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.

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.