New Rules and Game Ideas (Feb 14 2025)

Yesterday, Donald X. announced some new changes to the rules for Dominion’s duration cards. The main thing is, if they are no longer in play, their effects on future turns no longer happen. This was all argued about in private during January because an expansion was getting reprinted. A bunch of ideas were considered and everyone was happiest with this one. One funny thing is that I originally suggested some wording changes, and Donald X. at first they didn't want them and wanted to preserve the original wordings. But after a few days, when I had lost all hope, they went for my changes anyway.

Since I’ve cut down my usage of social media, I have no idea what other people are thinking about the new changes. If I had to guess, there are a bunch of people complaining about oddly specific combos being removed, which I’m happy not reading. I’ve already spent years doing that, it’s just repetitive at this point.

Originally for the PvZ Heroes game, I had one deck controlled by the host player, and whenever another player needed to draw cards, they’d ask the host client to get the cards, and then those cards would get sent over the server, This logic was to mimic real life, where there would only be one deck. But this game in particular is strictly a computer game, with no intention to be played as a board game, which means I don’t have to do any of this. Instead I can just have both players generate a deck for themselves that they draw from, and this makes things much easier (especially with undos).

Midway through the week I was thinking about Plants vs Zombies, and that there are actually 2 game modes that I could make my own version of. I always had fond memories of the Survival Endless mode, especially when you force yourself to play with very weird strategies. Really the main issues I have are that many of the plants and zombies are meaningless in that mode in particular, and also it starts off really slow. Another mode I liked a lot was I, Zombie Endless. It was fun as an endless puzzle game, but some issues there are that it’s also slow, and as the game gets harder you just don’t have enough sun. It’s not great to keep restarting until you get lucky enough that you’ll have enough sun. If I do go for either of these games, I’m not sure if it will be a tower defense game, but probably yes.

I was also thinking about Randomly Generated RPG again and I realized I have a new idea. The idea is that emotions can have a 2nd stage (like in Omori), where the 2nd stage just means the emotion can’t be changed by anything else. When it’s your turn again, the 2nd stage emotion downgrades and now it can be changed again. The idea is to make emotions slightly more permanent than before. Then I realized, this can just be a status effect that lasts a certain amount of time, and it can also prevent the character’s position (grounded/airborne) from changing as well. Which means now I want to update the game to add this status effect (called Locked) to some abilities, which should take about a week.

Another thing I was thinking about is that the speed stat is the least useful. Buffing/nerfing speed is not as noticeable of an advantage compared to power or defense. I figured out an overhaul to the system that would make the speed stat matter a lot more. Each character has a number, and each turn that number would be increased by their speed. Once that number exceeds 10, the character loses 10 of that number, and they can use an ability. Since characters will increase that number by different amounts each time, that means faster characters will take turns more often than slower characters.

This idea sounds great to me, except for a few problems. First, this is fairly complex and I don’t know if I want to change the tutorial to fit this information in. Second, it’s a pretty big change to an already existing game that I’m still happy with. Third, it sounds like something that would be better as the central mechanic of a game instead of a background system. All this means, I’m not going to go for it in this game.

Also it’s Valentine’s day. I don’t have any interest in this day; if you know you know.

Past and Current Projects (Feb 07 2025)

This week I noticed a really bad bug with Relentless Waves. Some of the enemies didn’t have sprites for their bullets. It was a late change I made that I didn’t notice. I fixed it but that’s one of those bugs that’s really embarrassing to let out.

While I was thinking about past games, I remembered one I made for the final project for Intro to Game Development. It’s not on my itch page but it’s called Shelf Puzzles. It’s a puzzle game where you can carry blocks and have to put them onto switches. Part of me kind of wants to revive that game (using my platforming physics from the 2024 Collection), but it’ll be a distant project.

I also thought about Randomly Generated RPG. I still like it, but I also thought, can I do better than having a do nothing ability for the players. The obvious effects I could’ve done are buffing your stats or decreasing your cooldowns, but I’m not sure I want them. It doesn’t want to dictate your strategy or be something you want to use all the time. The last idea I had was to swap one of your abilities for a new one. That’s probably the most promising one but I’m not sure I want people to waste time trying to get new abilities until they get the perfect combination. Anyway it’s most likely not changing.

Onto the current project. I considered how to handle cards, specifically if I want to use spreadsheets. It would be great to have spreadsheets handle all troop power and health. But unlike Randomly Generated RPG or Battery RAM, I think very few cards in this game would work well with spreadsheets. They all want to have unique abilities that won't work well with spreadsheet instructions. And then for the Clash Royale game that I’ve basically abandoned, 0 of the spells used spreadsheets, and I’m pretty sure 0 of the environment cards could use spreadsheets. Which is why I’m just going to program all the cards manually.

Another idea I had for a game is one where you and another player are giant robots fighting each other. You’d install weapons onto your robot, except that weapons can take damage and be destroyed. You’d have to consider where you destroy their weapons, or attack the main body and win that way. It sounded cool except that it’s really similar to the card fighting game. Which then made me think, maybe just have this game be that robot fighting game. Troops would then be weapons, and then environments would have to be something else.

The one thing for that robot fighting game is that maybe weapons start off with all their abilities, but when they take damage the abilities will either change / get worse / no longer work. But probably that’s just way too complicated to write out for a card game.

AI Opponent (Jan 31 2025)

First things first is that the bullet hell game is now released, you can play it right now. Adding art and flavor to enemies was hard, but even harder was coming up with a name. I gave up and just went with the bad name of Relentless Waves. I also put on the title screen that the enemies keep shooting after you defeat them, to make it crystal clear that it's intentional and not a bug.

I also started work on getting an AI done. It checks through every possible chain of decisions it could make, remembers which one has the best result, and then plays out the best one. To do this it also has to undo constantly when it's done with a chain, and needs to go back to a previous one. This was...very difficult. I spent days working on it and only just got it working a few hours ago. It's also slow, the game lags a lot when the AI is resolving everything, and it always feels like it's about to infinite loop and crash. And the game is still very simple, all it's doing is placing a troop in one of 5 rows. But at least it's making progress.

I also had 2 weird dreams this week. The first took place in Japan. I have no idea why, it just did. I was walking around on some school field trip, when suddenly I realized that I had won some art competition that I didn't even know I entered. Suddenly the field trip shifts to traveling towards the art competition to get my prize. While trying to enter, the mobile app I had to login to wasn't working, and I ended up spending a bunch of time standing outside. In the end I don't know if I ever got in or not, even though I supposedly won the show.

The second one was in an airport. While at passport check, for some reason the staff there were really interested in asking me about stuff. My notes say "philosophical questions" but I don't remember what those questions were. It went on for a really long time, until I eventually asked "and what is all this discussion for, why would my answers matter?" They responded with "I'm just curious, that's all." Then after I passed passport check, an alarm went off in the airport. My first though was that there was a fire in the airport and everyone had to evacuate, except that as I got to the exit of the airport, I saw people trying to get inside the airport. This baffled me, because why would people be trying to go inside of a burning airport? Then I realized that there was no fire, the alarm went off because there's been a zombie apocalypse, and the people outside are zombies.

And that's it for this week. The notes were pretty short this time because figuring that AI took so much time.