Addressing Different Issues (Oct 31 2025)

As predicted I started working on the new 2-player battling game. While doing preliminary work I came up with some ideas for the gameplay loop, and then scrapped them and came up with new ones.

One of my ideas was that you have 2 different kinds of coins: green coins and red coins. Again, during the first phase, you can only use abilities that affect you, and during the second phase, you can only use abilities that affect the other player. You can only use green coins in the first phase, and you can only use red coins in the second phase. The idea is that I could make cards that give you coins of a specific color, or take away coins from the other player. At one point I thought maybe it's just simpler to have 1 type of coin, but now I'm moving back to, maybe it's worth it.

I was also planning on having cards cost coins to play. The idea being, have some cards be played early and other cards be played late. But, and this has been a running theme, I don't want every single game to have cards that cost coins to pay. And also Fortress Siege already has cards that you pay coins to play, and I should try to make this game be as different as possible. Then I realized, I could use the trick in Territorial March. Cards cost 1 action to play, and you get more actions each turn. I could still have early game and late game cards by having their abilities cost different amounts of coin. Another thing is, Territorial March had to have this awkward rule where you can have negative amounts of coins and actions due to issues with how the areas worked. But this game won't this issue, which means this game will be the best place for the action mechanic to shine.

But then while doing math on some cards, I realized that early game cards are tricky to make. A card's power can be calculated based on its health and how strong its abilities are. If a card has stronger abilities, it'll have to have less health, and an early game card will have weaker abilities, which will mean more health. I don't want every early game card to have tons of health though. But there's an obvious solution: cards can give a bonus when you play them. The question then is, are those bonuses only allowed to affect you, as they can only be played in phase one? Probably I'll just have to live with it, just like how I'll have to live with the game being unable to support abilities like "you gain 2 health and they lose 2 health."

As for halloween this year: it rained all day and no one came knocking. Which I don't mind too much. I also realized that in last week's post, I forgot to acknowledge that it's the 2-year anniversary of these posts. I still don't actually know if this will continue into 2026. There was a period of not super interesting posts in the summer, but I think that was because I had to spend so much time on the secret project. But 1-2 months ago it was mostly finished, and now I could work on things I could actually write about.

Gameplay Issues (Oct 24 2025)

While working on the game, I found some issues with the game's design, and I found solutions to most of them.

First is the areas you visit each turn. My original plan was you shuffle a deck of 6 cards, and each card names 2 areas that you visit. But then it just sounded bad, because if one of the cards shows 2 areas you have no cards in, you were screwed. This also meant you can try to remember every single card that's come up so far, and what's left in the deck, and this also seemed bad. Now my solution is: at the start of the game you get 3 tokens for each area. Each turn, you spend 2 of those tokens and visit those areas. When you run out of an area token, you can't visit that area anymore. I think this is clearly better.

It turns out that moving cards around can have rules issues. I have a couple ideas for cards that have abilities when you play another card into the same area as them. But then what happens if card A moves one of those kinds of cards into the same area as card A, does that moved card trigger? I think it has to be a yes there. Then there's moving cards when you visit an area. If visiting an area causes you to move a card from another area to the area you're visiting, does that moved card trigger? It sounds like a yes, but I have to be careful here as it could cause loops (I move a card out of the area, then I move it back, those abilities now trigger infinitely).

Then there's the issue of not having enough control over what cards you play. This is sort of a baked in issue with the whole game of bluffing with face down cards, but for this type of game I think it'll be more apparent because the point is to find combos among your cards. One idea I have is, you start the game with (just one) delay token. When you are about to play a card, you can choose to delay it to the end of the game. Instead of playing it right now, you will play it after all 6 rounds, and afterwards you'll also get another chance to visit an area. This also helps if you play a late-game card super early, as instead of it being bad for you, it could be quite good for you.

Then I think, maybe this player interaction thing where you give cards to another player isn't a good fit at all. It certainly takes a while to resolve (both in deciding what card to put face down, and reading the cards you're given), and I'm sure there will be players who wouldn't enjoy the loss of control (they'd rather just play whatever's in their hand). But I don't want to completely remove it, as it's filling 2 important roles: player interaction (some people are fine with multiplayer solitaire games where you don't interact with other players until you compare scores at the end, but I prefer interaction throughout); and card balancing (the loss of control over what you play means the cards don't need to be as balanced as compared to something like Battery RAM). Which means I would have to find another mechanic that also addresses both issues, and this is difficult.

While I think on this, maybe I will start that new fighting game I mentioned. The one where in phase one you can only do things that affect you, and in phase two you can only do things that affect the other player. A lot of the online stuff I figured out for this game will carry over to that game, so it's not like the past month of work was worthless. And I don't think that game will have any blocking issues, other than making cards.

Improving the Log (Oct 17 2025)

For now I'm going with making a larger-scale game. I ported over some old code for downloading content from spreadsheets, and I'll be using that for card texts and numbers. I'm not going to have the spreadsheets do the card instructions though, since I plan on the cards having a variety of triggers and abilities that would be completely infeasible as spreadsheets. And like before, the spreadsheets will handle translations too.

Most of this week was spent figuring out how to do the log. The log has multiple issues I had to address. The first is that the current way I do log messages is messy. I create a new object for every single message and there's no way that's any good. The reason was because each log message needed to draw a yellow line underneath it in case you can click it for an undo (and undo multiple steps at once), and I didn't see any other way to do that other than having each log message technically be a button. For now I decided to give up on that, and just have it be that the undo button undos your most recent decision and that's it.

Then I had to figure out how else I could do the log. I created a 2nd Unity project just to experiment, and I eventually got something I liked. There are just 4 text objects, except that only 2 are on at once. There's one for: all messages from the past; all messages for the current turn; the most important messages from the past; and the most important messages for the current turn. When a log message is added, the text gets added to all messages from this turn (and if it's tagged as important, it also gets added to most important messages for this turn). Also when you do an undo, it just deletes the most recent line from the text object.

Adding messages to the log is also tricky though. The log has to be recreated for when you reconnect; some log messages have to be different for other players due to publicity (for you it says "draws [card name]" but for other players that card has to be hidden) and translation (in case they're playing with a different language than you). My eventual solution is to send over the text to translate and any variables, and the game goes from there. There is also a check for if it needs to be translated differently for other players. Explaining the full solution here is a bit complicated, but the spreadsheet helps here by having different elements for if information needs to be displayed differently for other players.

Finally when making cards, I realized I needed a way to differentiate the cards that get played into the different areas. I didn't want all cards to be able to do anything, it just seemed like "what area card does this card get played into" is arbitrarily chosen. My solution was to have an ability pie, like in Randomly Generated RPG. The 4 areas are themed: cards that get played to the Coast can make money and move cards; the Village makes money and makes boxes; the City makes money and removes boxes; and the Woods can do everything but make money. I enjoy it when games split up what things can do what, and this division seems solid to me.