September Archives

It’s interesting when you start working on a project. There’s things you plan for, things you think you planned for and then the things that you think you have covered until you realize you don’t which makes you replan your whole plan. Which is what tonight has led in to. It’s not a problem per se, it’s just a matter of handling each players cards. In cribbage, you’re dealt x cards, and then you keep 4, and send the rest to the crib. That’s the part I didn’t think about.. The rest..  So in a 3 or 4 player game, it’s easy; you’re always putting one card in the crib. Queue 2 player mode.. crap.. now I have to rewrite things to allow for selecting two different cards to send to the crib. Fortunately I caught that early enough and it was a pretty simple fix, but it’s a lesson in planning. No matter how well you plan something out, it’s going to fall apart, or at least deviate.. End of story..  So code will continue, now that I have the ability to select cards to put in the crib, it’s now time to actually program that and the animations to move them there.. The rest, should be easy..   Famous last words, I know…. And just for fun… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-H1OV4Bfm8

Nothing like a quick AI Gameplay video, in fast forward.. An entire month of two players condensed into roughly a minute and a half. There are a few issues I see, mostly that annoying taxman banner, when its rotated for the player on the right side of the board, it insists on playing its animation in 2 different rotations, which is extremely odd considering when you look at it, only one of those is real, the other is this weird ghost image that I can not track down. I have a fix, but it involves literally duplicating that prefab in unity, deleting the old one, and renaming the new one and assigning it. No code changes, its unity weirdness.. and it’s ONLY that one prefab.. it makes no sense. The dual animation on plays in the gameplay window on top of it all, it does not show up in the editor window.. I don’t have a clue what the deal is there, but the AI is almost done.. I need to implement it for the end of the month routines and end of game still, and all the logic and decision making that goes with that.. Of course animating the cursor too adds a lot of extra work, but I think it adds a little something extra to the game. If I had just decided to skip on the AI, I’d be done and on to my next project, but noooo… I decided to keep it.. ugh..

More AI work is done, and now close to 80% of the game can be played by the AI. It’s kind of fun sitting back and watching the computer players play against each other, and to be honest, it’s going to make my testing a lot easier. I’m no longer going to have to sit and click and make the choices to play through an entire game watching for anomalies while I play, I can set it up as AI players and just turn the speed up, watch them and look for any bugs or odd behaviors. I think later I will finish up work on the selling special items , currently only a single item focus is supported; that’s when the game decides it’s only interested in one particular item, or if the player only has one item. I’m still tossing around ideas on how I want the to ‘browse’ offers when more than one applies, and which one it will choose. Now I think it’s time for some Starfield!

Just testing to make sure webhooks to discord are working from wordpress, that way you get a notification, you can see I posted something on the blog, you can choose to click or not to click. Pretty dang simple… Yup…

So this last week has been dedicated to working out some basic AI players for this latest project, CashFlo.. Mind you this is pretty simplistic stuff, definitely nothing special or that’s going to win any awards or anything, but it’s still AI, and it’s still a challenge to make it “look and feel” like a real player. Mostly in this case, it’s going to be a pretty simplistic set of rules to determine outcomes. Do I have enough money to purchase this? Am I in the hole already? Is the loan amount needed more than triple my current cash.. I’m trying to add some randomness to it to give it the illusion of thought behind it. Not to mention adding a few timed delays, and having the AI control a mouse cursor so it actually looks like a person playing, instead of pieces just simply clicking and flashing around.. I hope it will be worth it in this case, I just know I need to get busy and get this finished and off to the beta team as soon as possible, especially if I’m going to hit my deadline on my next project (in theory the next project is supposed to be done by thanksgiving). I should have had this done at the beginning of the month, but ya know, there’s just been too many good game releases this month, namely BG3.. oops!