Quick Report (Apr 11 2025)

The post for this week will be very short as not much has happened. I fixed the AI bugs from last week and it took me 4 days to figure everything out. In the end the code is much better but debugging was frustrating as the code got into infinite loops, and figuring out where and why exactly it went infinite was difficult. Right now I'm 40% done with the cards and areas. There's still work needed in other areas though like the UI (currently there's no way to see how much money anyone has). With all of this, and including the fact that I need art for everything, means my goal of finishing this game by the end of April may be tough. If things go really well over the next week it could be possible, but if not it may come out in May instead.

For the original Battery Game I had spreadsheets handle choose one effects and if else effects. It was messy but it happened. For Battery RAM I gave up on that because I could manually program those effects and it was way easier. I briefly wondered, is it possible to actually make that work in a spreadsheet? Without looking at it too hard it's probably possible, but probably not worth the effort, especially since there are so many more urgent things to fix.

Episode 3 (Apr 04 2025)

I decided to go back and add a card gallery to Battery RAM. I don’t think I’m going to do that for my other card games though, they’re pretty old and don’t have as many cards. But also while working on the Soldier game I found some pretty awful bugs that are also still in Battery RAM that I also had to fix.

Speaking of the Soldier game, progress has slowed down a bit. I wanted the AI to be a bit smarter by seeing ahead. Since all areas resolve in a predetermined order, I want the AI to simulate those areas as well. Specifically, simulate areas that aren’t Camp (which gives +2 Cards +2 Actions and lets you play cards), as Camp is the one where you make the most decisions. This way the AI can figure out exactly what areas it should put its troops and scouts in, as some areas will care about that. So far this has been a struggle though, as right now the code infinite loops and crashes. I’m still working through it but after that I’ll be able to just focus on making cards.

Another thing that has slowed down my progress is that at midnight April 1st, there was a new update for The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. Episode 3 came out, and I wanted to play through it at launch. I ended up playing it from 12am to 6:30am, and reached the 1st ending at around 5am. During the 2nd ending I got stuck on a puzzle and decided to take a nap…for 3 hours. After that, I ate food and then continued playing, reaching the other ending at around 4:30pm.

This is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to taking an all nighter. The most I’ve ever pushed it was like 3am maybe. Somehow I didn’t feel super tired for most of the day. It was only at around 6pm that I started feeling sleepy. This is also something that I can only get away with while living by myself, as I doubt I can play the game with audio out loud while someone else is sleeping.

Anyways episode 3 was really good. It had a lot of content and was worth the wait. There were a lot more puzzles that I expected, and a few of them were a struggle. There was over a year gap between episode 2 and 3, except that since I only played the game a few months ago the wait wasn’t as long for me. As mentioned last time though, the game does have a lot of swearing (looking through the game script, there’s now over 400 f-bombs) and dark themes (no joke, there’s a rape scene), which means I can’t recommend it for everyone. But if you can handle it, it’s on sale right now.

New Project (Mar 28 2025)

Fortress Siege is now released on itch.io and this website. I like how it turned out, except in an ideal world it would be simultaneous. One thing I thought of when making the last few cards was to make token troops. Basically a troop would create other troops that have no abilities, they just attack. In the end I decided against it because I didn’t need it especially and it would have some other issues to figure out (like what if it gets returned to your hand, how does that work). Another thing is that the game doesn’t do any of the classic card tricks that lots of card games do, such as making players discard, or regaining cards from a discard pile. Even though those cards could’ve easily been made, all the cards were instead related to the game’s core mechanics.

But now onto my next game. I had 2 ideas I described in the past: the map game where you put buildings on a shared map, or the game about advancing troops and placing scouts into different areas. One advantage of the first game is that it should be much easier to make, it’s a much simpler game in concept. But I found the second game more exciting and I’m working on that one first.

Now that I’m working on this game, I can now explain more of my plans. Each game there is one Area card randomly assigned to each of the 4 areas. Two of them are the same each game: “+2 Cards +2 Plays, you may play cards” and “Any amount of times: You may pay $4 to advance 1 troop.” (Yes originally it was +1 Card +1 Play but I bumped it up to speed up the game.) The other 2 will be different each game. Players resolve the 4 areas in order, and will continue to play that loop until someone gets all their troops into the final area.

This game will also include the AI from Fortress Siege. But since this is a different turn-based game I had to change some things. The main issue is, it can’t literally do its turn in the background while you take your turn. You shouldn’t be able to know what the AI does on their turn, and the AI shouldn’t be able to know what you do on your turn. Right now I have the AI calculate its turn at the very start, but it doesn’t perform its turn until you finish your turn. It may look suspicious (maybe to the player it looks like it did its turn after seeing you turn) but for now I’m going to have to ignore that.

Then there’s the question of, should I use spreadsheets for this game? For Fortress Siege I still feel it was correct to not use spreadsheets. I made very few cards that would’ve made sense with spreadsheets, which is one big advantage, I do have more free will to make weird cards if I’m not restricted in that way. Spreadsheets still have huge advantages though, like it was amazing that Randomly Generated RPG could have 150+ abilities all working with spreadsheets. Really it’s just, what % of cards do I expect will be doable with spreadsheets? For Battery RAM it was over 50%, which felt reasonable. For this game probably a similar % too. But for sure if it’s 40% or way less (like Fortress Siege) then I may as well just code everything myself.

Finally on tuesday this week there was a power outage in the area. Unlike the one in November it was shorter (only a few hours) and wasn’t in cold season which meant it wasn’t as bad (there were no worries of my computer and laptop running out of power), but still it meant I couldn’t get work done on any games which was bad. I spent 4 hours just listening to music.