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.

Various Things (Apr 25 2025)

The soldier game has made progress but I’ve given up on finishing it by April. I’m at about 90% of cards (I’ve removed some I don’t like) and can probably finish them by next week. The cards still don’t have names and art and the game still doesn’t have a name, and because of that I don’t think the game will come out next week either. To follow up on last week’s post, I like having negative actions and money, but I decided against doing negative scouts. It just felt too weird and I don’t think I need it.

While working on cards, I briefly considered, should the 2 extra area cards always be in positions 2 and 3, and Camp and Road are always in positions 1 and 4? One advantage this change has is that areas can’t say things like “+1 troop from here” or “-1 troop from here” because if they’re in either area 1 or 4, those abilities may not do anything. And maybe some areas can take advantage of the fact that Camp and Road are always in the same place. In the end I decided I don’t need those effects, and that the variety in having the areas be in any place is better.

But also earlier this week I started toying with Relentless Waves again. I was trying to figure out if there could be a new enemy added, but I didn’t figure one out. An issue I kept running into is that any wave can have multiple of the same enemy. One idea that I thought had potential is a lightbulb; once you defeat it, the arena goes black and you can’t see any bullets for a few seconds. It may have been possible to make it work but it sounds frustrating and the code for it did not work out. Instead I just added some small changes and then released the update. 

First the game can now be played at 150% difficulty. I didn’t verify if it’s possible but it probably is. I tried 175% but it seemed way too hard, and anything above that is straight up impossible (plus super laggy). Then for the enemies, I added a visible timer to the phoenix when it’s defeated, that way it makes more sense when it comes back to life. I also changed the ghost to disappear faster after it shoots, now it actually spends some time invisible. Finally I changed how the UFO attacks. It used to just shoot bullets at you, but now it creates a circle that starts at its position, then grows larger. It’s to take advantage of the fact that it can move around and its circle will take over different positions.

While doing this though, I also wanted to experiment with something: translations. Since Relentless Waves has very little in-game text, this was the perfect time to try out translations. The system I have is that everything that needs to be translated is put into a text file, formatted like this:

Last Update=Last Updated: Apr 23, 2025

Language=Language

If someone wanted to translate the game to a different language, they’d take this file and replace everything on the right of the equal sign with whatever words. The game takes whatever language is selected and replaces all strings with it. I was going to google translate the game to Chinese and then include that file, but I didn’t have any fonts that rendered Chinese characters. This means that you can’t actually see the translation system work (there’s only the English file) but it does work (and if you download the project from my github you can test it). I don’t think I’m bringing this technology to the soldier game though, there’s a lot more words there (both for UI and the cards themselves).

Finally, while I almost never make games using flavor first, there is one idea I have, which is tarot cards. Basically the cards are all named after the 22 tarot cards, and they have 2 sets of instructions: a good and a reversed side. I have no idea what kind of game this would even lead to, and the flavor may just be no good (how would I make a card that represents the high priestess, for example), but it’s the only idea I’ve come up with.

Resources (Apr 18 2025)

Progress this week has resulted in a bunch of cards. Right now I’m at 40 cards and only need 10 more cards to be done. Plus I did all the UI stuff, like displaying the amount of coins and actions you have. I still need a rulebook, but the biggest missing things left are a name, card names, and art. I’ve put in literally 0 effort into names, they’re still just named letters and numbers. Considering I now have to come up with 50 names, it’s seeming unlikely that this game will be done by April but oh well. I'm even considering having the player cards not have art, just to give me less work to do.

After making a bunch of cards, there’s something I’ve learned about how resources work in this game. The resources in Battery RAM are cards, coins, batteries, crowns. The resources in this game are cards, actions, coins, troops, and scouts. Battery RAM’s resources are plentiful and you’re constantly getting more of them. This game has more resources, and yet those resources are actually harder to work with. Specifically when it comes to paying/losing them. 

Like with coins, their main use is to be used on Road (pay $4 for +1 troop) and it’s in every game. This means every other card that wants you to pay coins has to deal with the fact that every coin you spend on it is a coin that you didn’t spend on Road, and you have to spend coins on Road to win. Also since player cards give coins, I can’t really make “lose coin” effects there, as gaining money just to immediately lose it feels like a waste. I also can’t make area cards that make you lose money due to how the game puts areas into random spots. If I make an area that forces you to lose money, that means it can either be before Road or after it. If it’s before, you’ll lose the money before ever getting to spend it on Road, which is bad because that makes it much harder to advance troops and win the game. If it’s after, it will never do anything, as you can spend all your money on Road first.

Then with actions, there are 2 things that combine into one issue. First, you basically always have more cards than actions. Second, Camp lets you spend any amount of actions as you want. This has a similar issue with coins/Road in that you can spend all your actions before an area card can make you lose any actions. But this also means you rarely want to spend your actions on anything but playing cards, as you tend to have more cards that you get to play, and cards you can’t play don’t do anything.

Scouts have another issue. In Battery RAM it’s easy to get resources, as they’re always available in one of the 4 actions. And in this game, the game always gives a way to get cards and actions (Camp), money (playing cards), and troop advancements (Road). But there’s no guaranteed way to get scouts, it’s all up to the cards to generate them. This makes it hard to make ways to remove scouts, because if there’s no way to get scouts, they do nothing, and if someone else has a player card that gives them scouts and you don’t, you’re at a big disadvantage. 

There is a workaround solution I've found, which is to take advantage of the fact that these resources are just numbers. I can allow players to have negative coins and negative actions. You can’t “pay” 4 coins if you have < 3 coins (negative or positive) but you can “lose” 4 coins even if you have < 3 coins. This means I can have cards that make you lose actions, and they won’t look stupid if they’re placed after Camp. This could work with scouts too; having negative scouts in an area sounds weird but since it’s a video game it could be totally fine. One downside to this solution is that if you have a card like “+1 card per action you have” and you have -1 actions, what happens? The ruling would be you get +0 card but it’s best to avoid this situation as it’s confusing and I don’t want anyone to think it means you get -1 card.