DELTREE'S PROFILE

Haha, I had no idea this had its own media section! Thanks!

dragons love their popped collars

Youtube seems to insist that the game of origin is World of Warcraft, and I have no way to change or remove that branding. I've never felt so insulted.

Going first means you can steal a corner, which leaves an even number of edges open, so if the opponent takes it, you can take it right back and lock it up, which is pretty advantageous! Also, it lets you bury a low corner or get rid of a weak card, for the same reason.

Thanks, y'all! I'm still figuring out the gameplay; originally there was a much greater emphasis on momentum and running starts (to parallel the battle system) that I simplified significantly, but didn't remove completely due to not wanting to make the physics feel too stiff. I also had the "locked" camera setting turned on; the default one is more of a lerp camera that pans ahead when you're running at full speed, but I thought that may be disorienting for quick cuts (I wanted to edit everything down to fit in the length of the song!) so I stuck with the basic one.

Animations should be a simple tweak; it's all cel-based with pivot points, so I can do some nudging around.

It's a pretty late alpha; I'm missing much of the graphical and audio content to make it a proper "beta," but it's structurally sound and the narrative and systems are all in place and awaiting delicious assets to be delivered.

Haha thanks! Actually, I messed up at some point and introduced an infinite loop that I think I'm close to unraveling after two hours of head-hit-keyboard. I have no idea what I did to cause it, though I'm sure it was something innocuous, and I couldn't just hit Undo because stopping a runaway loop in Unity involves killing the process entirely. Anyway, hopefully more progress tonight!


Edit to avoid double post:

Welp, I've done it. The AI beats me (usually just barely) when both of us have roughly-equal cards (in this case, the ten lowest-level ones). A few times, I got close, but blew it and played into a trap when I wasn't paying attention, so those instances were suitably my fault, too.

So, I got to see a lot of this in the past hour:


I added a small boost toward the weight if the initial play (before the hypothetical games are played) would result in a capture, which makes the AI really aggressive. Also, most of the weird behaviors from earlier were because I messed up the elemental comparison function, and passed in a value that was one off of the true card ID (because of array counting, so it's like being in high school again!)

Right now, it's running at 500 iterations per turn. Oddly, if I turn that way up (10000+), performance doesn't take much of a hit, but the AI actually becomes a pacifist and becomes less likely to go for open cards. I will have to look in to that further.

Overall, it's pretty neat! It more or less plays like how I'd hand-designed the tactics before, but it's still able to routinely stump me, so it will work well for a high-level opponent. This also means that I can gate the difficulty according to the computer player's deck, but I'll still leave open the ability to include varying levels of aggression and maybe other weird variables, like elemental awareness. It's also still cheating and using my cards to play out its own hypothetical turns, but that should be easy to toggle too.

I am exhausted, and it's almost time for Arrow, so I am calling it a day!

Late edit response to Merlandese' edit: As for not playing the strongest cards immediately, my original AI factored that in. If there were several cards near the "top" of the weighted pile, it would pick the one whose numbers added up to the smallest value. So, if it could capture a card with smaller numbers, it would try to do so. I'll see if it's possible to mimic that behavior again, though that's starting to seem like I'm not trusting the point of the simulations! Something I'll think about.