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.