Oxtongue Heroes

A short note as I acknowledge that Oxtongue Heroes has been on hiatus for effectively a year:

From the start of real work on it, I considered the main purpose of OH to be to perform an experiment. That was around the time I found out about the field of constraint programming. It had immediately caught my interest, in part because of the math connection and in part because using it would make an entire decent-sized solver I'd once programmed for another minigame (not on RMN right now) basically unnecessary.

So, I wondered how well I could get it to work with a harder-to-define problem: what the enemy should do on a given TRPG turn. The ideal case would be to have map-designer-determined objectives, typically things like "KO as many player units as mathematically possible, and do as much total damage as possible to the rest". But I knew that was a large problem space and I'd probably have to cut down on it somehow; the experiment was to find out whether I could find tradeoffs leading to a reasonable result.

In short, I didn't. I guess for brevity's sake I won't get into depth here. Despite occasional encouraging signs, I never got things on the AI to a point I was really happy with.

If I choose to entirely or almost entirely switch to a more conventional AI strategy, it leaves the rest of the game in a curious state. I'd kept the investment in plot really low largely because the gameplay experiment was risky. That just leaves (orphaned?) gameplay elements to look at - for example, having wholly deterministic damage was forced by the choice of AI! (Insofar as I'd been making a game with symmetric mechanics, at least.)

(Though I'll spare a paragraph to say: undo and the action queue, which occurred to me mostly because I did have determinism to work with, are a really handy UI element I'd want now in any game where I have to coordinate large numbers of sequential actions on a turn. I probably undersold that feature in the alpha release.)

So, though there remain ideas here I'd like to come back to sometime, I wouldn't be continuing this game without some re-evaluation. Thanks to my testers and subscribers for your support, and if anyone has any suggestions or comments, I'm here.