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.

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.