Unity Morningstar: Book of the Fallen [v0.4.0] [Droid Productions]

4.90 star(s) 12 Votes

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Second play through, suddenly I got this "Luke, I am your father" vibe......
Note that you can load the 'end of act' save, and keep going past day 16. There's another ~20 days of side content (mostly centered on Lin and Snowdrop).
 

okokok

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Aug 19, 2016
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Would be nice to have a way to preview what ability upgrades on the meditation board do. Simply saying upgrades level 1 to level 2 does not give much to go on
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Dec 30, 2017
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Would be nice to have a way to preview what ability upgrades on the meditation board do. Simply saying upgrades level 1 to level 2 does not give much to go on
Worthwhile point; I'll have a look at it when I return from finishing Act XVI.
 
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somebodynobody

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May 11, 2017
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Earlier mention of making a non 18+ version, it might allow it on a bunch of the other shops in the world that are more conservative. Hell even Fate Stay/Night made a non lewd version for the Playstation 2. Look at Type-Moon now, rolling in the Gacha money with Fate Grand Order.

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Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Dec 30, 2017
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Earlier mention of making a non 18+ version, it might allow it on a bunch of the other shops in the world that are more conservative. Hell even Fate Stay/Night made a non lewd version for the Playstation 2. Look at Type-Moon now, rolling in the Gacha money with Fate Grand Order.
I did consider it. Since there's less "porn logic" in Morningstar than in Love of Magic, I could hide the NSFW content reasonably trivially, and put out a Google/Apple version, for example. I'm also a registered for Switch development, so... that could be a possibility.

Switching engines when you have a large and happy codebase is a terrible idea; it would mean throwing away tens of thousands of lines of working codebase and starting from scratch.

Apart from that, thanks for the list of Match3 games; I've played most of them. The big 2 inspirations for the gem matching game in Morningstar's Gems of War and Puzzle Quest 1 & 2 (the newer versions suck).
 

Deleted member 2755092

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Aug 20, 2020
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I did consider it. Since there's less "porn logic" in Morningstar than in Love of Magic, I could hide the NSFW content reasonably trivially, and put out a Google/Apple version, for example. I'm also a registered for Switch development, so... that could be a possibility.

Switching engines when you have a large and happy codebase is a terrible idea; it would mean throwing away tens of thousands of lines of working codebase and starting from scratch.

Apart from that, thanks for the list of Match3 games; I've played most of them. The big 2 inspirations for the gem matching game in Morningstar's Gems of War and Puzzle Quest 1 & 2 (the newer versions suck).
You just need some marketing Droid.

May I suggest a "fuck a chosen, fuck two more for free" kind of deal? Oh wait, nevermind, that's the current deal already.
 

bacienvu88

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Aug 3, 2021
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Switching engines when you have a large and happy codebase is a terrible idea; it would mean throwing away tens of thousands of lines of working codebase and starting from scratch.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. :) What is important isn't how many lines of code you throw away. What is important is how much *new* code you need to write. If I can remove 10K lines of code without loss of functionality and without needing to write any new code I'll do it in a heartbeat.

As people greater than me has said: I hate code and I want as little of it as possible.
 

Droid Productions

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This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. :) What is important isn't how many lines of code you throw away. What is important is how much *new* code you need to write. If I can remove 10K lines of code without loss of functionality and without needing to write any new code I'll do it in a heartbeat.
Meh, the functionality still needs to be provided; it's not like Godot ships with all the stuff I'd need, so large chunks of tools and gameplay functionality would need to be written from scratch. It can be argued that doing it again let's me rewrite the code cleaner and better; the guys certainly argued for that.

In general, if you have a battle-tested codebase that does what it's supposed to, you only ditch that if the next codebase has massive advantages you really need. The classic example here is Bioware, which went from their internal engines, to UE3 and eventually frostbite, shedding functionality and interactivity along the way, because they lost access to generations of tools they'd made that worked great.
 
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bacienvu88

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It can be argued that doing it again let's me rewrite the code cleaner and better; the guys certainly argued for that.
That rewrite is the poster child both to why you should rewrite and why you shouldn't rewrite. Netscape the company completely disappeared as a result of the rewrite, but the rest of the world got Mozilla and Firefox. :)

And "cleaner and better" is the worst argument for a rewrite really. Being able to provide features you otherwise wouldn't be able to do is a much better argument for a rewrite.
In general, if you have a battle-tested codebase that does what it's supposed to, you only ditch that if the next codebase has massive advantages you really need.
Being battle-tested is a very important property of code that most people seem to disregard.
The classic example here is Bioware, which went from their internal engines, to UE3 and eventually frostbite, shedding functionality and interactivity along the way, because they lost access to generations of tools they'd made that worked great.
While that is certainly true we don't know what would have happened if they stayed on Aurora or an evolution of it. It could have turned out great. Or they could become stuck with an engine that isn't able to take full advantage of newer graphics cards and loses lots of sales due to it being perceived as having "poor graphics". The change from UE to Frostbite seem utterly unnecessary though.

Anyway, my intention was not to go in depth on why or why not to rewrite, it was just to point out that bit.
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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While that is certainly true we don't know what would have happened if they stayed on Aurora or an evolution of it. It could have turned out great. Or they could become stuck with an engine that isn't able to take full advantage of newer graphics cards and loses lots of sales due to it being perceived as having "poor graphics". The change from UE to Frostbite seem utterly unnecessary though.
The Change from UE3 to Frostbite was a corporate decision; EA wanted all their internal studios on the same engine.

Which might have been a great idea if it was a general engine, but Frostbite by all accounts was *very* FPS centric, and the tools for anything RPG focused was non-existent. The UI tools (which RPGs use a lot heavier than FPS games), in particular, weren't that great. The right solution would have been to dispatch a small tools group (10-20 engineers is pocket change for a company the size of EA) as a forward operations team, ensuring that while they built game X, game X+1's toolbase was fully brought up to speed with all the bells and whistles they expected.

Sadly, this was political, and every team that could (Bioware included) were shifted onto it, effective immediately. The end result was a number of very bland games (DA:I, ME:Andromeda, and Anthem).
 
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Deleted member 2755092

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Meh, the functionality still needs to be provided; it's not like Godot ships with all the stuff I'd need, so large chunks of tools and gameplay functionality would need to be written from scratch. It can be argued that doing it again let's me rewrite the code cleaner and better; the guys certainly argued for that.

In general, if you have a battle-tested codebase that does what it's supposed to, you only ditch that if the next codebase has massive advantages you really need. The classic example here is Bioware, which went from their internal engines, to UE3 and eventually frostbite, shedding functionality and interactivity along the way, because they lost access to generations of tools they'd made that worked great.
"(...)Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. (...)"

In essence, it does rust. As time goes, the chances of it working as it should in the newer OS, are decreasing.

Hell, even the same OS may completely break it, just look at windows10 requiring a certain version or more of the OS for things to run. If one agrees that new OS releases are equivalent to rust for the older stuff, then yes, your codes rust with time, it doesn't age well like a fine win I'm afraid.
 
Aug 5, 2017
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"(...)Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. (...)"

In essence, it does rust. As time goes, the chances of it working as it should in the newer OS, are decreasing.

Hell, even the same OS may completely break it, just look at windows10 requiring a certain version or more of the OS for things to run. If one agrees that new OS releases are equivalent to rust for the older stuff, then yes, your codes rust with time, it doesn't age well like a fine win I'm afraid.
that's not quite how it works. When your code relates to itself it doesn't change or gain bugs. The outside world keeps moving and you need to patch the edges to match but you don't need to change your core. Yes, it may "quit working completely" on an OS update but that doesn't mean a complete rewrite, it might be as simple as patching to change 1 OS function that's no longer supported to one that is.

It's not really something you can judge from the outside in the abstract. A codebase for a high performance internet server may be tightly coupled to specific OS support and porting might break it entirely. Or maybe you wrote your entire game for a virtual machine that's been ported to hundreds of different platforms and works flawlessly on each and every one of them decades later without any changes.
 

paradroid

Member
Sep 19, 2020
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I'm about to start playing, is there a 'canon' or default name for the MC, in the same way Owyn seems to be the name for the MC in LoM?

I prefer to play with a default name, I had one game where I named to MC Joe, the FL Jo, and of course they found another character in-game named Joe. That was a very confusing scene, and of course I was too far into the game to easily change the names. (My MC in LoM is named Flynn)
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Dec 30, 2017
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I'm about to start playing, is there a 'canon' or default name for the MC, in the same way Owyn seems to be the name for the MC in LoM?

I prefer to play with a default name, I had one game where I named to MC Joe, the FL Jo, and of course they found another character in-game named Joe. That was a very confusing scene, and of course I was too far into the game to easily change the names. (My MC in LoM is named Flynn)
Owyn only really became canon after a Streamer (Laura) used it. I don't by default have them.

People have suggested Adam or Damian, but so far nothing's stuck.
 
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4.90 star(s) 12 Votes