— shuppy

shuppy (@delan) — [archived] 2022-12-11T18:36:31.642Z

christine (@love) — [archived] 2022-12-11T17:29:38.327Z

So exactly one person is posting speedruns of GITCL on speedrun.com and normally I don't like looking at speedruns but... I mean... obviously I'm gonna look at one of my own game. Unsurprisingly it is insanely fucked up but also thankfully not nearly as fucked up as I feared? Like it's "oh lmao I guess that was exploitable" fucked up, not "how did I ever think this game worked properly" fucked up, at least!

That said it is bonkers to me that the no DLC speedrun is TWICE THE LENGTH as the one where you do the DLC, despite the fact that you... have to do the DLC. Which has a ton of mandatory random encounters and a boss that I'm continually nervous that I gave too much health to. (Whenever I revisit her for testing purposes, the Jill fight always takes long enough that I'm like "uh, maybe this was a bit much.") Anyway it turns out the reason why is because they figured out a combination of things that lets you do like 1000 damage in a single hit against normal bosses, and positively absurd numbers against bosses with elemental weaknesses. I had no idea the numbers could go this high. This is a game where 99 is considered a lot. The toughest bosses have like 8000 HP. If I had known, I would have implemented a Final Fantasy style max damage!

Seriously what the fuck is that. Good lord.

Anyway despite all that it's... actually, I'm kinda satisfied seeing it? The goal with the DLC items was to give players stuff that could POTENTIALLY be exploitable, but in a "you gotta understand the systems to know what to combine it with" sort of way, not a "this straightforwardly does more damage than everything else" sort of way. And I guess that turned out to be the case! I bet this was really fun to figure out.

I mean yeah okay it's Bank Breaker, but it's not JUST Bank Breaker. Also if you figure out exactly how to maximize on using a weapon that literally costs money with every use, imo that's sick as hell and you deserve it.

I'm actually really satisfied that this loadout took advantage of a Support ability... Sam has basically zero damage output, and having just three ability slots means that the game kinda has to deemphasize buffs/debuffs because you can't have a spread of them like you could in a more traditional RPG. So it really is a testament that the ones in the game really do count, and that support is the lynchpin of this strategy! In this case, they use Uncanny Light to keep adding stagger on every hit and just letting them ignore the combo system entirely to do damage in huge bursts.

And in the no DLC run, honestly, the big fights actually seem to pretty much line up with how I balanced them—even in hyper efficient play, they actually do stay roughly within the player damage spread that I intended, nothing is straightforwardly a pushover. That's pretty cool! Wow! GITCL was definitely a learning experience for me to develop and I had to figure out a lot of stuff about balance as I went along, but like... if the systems can withstand this much pressure and still be fun, I feel like that's a huge W! Watching this insane bullshit actually does make me feel like I got a lot of things right. Well, other than not having a damage cap lol.

shuppy (@delan) — [archived] 2022-12-11T18:36:31.642Z