Progressing to the End (May 16 2025)

The soldier game is now content complete, I have all 60 cards done. I also have the rulebook done, and now all that's left is a name for the game, some card art, and a website page. Hopefully this game will be out next week, which will be a relief as I originally thought this game would've been done by April.

The last Area card was the trickiest one. Since I already had enough of the things I needed (+cards, +actions, +coins, +troops, +scouts), what else was there to do? The alternative was to find something super exotic, even though those cards are extra hard to think of and to program. I spent days trying to get something. I considered “give all your cards, actions, and coins to the player to your left” but was worried that meant you spend the whole game doing nothing, in fear of the other player profiting. I also considered “remove one of your troops from the game” but it didn’t sound that interesting, it just makes the game shorter. I also didn’t like “do any other Area except for Camp” as there were only 2 other options: Road and the other special Area.

Finally I landed on doing the instructions on an Area that changes. Normally the other Areas that don’t get used each game would just be in the deck, doing nothing. Now the top card of that deck is revealed, and this Area would make you do the instructions on that Area. After it’s done, you put that card on the bottom of the deck, and the next round there’ll be a different Area on top of the deck. It has to be revealed the entire time because it didn’t sound fun for the bonus Area to be a complete surprise. This was the idea I went with, except it required a lot more programming work than the average card that needed manual programming, as I also needed to add custom UI to let you right click the top Area.

This was a fun card to do, except there was absolutely no way this would be possible with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets help a lot with making these kinds of card games, but it does have its limits. Even though about 57% of the cards in the game could be handled just by spreadsheets, I wonder if having spreadsheets handle card instructions is actually the right move anymore. Considering I still have to program all the card effects (like +Cards) in the first place, maybe spreadsheets don’t actually save too much time after all. Also now I have an AI that tries to do math, and this is inconvenient with spreadsheets. 

But every time I get doubtful about spreadsheets, I still have to keep in mind that Randomly Generated RPG was a slam dunk for spreadsheets. That’s a game that would’ve been way more inconvenient if I had to program everything manually. Partially because I kept replacing abilities, but also because the spreadsheets for it have more support. What I mean is, it includes things like being able to customize which character(s) an ability can/will target. This makes the spreadsheets much more flexible and more powerful, and can handle 100+ abilities. All of this is to say, while spreadsheets may one day be useful again, it’ll require more setup behind it to be more usable.

But speaking of Randomly Generated RPG, I decided to do the daily challenges update for it. I said I was going to do it next month but it didn’t actually take too much time. To do this I had to splice together the prototype I did for daily games, and the code for choosing what Areas you play with in the soldier game. The old code was actually pretty bad, it generated the players on the title screen so their abilities can be displayed for the Play Game button. But now I just have the players be generated at the start of the battle scene, where you select their abilities.

Usually it’s a mistake to do more work on that game because I feel like changing a bunch of stuff. Fortunately I didn’t feel the need to do that this time. I did end up tweaking the numbers on a few player abilities. The main thing being, since Wizard attacks multiple enemies at once, they’re the one where stat changes are the most scary. Giving Knight +2 power is one thing; giving Wizard +2 power is another, as that +2 is +2 against multiple enemies. Which is why I decided to nerf some of their abilities, as I don’t want them immediately killing 1-star enemies with only one attack.

Lastly I made a late change to the character UI. I didn’t have a place to put modifications to character stats like power and speed, I just hid it behind right clicking. But that didn’t seem great, and now I display that stuff below the text listing the character’s position and emotion. It’s a bit small but it’s way better than having nothing at all.

Daily Games (May 09 2025)

Last week, the soldier game was at 6 cards remaining. Now the game has 4 cards remaining. This doesn’t mean I spent an entire week just to come up with 2 cards, it just meant a few other cards died along the way. Otherwise there isn’t much to report, as there still isn’t any art or name or rulebook.

One day I got an idea in my mind: what if I had a game that updated every single day? Kind of like NYT Connections, or Temple Gates Games Dominion. Every day the game generates a new puzzle/kingdom that’s the same for everyone. It's a pretty easy way to get engagement, people can talk about the game every single day. I took the time to prototype this idea of a new thing every day and it worked out. I can have the RNG seed set to the current day in UTC, and it won’t change until another day passes. I even have the code be able to output how long it’ll take before the RNG seed will change.

I was going to make a quick word puzzle game to showcase this discovery, but have struggled with an idea for it. My first thought was a game where the game picks a word and then adds in random letters. Your goal is to select the wrong letters until you figure out a word, but this has the issue of, what if you find a word that wasn’t intended? My other thought is to do Cards of Fortune again, but it didn’t seem too exciting to make the same game again. Anyways, unless a great idea comes by I may not end up making a word game after all (especially since I should first finish the soldier game by the end of this month).

Instead, where else can I use this discovery? A good choice is Randomly Generated RPG: every day player abilities and enemies are predetermined, and maybe some cheats/challenges are forced on. It seems great except that I’ll have to first rewrite how players and enemies are generated. Also I never added in a way for you to manually select player abilities. The reason I never did it originally was because the game was always intended to be random, but maybe I should just do it anyway. Plus if I’m already having to rewrite how abilities get randomly selected, it should allow this functionality as well. Again I’ll get to this in a month from now.

Game Expansion (May 02 2025)

Since I’ve already delayed the soldier game, I’ve decided to delay it from mid-May to end of May. The original plan was 30 player cards and 20 area cards. Now the plan is 35 player cards and 25 area cards, adding 10 more cards. After more work this week, I only need 6 more cards to be content complete. Except that when trying to make more cards at this point, the ideas remaining are more pinched and are harder to keep distinct from other cards. I’m also pretty sure I’ll commit to not getting art for player cards, it’ll just be the areas.

In order to generate more cards at this point, I’ve decided to break a rule: a few cards now get to do things beyond this turn. I decided against doing any permanent abilities like in Temporum, but I decided to allow a few cards to do things until the next Camp. For example, cards can give you guaranteed control over an area, or force you to ignore all other areas. What makes these enticing is that they’re effects that can’t be done through other means, and I think it’s worth it.

Another thing I learned while working on cards is that coins are weird. Battery RAM can give you lots of coins because they’re only one part in winning. You need to spend coins and cards to play a card for crowns. This game, you just need to spend coins to advance troops. This has 2 consequences. Large amounts of +Troops is already scary because that bonus directly translates to winning the game, but since coins is all that’s needed to advance troops, that means large amounts of +Coins is also scary. But another thing is that “+4 Coins” is literally a roundabout way of saying “+1 Troop” due to Road. This means that I can’t really do large amounts of +Coins, as they could just be +Troops. I can still do large amounts of +Coins if it’s through a formula (“+2 Coin per area you control”) as it can fluctuate between +2 and +4, but if a reward is always +4 Coins, it may as well be +1 Troop.

Looking back at the games I made in the past year, almost all of them involved math. It’s a great tool and I learned a lot, but also I’d like to take a break from it. Math isn’t at all necessary for making a fun game. But also I want to try making more games that don’t need much balancing, such as All Shapes and Sizes and Relentless Waves (they needed some balancing, but far less). But a game without a need for balancing has to be something where you can’t really complain about something being too strong or weak. All Shapes and Sizes is the example here, it makes no sense to say that one of the shapes is too strong or anything.

But while that game is still in the distant future, I still want to go back to Relentless Waves. I wonder if I can spice it up with some extra cheats and challenges, things that I can’t do with enemies. I could also make official levels with predetermined enemies instead of having only random ones, which could act as a tutorial. It sounds fun as a project for the future.