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[delphonso]

Okay so programming a card game was way harder than I figured - I'll keep messing with this in the background, but this was posted about a day before I suddenly had to search for a job and so, all of these things fell to the wayside. I haven't coded /really coded/ in a long time, and so now I'm thinking about a "simple" project to warm back up.

DF RTS died when a friend said they'd take a crack at the map code and then didn't. And also when I said I'd put the finishing touches on it and then upload it, but also didn't. I'll save the files and dedicate time to them in the future.

The card game is waiting on the Pathfinder Card Game to arrive in the mail from the US - once I've gotten those rules down I should have a better grasp of where this whole business is at and where its shortcomings are. I've decided to flesh it out more fully in design documents before trying to code it, lest I code myself out of possibilities I'd like the game to have.

Anyway a warm-up project. All of these usually balloon to being a 3-month long thing that never gets done, so that's what I'm expecting here. I dunno, maybe I can make a tamagachi or something? That's easy enough to manage, he said, lyingly. I'm not sure what I'd like to work on, but my hours are few, and when I start a new job, my time might be even tighter...Unless I just stop sleeping, which...hmmm...

[King Zultan]

Sleep is for the weak, I mean who needs sleep when you got code.

[Duuvian]

Oooh a card game!

My favorite (video) card game is arcomage.
it's a minigame found in the might and magic series.
(not the heroes of might and magic rts game,
this one is closer to the elder scrolls or wizardry, it's old)

In Might and Magic Day of the Destroyer, you can find a deck of cards to play arcomage in taverns, and each tavern has it's own rules and win conditions. You get a prize for beating all the taverns. I think in Day of the Destroyer, it's a pair of artifact swords.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd6whbzhLcw

I enjoyed Arcomage a great deal. I had MM8 when I was young and played it heavily in that game along with HoMM3 and it's expansions. Arcomage also had a stand-alone version released some time after MM8 but I don't think it did very well, might be abandoned by now but I haven't checked. HoMM4 was pretty good but I was disappointed by the reset by the new owners. Gauldoth Half-Dead campaign made up for that though. I don't know what happened to the series after that, it didn't seem like good things from what I read on the internet but I don't know as HoMM 4 was the last one I tried.

Delphonso, if you get to the point of beta releases I'd help with those if I am available and also if I see it in this thread (I often don't check Creative Projects section). If you would like, feel free to pm me if I miss it were that to occur. I didn't read the whole thread, in case something along those lines was already posted. I'm also no good for coding help.

[Salmeuk]

I dunno, maybe I can make a tamagachi or something?

my first and only attempts at making a game was some kind of clicker / idle game take on an aquarium. but it ended up rather tamagachi like. of course that project never got very far..  so I approve of this random throwaway idea!

in fact, a little portable tamagachi-like device that contains an active Dwarf Fortress sounds rather cute. you shake it every once in a while to wake up the sleeping dwarves haha. oh the possibilities!

[Duuvian]

I remember Tamagachi were wildly popular for a year or two when I was about nine or so. I wanted one lol, I got a decent cheap knockoff depicting a dog a few years later in a Christmas stocking after they weren't cool anymore. It was kind of f'd up unintentionally though; one of the options was to discipline the digidog (a digi hand smacks it) and the only way to start a new one was after the existing one dies. This meant if you didn't want to wait for it's natural death which took two weeks to a month of realtime IIRC, you would have to beat it to death while it wallowed in it's own excrement and starved since there was no "new game" option and they were tough little digidoggies that took a lot of that to start a new one.

[delphonso]

So the Pathfinder Card Game is almost exactly what I wanted. There's certainly some "improvements" I could make, but the system they have set up is really good, and allows for a lot of flexibility (because it's a card game, and you can just...tell the players to do a new way to play the game). I'll tool around a bit with what I've already got, but it's clearly going to be hard to match up with what Pathfinder has presented already - I might make some custom campaigns for Pathfinder instead of making a whole new game.

That said, the Pathfinder Card Game Video Game is quite poor, and they've abandoned the new ruleset already, so unlikely to get an update or remake any time soon. Might be worth a gamejam or something to make a 3-scenario mini campaign or something. Just make the rules necessary for that.

Cheers, Duuvian, I'll give you a shout anytime I make something worth playing.

I dunno, maybe I can make a tamagachi or something?

my first and only attempts at making a game was some kind of clicker / idle game take on an aquarium. but it ended up rather tamagachi like. of course that project never got very far..  so I approve of this random throwaway idea!

in fact, a little portable tamagachi-like device that contains an active Dwarf Fortress sounds rather cute. you shake it every once in a while to wake up the sleeping dwarves haha. oh the possibilities!

Insaniquarium is still a masterpiece.

A pocket dwarf is actually a good idea - just let a dwarf grow up, get his psychological profile, maybe there's a strange mood minigame...Then when he dies, get a new dwarf from the fortress. There's something there!

I remember Tamagachi were wildly popular for a year or two when I was about nine or so. I wanted one lol, I got a decent cheap knockoff depicting a dog a few years later in a Christmas stocking after they weren't cool anymore. It was kind of f'd up unintentionally though; one of the options was to discipline the digidog (a digi hand smacks it) and the only way to start a new one was after the existing one dies. This meant if you didn't want to wait for it's natural death which took two weeks to a month of realtime IIRC, you would have to beat it to death while it wallowed in it's own excrement and starved since there was no "new game" option and they were tough little digidoggies that took a lot of that to start a new one.

Jesus christ...

I had a Tamagachi when I was little. They were just impossible to keep alive, for my 7-year-old self. My sister also struggled with it. I recall keeping them in our backpacks at school, and going to feed them/clean up their shits on the excuse of looking for books. I went back and found mine dead, and sat down at my desk and quietly cried. Oh to be kid again...

I picked up a "Vital Bracelet V", which is a Digimon pet that is also a pedometer/heart rate monitor. It's great - the little dudes don't die, and just slowly evolve over roughly a week. Once that's all done, you tuck them away in an app (or just delete them) and load up a new egg. It's got a lot of modern conveniences, like being able to just wipe whatever you have and start over any time, or tuck one away into 'storage' until you're ready to raise it.

[brewer bob]

I went back and found mine dead

You monster! You killed it!

[Starver]

I never did have a Tamagachi (not the target age for it), but I did dabble with various other A-Life things. Somewhere I might still have the disks (indeed, I might still have the installation on the original and long-unused computer buried a bit in my pile of old hardware) for Creatures, which was perhaps a bit overambitious a project given that I was often supposed ro be working at home, when I wasn't actually working at work, and probably couldn't spend the time to reinforce be reward/punishment the trainable behaviours of my Norn(s) and make them more self-sufficient (or at least intelligent enough to go to whichever bit of their biome they needed to be for me to keep them alive and safe at any particular moment).

[King Zultan]

I had a Tamagachi when I was little and I never got to play it because the damned thing didn't work, I mean you could turn it on and watch the critter slowly die because none of the buttons worked.

Also having to beat it to death to get a new one is a pretty metal way to start a new game.

[delphonso]

It's time...

[brewer bob]

*anticipation intensifies*

[King Zultan]

The HYPE it builds!

[mikekchar]

Forgive me because I haven't actually read very much of this thread :-)  I started work on a DF-like game a few years ago and got a fair way through.  I generate a map and have a dwarf wandering around in it trying not to die of thirst.  Not really that engaging, but it was fun to code.  I did most of it on Twitch, live streaming usually 8-10 hours a week for about a year.  Unfortunately, I found that the stress of keeping that schedule on top of my already busy work life caused problems for some health issues I had and so it's been on the back burner for a *long* time.  It was super fun streaming development, though, so I'd like to get back into it.

Having made that long winded introduction, I've learned some things along the way.  The first is the old classic: You can make a game or you can make a game engine.  If you start making a game engine to make a game, at best you will complete the game engine.  More normally you complete nothing :-)  Going the other way around is actually easier.  Pick an engine that gives you as much facility as you can find, start writing your game and when you get a good way through it, rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

The reason for this is that coding is coding.  You've just got to grind your way through all of the details.  The hard part is figuring out what the details should be.  if you are coding the engine at the same time you are figuring out how the game should play, or what facilities your game engine needs to provide, you will not be nimble enough to try what you need to try.  One day you think, "I know!  We should try X".  6 weeks later you finally add the features to your engine to try X.  X sucks.  It's fine because by trying X, you realise Y is the *real* way to go.  6 weeks later, you add the features to try Y.  Y doesn't suck, but it's not really right either.  Z is definitely the way to go!  Rinse and repeat forever.

Ideally you want to be able to rapidly try your ideas until you are very sure that you have the game play that you want.  Then you have plenty of time to implement it in the best way possible.  At least if you are an indie dev and you don't have project managers screaming at you to do the *next* idea, so let's hang on to that bloody legacy carcass a bit longer...

This is obviously not what Tarn does, but he's special in a number of different ways :-)

I think the other big thing I learned was that it helps to make a lot of small, completely unrelated games before you tackle a big long term project.  The reason is that the "game loop", the thing that people find fun about playing your game, is quite elusive.  I had assumed that, like most development I do, I could write something quite basic and then just keep enhancing it with more features as I discovered what I wanted to do.  The problem is that "fun game loop" is surprisingly difficult and it's not really an incremental thing.

Getting some practice just crafting "fun game loops" is a really good idea, I think.  This is something that Tarn and Zack do a lot of (and you can see that they have *many* games in various state of completion).  I think this is part of their "special sauce".

So, what I would do now that I have some experience is:

1) Write something tiny, unrelated to any big idea, using an established platform that makes it quick to churn out a game.  Tamagotchi remake is a *wonderful* idea.  The original is *so* basic, but it has a fun game loop.  Try to implement just that classic game loop.

2) When you have something working, think about what the ideal development environment would be and build that.  Then reimplement your tiny game.

3) Spin on that idea for a while, changing the "fun game loop".  How did that influence the underlying development environment?  What kinds of things did you have to do?  How would you support that in a larger game.

4) Goto 1, but with a bigger idea.

Hope that helps you.

[delphonso]

*snip*

Thanks, Mike. I threw that up in the game design thread - as I think it's good general advice. I mostly stumbled on the same stuff on my own after...10 years of trial and error and error and error. The issue I run into is when my eyes are bigger than my stomach with my next 'slightly more' complex game. See the DF RTS - which was just too much for me to realistically tackle.

Speaking of -

Abandon all projects! There is only GLORY!

Drag tamagachi out into the streets and stomp them to crumpled plastic and cheap silicon.
Remove all strategy from the RTS - it is time to get real.

Stuff your ambitions away and make that which is attainable! Simple! Game!

Here's the thought process: I should stop trying to make games I play (Starcraft, Pathfinder ACG, Morrowind) and make games I want to play.

You know what I've always wanted to play? A gladiator game that doesn't suck/was made by a fascist.

You know, Sewer Kings is just fun - as mike points out - the core loop is fun. What if that, but it's gladiators?

And what if it's more rogue-ish? Sleeper is only fun when the time is almost out - so how about timed rounds like in Vampire Survivors?

Oh! So you'll be playing as a lanista - a manager - and the gladiators aren't exactly you. Perhaps you don't really control them, just like Sewer Kings?  I could write better AI, as I learned in the RTS, so instead of simple location commands, you could set a personality, basically (greedy, aggressive, defensive). Maybe. Or you control one gladiator and have a team of 2 or 3, the others being AI controlled.

As lanista, you'll be gaining money from these fights, spend it on new arenas, new gladiators, permanent upgrades - all like Vampire Survivors!

There's a good idea here, I think.

So here's the project: Untitled Gladiator Game. Ugg

Mechanically, I want to rip off Vampire Survivors as much as possible, but I want to make something more similar to an autobattler. No weapon upgrades/combinations like in most VS rip offs. Really, I just want to rip off their progression system, because it's very satisfying. The core gameplay will be more similar to Sewer Kings, but much more stream-lined and hopefully having rounds of enemies showing up.

I'm going to get started on a basic code-base today. I've spent the last couple weeks planning this out in my head, so it shouldn't take too long to get to a point where I've fucked it up so much I want to quit again.

[King Zultan]

Sounds pretty cool, can't wait to see how it turns out.