Progressing to the End (May 16 2025)

The soldier game is now content complete, I have all 60 cards done. I also have the rulebook done, and now all that's left is a name for the game, some card art, and a website page. Hopefully this game will be out next week, which will be a relief as I originally thought this game would've been done by April.

The last Area card was the trickiest one. Since I already had enough of the things I needed (+cards, +actions, +coins, +troops, +scouts), what else was there to do? The alternative was to find something super exotic, even though those cards are extra hard to think of and to program. I spent days trying to get something. I considered “give all your cards, actions, and coins to the player to your left” but was worried that meant you spend the whole game doing nothing, in fear of the other player profiting. I also considered “remove one of your troops from the game” but it didn’t sound that interesting, it just makes the game shorter. I also didn’t like “do any other Area except for Camp” as there were only 2 other options: Road and the other special Area.

Finally I landed on doing the instructions on an Area that changes. Normally the other Areas that don’t get used each game would just be in the deck, doing nothing. Now the top card of that deck is revealed, and this Area would make you do the instructions on that Area. After it’s done, you put that card on the bottom of the deck, and the next round there’ll be a different Area on top of the deck. It has to be revealed the entire time because it didn’t sound fun for the bonus Area to be a complete surprise. This was the idea I went with, except it required a lot more programming work than the average card that needed manual programming, as I also needed to add custom UI to let you right click the top Area.

This was a fun card to do, except there was absolutely no way this would be possible with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets help a lot with making these kinds of card games, but it does have its limits. Even though about 57% of the cards in the game could be handled just by spreadsheets, I wonder if having spreadsheets handle card instructions is actually the right move anymore. Considering I still have to program all the card effects (like +Cards) in the first place, maybe spreadsheets don’t actually save too much time after all. Also now I have an AI that tries to do math, and this is inconvenient with spreadsheets. 

But every time I get doubtful about spreadsheets, I still have to keep in mind that Randomly Generated RPG was a slam dunk for spreadsheets. That’s a game that would’ve been way more inconvenient if I had to program everything manually. Partially because I kept replacing abilities, but also because the spreadsheets for it have more support. What I mean is, it includes things like being able to customize which character(s) an ability can/will target. This makes the spreadsheets much more flexible and more powerful, and can handle 100+ abilities. All of this is to say, while spreadsheets may one day be useful again, it’ll require more setup behind it to be more usable.

But speaking of Randomly Generated RPG, I decided to do the daily challenges update for it. I said I was going to do it next month but it didn’t actually take too much time. To do this I had to splice together the prototype I did for daily games, and the code for choosing what Areas you play with in the soldier game. The old code was actually pretty bad, it generated the players on the title screen so their abilities can be displayed for the Play Game button. But now I just have the players be generated at the start of the battle scene, where you select their abilities.

Usually it’s a mistake to do more work on that game because I feel like changing a bunch of stuff. Fortunately I didn’t feel the need to do that this time. I did end up tweaking the numbers on a few player abilities. The main thing being, since Wizard attacks multiple enemies at once, they’re the one where stat changes are the most scary. Giving Knight +2 power is one thing; giving Wizard +2 power is another, as that +2 is +2 against multiple enemies. Which is why I decided to nerf some of their abilities, as I don’t want them immediately killing 1-star enemies with only one attack.

Lastly I made a late change to the character UI. I didn’t have a place to put modifications to character stats like power and speed, I just hid it behind right clicking. But that didn’t seem great, and now I display that stuff below the text listing the character’s position and emotion. It’s a bit small but it’s way better than having nothing at all.