#slice & dice game

[mylordshesacactus]

I kept meaning to make a big cinematic post about this but didn’t have the energy, and the end result is that it didn’t get highlighted the way it deserved. So, shoutout again to Audie The Utility Wizard, for what was arguably the most clutch single spell in the entire Siege of Suncrest.

The scene, roughly: Andromeda, our paladin, is conscious but at a single hitpoint--I think Guard-Captain Olassa, herself a low-level paladin, got her up with a Lay On Hands but couldn’t do more, then retreated again to cover the breach.

So. Andromeda, not only a heavy-hitting tank but also the party’s only real healer, is at one hitpoint. She’d previously flown over the heads of the retreating party to get another party member out of danger, so she’s also alone.

She is also ten feet away from the advancing fae commander.

The fae commander has multiattack. Triple multiattack. She hits hard and well--counting on her missing her attack even once would require a disastrously poor roll on her part. Odds are very good that all of those blows would hit. She has also been established as methodical, unhurried, and incredibly fucking cruel. Everything she does is, functionally, a taunt. There is no way she won’t go for the barely-stirring, bloodied young paladin as viciously as possible.

Understandably, the party is panicked, and Audie’s player is frantically flipping through spells trying to find something that Audie can pull off with dwindling spell slots without killing Andromeda. The only thing that seems viable is one final casting of Banishment. It won’t fix everything--it’s been established that with the planes converging, fae don’t banish permanently, so she’ll be back in one minute--but it will buy them sixty seconds without the fae commander on the battlefield so Andromeda can run.

But the DC is not that high, the odds that it will fail are very good, and the fae commander’s turn is before Andromeda’s.

(I, the DM, am internally screaming and trying DESPERATELY to find a way to avoid going Full Mollymauk over here, but mostly trying to think of a way to deliver this death blow in a way that is respectful and meaningful to the character as well as how to talk the player through it in the aftermath. I was speedrunning some stages of grief, y’all, it was fucking OVER for Andromeda at this point.)

Audie, OOC: It just says ‘a creature within range’. DM: Yeah? Audie, OOC: ............Can I banish Andromeda?

That is EXACTLY what she does. Audie calls to Andromeda--who had at that point been failing death saves and was barely conscious--not to resist, then casts Banishment and snaps her into a safe, harmless pocket dimension. It’s concentration-based, and dropping concentration is free; so all she has to do once it’s Andromeda’s turn again is stop concentrating and we have our paladin back, ready to Run Like Fuck.

So like. EVERYTHING Andromeda does from here on out is the result of a single extremely clutch battlefield decision to use Banishment as a utility support spell, and not a combat spell.

Slow. Fucking. Clap.

[czernos-art]

Slice & Dice Steam release AND 3.0 update is 3/20/2024 so I'm once again saying you should try it out

[sprinklecipher]

How Much Dialogue Each Character has in PLvsPW

I made some graphs about the amount of dialogue each character has in Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, because I'm a graphs kind of lady :)

(Minor/oblique spoiler warning)

The color coding will make more sense when you see the 2nd graph, but it’s basically unique colors for major characters, and category-based colors for minor characters (witnesses and Flynch = blue, characters who give puzzles = orange)

I was curious what it’d look like if you grouped the word counts according to characters’ series of origin, so here’s that:

More details below the cut ~

Some notes about the 2nd graph:

“Puzzle characters” are characters who give you a puzzle (or only show up in the puzzle gameplay segments) and are not part of the trials

“Trial characters” are the witnesses and Flynch (although all of the dialogue they have outside of the trials still counts towards their total, fwiw)

The unlabeled part at the bottom of the PLvPW column is the Storyteller, with 5,200 words, and the one at the bottom of the PL column is Chelmey with 986 words (couldn’t get the labels to fit lol). Edgeworth has 50 words fwiw, which isn’t really enough to be visible (although he technically is represented on the graph, as a tiny line at the top of the AA column)

Also, in case it’s not obvious, the judges are grouped into the PLvsPW column because they’re not the same character as the AA judge. The English and Labyrinthian judges are also lumped together due to them being labelled the same in the data and there not really being a good way to separate them out with how the data is structured         

Part of my inspiration for making the second graph was that PLvPW seemed like more of an Ace Attorney game than a Professor Layton game to me based on vibes, and I was curious whether the balance of dialogue would reflect that (with the caveat that the dialogue would naturally skew towards the AA characters since the trial gameplay is more dialogue heavy than the puzzle gameplay is). To be clear, I don’t mean that as a criticism of the game or anything—I enjoyed it a lot!—I just thought it leaned more heavily on the AA side compared to the PL side, and I was curious what that leaning might look like, numbers-wise

With that said, the overall dialogue word count totals end up being 99,256 for PLvsPW characters, 63,633 for AA characters, and 48,070 for the PL characters, a 47%/30%/23% split, respectively, although notably that's counting expy characters (like Flynch) towards PLvsPW

Some observations:

Layton and Luke have way more dialogue in PLvsPW than they do across the first couple PL games (Layton has ~19k and Luke has ~10k total words of dialogue across both Curious Village and Diabolical Box combined, vs ~29k and ~18k here). I don't have data readily available for any of the later games, so IDK how those would compare, though

The overall total character-based dialogue word count is 210,959 words, which is about the same as AA1 or AA2 (which have roughly ~210k words of dialogue) but less than AA3 or AAI1 (~260k words)

The vigilantes collectively have more dialogue than the Storyteller, which is just wild to me

Data source: I used the scripts that Jozerick posted to the Court Records forums, which pulled the text from the PLvPW ROM. I wrote a python script to process those scripts further to use like this, so there’s a chance I introduced some error with that, but the numbers should be pretty accurate.

Word counts: The data set DOES include dialogue from the animated cutscenes, but it does NOT include puzzle instructions/hints, any descriptions from the Court Record, or interjections that have a gif rather than normal text dialogue (“Objection!” etc.). It also doesn’t include the dialogue from the special episodes, since those weren't included in the data source I used.

[gorematchala]

I love this game so much how did I win a run and get 5 floors into Nightmare mode with a house cat

Genuinely more helpful than Meddler

[anaalnathrakhs]

this game knows what i want

[teppywepy]

Slice and Di(c)e.

On a bit of a roguelike-game-that-kicks-my-ass fanart spree right now so expect more.

Also, it's possible this only makes sense in my head

[creeperman247]

[muttonsnacks]

Had such a stupid dinky ass synergy going on here but i pooped it up on fight 19 teehee

(explanation: the purple ↩️s give a reroll when rolled. the purple knives deal damage when theyre rolled. so i just roll for as long as luck will allow and lay the smackdown)

[itsbenedict]

folders!

hell yeah! you can double-click to go in them and they got go-up-a-folder buttons to go back.

and loading unit templates and editing their names and IDs! and i can basically copy and paste the field definitions for most other unit fields but it's late and i want to connect it to the sprite bank for image uploads next anyway.

with fields clickable to toggle making them inputs, input validation on the ID thing, and visibility toggles for when you have a lot of units. probably i need a tagging and filtering system on these too, because just manually hiding and showing won't help much when you've got like a hundred-plus unit templates in your game...

still, not bad for like an hour's work riding a productivity high in defiance of bedtime. i'ma sleep now

[pakop-the-backup]

From now on I'll share with you dumb things that I like about a game called Slice & Dice.

Just silly things that make me smile while I play it.

My favorite item <3

The wise barrel

And that's it (for now)

[masked-and-doomed]

Maybe Daan and Keiji are the same guy but just in diff death games ..

[greatwyrmgold]

I like this game a normal amount.

(The number above each difficulty mode is the number of times I've won at that difficulty.)

[czernos-art]

When the squad pulls up

[beamng-dot-shark]

I keep trying so hard to get into Destiny 2 but Warframe has my ass so spoiled D2 feels like a downgrade LMAO

[scientistknife]

I broke the game. 63 out of 2 rerolls and 272 out of 3 mana.

[trash-bin-ary]

Just bought a game and omg it’s bang the single player dice game