On Playin Slayin: a Guide to...Slayin

(Formatting note: I wrote this guide in Google Drive and optimizing it for Blogger would be very unfortunately problematic. If you find it unreadable, please let me know in the comments, but otherwise I'm going to leave it as is.)

If you haven’t already played it, Slayin is a retro-styled arcade game ported over to the iOS. The controls are incredible simple. Your character always runs forward. You can change directions left and right and you have one action button. The action button does something different for each character, but it is essentially both an offensive and defensive move of some kind.

Slayin is really hard. It’s like retro-hard, where you die and die and die and swear to yourself that you are going to beat that damn level even if your fingers fall off as a result. And then they do and you still keep trying. It’s like, retro-hard.

So naturally I wanted help. I turned to Google for answers to certain questions I had while playing. When I searched, I was shocked to find that there was no information. In fact, what I found was a wealth of misinformation. I found advice like “always spend your gold” and “play cautiously, occupying one half of the screen.” This is awful advice if you have a clear picture of the game’s mechanics in mind. Let me shed some light on essential advice to getting to the depths of Slayin’s brutal levels.

1. Combos are gold - No,  really. I mean points are nice and all, but combos give you more gold. It is essential to build a 25+ kill combo and maintain it at all times. Buying certain items means buying up the prerequisite items and the costs add very quickly when combined with armor and potentially health that you might buy. You need a lot of gold early-mid game and that means you need combos. I find myself slayin only two to three enemies at a time so that new ones have time to spawn. If I slay everything on the screen at once it is likely I’ll lose my combo while waiting for new enemies to slay.
2. Gold, in addition to being gold, is also health - This is the other reason why combos are clutch. They keep you alive. The best way to keep your health up is to avoid getting hit...but collecting tons of gold is the next best thing. It can’t protect you from taking tons of hits all in a row, but it’ll keep you topped off.
3. Great as gold is, don’t lose your combo for it - You have to let some loot and gold disappear. There’s often a coin or a chalice that you’ll want to pick up but there are no enemies over there and you’ll lose your combo to get it. Leave it be. Even if you need the health from the coin, let it go. Your combo is worth more health over time than that one coin. I go out of my way to get the giant coins from treasure chests, though. I find they stick around long enough that it’s rare for me not to be able to get them.
4. You don’t always need completely full health - The price of health at the vendor goes up very quickly, and extra quickly for certain characters like the Archer (those with low defense, I suspect, but haven’t tested it). Try to be efficient with how much you buy. Use coins to fill your health and leave a little room for that at the end of your health bar when buying health.
5. Some weapons and abilities are worthless - Just a fact of life in any game. Some of the equipment, units, etc in any game are not worth using. The Knight has a lot of good equipment options in my opinion, but the Wizard and Ninja have some utterly pointless ones. Ice spells in particular, all of them, are terrible. They freeze enemies instead of killing them. The frozen enemies still hurt you if you touch them and they unfreeze soon after. Just avoid stuff that you figure out sucks. So far the things I don’t like to use are those ice spells and any of the Ninja skills except the Shuriken.
6. Horizontal attacks are the best attacks - This is common sense considering that enemies line up along the stage in rows. If you launch a lightning ball across the board it clears out all the ground enemies in that direction. Remember that horizontal doesn’t just mean along the ground. The reason the Shuriken is so good for the Ninja is that it clears out all the air enemies. The Archer’s bounce arrow essentially does both jobs, flying up into the air and then plowing through enemies in a line on the ground.
7. Vertical attacks are also the best attacks - Or rather, they are essential because you need to be able to kill enemies in the air and if your air attack has some horizontal momentum to it, all the better. Again, this is one of the Archer’s greatest strengths. His arrow flies in a parabola, killing a couple air enemies and landing on guys on the ground that are out of the reach of his slide.
8. Master the back and forth shuffle - Your character is always moving forward, so the only way to stay in one place is to run back and forth. You have to do this to time attacks well. It matters a lot with the Archer and Wizard who have some down time between attacks.
9. Strategize your upgrade purchases - You don’t have to spend all gold immediately to get upgrades like many guides suggest. In fact, if you don’t plan out what you are buying and when you might find you don’t have enough when it matters. I’m sorry to say I haven’t got the upgrades progression figured out, but they seem to be linear. They show you three--if you buy the second one you’ll see two more the next time you visit the vendor. But sometimes the list updates on its own. The Wizard can buy the 80gold spell and then wait until the ice spells disappear on their own, skipping to the lightning ball, for example. I wish I describe a more concrete pattern, but you should be aware that there is one.
10. Play the whole board - Many guides advise sticking to one side of the stage and keeping it clear. I tend to start at one end and gradually work my away across the board. Then I get to the other side and having collected all the gold and loot, I edge my way back to the other side where more gold and loot are undoubtedly waiting. Playing only half the board makes comboing difficult because you only have access to about half of the enemies and…
11. Killing fast means leveling fast - Why does it matter what level you are? Because your level determines what enemies spawn and when the stage ends. If a certain enemy tends to  give you a hard time, kill a lot of enemies as quickly as possible and it will stop spawning. I do this most often when I fight spiked walls (really try not to get in a jump/attack/evade cycle that has your jump/attack/evade ending just as the walls crash in since that can get you killed very quickly).
12. The Dragon Scale item doesn’t help at all with high scores - Every guide I’ve seen talks about how you need to get the Dragon Scale ASAP. I don’t know if it might have been patched since those posts were put up, but don’t bother if your goal is to get a high score. It resets all your points and in most cases won’t be worth it. To get a really great score, you have to just play awesomely. The only times I use the scale are to try and clear a quest that I’ve almost finished or to just play more continuously/further in the game.

Character specific notes:

The Knight:

The Knight is pretty good all around and is easy to get accustomed to. Get used to his jump so you don’t bump your head on enemies. Jump often because the other way the Knight frequently takes damage is enemies biting his ankles as they spawn underneath him. Oh, armor is good. Get armor. But some guides advise getting armor every time it is available. You don’t have to, especially if you don’t get hit a lot. But the price of armor does go up after the Death Worm boss, so at the very least get it half-way through that stage.

His weapons:

The Thief Knife:

It’s good because it boosts your luck which gives you more coin and loot drops. That means more health, more points and more gold to shop with. It is short and that means you take more damage, but to a degree the extra gold makes up for this. Still, you have to be proficient in not taking a lot of hits.

The series of weapons with long reach:

There are several of these and the more expensive they are the better they perform. The weapon prereqs come into play, but I have found you can skip the Bone Cleaver and Silver Sword if you buy the Thief Knife, wait a while and then buy the Broad Sword. That unlocks the Lance for the least amount of gold possible if I’m not mistaken.

The speed weapons:

These are great because the speed lets you play very aggressively which helps you keep up combos and clear the levels quickly. I think I might have noticed a bug where if you buy the upgraded armor enchantment while using these weapons then it makes you slower. I’ll have to try that again to test it out.

The Wizard:

She is really powerful and easy to use. Her action makes her invincible and kills what she touches. While not attacking she charges a spell if you have an active one equipped.

Various non-obvious notes:

Ice spells are worthless because they don’t kill enemies. Dancing Flame is amazing, but only in the first half of the game. The higher the level of your spell, the taller your tornado attack gets. There is a limit as to how tall you need your tornado to be. I think the best spell is Lightning Ball because it is cheap, gives you a tornado tall enough to kill almost all air enemies all the time and wipes everything in front of you on the ground when cast. This was the first configuration that I beat the game with. I buy Lightning Ball about half-way through Peloria’s stage because on that level there are a lot of air enemies which makes it difficult to combo with Dancing Flame.

The Archer:

He is a monster in a man’s skin. I love this character because once he gets a few armor upgrades (allowing his arrows to kill multiple targets), his gameplay becomes very technically satisfying. I play him dashing back and forth around the middle of the board and launching arrows toward the board edges. Firing your arrow with perfect timing at the end of your slide results in a golden arrow that doesn’t disappear due to striking enemies. Enemies hit by it always drop coins of a grade 1 higher than your combo allows. For example, with no combo, you will get gold +2 coins. With a 25 kill combo, you will get +3 coins from enemies struck by the golden arrow. It adds a layer of depth to the character, which is fun, but it also allows you to get more coins and thus survive longer.

Arrows:

I always buy the basic arrow because comboing with the Archer using only the slide in unbearable. Then I get the first armor upgrade and the Bounce Arrow after that. Then the rest of the armors and that’s it except for health. I have found the other arrows to be more difficult to use and/or obtain. I like the Light Arrow for example, but getting it means throwing a lot of gold away to unlock it. The bounce arrow, by contrast, is cheap and kills enemies in the air and then in a row on the ground. It’s essentially doing the same job as the Wizard’s Lightning Ball. I really only use the other arrows to complete quests specific to them.

Knave:

I have little experience with the Knave, but I have noticed his jump vector is different from the Knight. For example, getting over the Minotaur boss is harder. Killing enemies in the air requires different timing as well. As with the Thief Knife for the Knight, I find that the Knave’s high luck means you can get a lot of coins which helps keep you alive.

Ninja:

The Ninja has a lot of attacks that I found difficult to use. In my uninformed (I haven’t used her a whole lot) opinion, the Shuriken might be the best weapon, but some of the others are fun. I think the biggest challenge is learning to evade with her. She’s not invulnerable for the whole duration of her jump, but it seems like there might be some frames in there where she can’t be hurt. I’d have to test it more to say anything useful about it. I do know, however, that I often take damage coming down from it.

Tamer:

I played the Tamer. It doesn’t get lamer.

I don’t even understand how he kills airborne enemies. Maybe he’s neat if you figure him out, but I have yet to.

Slayin is a surprisingly deep game considering there are only three buttons and a few upgrades. When I first picked it up I had the impression I would mess with it until I got over the iOS app addiction phase, but I've found that there is a lot of satisfying challenge buried within. I hope this woefully incomplete guide will give you the edge you need to SLAY.

If you have any comments, specific questions or advice to add to this, please post them in the comments!

Making Mistakes So You Don't Have To: On Using Liquid Mask

I bought this product on impulse, barely even knowing what it was for. I mean, I knew from the name, but I didn't know such a thing existed so it was hard for me to imagine how it was used. Well, falling back on ultimate wisdom and immaculate technique, obviously the thing to do was jump in without tests and use it on a model I put hours and hours of work into converting =D Okay, maybe that wasn't so wise hehe. It did turn out fine, but more experience or research might have prepared me for some of this substance's unique characteristics. This is to be the first of many tutorials/reviews/articles where I try to help you avoid the mistakes I've made myself.

Like the bottle says, Liquid Mask is a resin. Having not looked up anything whatsoever about liquid resin, I had no idea what it would be like once I dropped some onto my palette. I dropped out a generous amount, maybe 7-10 drops and went to apply it with a generic crappy brush I got at a 100 yen shop. I don't even know if I got my brush onto my Wave Serpent's LEDs (no pics really, except in the background of the one up top) before the bristles were ruined. NEVER use a good brush with this stuff. I was damn close to using my favorite (a Loeb sable, best I've ever used) but thought better of it just in time. The Liquid Mask starts to congeal almost immediately when exposed to the air. It becomes a lot like rubber cement. This had my brush gunked up, but I spread the bristles wide and was able to use it like a tiny rubber spatula.

When I did the LEDs I had no real idea how much I needed to apply. As with any mask, all you need to do is cover the thing being masked. The thickness doesn't really matter. But I didn't know anything about this stuff's adhesion or durability. Worried that it might scratch off in handling, I applied a decently thick coat. This caused trouble when it pooled at the bottom of the LED, where it contacts the Serpent hull. Okay, I thought, no problem. I'll just scratch it off there when it dries. Yeah...no. When it dries it gets so rubbery that it is almost impossible to cut without tearing or peeling what you need to remain. I feel like preventing it from pooling in the first place is the best option, but I haven't gotten a chance to try that out.

Here you can see some canopies I did. The one on the left has already been peeled and the one on the right has paint covering the resin. In the picture below you can see from the clear bottom what the resin looks like when dried. Peeling is easy enough. I do it with a tooth pick. Incidentally, I also applied these with toothpicks. But as with the brush they get gunked up quickly and need to be replaced because they stop sliding across the plastic.

Next time I do canopies this way I am going to remember to coat the bottom side too. I spray my primer and these windows look a little foggy because they weren't masked on the bottom side. Although on second thought, since the bottom doesn't need to be done precisely at all and because it curves gradually, tape would work just as well.

Because of the way the resin pools in crevices, I found that I had to go back and black line these anyway. I was hoping doing this would save me from having to be careful when painting around the clear plastic, but it couldn't be avoided this time around. I'd like to try again, redoing parts that pool up too much. If you try this stuff, don't worry about it if you redo parts. It peels easy and leaves no residue. It doesn't rework well at all, so try to get it right while it's still wet.

How would I rate this product after a couple small projects? Only above average considering what a pain in the butt it is to apply. If I could cut it with a hobby knife to clean it up I'd love the stuff, but as is I only like it. The simple fact is that it does something you can't do with tape: mask shapes with steep curvature. It was amazing on my LEDs where I had to spray the hull, but on small canopies that I was painting by brush, I don't know that it saved me any time at all. If you paint with an airbrush it may hold some value to you. On the other hand, Vallejo products are so cheap that it's easy to think "well, I'd rather have it than not...just in case." Dangerous thinking. That's how I've come to have a paint collection that's almost bigger than my model collection.

Have you used any products like this? Were they anything like this one? How well did they work for you?

Zen and the Art of Airbrush Maintenance: Oh you, O-rings!

Iwata HP-BH. Excellent for the scale of our hobby,
though I sometimes wish for a bigger color cup.

I want to talk about o-rings. They are very important to the operation of airbrushes. Simply put, o-rings are there to make a seal. They block air and/or fluids from flowing between parts at a joint. Unlike the stainless steel parts of your airbrush, they do not hold up well when exposed to organic solvents and other cleaning agents. Being made out of rubber, under the wrong conditions they can corrode or maybe swell.

Luckily for me I haven't had any problems like these (yet). The problem I had recently was pretty simple, but figuring that out took a good deal Googling and reading. Basically, the trigger was sticking which meant air was continually flowing through the valve. There are a two most likely causes for this. One could be that the o-ring is swollen and squeezing the piston. That could prevent the control spring from returning the button to the off position.

In the image above, the control spring is inside that detached piece, which is the air valve set. Air flows through this when the piston, visible as a silver circle in that hole just below my index finger, compresses the pin at the top of the valve set. The piston o-ring is barely visible around the piston there.

Disassembled airbrush with the top of the piston visible through the trigger slot.

The other cause, the one that I had trouble with, is that the o-ring could need lubricant. If there is too much friction between the piston and the o-ring, it could cause the same problem as the situation I described above.

Here you can see the o-ring and the piston separately.

From what I have read, you have to be incredibly sparing in how much you apply. Using too much could result in getting oil all throughout the air passages. That could contaminate your work later on when you spray. I used a toothpick and a really tiny kind of Q-tip I buy from a local hobby shop. Apparently you also need to avoid some oils that can damage the rubber. Iwata has a specialty lubricant of their own, but as with most specialty goods I expected my local hardware store would sell a product in some ridiculous quantity I could never use up. Probably 90% cheaper than the brand name one too.

What I found was a huge tube of lithium grease. I wasn't sure that the recommended lubricant, Medea Superlube, was a lithium grease so I had to Google until I found the material safety data sheet (the MSDS). Be sure to look around for yourself if you want to use an off-brand as different companies use o-rings made of different materials.

This post is mostly about the o-ring that was giving me trouble, but there is another important o-ring in my model (probably in all of them, I'd think) and it is the one that creates a seal around the needle. I couldn't get a picture of it, but it is just behind the color cup. That one also needs to be lubricated as you don't want friction between it and the needle. I wasn't having any problems with that one, but I went ahead and greased it anyway while I was at it.

When I finished, I sprayed two shades of purple over the course of an afternoon and didn't have any more issues with the trigger. I'll post more about these sorts of topics, but it'll be most likely if I have a problem with some of my hardware. Let's hope that's not the case!

Modeling Tutorial: Rangers in Cover

Purpose
The goal of this conversion is to make a unit of Rangers themed on their use of cover.  Some of the postures available in the Ranger box are more suitable to the conversion and have benefited more from it.  Others will be left more simple.  The intent is to balance unique addition vs. visible miniature detail.  Cover will consist of a wooden fence, a wooden fence with barbed wire, a tree and tall grass.

Tools Used

Hobby Knife
Needle nose pliers
Tweezers (2)
Frayed copper wire
Basing sand (large grain)
Modeling tool for green stuff
The needle of a compass for detailing the green stuff (though I've since bought a tool for that)
Pinning tools (vice and paper clip)
Wire cutters
Excess sprue plastic
Modeling tall grass flock
Liquid super glue
Scissors

Part 1 (a) - Wooden fences

First, find some trash sprue that is roughly the shape you want to make the fence in. Use a sharp hobby blade to shave it down. This will give a natural, fence-like texture.

Make notches where the pieces will glue together. If need be you can putty them to clean them up later. I considered dental floss as binding at the intersections, but it was too late at that point.  Maybe next time.

The assembled fences.

Part 1 (b) - Barbed wire

Frayed copper wire that we will use.  First, make a long one by twisting two frays together.  I use pliers to hold them at the point where they're twisting.  Move the pliers as you twist so you don't overstress one point and break the wire.

Wrap and glue like so.

Now wrap very short segments onto the long double one.  It's okay if they're too long, you can trim it (pic below).  You'll need two of these for each barb in order to make it look right.  Tying these on is where the pliers and tweezers come in handy.

Trimming the barbs.  I used needle nose pliers to hold the barb where I want to cut it, then pressed against the pliers for leverage.  Be careful though, it's easy to slip and cut yourself doing this (luckily that was learned the easy way).

Both fences completed.

Part 2 - Tree!


Making this tree took a good deal of stop-and-go putty work. I tried to balance it's size for such a small base.  The segment of frayed wire I used was 12cm long. I then split it at the top for 2 main boughs and trimmed them to my own taste. I glued the excess to the point where they split so I would have 2 more boughs without wasting more wire (less \ spent on materials is more spent on figs!)

For durability, I drilled through the base and
bent the tree trunk into it with pliers.

Many double and triple twists for smaller branches.

Glue twists in place before sculpting.

The entire tree will be coated with green stuff for durability.  Trees can be made from just wire, but I don't trust them not to break or flake off my paint when they bend. I also don't like textures that are easily seen for what they are. I want stuff to look believable.











Here is what not to do. I tried to put a thin layer on the wire and then carve into the GS with a sculpting tool in order to get a bark-like texture. The effect I got was horrible. It looked like a cactus and not even a good one at that. Not using enough GS means you don't have enough material to give the sculpt depth and you can't exaggerate any of the shapes.

Close up of exaggerated shapes. Work was done in stages,
sculpting one area and letting it dry so as to not ruin previously done putty.

Here you can see how I wasn't shy with the

amount of GS I used. When I detailed the limbs, I

failed to take pictures but the final pictures give an solid idea of what I did.  I let the GS cure  a little bit (probably less than most people do, as it was still quite pliable).  Then I used the end of a math compass to poke lines in wood patterns.  Again, exaggerate.  You don't have to draw too many lines because the brain will fill in the blanks as long as the texture looks about right.

Bonus! A hood!

I made this hood because I already had another unit with this same model in it. I like that figure, so I wanted this guy to look a little different. The hood was made with a small thin patch of green stuff that I draped over his head and pushed into shape.

Grass

This is a bag of tall grass I bought in the model train section of a handicraft store. There may be better materials for getting this effect, but this is what I have used so far. It is a hassle to handle the way it comes in the bag. The strands get every where and getting them all going in the right direction takes a lot of patience.

Glue a lock of the grass at one end. I used liquid super
glue this time, but since then I have been using regular
 white PVA glue. It takes longer, but is easier to work with.

Along the lock of grass, place glue at intervals
approximately as long as the tufts you are looking
to make. Cut the grass when dry.

Finally, use a very, very small amount of super glue to bend the grass for wind effects. I feel that this was the strong point of my method, but that overall I was dissatisfied with the grass. I had made many tufts of grass. Even though grass does grow like that in nature, it is hard to achieve an effect like the models are wading through grass this way. Then there is also the practical problem that if you achieve that look, you might as well only build the top half of the model because you won't see the bottom. If you like the figures you have and want to see them, it is something of a waste.

A few words of caution:

The tree took a lot of time and a lot of green stuff.  It probably added $4 in materials and it took like a week of daily here-and-there work to get it done.  I much prefer it's look to the wire trees though.

After using super glue on the grass for this unit I used regular PVA glue on a different one. That time I didn't do wind effects, but I expect there is a way to do that with glue that isn't as caustic as super glue. Doing the grass in this tutorial was not particularly good for the skin on my fingers, to put it lightly. Be careful if you try it this way.



The painted conversion:

The whole crew together.

The two guys with fences.

"There's nothing creepy about watching...just a little."

"What do you mean you can see me hiding back here?!"

Thankfully my painting has improved since I made these guys some years ago, but I still like the basing and I still use some of the things I learned from making these guys.

Hope this is helpful. Thanks for having a look! Cheers!