My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

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Velensk
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Velensk »

Sorry for not being clear: The reason it was updating, was because I hadn't turned updating off (I was just making sure that it ran as a baseline). The reason I was telling you about the result was because updating is on by default and I thought the fashion in which it would keep updating and yet run just fine if the updater was quit might be useful in figuring out what the updaters issue was.

I'm once again running into the problem of getting something working then trying something which causes the program not to work and then it not working when I revert the changes. I will give what I have now below though.

After the last test I:
-Removed updating from the game master_config ran the game, it went strait into the game and worked fine.
-Changed the game master_config, the module master_config, and the folder the module is in to say citadel_dev instead of citadel, game crashed (terminal report below)
-Reverted all the names and files. Game still crashes.

Game master config:

Code: Select all

{
//	"id": "hex",
//	"abbreviation": "hex",
//	"name": "Tester module for Hex tiling",
//	min_engine_version: 1.2,
	arguments: ["--module=citadel”], //"--width", "1024", "--height", "768", "--bigscreen", "--proportional-resize", //"--no-iphone-controls"]
}
Error message

Code: Select all

Frogatto engine version 1.4
Build Options: isomap save_png sdl2 shaders svg
LOADING CONFIGURATION FROM master-config.cfg
PARSE ERROR: ./master-config.cfg: line 6 col 42: - found in illegal position in number
PARSE ERROR: ./master-config.cfg: line 6 col 42: - found in illegal position in number
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type json::parse_error
Abort trap: 6
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Ravana
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Ravana »

Not sure if thats the only problem you have, but json does not accept any sort of commenting markup.
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johndh
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by johndh »

Got another crash, this time on trunk:

Code: Select all

BOT: @5446310 GOT RESPONSE: message_received
BOT: handle message @ 5446310 : message_received... ( {
	"game_type": "citadel",
	"id": 1426629264,
	"log": "",
	"nplayer": 1,
	"players": ["johndh","Salak"],
	"rng_seed": -1691699640,
	"server_time": 25,
	"started": false,
	"state": "@eval deserialize('0x82fc752c47424e8')",
	"state_id": 26,
	"type": "game"
} )
CONSOLE: 'BOT: FFL message type: game'
CONSOLE: 'BOT: handle game message: 26'
CONSOLE: 'BOT: request_updates: 1426634577'
BOT: handled message in 1
BOT: SEND @5446312 Sending response 90/91: (nil) {
	"send": {
		"allow_deltas": false,
		"state_id": 26,
		"type": "request_updates"
	},
	"session_id": 1426634577
}
src/formula_object.cpp:1013 ASSERTION FAILED: Could not find expected object id when applying delta: {
	"_uuid": "b636a88d94814a6a9d45a169065f607a",
	"summoned_this_turn": false
}
At /home/john/.frogatto//dlc/citadel/data/objects/citadel_controller.cfg 2463:
apply_delta(state, message.delta) asserting message.delta_basis = _state_id,
^--------------------------------^


---
---
ATTEMPTING TO SEND CRASH REPORT...
Aborted
Running on Linux, this happened during a match with an AI opponent.

Secondly, when running ./anura --auto-update-module --module=citadel, I get a window with the Frogatto progress bar for a split second, which then disappears, then repeats over and over while the console repeats the same message. Launching without --auto-update-module runs the game as expected.
http://pastebin.com/64RQJdE2

In more general feedback, it's fun so far, and I like the variety of land effects. I'm by no means a CCG aficionado, (I've never even played MtG) and I found this easy enough to grok. My one gripe would be that most turns result in everyone dying, as my opponent's attack is better than my units' health and vice versa. I guess that's kinda the point, constantly losing units and drawing new ones? That's not necessarily a bad thing, just very alien to my usual strategy play style.
It's spelled "definitely", not "definately". "Defiantly" is a different word entirely.
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iceiceice
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by iceiceice »

Hi Dave, I played around with this this afternoon. Velensk and I even managed to get the co-op working and the p v p working.

I don't feel I have any deep insight into the strategy (or even a complete understanding of the rules), however here's my thoughts on the overall user experience.

1. In the co-op campaigns Velensk and I thought there were some things that were unusual, for instance, it seems that the second player doesn't "exist separately", i.e. all of the lands and levels and such go to benefit the first player. I'm not sure how that can be resolved though. Are they both supposed to have separate lands or share lands?

2. There were a few times when I played that the UI seemed to get stuck. What would happen is, the AI would play something in response to something that I did, and I would have an opportunity to counter respond or so it seems, but what would actually happen would just be that the AI's card would be flashed on the screen and I couldn't click past it or do anything.

3. The UI seems to get confused by window resize events. There were a few times that I couldn't click on any of the buttons, unless I hovered the mouse about 20-30 pixels below where the button was displayed on the screen. I was able to bypass these issues by pressing the window maximize button, then the program seemed to adjust properly again.

4. Its a bit awkward in the deck building interface right now if you want to remove cards. Afaik there is no way to decrement the number of instances of some card in the deck, I can only go back to the list of cards at right and press X on them. But that list also cannot be scrolled, so in a large deck I have to just delete most of the cards in my deck so that the ones I want to delete are visible, it seems.

5. It's a bit awkward that you can't operate the deck-building while queuing for multiplayer. (Or so it seems.)

6. I'm not sure how the AI works, actually I'm surprised that you have a generic algorithm that does pretty well, it sounds nifty :)
However for what its worth, I think the AI might use some tweaking for the "Sapienza"-school enemies -- it seems to favor blasting me with fireballs rather than my creatures. Maybe I don't understand how that deck is supposed to work but when you play it that way it seems to get rolled even by quite slow decks with substantial numbers of creatures.

7. It seems like there might be some RNG seeding issues. When I didn't play the same level repeatedly I would get different cards in my hand when I start, however, after a session where I was trying to get all the available cards for my library, I found that I got the exact same starting hand 5 games in a row, and the AI got the same cards as well apparently and made more or less the same moves. This was in Gatekeeper level 3.

8. Some minor thoughts on the game mechanics anyways:

- Poison seems very weak, so weak as to be useless. Maybe poison should do 2 damage a turn?
- Is it intentional that there are no "area" damage spells? Like a spell that does 1, or 2, damage to every creature?
- Is it intentional that there are no spells which prevent a creature from moving?
- Sometimes the "card draw" mechanics seem like they don't work the way I think they should. It appears that when my hand is refilled at the start of my turn, it is always to the same maximum, regardless of if there were spells or abilities that say I should have extra cards. For instance, suppose I start with 4 cards in hand, and I play them all, and also in combat a creature dies which gives me a new card. I think that the next round I should start with 4 cards as usual, plus an extra one for that creature. Otherwise its not distinguishable from if the creature didn't have that ability. Similarly, the "ghost" creature is supposed to return to my hand when it dies. But when it does this, it blocks one of my new cards from being drawn. I think that in the next turn, I should instead get the ghost, plus 4 additional new cards, so that the ghost is not blocking my card draws.
Andrettin
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Andrettin »

I'm online right now - anyone want to play?
Velensk
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Velensk »

@iceiceice: About the card draw, that's actually an integral part of how the game works. At the start of each turn you automatically draw to your hand limit. Your hand limit can be increased by lands and the like but no matter how many extra cards you draw from effects you'll still draw back to this amount. Thus, if you want to draw more cards you must either use or discard cards as well as increase your hand size. As such, effects that simply draw you cards (as opposed to increasing your hand size) are much less powerful than in other card games
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

@Velensk: I will pm you about your troubles so as to not clutter the thread. When we work things out we can update any docs.
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

Ravana wrote:Not sure if thats the only problem you have, but json does not accept any sort of commenting markup.
Standard JSON doesn't but we use a JSON-like language that has some added capabilities for convenience, including commenting. We call if FSON.
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Velensk
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Velensk »

Another bug report: For some reason, zombies don't seem to do damage when it isn't their owners turn.
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

iceiceice wrote:Hi Dave, I played around with this this afternoon. Velensk and I even managed to get the co-op working and the p v p working.
Thanks for playing and for your comments!
iceiceice wrote: 1. In the co-op campaigns Velensk and I thought there were some things that were unusual, for instance, it seems that the second player doesn't "exist separately", i.e. all of the lands and levels and such go to benefit the first player. I'm not sure how that can be resolved though. Are they both supposed to have separate lands or share lands?
Firstly I would note that co-op is the least developed part of the game. More at 'proof of concept' level than anything else.

The idea though is that the players share life, but have their own cards and mana pools. Yes there are some unresolved bugs with how lands and things should work that need to be fixed.
iceiceice wrote: 2. There were a few times when I played that the UI seemed to get stuck. What would happen is, the AI would play something in response to something that I did, and I would have an opportunity to counter respond or so it seems, but what would actually happen would just be that the AI's card would be flashed on the screen and I couldn't click past it or do anything.
This seems strange. What do you mean by 'flashed' exactly? You mean it just sat there and hung ... forever? Was this single player or multiplayer?

iceiceice wrote: 3. The UI seems to get confused by window resize events. There were a few times that I couldn't click on any of the buttons, unless I hovered the mouse about 20-30 pixels below where the button was displayed on the screen. I was able to bypass these issues by pressing the window maximize button, then the program seemed to adjust properly again.
Yeah I need to work a bit on window resizing working nicely, definitely noted.
iceiceice wrote: 4. Its a bit awkward in the deck building interface right now if you want to remove cards. Afaik there is no way to decrement the number of instances of some card in the deck, I can only go back to the list of cards at right and press X on them. But that list also cannot be scrolled, so in a large deck I have to just delete most of the cards in my deck so that the ones I want to delete are visible, it seems.
The UI should have 'Next' and 'Prev' buttons to scroll through the cards as in this screenshot: http://www.theargentlark.com/screenshot ... el/2e3.png -- do you get those Next and Prev buttons on your system?

Do you have suggestions for making it easier to add/remove cards?
iceiceice wrote: 5. It's a bit awkward that you can't operate the deck-building while queuing for multiplayer. (Or so it seems.)
Yeah I agree with this. Will look at fixing it.
iceiceice wrote: 6. I'm not sure how the AI works, actually I'm surprised that you have a generic algorithm that does pretty well, it sounds nifty :)
However for what its worth, I think the AI might use some tweaking for the "Sapienza"-school enemies -- it seems to favor blasting me with fireballs rather than my creatures. Maybe I don't understand how that deck is supposed to work but when you play it that way it seems to get rolled even by quite slow decks with substantial numbers of creatures.
Yes I agree entirely that the AI was misusing fireball. I've tweaked it so it should use fireball on your creatures more now!

I think the AI system we have is a pretty good foundation though there is certainly a lot that can be done to make it better.

iceiceice wrote: 7. It seems like there might be some RNG seeding issues. When I didn't play the same level repeatedly I would get different cards in my hand when I start, however, after a session where I was trying to get all the available cards for my library, I found that I got the exact same starting hand 5 games in a row, and the AI got the same cards as well apparently and made more or less the same moves. This was in Gatekeeper level 3.
Hmm were you quitting the game between tries? Can you repro this consistently?

iceiceice wrote: - Poison seems very weak, so weak as to be useless. Maybe poison should do 2 damage a turn?
I agree with this. Actually when I started developing the game, all values were half what they are now (so a Wolf was 2/2 rather than 4/4, Fireball did 3 damage, etc). Back then poison was more reasonable. :)

We could of course double poison too, but what I'm thinking of is the idea of making it so poison has a value attached to it, which is how much you lose per turn. I like the idea of creatures that do poison damage, which they inflict on enemy creatures, and on players meaning the player will now consistently lose life each turn once poisoned.
iceiceice wrote: - Is it intentional that there are no "area" damage spells? Like a spell that does 1, or 2, damage to every creature?
- Is it intentional that there are no spells which prevent a creature from moving?
No, both of these are mechanics I'd like to explore. One thing which I think could be interesting is a "Meteor" spell which does damage to all creatures in a tile and surrounding tiles, but the card is delayed by one full turn before taking effect.

I also want to add a 'frozen' status effect which basically immobilizes a creature for a set amount of time.

Any of these things can be implemented very easily! (Though harder will be the cool gfx we might want to go with them! :p )
iceiceice wrote: - Sometimes the "card draw" mechanics seem like they don't work the way I think they should. It appears that when my hand is refilled at the start of my turn, it is always to the same maximum, regardless of if there were spells or abilities that say I should have extra cards. For instance, suppose I start with 4 cards in hand, and I play them all, and also in combat a creature dies which gives me a new card. I think that the next round I should start with 4 cards as usual, plus an extra one for that creature. Otherwise its not distinguishable from if the creature didn't have that ability. Similarly, the "ghost" creature is supposed to return to my hand when it dies. But when it does this, it blocks one of my new cards from being drawn. I think that in the next turn, I should instead get the ghost, plus 4 additional new cards, so that the ghost is not blocking my card draws.
So, they are working as intended, I do understand why at first it might seem like something isn't giving you any value, such as Soothsayer's ability.

The thing is, if your Soothsayer dies, you now get a card immediately. This means you can play it straight away if you have the mana, or if you don't like the card you can discard it and get a new card next turn. Card draw is definitely beneficial, though of course something like Library which gives you a permanently larger hand size is generally better.

David
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

Velensk wrote:Another bug report: For some reason, zombies don't seem to do damage when it isn't their owners turn.
Err yeah Zombies used to not attack until the first full turn after creation. I removed the rules text but not the logic for this. Removed the logic, should work now!
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

johndh wrote:Got another crash, this time on trunk:
Hmm I've had a couple of reports of this crash but never reproed it myself. It seems quite random. Please let me know if you work out a way to repro it!
johndh wrote:Secondly, when running ./anura --auto-update-module --module=citadel, I get a window with the Frogatto progress bar for a split second, which then disappears, then repeats over and over while the console repeats the same message. Launching without --auto-update-module runs the game as expected.
http://pastebin.com/64RQJdE2
Okay I have fixed this, however please note that you generally don't want to run with --auto-update-module while having a fresh version of the module from git present under modules/

--auto-update-module is designed for a user that does not want to do development and just wants to play the game. Getting the module from git is of course for someone interested in modification and development. Mixing the two approaches is likely going to lead to tears at some point.

johndh wrote: In more general feedback, it's fun so far, and I like the variety of land effects. I'm by no means a CCG aficionado, (I've never even played MtG) and I found this easy enough to grok. My one gripe would be that most turns result in everyone dying, as my opponent's attack is better than my units' health and vice versa. I guess that's kinda the point, constantly losing units and drawing new ones? That's not necessarily a bad thing, just very alien to my usual strategy play style.
I definitely want feedback from people who haven't played so many CCG's, as I want the game to appeal to both CCG veterans and more casual players (much as Wesnoth holds a certain appeal for wargame enthusiasts and players with no background in wargames).

As the game has completely deterministic combat mechanics, it is natural that much of the time both sides will perish. However, the idea is to tilt things in your favor by using spells to influence combat, and to position creatures in places where they will emerge victorious instead of both sides dying. Of course often both sides do die for one reason or another, but such is life!

David
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Dave »

Thanks to everyone who has offered feedback in here!

I think there has been enough feedback and different topics that it's hard to keep track of all the threads of conversation in a single forum thread. (Which is a good problem to have).

Rather than open Argentum Age's own web forums, I want to try something a little different and use reddit to discuss Argentum Age's development. You can go here to discuss and help develop Argentum Age: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArgentumAge

Note that reddit has an extremely easy registration process and is a nice minimalistic site which allows fully threaded conversations, so I think it will work well.

I will still monitor posts in this thread, though I would love for people to give feedback over at reddit if possible!
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by Andrettin »

Dave wrote:Do you have suggestions for making it easier to add/remove cards?
I am not iceiceice, but if I may make a suggestion: I think that right-clicking a card removing it from the deck would work very well (since you left-click to add it to the deck).
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iceiceice
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Re: My latest project -- a digital collectible card game

Post by iceiceice »

Hi Dave,

I think you answered many of my questions. I don't have a reddit account, I will get one, however I thought I should provide feedback for a handful here, so that I also don't get confused :)

Re #2:
This seems strange. What do you mean by 'flashed' exactly? You mean it just sat there and hung ... forever? Was this single player or multiplayer?
So after playing some more, I think what I've gotten confused about is the following. Sometimes you play an invocation, and in response the AI or another player plays an invocation. Then both of the cards are displayed at large size at the left and right of the screen respectively. I had some confusion about what to do when I am satisfied with the result. I think it expected me to press "pass" but the pass button is only barely visible behind my card, and clicking on my card doesn't move it out of the way or anything. Eventually I learned that if I just press the left-most nub of the "pass" button then I can proceed. This might be specific to my screen resolution, which is ~ 1366 x 768.

Re #4:
The UI should have 'Next' and 'Prev' buttons to scroll through the cards as in this screenshot: http://www.theargentlark.com/screenshot ... el/2e3.png -- do you get those Next and Prev buttons on your system?

Do you have suggestions for making it easier to add/remove cards?
I realized what it is -- it appears that I only get those prev and next buttons when creating a new deck, but I don't get them when I'm editing an old deck.

I think right click to remove a card is probably the simplest, like andrettin suggested, and I did definitely try that.
An alternative would be like, when you click on the card, a + and a - button appear next to the card count x/3.
Not a design expert personally :)

Re #7:
Hmm were you quitting the game between tries? Can you repro this consistently?
I can reproduce this consistently. It seems that if I play a level and beat it, then click to play it again from the campaign screen, I get the same seed as before. If I press escape and the "restart" button then I will get a different hand.

However even when using the restart button every time I still feel like there is not that much variation between the hands -- I feel like I've often gotten the same hand across different sessions of playing the game, and the AI also played similarly. This part is more nebulous though, maybe its an instance of birthday paradox or something.

P.S.
Having played some more, the card draw mechanic makes much more sense to me now :)
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