and restore functionality, but not for individual save files as otherwise it would be really easy to use built-in restore tools to cheat. Similarly, having the game write the files to non-private storage would also make cheating really easy via any file manager app.

    The main reason for this is that in most cases players are tempted to cheat as a quicker way to overcome a challenge in a game like Shattered, and by doing that they rob themselves of the satisfaction of beating the game legitimately. It sounds like in your case you have already gotten legitimate wins and it’s more about mistap insurance, but there’s no way for the game to know that unfortunately.




  • I have actually decided to look into improving how some windows persist between scene resets, but I don’t plan to put in full tracking functionality so that the scrolls window will re-show if the game is closed. I’d rather just treat that as cancelling the scroll given that in most cases you have to force quit the game for that to happen.



  • Sorry but I’ve removed this. It’s a funny comic but this post has no relation to Pixel Dungeon. See our second rule: “Posts must directly relate to Pixel Dungeon: All content posted must directly reference Pixel Dungeon or one of its variants in some form. Loose connections or similar nomenclature from irrelevant works do not count.”



  • That’s a pretty extreme position. I do agree that Alek’s style has gotten a bit softer over time (Warrior is the clearest example of this), and that’s fairly subjective. But there are other details such as overall lighting, Warrior proportions (think about how skinny he would need to be to fit into his armor), and facial details (Huntress in particular) that I would say are objective improvements.



  • Unfortunately this is correct functionality at the moment. Leaving the game prompted the scene to reset, possibly because of a power saver feature on your device. This closes all of the open windows in the game, and so refunding the scroll in this case would make it easy for players to exploit that and keep the scroll of the metamorphosis options shown to them weren’t what they were looking for.




  • The problem with that is adding artifacts back into the pool will also influence what artifacts get dropped by future transmutes. It would create the possibility of something like: horn of plenty -> unstable spellbook -> horn of plenty. In fact, when fairly late in a game the chance for that might be very high.

    It’s also not possible to guarantee a player won’t go back to open a previous crystal chest, especially now with things like the skeleton key.

    The alternative is to simply have transmute fail when the game is out of artifacts, which is something I’ve got the impression players would dislike more.



  • Exploration score is not based on tiles, to get full exploration score you a floor you have to:

    • see every item pile, open every container, use every key (except for containers that are impossible, e.g. 2nd crystal chest)
    • clear any magical fire or sacrificial fire
    • defeat every state/mimic (ally conversion counts)
    • clear every barricade, locked door (except extra crystal doors), and hidden door