Card Game Creatures That Act On Their Own

I'm gonna Crush you party dance style dweeb brilliant I am creating a playable and show accurate version of Card Wars from Adventure Time I'm going to give a recap so don't worry if you haven't watched the other videos I figured out the turn structure in the show and made a combat system playing cards is free because there's no Mana system you also never net gain cards so it balances out I implemented an economy system which allows players to get money and blind auction for cards and then I did a bunch of play testing with all that stuff and here we are I've worked on two things since the last devlog refining the economy specifically the way you get money and adding a system to subtly incorporate random AI behaviors into the creatures on the board adding a random Behavior mechanic honestly seemed impossible when I started this project even if this was a video game simulating tons of things at once would cause the scope of the game to Skyrocket however because I didn't sit down and force myself to make the mechanic and instead ended up randomly getting an idea I didn't actually end up wasting a significant amount of energy trying to solve it regardless I was very happy with what I came up with so last time I implemented the economy systems in the game for those of you who are new here because I'm making the game show accurate I had to put monetary mechanics in because Jake implies their existence the system worked like this rotate a money producing card to place a money on it at the start of your next turn you can claim that money at the end of a turn you can spend two money to initiate an auction where you force the other player to flip the top card from their deck up then you both blindly bid for it without knowing how much the other player decided to pay the winner gets the card added their hand and can move the economy tracker one space this tracker shows who's ahead in the economy the player who's ahead in the economy can buy cards but also cannot initiate an auction anyway anyway I quickly amassed several pages in my notebook detailing my many criticisms of the mechanic after playing with it several times my biggest gripe was all the pieces everywhere you could exhaust a structure or worker to place one money on it then if it survives until your next turn you get that money so structures and workers were constantly making money and both players had a bunch of little yellow circles everywhere and it was so cluttered the next biggest thing which was technically far more important than the pieces everywhere was how lowrisk producing money was this definitely contributed to the Clutter problem and money became super prevalent in every single game when I just wanted it to crop up if you were trying to play around it or every once in a while to spice things up there were plenty of other little issues that I had but a surprising amount of them felt like Domino's once I fix these two main things too many pieces on the board track the money in a way that doesn't use them too low risk add risk I bundled these ideas together by adding a new state that cards could be in flipped cards can be flipped during your main phase which turns them face down when a card is face down it retains its tags but has no text and zero attack face down cards are destroyed if they take any damage flipped cards then unflip at the start of your next turn giving you one money honestly I really loved this idea it greatly increased the risk of money production by forcing you to leave your cards vulnerable and allowed you to track the money you were making without putting the little yellow circles all over the place since if you simply rotated the card to make money you would have to remember which cards were exhausted for that purpose on the next turn unless you put a yellow Pebble on them this way at the start of your turn you get a money for every card you unflip so you don't have to put pieces on the board to keep track but this system had a tiny flaw money was now impossible to get when you flip a card it very rarely survives until your next turn for you to claim its money and because you're risking a card to get something non-essential you'd hardly ever do it it was technically possible if you really strategized around it and protected your cards but it didn't really work and was hardly ever worth the risk now I don't want money to be a big part of every game since outside of it being mentioned we don't actually see it played in the show at all I want money to be something that has potential to come up when it just sort of feels right but I ended up pushing it way too far down into Oblivion the first attempt to subtly bring it back up was to lower the cost of money related actions so that auctions now cost one and the economy board had lower card costs also if a player bought a card the other player could then move the economy tracker by one these two things were somewhat unrelated but it kept a player from staying control and farming money it also meant the Restriction allowing only the player behind in the economy to initiate an auction could be removed this didn't really fix anything since it was still too easy to prevent your opponent from getting money in the first place then even if you managed to get the money and pull off an auction it ended up being a little one-off thing and it was likely your opponent couldn't contest it so I needed to focus on making money easier to get I tried making it so when you flip a card you get the money instantly which has been working pretty well in play testing getting money is still high risk since you can lose your workers and structurers really easily but the money gain becomes guaranteed and more immediately useful instead of a long-term investment which doesn't make much sense in a short game like this with this tweak I also had to make it that you can't initiate an auction on turn one since otherwise you could just make money on turn one and then Force an uncontested auction the flow of money was still significantly lower than it was in the last video and the average game didn't have nearly as many pieces being moved around anymore which I think is excellent so I just left the decreases in cost I implemented before and everything seems to be working pretty well the occasional game might have no money at all and then another one could completely revolve around the economy While most games have little touches of it here and there this is the balance that I was going for and it's how the rest of the game works there's a lot of emergent gameplay and each game ends up being defined by a different thing because of how crazy the cards are now speaking of emerging gameplay the game is about to get even more unpredictable it's sort of Fallen by the wayside but there was a lot of discussion about the wandering bald man and the simulated aspect of the game off the heels of the first video essentially in the episode Jake's wandering bald man wanders around the board and gets stuck in the mud without either player's input there are a lot of issues here and I guarantee you that I cannot emulate this one to one because this happens during Finn's turn while they're both talking I cannot make a system that is constantly running in the background technically a video game could simulate this but even that would be pretty over complicated but I have some ideas that capture that random AI element of the creatures in a way that I think is interesting and will hopefully feel right so with some outside help I had an idea for these behavioral dice which was the first step to developing something to emulate it these behavioral dice meant literally nothing at the moment aside from the fact that they each represented a different personality type but I thought if I made them and threw them around a bit I would come up with something which obviously happened since I said in the intro that this was the second part of the video I'm going to interject here really quick to let you know about our memberships which support the project more than I can express I wouldn't be able to keep working on this without you guys if you sign up to become a member you get access to private development streams every Saturday where we show off our new stuff and and design cards together live but also you'll get early access to the first play test once it's ready in the upcoming weeks of course there are also these other perks so if you're interested in supporting the project please consider becoming a member there are several board games that simulate an external Ai and I've seen a few that use a sort of event deck essentially you can simulate a bit of Randomness into the World by drawing event cards which make things happen there are two things that made this a bad idea for my game one it would involve a new third deck sitting between the players you'd have to draw from which just doesn't feel right for a card game like this and two when do you draw from the deck I don't like the idea of it being even a little bit consistent like having players draw at the end of their turn or every few turns it wouldn't feel fluid and random similarly I didn't want a system that made things resolve all at once like a set time to check all creatures one at a time for random behaviors so I began searching the game for triggers that could cause the player to roll these dice at random times things like when you flip a creature but don't move it roll a behavior dice for it this is an example of a terrible idea and all I had were terrible ideas like it until I realized the one thing that is is random in the game what card you draw I'm going to make event cards and shuffle them into each player's deck this way when players discard and draw occasionally something will happen then once that has resolved they'll draw another card so you aren't losing a card as a result I created a few cards that work sort of like the destiny Pile in Cosmic Encounter where they essentially give some criteria to determine which one of your creatures will be affected like your creature with the most attack then you roll a random Behavior die based on what kind of personality the affected creature has at the moment the Personalities in the game are neutral aggressive and dumb with some overlap between them the only issue now was that the dice still didn't mean anything and because I can't write information on the side of a D6 I would have had to have a table Elsewhere for you to cross reference I don't want that way too slow plus it's quite rigid just having six simple behaviors for each creature type is very predictable how did I fix the dice I got rid of them they were an artifact from a previous idea which had now become vestigal I simply put the behaviors on the cards themselves which I call unpredictable Behavior cards I can now just make a whole bunch of these cards with as simple or specific behaviors as I want and then put them into a deck and then have players each take a few randomly and shuffle them into their decks at the start of their game now that the cards detail the behaviors I needed a new way to determine the creature that is actually affected by the card if the cards themselves specified a Target things would get predictable in certain ways only the weakest creature would ever wander or only the farthest left creature would ever get pregnant I wanted to keep the personality thing intact so that the aggressive creatures would tend to do more aggressive actions and the intelligent creatures would tend to do the more sophisticated actions but then maybe there could be creatures that are just generally unpredictable and could just do anything at all so if there were to be personalities the creatures themselves need to have something that denotes what personality they have and because theyd already be adding new information on every creature card I was fine tacking on another stat to creatures as well unpredictability the more unpredictable a creature is the more likely that they will do something inane maybe I should call the stat inanity that would be more fun right please give me some suggestions in the comments I've suddenly become interested in alternate names while I'm writing the script the way targeting works is that when an unpredictable Behavior Card is drawn the creature that has the highest inanity is the Target and will carry out the list of behavior however most Behavior cards have an Associated personality intelligent actions say intelligent of them if an unpredictable Behavior Card is drawn with a personality type matching one or more of your creatures you may choose for to affect a creature with a relevant personality instead of the creature that is the least predictable by the way these are the now updated personalities that I put in simple friendly intelligent aggressive and monster I think they cover all the bases that I'm interested in through some testing this seemed to function pretty well although it didn't come up quite as much as I would have liked but that's the nice thing about this mechanic it's highly adjustable or easily removed entirely if you don't want such an anti-competitive element in your game you just Shuffle some random amount of these cards into each player's deck and you're good to go put less or more in as you please I said the mechanic is anti-competitive but that's not entirely true because the creatures have personalities and an unpredictability stat you can exert some control on the targeting of the behaviors even if they are very random if you have an important creature you can drop a more unpredictable creature along with it to prevent it from messing around too much I'm not worried about appearing so I've just been using the same format for the cards I've put in so far but I'll probably throw something different together by the next video so it's a bit more obvious when you draw one and they will be easier to sift out of a deck these are the cards I've thrown together at this point there won't be any duplicates so the same behavior can't crop up multiple times in one game some examples are the famous wander that makes creatures simply drift around eat which makes creatures rumage around for a snack and the aformentioned get pregnant behavior that makes them tired but produces a baby these cards are very easy to implement and likely won't have any art in them so if you guys have any ideas for unpredictable Behavior cards feel free to throw those out there and I'll be trolling around for them speaking of I'm going to give a community shout out to some incredible artist designers and someone who pointed something out making me look like a fool right after my notes with everyone's favorite OC globulin while talking to a friend at length about the monetary system and resources we ended up going on for a while about the hypothetical implementation of various resources like Katan gain depending on the land or structure the worker was flipped on I ended up wasting a bunch of time thinking about this idea which is objectively terrible but the idea of having cards like sheep and wood in your hand was just so unbearably funny to me I couldn't stop thinking about it speaking of I still think worker placement doesn't matter enough so I wanted to figure out ways to force workers to move on the board for some reason the idea I just mentioned would make them positioned to get different resources but I was considering making the lands get overworked when you flip cards on them making it so that you can't produce money there on your next turn I'm still not sure about this though once lands are properly implemented I feel like it should be possible to attack them directly but I don't want it to be too easy to just destroy them or necessary for winning the game since that would make the ending of the game a slow battle to destroy your opponent's lands one by one I think that maybe destroying a land merely exhausts it in some way so that it becomes open to being overridden and transformed into enemy lands with spells or some sort of other action but the land would not simply be destroyed simply by enemy attacks unless capitalized on at some point in my notes I ended up getting confused and referring to unpredictable Behavior cards as up cards instead of U cards somehow so there are several pages of that I plan on making the lands you choose determine the deck compositions people talk about this a lot actually why you'd have various lands or what it means in terms of playing CS aside from the lands having some sort of gameplay influence or passive effects I'm going to make it so that when you compile a deck you pull six to eight cards from an element per corresponding land that you have yes I know these are small decks on the low end they would be just 24 cards but believe me we have never even come close to decking out neutral cards are also on the table which would potentially substitute in for Elemental cards when compiling your deck all right back you go globulin a few more videos and I'll give you the first page onto the community spul Spotlight firstly there are three incredible artists that have become the first people to have properly Illustrated cards in the inter play test first is AAA by Blaze rkgk on Twitter it's just so overwhelmingly adorable and oozing with personality I feel like I know what he's thinking based on his pose and expression I mean just look at it see how the golden ratio fits right on there that means it's good art next is mind Goblin by at unnatural Decay on Twitter it has a really nice graphic feel to it from its use of symmetry and I also just get a really nice sense of its passive personality that matches the ability on the card really well last is pining Tree on Discord who made puffer brick here they were actually turnning out a bunch of little creature designs but this was my favorite it design is so simple but so unique round body and thin spikes complimented by The Big Cube that it's stuck in but it's happy all the same now I've been proven a Fool by Apollo in our Discord server who pointed out that the Husker Knight stats are 6/ question mark where the question mark is equal to the number of corn fields in play and because the Husker knites go down when the pig eats the corn fields that must be its Health meaning the health is on the right and the attack is on the left and I was in fact wrong and the immortal maze Walker is a 455 which is insane thank you all so much for watching watching please do the liking and the subscribing I think there's a button below the video you can just click on to do it I'm not entirely sure also if you'd like to support the project even more put some thought into becoming a member but I don't think that that's one of the buttons down there [Music]

Channel: BigHoles

Views: 153,650

Keywords:

Id: oruDFFC3qyU

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2024