Souls Like Strings

Very short week this time since Monday was a public holiday and I'm taking Friday off to go on a long weekend trip to Nagano with the fiance.

• Even making a simple change can be complicated if it affects clients
  • Especially if those clients have distributed printed guides to using your service
• Even if it's frustrating, taking the time to make sure other teams understand how to use your features is worthwhile
  • People won't remember that they messed up by ignoring instructions, they'll remember the bad experience
• moment.js is 4MB, and dayjs offers...

A genuinely unique 'card' battler

Why

• Deep gameplay and plenty of replayability
• Makes some big changes to the card battler format that pay off
• Cool pixel art and varied scenarios

Why Not

• You want a game with a clearly defined/visible endpoint
• You're heavily motivated by story

Impressions

This is a great game which clearly lives up to its overwhelmingly positive reviews, but after ~3 hours I'm dropping it.

It's not the game; it's me. The gameplay is great; moving from the typical many cards/few upgrades to few cards/many upgrades (and cooldowns on cards rather...

• Every time I try a major dependency upgrade (React, Node, etc.) it's an absolute lottery whether it'll be a 3 line or 3 day change
  • Thank god for Typescript and (better than before) test coverage though, without them it'd be hopeless
• Caching is amazing until you have to troubleshoot a problem caused by cache
  • If you're going to use a variable as part of a cache key, make sure it can't be undefined
• Yet another NPM social engineering attack made me go through all our dependencies to see if we need them
  ...

• It's very important to clarify requirements from the PM before holding an RFC meeting
  • otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time because no one knows the problem they're trying to solve
  • still managed to hash out some parts of it though
• Even if I had all the necessary info, I definitely could have facilitated better
  • maybe ok to open by giving an overview since not everyone had time to read it, but should've prepared something
  • should have opened by going through the comments
  • then asking if anyone had questions/opinions overall
• Caching is amazing, I...

Maybe not a good sequel, but a great game.

Why

• You want a different but familiar take on Dark Souls
• You enjoy being thrown into ridiculous situations and fighting your way through
• You like power-stancing to the same unhealthy degree as one of my coworkers

Why Not

• The only reason you liked Dark Souls was the interconnectedness of the world

Impressions

This one didn't pull me in to the same degree as the original; I took two long breaks to play other games (Ender Lillies/Magnolia, then Persona 5) and I think that's the biggest...