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Card Counting (Mar 21 2025)

    For some reason I never added this to my previous card games, but I added a card gallery to Fortress Siege. I say “for some reason” because it really wasn’t that hard, most of it was just me using code from Randomly Generated RPG. Anyways it’s in and any future games should also have it.


    While working on cards I decided to get rid of status effects. The ones I had are stunned (skips next attack) and shielded (can’t lose power or health). They are powerful and I didn’t come up with enough effects to justify using them. Plus they add complexity and I don’t need that complexity for this game.


    Last week I was planning on only doing 40 cards, but I now have 42. Now my plan for this last week is to go up to 45 cards, replace some placeholder names, and then be done with the game. A game with 45 different ideas in it seems like a pretty good number. Some data points: 


    Flower Draft has 30 cards.

    Antiquitus has 4 tiles you pick up + 2 event tiles + 36 placards = 42 ideas. 

    Battery RAM has 30 robots + 15 events = 45 ideas. 

    Dominion Rising Sun: 25 cards + 10 events + 15 prophecies = 50 ideas 


    Of course, just having a bunch of ideas isn’t the end all be all. I still like Relentless Waves even though it only has 10 ideas (the enemies), and I still like Mutating Forest even though it really only has 12 explorers (the paths don’t count as ideas). It just feels good to make a game with tons of ideas in it though.


    Temporum has 30 cards + 48 zones = 78 ideas. 

    Moon Colony Bloodbath has 45 buildings + 20 robots + 25 twists = 90 ideas. 

    Randomly Generated RPG with 63 player abilities + 92 enemy abilities = 155 ideas. 


    I also have notes on 2 dreams I had, time to see if I can recall them. The first one is apparently some real life theme park based on Mario Kart, where you can go racing on tracks. The main thing I remember is that there was an underwater track, and it was very slow. The experience was also miserable, by the end of the race I was coughing and spitting out water. After doing all the tracks I and another person agreed that the underwater one was by far the worst one.


    The second one I remember more of. It was a school field trip where everyone was staying at a hotel. I got my room key and watched everyone else check out their rooms. Meanwhile I struggled to find my room, before I was told that it was hidden away. It turns out my room was actually quite large and looked like a palace, which was great (plus I had no roommate). But the actual purpose of this school trip was to perform in a choir (why I was in the choir I have no idea why). While on a lunch break I realized that my phone was nearly dead and my charger was up in my room, but I wasn’t allowed to go there. Instead I had to sneak up there using some very narrow stairways. It took so long to get back up there that when I got my phone charger, I had missed the choir completely.

    Quick Recap (Mar 14 2025)

      This week’s post will be shorter compared to some of the previous posts, as not much has really been going on.


      I updated Antiquitus, Mutating Forest, and Slow and Steady to be playable on itch.io now. It wasn’t too hard to do. The main thing is that it’s so much more convenient if you can play the game on the web page instead of having to download it to your computer (and if you’re on Mac you have to run the application through the itch app instead to get it to work). Updating Chromatacombs may be trickier, as it’s a larger game. Another issue is that it’s an action game, which means I’d have to make sure it’s not too laggy on webgl, as that would be really bad. Any other games (tier 3 and below) I’m not going to feel the need to update.


      I’ve added a new page to the website called Writings. This will contain any game design topics that I’ve written about in some polished manner. Currently it has a link to the slideshow I made about math in Temporum. I don’t know if I’ll ever write any more like that, but it seems good to put that one somewhere easily accessible. If I did do another one, the most obvious candidate to polish up would be the war between simultaneous games and consecutive turn games, which I’ve written about in a previous post.


      As for the game I’m working on, I think it will be able to come out by the end of the month. I was going to go for 50 cards but now I think it’ll just be 40. I’m at 34 cards right now and I don’t think I’ll need to go to 50, as you’re not building a deck from scratch anyways. As for naming the game, I think I’ll commit to the idea of 2 fortresses attacking each other, which means the name should suggest that somehow.


      Finally here’s a dream I remember. For some reason a class I was in had students deliver a presentation on a zombie from Plants vs Zombies. I was assigned to do a presentation on the Flag Zombie, and I had not much idea what I could even talk about there. But also for some reason another student was also assigned that same zombie and was presenting before me, which meant I now had to talk about something that they didn’t talk about. I don’t remember what I actually ended up talking about though.

      Retheme Work (Mar 07 2025)

        The game concept of 2 robots gaining weapons and fighting each other. It sounds great, except that applying it to this game has been harder than expected. Naming the weapons is hard without them all sounding super similar, and I got nothing for the environments. Plus finding art would be hard too. Instead I gave up and went for something more basic: the players are 2 fortresses fighting each other with troops. Art should be somewhat easier as they can be from Randomly Generated RPG.


        Renaming all (25) cards for this has been annoying too though. For the environments I decided that they’ll be auras of some kind, which sort of makes sense why there can only be one aura per row. I haven’t gathered any art yet though. It’s fairly annoying that everything will need art though. For the Randomly Generated RPG update, most of the changes were in the abilities, which don’t need new art (I had to get a couple new pieces of art for some renamed enemies, but it was like 3 at most). This game though, every card needs art.


        Last week I got a new idea for a game and shelved it for the future. I made the same mistake and came up with another new game idea. It’s another 2-player game where you place buildings on a shared map. Each turn, you add a building of your color, then you play a card that gives you points depending on where the buildings are, such as “+$1 per building in a column.” After both players empty their hand, the game ends. If expanded upon the buildings can do different things when placed/run. The only downside is that it can’t really be simultaneous, as what if both players place a building in the same spot? Anyways it sounds like a nice concept for a game.  


        I’ve also worked out a new way to draw cards. This would be used in a game like Battery RAM, where there’s only 1 deck of cards that players draw from. Instead of directly drawing cards from that deck, each player has their own mini deck of 12 or so cards. In between turns, any cards you discarded get sent to the master discard pile, and if your mini deck has less than 12 cards, you add cards from the master deck to the bottom of your mini deck. If the master deck doesn’t have enough cards for all players, it reshuffles the master discard pile first. This is way better at handling cases where multiple players need to draw cards at the same time.


        Other miscellaneous stuff. Since the start of the year I’ve majorly disconnected from social media and the news. It’s just endless negativity and complaining. Most of it is just an echo chamber and I don’t feel any need to see any of it. It’s great, I recommend it. Really the only things I read now are Donald X.’s private playtesting discord, and Blogatog.


        I also managed to remember a weird dream, but only a little bit of it. I was in a flower field on top of a mountain, but then suddenly the sky turned orange and the whole flower field got set on fire. I had to escape by jumping off with a parachute (I have no idea where it came from). 


        Finally, here are some new songs I’ve been listening to recently.

        Thomas Tang (DZ)

        tt2195@nyu.edu

        +1 (646) 236-5503

        Redmond, WA

        ©2025 by Thomas Tang

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