Ability Changes (Nov 14 2025)

For some reason the blog on the website didn’t work on Nov 14, which is why this didn’t go up. But I did write this post on that night.

While making cards, I made some changes to the game’s rules. First I planned on having a Play phase and a Defend phase. But I decided to merge both of them into one phase. One reason is it just seemed faster gameplay-wise. The other reason is with how actions worked. You can only use actions when playing cards, which means if you get any +actions during a Defend phase, you can’t use it that turn. Which means during a Defend phase, there’s no difference between “+action this round” and “+action next round.” Now that you can play cards during a Defend phase, there will be a difference between those 2 effects. Plus Play effects are restricted to doing things that Defend abilities can (e.g. they can only affect you and your cards).

Another change I made is with card abilities. My original intention is you can choose which abilities you want to use, and skip any you don’t want. But now I changed it to, you have to do as many as you can do. If you can’t pay for its cost (e.g. an ability costs 1 shield but you have 0) you’re fine, and you can choose the order for your abilities, but if you can use the ability, you have to. The reason why is to have abilities that aren’t actually a good trade. If a Defend/Attack ability is net-negative, it wouldn’t affect the math for a card, because you can just never use it. But if you’re forced to use that ability, that does affect the math. The main reason I want this is to have more variety in abilities/penalties, and for some potential combos (such as ordering your abilities to never have to pay for a bad ability).

I also changed how decisions are handled in the code. Mostly this is just cleaning up the existing code to be easier to work with. But also the old way was messy. Every time you had to choose an option on the screen, it created a window in the center of the screen with some buttons with text on them, and when you made your decision the game would delete that window. I got rid of this by reusing the same buttons and not having a window anymore. The only tricky part I haven’t quite figured out is what if you have to click on cards that aren’t on the screen, and how to do that without a window. Possibly for that situation I’ll have to just use a window. I don’t really know how to make “I talk about how I improved code” super interesting to talk about, but it does make my life way easier.

As for finishing the game, I’m at about 11 cards, and I think I want about 40 cards. I’m also aiming for the game to be done at the end of November. Which means I’ll have to make at least 2 cards every day for 2 weeks. Each individual card isn’t too difficult to program, the bottleneck is more thinking of what they’ll do and getting art for them. A lot of other miscellaneous features like resigning and summarizing what each player did at the end of the game is done too, it’s all down to the cards now.