The Stack

The latest Humble Monthly — yes, of course I’m a Humble Monthly subscriber, I’m exactly their target audience — contained a couple of games I had been curious about, including This War of Mine. I’m currently one week into it, in terms of game time.

The basic concept is that it’s a story of war from the point of view of noncombatants without a lot invested in the outcome, who just want it to end. You get a team of three (to start with) displaced people, sheltering in a bombed-out house, which you see in a sort of dollhouse-like cutout view. During the day, you direct them to resource-management and crafting tasks, trying to make their improvised space more livable, feeding them and tending to their wounds. During the night, you go on scavenging missions to other dollhouses, to find more food and crafting materials. How aggressively you scavenge seems to be a matter of choice: there are places where you can take other survivors’ possessions, by stealth or force. A mere week in, the game has not yet pressured me to take the dark path. I’ll admit that I did some stealing at one point, mainly because I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but I haven’t even tried to craft weapons yet. That may prove my downfall. Always in games with resource-management aspects, like Civilization, I tend to overprioritize research and production and underprioritize defense. And this game is in some ways Civilization played at a much smaller scale.

It’s unusually slick for such an obviously political game. This is no Papers, Please, made of cartoony pixel art, but a current-generation-console-looking work, all done in the desaturated tones and light blooms that console gamers seem to think signify “serious game for grownups”. Except that this time it might be true.

Only, I keep asking myself: Is it really so different from a zombie apocalypse game? I’ve certainly seen zombie games with very similar underlying crafting-and-survival mechanics. War is presented here as just a flavor of natural disaster, something beyond anyone’s control that destroyed these people’s lives to the point that they have to start over. And while that is a considerable statement in itself for a game to make, it also makes it seem like choosing war as the thing that destabilizes civilized life was a little arbitrary.

Something I was thinking about recently that doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention in the voluminous writing about Undertale: the repeated theme of garbage and its redemption. Like how Bratty and Catty, two shopkeeper NPCs found in an alleyway, sell you things they found in the garbage, including the second most powerful weapon and armor in the game, or how Napstablook, a depressed ghost, invites you to “lie on the floor and feel like garbage” together, which results in visions of the universe. Spoilers ahead.

There’s a garbage dump in one area, which isn’t notable in itself, except that the ending of a Pacifist run keeps returning to it: there’s a bit about going to the garbage dump for a date, which leads to a conversation in the epilogue involving the line “OH MY GOD! YOU’RE GOING BACK IN THE TRASH!!!”, which results in everyone else saying that they want to be in the trash too. And why not? They really are rubbish monsters: even the most formidable of them failed to take down a small child without any EXP who wasn’t even fighting back. The same scene has them admitting that they’re all losers — but that being defeated by the player character was the best thing that happened to any of them.

The garbage dump collects refuse from both the underground and the world above, the world of humans. As such, it’s where the monsters get all their human technology. You get to it by falling, an echo of the fall into the underground in the game’s beginning. Thus, all of monster civilization is as a dump to the surface world. The humans regarded the monsters as trash, so they swept them into a cave where they wouldn’t have to look at them.

This is echoed in one other area, the True Lab, located far under the Underground just as the Underground is far under the surface. This is where Dr. Alphys ran away from her guilt by sealing away the wretched products of her mad experiments: disturbing things that glitch up your screen and put the wrong text in the wrong places during combat. In fact, the entire atmosphere of this sequence is one of wrongness, and the wrongest part of all is the monster named Amalgamate, which can’t even attack you properly: it instead makes pathetic gestures towards what would be an attack if it were being done by something less messed-up. But at the end, all the creatures in the lab are freed and reunited with their families, who accept them.

Dr. Alphys herself spends a lot of time at the dump. I suppose that makes sense with the dump’s connection to technology, but it also has to do with her sense of worthlessness, of having failed as a scientist and as a person. She was tasked with something bigger than she could handle, and she lives with the weight of the consequences. There’s some subtle suggestion of a suicide attempt. She’s so convinced of her true worthlessness that she engages in the always-disastrous ploy of trying to fake being a hero, repeatedly creating the appearance of danger so she can come to your increasingly unconvincing rescue. This plot thread is designed to make the player annoyed with her, but annoyance is defused once you recognize the hopelessness that inspired it.

The really striking thing about Alphys, though, is that when she’s first introduced, she seems like nothing more than a comic character, a socially-awkward anime-loving nerd stereotype. And she never actually stops being that, even as you come to understand her better and feel sorry for her. Forget redemption from guilt. It’s the guilt that redeems the character from being just a joke.

In fact, that’s a general feature of Undertale‘s style, and of Homestuck‘s style before it. (Toby Fox, creator of Undertale, is one of the main members of the Homestuck Music Team.) Characters and plot elements are introduced in a mocking way that makes you not take them seriously at first, but you wind up gradually caring about them as you learn more. Even the music often has a pattern that fits this notion, starting off with chiptuney square waves and then introducing richer sounds and realer instrumentation once the melody is established. Heck, the very first thing you see in the game is a mockery of all manner of awkwardness in old games: a picture in what I think of as “CGA Palette 2 Brown” over the text “Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: HUMANS and MONSTERS.” Accompanied by what sounds like the soundtrack of a NES title, but which eventually turns into the most significant and emotional theme of the game. Garbage redeemed.

There’s actually a second theme twined up there: Memory, a theme first heard from a music box under a forlorn horned statue in an unregarded passageway under a leak that’s raining water on its head. This statue isn’t in the dump, but it’s in the same general area. You have no way of knowing its significance, or even if it has any significance at all, when you first encounter it. It’s only much later that you find a “Royal Memorial Fountain” containing an awful statue of the local TV star Mettaton that was installed only a week ago to replace an old statue of Prince Asriel, and can put two and two together. Asriel is the game’s chief villain and also its chief victim, a dead child infused into flower by one of Alphys’s experiments, as forsaken as his discarded statue, with nothing but determination where his soul used to be. “Flowey”, as Asriel now calls himself, does his best to provoke you into violence throughout the game, but the best ending can only be achieved by showing compassion to everyone, including him, the character who deserves it the least but needs it the most. And the statue foreshadows that: by showing it a little kindness, protecting it from the underground rain with an umbrella obtained from a garbage can, you start the music box playing, giving you the musical clue you need for a puzzle that conceals a powerful artifact.

You don’t actually get the artifact, though. Your actual reward for your compassion: dog residue.

See, this is one of the game’s big participatory jokes. When you try to take the artifact, you’re told that you can’t, because there are “too many dogs in your inventory”. Checking your inventory, you see that there is an “Annoying Dog” in there that wasn’t there before. When you remove the dog from your inventory, it immediately runs to the artifact and absorbs it, leaving behind only some “Dog Residue”, which is variously described as “Dog-shaped husk shed from a dog’s carapace”, “Dirty dishes left unwashed by a dog”, “Jigsaw puzzle left unfinished by a dog”, and various other randomly-chosen descriptions. Using this item fills up all the empty space in your inventory with more dog residue. Except sometimes it also yields some “dog salad”, which is a healing item. So your reward looks like garbage, but it’s really unlimited free healing items, provided you’re hip enough to this game’s themes to not just throw it out. You can even sell the extra residues for free unlimited cash, if you can find a shop that will take them.

The amount of healing you get from dog salad is somewhat randomized, with different descriptions for different effects. At its strongest, it heals you completely, with the message “It’s literally garbage???”

Even though I’m most of the way through Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows, I think I have to hang it up for a bit for the sake of this blog’s recovery. I need to play something I can finish, and this game isn’t really designed around finishing. It’s designed to be a lifestyle game, like Candy Crush Saga or the Elder Scrolls series — something that you keep dipping into over a long period of time. That’s how I was playing it before I started blogging again: at most a battle or two a day, and not all of them victorious. New unlocks, new ideas, were sparse. Mostly it was just new battlefields. There’s well over a hundred maps — more than I’ve ever seen in a tower defense — and the systems of level-specific achievements and harder difficulty levels that net you more XP are all trying to get you to play them more than once. People online talk about beating Endurance mode, which I didn’t think was even theoretically possible.

But I do want to come back to it (or keep coming back to it). It’s insanely polished, especially in comparison to previous Gemcrafts, to the point where I fear it will spoil me for other tower defenses. I can see this being the game that I play between other games this year.

OK, I started talking before about how the exponentially-stronger enemies in Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows inevitably overtake the player. That’s a good safe way to design things where the numbers get arbitrarily large; it’s the cornerstone of the Clicker genre, for example. And this is certainly a game where numbers can get large. After you win a battle, you have the option to keep going in “Endurance mode”, which means letting additional waves keep coming for as long as you’re capable of fending them off, the better to rack up lots of XP. In this mode, I’ve seen it get to the point where it’s expressing enemy hit points in scientific notation.

I’d like to go into more detail about the efficiency of gems, and how it’s possible to keep pace with the exponentiation for longer.

First of all, more powerful grades of gem are created by fusing gems. In general, you make a grade n+1 gem by fusing two grade n gems. There’s a hotkey for upgrading a gem, but using it is exactly equivalent, in both effect and cost, to creating a duplicate of the gem and then fusing them. Creating a grade 1 gem and fusing two gems are both primitive actions that cost a fixed amount of mana. Creating a grade n gem from these primitives would require 2^(n-1) grade 1 gem creations and 2^(n-1)-1 fusions.

Now, the damage that a gem does per hit varies with the color of the gem, but one thing is consistent: the damage per hit of a grade n+1 gem is less than twice that of a grade n gem. Given that the cost of a grade n+1 gem is more than twice that of a grade n gem, it may seem like it’s always worthwhile to deploy multiple low-grade gems rather than a few high-grade ones. But there are several confounding factors. For one thing, there’s only so much space on the board. I’ve been routinely getting my strongest gems above grade 20 lately, and there’s no way to deploy 2^20 grade 1 gems, because that’s more than a million gems. Also, high-grade gems fire more shots per second than low-grade ones, although there’s a cap to that. Sometimes you need to do lots of damage in one hit to punch through armor or overwhelm regeneration effects. There’s a trick where you cast a beam spell on a mana-leeching gem to get lots of mana-leeching done at once, and you need a high-level mana-leeching gem to get the most out of that.

Regardless, the cost of gems rises exponentially with level, and the damage they do also rises approximately exponentially. I haven’t crunched the numbers, so the “approximately” there could be hiding a significant factor, like a penalty that increases with the grade. But let’s assume it doesn’t and say that the two exponentials cancel out and the resulting damage-per-second-per-cost is basically constant. That means that the damage you can put out is proportional to the mana you’ve collected.

Yellow gems increase this by doing critical hits some of the time. In the original Gemcraft, with its overall lower numbers, critical hits were simply triple damage, and the chance of getting a crit increased with the grade of gem. But triple damage doesn’t mean a lot in the exponential world of Chasing Shadows, so it works differently: the grade increases the crit multiplier. (The chance of a crit still increases with grade, but caps out at 80% before too long.) The multiplier increases in the same not-quite-doubling way as the base damage, so the overall damage from yellow gems is proportional to the square of the mana you’ve collected. This is clearly going to track the increases in enemy strength for longer.

Add a white component, and you have an additional factor, which is harder to analyze. White gems give an additional multiplier to both damage and specials — which is to say, on a yellow gem, it increases damage twice, once as a bonus to the base damage and once as a bonus to the crit multiplier. However, this multiplier increases only linearly with gem grade — which is to say, it increases logarithmically with the mana you’ve invested in it. It also increases with the size of your mana pool, but that also only increases at exponentially increasing intervals, so let’s call the end result log(n)^3. It’s a bonus worth getting, but in the long run, it’s going to be insignificant compared to the quadratic and even linear increases from just upgrading ordinary gems. I’ve seen it said online that the multipliers from black gems start outstripping white gems at around grade 30, but I haven’t got there yet.

Orange gems increase the rate at which you collect mana. Each hit from an orange gem gives you a fixed amount of mana that increases with the grade of gem at a less-than-doubling rate, just like the damage does. So with orange gems, your rate of mana collection is proportional to the amount of mana you’ve collected? Wouldn’t this yield exponential growth, potentially disrupting the Clicker-like guarantee of eventually losing that I described earlier? I suppose that as long as the enemies are getting tougher at a faster exponential rate than your mana collection, they still win. But it seems risky: all it takes to make one exponential function greater than another is a sufficiently large constant scaling factor, and the rules here are complicated enough that it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a player could figure out some trick to provide it.

Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows has 419 Achievements.

One is awarded for winning the game in “Iron Wizard” mode, a harder version of the game that becomes available when you reach experience level 100 in regular mode. (Not as big a deal as it sounds — I’m well over level 500 currently.) Iron Wizard doesn’t seem to be the no-failure-allowed ruleset that other games call “Iron Man”, but it removes the experience system, which makes skill points much harder to come by. At any rate, I won’t be able to get that Achievement in my current playthrough.

The other 418 are a varied lot. Some are outright impossible to not get. Some require special effort. Some are tutorial-like, using the achievement system to point out non-obvious things about the rules, like the fact that building an Amplifier right next to your base helps reduce damage to it. There’s a whole set that require beating particular battlefields under arbitrary constraints that you’re unlikely to do unless you’re specifically going for the achievement, like “Harvest 24,000 mana from shards at field K5 before wave 18 starts”, or “Don’t build anything at field H1”, or “Use only armor tearing gems at field R4”, injecting a little extra variety into proceedings.

The one consistent thing is that every Achievement applies to a single battle, and you must actually win the battle for it to count. Even in the few cases where the condition for the achievement is something that happens outside the battlefield, like “Upgrade all skills to level 5 or greater”, you have to actually play out a battle in that state to get credit for it.

No matter what’s in the achievements, they all seem quite achievable. I have the majority of them already, and I’m making a serious go of getting them all. This is clearly what the designers want. These are not your tacked-on Achievements concocted at the last minute to satisfy console certification requirements. These achievements are deeply integrated into the game. Achievements give you extra skill points — it’s a fraction of what you get from leveling up, but every little bit helps. And there’s a very nice in-game Achievements menu that lets you filter them by various attributes, including the attributes of “locked” and “unlocked”. This is useful for planning which Achievements you want to go for in your next battle. Sometimes I can find several that naturally go together.

In fact, the game goes a step beyond that. It lets you access the Achievements menu in the middle of battle. I really didn’t see the point of this at first — it seemed like a case of counting your money while you’re sitting at the table. But the battlefield version of the menu shows bar graphs where applicable, letting you track your progress towards that “Kill 150 Cursed monsters using the Beam spell” or whatever. Better yet, it adds a few new filter attributes, letting you look at just the achievements that are still achievable in the current battle.

So basically, the developers have put a lot of effort into catering to the achievement-mongers among us. The only game I know of with a more capable in-game Achievements UI is Team Fortress 2, which lets you display progress towards selected Achievements on the in-game HUD. TF2 is also one of the few games I’ve played that has more Achievements than this one.

OK, so I basically called Gemcraft boring in my last post. And yet I’m still playing it. “Boring” and “compelling” are not always contradictory qualities, but in this case I think it’s because Chasing Shadows is doing a better job than its predecessors of keeping things varied, and of keeping a sense of forward progression. It’s not just that the battles keep getting bigger or that numbers in general are going up (although that’s certainly a factor). It’s that the bigger numbers result in changes in the dominant strategy.

To explain what I mean, I’ll have to describe the details of the game a little more.

Gems come in nine colors, each with a different special ability: blue gems slow down enemies they hit, yellow gems have a chance of doing critical hits, purple gems reduce armor, and so forth. You can combine multiple colors in a single gem for something that does more damage and has all the special abilities of its components, but isn’t as good at them as the pure gems — unless one of the colors is black or white, which are special colors for enhancing other colors. Gems with a black component are called “bloodbound”: they become more powerful with the number of times they hit enemies. Gems with a white component are “poolbound”: they increase in power every time your mana pool levels up by hitting certain exponentially-increasing thresholds of accumulated mana. (In the original Gemcraft, you had to pay large amounts of mana to upgrade your pool. Here, the only cost is opportunity: if you want your pool to gain levels, you have to refrain from spending all that mana while it builds up. This, it turns out, is enough of a cost.)

There are a few things you can do with gems besides putting them in towers. You can drop them as bombs, but this struck me from the very start as a big waste, getting a little temporary damage out of something that could otherwise dish out damage continuously. You can use them to enrage waves, as I mentioned before, although in the early part of the game this struck me as even more counterproductive than exploding them. And you can put them in traps, an alternative to towers that requires monsters to walk over them (more or less). Traps don’t do nearly as much damage as towers, but they’re much more effective at the color abilities.

Now, not every color of gem is available on every level. Most of the early levels have only two or three colors. But you can unlock skills that let you upgrade the effectiveness of specific colors, and any color that’s upgraded will be made available everywhere. This is part of what lets strategies dominate.

The first really effective strategy I found was to fill the pathways with green gems in traps. Green gems are poison: in addition to their normal impact damage, they do damage over time that ignores armor. Putting them in traps not only made them more poisonous, it also solved the big problem with poison gems in towers: that they tend to target the same thing over and over until it dies, at which point the next thing hasn’t taken any poison damage at all. Traps all along a path spread the poison around among everything on that path for maximum efficiency.

After a while, though, this approach can’t keep up with the increasing hit points of the enemies as the number of waves per level keeps going up. I haven’t really analyzed this, but I’m pretty sure that the general monster stats increases exponentially with the wave number — the base of the exponent is close enough to 1 for it to be a long, slow exponential curve, but it’s exponential enough to eventually overwhelm any non-exponential strategy.

My current strategy is powered by orange/white combination gems. The power of orange is mana-leeching: every time an orange gem damages an enemy, it gives you a fixed amount of mana, which increases as you upgrade the gem. I had more or less given up on orange gems early on as wasteful — they’re the least damaging gem type, and they never seemed to make their own cost back at the lower levels. But once I had both orange and white available everywhere, I realized there’s a neat little feedback loop to be exploited. Leveling up your mana pool makes the orange/white gems more effective, which levels up your mana pool faster. Eventually you want to make some gems that specialize in damage rather than leeching, but by that point, you’ll have loads of mana to do it with. The exponential enemies do overwhelm eventually, but I can hold them off for well over a hundred waves this way.

In fact, this is the point where I had enough of a mana surplus that I started experimenting with the things I had earlier dismissed as wasteful, like gem bombs and enraging waves. And it turns out they can be quite effective, once you can afford them.

The big question is: Is this the final dominant strategy that will last me the rest of the game? Or will it fizzle out like the poison paths and force me to discover something new? And I don’t know the answer to that. There’s still an entire difficulty level I haven’t unlocked yet. Maybe when you last to wave 200, the bloodbound gems start being more effective than the poolbound ones.

So, apart from your witnesses and undertales, what have I been playing for the last few months? Time-wasters, mostly. When I feel like I might be yanked away from a game at any moment, I choose ones where that’s no tragedy, either because I have low expectations for the game but just want to try it out to see if it surprises me, or because the game contains so little context that I’ll be able to jump in again without problems after an extended break.

Lately, the game that’s been wasting the largest portion of my time is definitely Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows. It fits mostly in the second category, but also a little in the first: I’ve played enough of the previous three ¹Chasing Shadows is designated “Chapter 2”, but that’s because two of the other games are a “Chapter Zero” and a “Lost Chapter”. Gemcraft games to know pretty much how they work, and I think I’ve gotten bored with each before reaching the end. (I’m not completely sure. I might have finished the first one, but if so, the ending wasn’t very memorable.) I suppose this reaction is partly because they were free online Flash games, distributed via sites like Armor Games and Newgrounds, which made me value them less than Chasing Shadows in my Steam library, even if I did get it as part of a bundle.

The Gemcraft games are tower defenses, a form where individual games are still mainly distinguished by how they innovate on the formula. The original Gemcraft had two chief distinguishing innovations. First, it separated the towers from the weapons installed in those towers. The weapons take the form of enchanted gems in various colors, which can be combined to create more powerful gems. If you upgrade a gem a lot, and then realize that it would be more useful somewhere else, you can simply move it to a different tower, albeit with a delay of several seconds while it “resockets” to discourage you from doing this all the time. I find that this actually isn’t much of a force on me or my decisions during gameplay. It’s a nice convenience, but it fades into the background once you’re used to it.

The other and more interesting chief innovation was that you could earn bonus mana (for buying towers and gems on the current level) and XP (for purchasing permanent upgrades) by releasing waves of enemies early, or even releasing multiple waves at once. This makes it into something of a bidding game, like Bridge: you tell the game how much of a challenge you think you’re capable of handling at the moment, and if you judge right, you reap a reward that makes things easier later.

After three sequels’ worth of complications to the rules, there are now several additional ways to bid. You can sacrifice a gem to “enrage” a pending wave, making the enemies tougher and more numerous, which means you get more mana and XP for defeating them. You can turn up the difficulty for an entire level to get a large XP multiplier. And there’s a whole system of more specific and multi-tiered ways to make levels harder, called “battle traits”. For example, there’s a battle trait that decreases the time between waves, another that increases the number of Swarmling waves and also makes Swarmlings harder to kill, another that makes your earned mana come in lumps at regular intervals instead of continuously. My favorite battle trait gives you a number of “orblets” at your base, which basically function like the power cores in Defense Grid: if a monster manages to carry one offscreen, all mana gains from that point onward are reduced by 10%. New battle traits are awarded over the course of the game, just like new upgrades. Activating multiple battle traits at once seems to be the real secret to gaining XP quickly, especially if you turn up the difficulty level as well, which increases the XP multiplier for each battle trait.

I’ve seen things similar to the battle trait system before. For example, the idols in Bastion are essentially the same thing. But for some reason I was hesitant to use it at all there, whereas here in Gemcraft, I often overbid with it, activating too many traits at once and losing the level. Probably because the game is so repetitive. Once I’ve beat one level, I feel like I can easily beat them all.

And here we are galloping towards a full year since my last post. The chief factor in my silence can be summarized as “work”, and summarized slightly longer as “the worst, most extended crunch period of my entire career”. It wasn’t eleven months long, but it was long enough to completely get me out of the habit of blogging, and habit is the most important thing.

But there’s another factor as well. Last year, I violated the Oath in a completely new way: by purchasing a game on Steam when, according to the Oath, I was not allowed to. It was one of those cases where a game was so zeitgeisty and in-the-moment that I felt like I had to play it in order to keep up with the broader online discussion of games in general. And, having done that once, it was easy to decide to do it again, and again. Now, I’m accustomed to breaking the Oath by posting late. And I know what to do about that: just write the post late and move on. But I wasn’t sure what to do about this new infraction, and that uncertainty has paralyzed me.

These are the games I purchased this way: Her Story, The Beginner’s Guide, Undertale, The Witness ¹Thekla, 2016; not to be confused with Stu Galley’s The Witness (Infocom, 1983). I’ve contemplated pulling the same joke as I did with Portal but I don’t think it supports it as well., and Firewatch. Each worthy of lengthy discussion that I still don’t feel up to. No, if I’m going to make blogging a habit again, I think I’ll have to just blog about whatever I’m playing on any given day — just write the post and move on.