atomicpineapple

@soulcake: is that kinda like the whole battle pass thing?

@flashflood_29: Weeeeeelp that's a shame :/

Anyone else have a better idea, lol?

@wolfstein_3d: I agree that on paper this looks like a revenue loss, but I'm just wondering if the always reducing prices will entice those who wouldn't normally spend money on such things to do so, and if that would make up for the difference? Also, I feel like employing something like this would simply be a way for people to eventually pay what they'd normally pay for a game, you know? Like, if the game is free and everything unlocks at a certain point, then everyone who hits that mark has paid for the game, and everyone who wouldn't have paid for the game but tried it because it was free and threw a couple bucks towards it end up paying more than if the game had an entry cost.

Honestly I do not have a head for these things.

Hey everyone,

I was watching a few videos on YouTube and saw that there's apparently a thing going around now about how Anthem's in-game store is going to have $20 skins and such. I am a hobbyist game designer, and I've often thought about how I might do micro-transactions "properly", if that's even a word you could apply to them, if the day ever came for me to employ them. I think I've come up with how I'd do it, and was hoping to get some thoughts.

Basically, the more money you spend, the cheaper things in the store get, up to the point where everything is automatically unlocked. For instance, at a threshold of $30, every item for sale is free, and every dollar you spend towards that $30 reduces the price of each individual item.

From an implementation perspective, it's pretty simple:

playerCostMod = playerHasSpent / costThreshold //for example, $21.56 / $30.00 = 0.718, remaining items are 71.8% discounted.

if( (itemCost[storeIndex] - (itemCost[storeIndex] * playerCostMod)) > 0)

// if this item costs $9.99, then 9.99 * 0.718 = 7.17, 9.99 - 7.17 = $2.82, item costs $2.82

itemCost[storeIndex] = itemCost[storeIndex] - (itemCost[storeIndex] * playerCostMod);

//this would handle if the player has spent less than the threshold, but the current purchase would put them past it and just //make the item cost the remainder of the threshold

else

itemCosts[storeIndex] = costThreshold - playerHasSpent;

All of this could be wrapped in an if statement that checks if the threshold has been met, auto-ing everything to 0, and yes there's rounding functions and such that have to be put in but you get the gist.

Would this appeal to anyone? Do you have a better idea? This is obviously a problem that's not going away, but is it only a problem because so many people implement these systems in a way everyone hates? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not surprised in the slightest that nobody (I don't think) has mentioned Wild Arms, but, fuck yeah! Wild Arms! One of my fave series, up to and including 3.

I know it's almost a cliche at this point, but Dark Souls 1 is my jam. The weirdest thing I ever did with it was that after I saw VaatiVidya's video "A Tale of Two Adventurers" I went and beat the game from start to finish only ever using the starting soldier armour and a light crossbow in either hand (Used whatever I had on me for the tutorial boss, since you don't get the first crossbow until the Burg.) Used probably about 2000 bolts throughout the whole run. Not being able to move for 2-3 seconds after every single attack is NOT the way to play that game.

@belowstupid I had to disable to motion controls because the cursor was shifting around as I was moving around on my bed. That being said, I'd absolutely play with a mouse if we could because trying to build stuff and click on tiny parts in-game is really not working with the DS4 joysticks.

I played it. Right now it seems really laggy, not sure if that's something that can be fixed through optimization later or if it's just a reality of the hardware limitations. Also, the game crashed after a few hours and it corrupted my save file so I had to start over. THAT I really hope they fix, because you could potentially play the career for a long ass time, and to lose a 100+ hour save file would be real bad. I'm still having a hard time getting used to the controls, because it's one of those things where there's waaay too much stuff to have to manage on the DS4, so there's a lot of button combinations. For instance, Circle toggles SAS but L1+Circle increases time step, which are two things you really don't want to mix up when you're re-entering atmosphere.

The dev blog has been saying that the controls translated well, so hopefully there's a good solution in terms of the build mode (and that the solution does not include the touchpad). I hope it releases at midnight instead of tomorrow when the store refreshes at like 4pm.

Anyone else chomping at the bit? I've been waiting to play Kerbal since it first appeared on Steam years ago, and Project B.E.A.S.T. only fueled that fire. I can't wait. On the plus side, it also looks like a very doable Platinum.