Fortunes update
I've Been working on using NGUI to update Fortunes.
The main benefit is that it will be able to automatically scale with resolution so we won't get awkward overlapping. But it also has some nice handling of drag scrolling that was frustrating me for the cards in hand.
Next up will be the most challenging part of the GUI update, handling Tarot Divination layouts. I have some thoughts from looking at some tarot apps and the better scroll handling should allow more flexibility in that regard.
What has been the most interesting tarot deck art you've seen? Let us know in the comments.
#if Fortunes … #endif
No Just Deserts today, been trying to clean up Fortunes so our client can show off what we have so far at RavenCon and at her talk at the library of congress. She wrote up an impressive amount of copy in this ungodly dark magic excel spreadsheet James designed and I've had fun wrangling getting unity to read from that. Apparently even if you get it working in the editor that does not mean the excel file will be moved properly when you go to build so I have to copy it manually after building each time. Future task: automate that process.
I additionally have poked around in conditional compiling since our code for saving a divination doesn't work in a web player which is something we want to be able to do. Just in case you're trying to do the same thing this page http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Platform%20Dependent%20Compilation.html is helpful but not the first thing to come up when I was searching myself.
Models & Animation – Adding a touch of gloss
Worked on updating the graphical appearance of Just Deserts today. Its surprising what a difference throwing some textures on a few models can make.
Ran into some trouble with trying to animations and Mixamo to work. The player model I'm using gets into a walking pose but won't actually animate walking. I'd like to drill down into it but I've got a day-job I have to get away too.
Before
After
Iron Developer
When I'm not browsing various game development related sites, I frequent a site called Nerd Fitness.
Nerd Fitness, no its not an oxymoron
They are starting up a 6 week challenge that also coincides with the Edge online unity competition. So I will be doing some serious leveling up of my life as I challenge myself mentally and physically over the next few weeks.
I won't bore you with the details here, but if you're interested you can check it out here
Divination — Fortunes
What does the future hold?
There is a for fun Divination aspect to our game fortunes where at the end of the game you get a future generated by how the game went. Since the game play is mostly solid yesterday was working on making this a little bit more visual.
No, not exactly what I meant...
A problem we ran into is the fact that the layouts are pretty large. We have to make the cards tiny to fit on screen or have you scroll forever. So what I've tentatively done is to just have a picture of the layout with boxes for the cards which you click to reveal the detail of the card for that position.
This is a layout for a fortune...
clicking on one of the boxes gives you...
Ignore the silly text, its a place holder just like the art.
For reference the old, boring wall of text version looked like this:
This is a good fortune we promise
So what do you all think? Is this change an improvement? I may add colors or something to distinguish the separate categories within the layout to make it pop a bit more but visual aspects are not my strongest point. As you can tell by looking at the website! Well if you read this far thanks for reading and please share your thoughts.
AI for fortunes
Let's open it up and do some tweaks.
Working out what to do for the AI has been a bit interesting. I've never done AI for a card game before. I was initially thinking of trying to do a min-max tree but quickly came to the decision that the branching factor and uncertainty would cause that method to be a bit unwieldy.
So After some rethinking and discussion with James we can upon our current idea. Basically we are going to have two weighted factors to decide which card to play. One being the likelihood of the card to win the current trick and the second the strength of the hand hand that was left afterwards.
building a strong hand
These aren't static weights, at least they won't be once I've implemented them shifting over time. In the beginning the AI will favor building a stronger hand and near the end they will care more about winning the trick immediately. This two factor AI should deal with things like not wasting a strong card when a weaker one would just as easily win the trick.
Sometimes shortcuts can be found
Of course with the way the rules of fortunes work I couldn't just use the rank of the cards for how valuable it was for a hand. Since tricks can be either High or Low we have to use the distance from the center instead.
foreach(Card c in newHand){
if(c.suit != Card.suits.stars){
if(c.rank > 7)
score += c.rank - 7;
else
score += Mathf.Abs(c.rank-8);
} else {
if(c.rank > 10)
score += c.rank - 10;
else
score += Mathf.Abs(c.rank-11);
}
}
Sorry wordpress didn't preserve my indentation. Anyway The Major Arcana are slightly more valuable since they can switch a hand from low to high or vice versa, but this is hopefully captured in the slightly higher range of values for Major Arcana from 0 to 10 instead of 0 to 7 like the minor Arcana.
Thanks for listening to me ramble about AI here. If you think I'm way off base and have a suggestion, or just have a question about what I'm doing, share in the comments below.
On Funding
Ant likes to send me articles. Lots of articles.
Being the good friend I am, I read them all. Maybe not in a timely manner, but I read them.
Recently, he sent me an article advising people to refrain from self-funding. The author says that from their personal experience that self-funding is a bad idea, though explicit reasons are not given for this, and that outside funding is the way to go for everyone.
Now, I used to work at Cardlytics, and one day, I asked Scott Grimes, who used to work in venture capital, what a person needed to get investment from a VC firm. These are the things he told me:
1. Your idea must be attractive to a large market of people.
2. Your idea needs to something that can grow really quickly. Most investors are looking to exit from the investment in 5 - 7 years and are looking for a return of 7 to 1. That is, seven dollars for even one dollar invested.
3. A proven track record. This means that you need to be able to show that you can grow a business. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have started a business before, but that when put in charge of a business, you led it into a period of expansion. It also means that you need to be able to prove that you can provide a product or service in a timely manner. You may have great ideas, but if you can't produce, then investors aren't going to be interested.
4. Customer testimonials. You need to be able to provide proof that your idea or your business can meet the needs of your audience. This can be either for your current idea or from business you have grown in the past. Investors want to know about you as a businessperson.
5. A good business plan. Now what constitutes a good business plan? Being specific about who your audience is, what your product or service is, what your needs are, where you need improvement and your realistic expectations of growth along with your rationalization for that expectation.
Even after providing all of that, VC firms only invest in 10 - 15 companies a year. Angel investors even less. The fact is that outside investment is hard to get, and chasing it can pull you away from your business, so don't let the lack of outside funding deter you from pursuing your business. Most companies are self-funded and by doing so and succeeding even modestly, you will be able to provide those things that investors are looking for.
Fortunes Screenshots
The title menu
Last weekend I holed myself away at James' place and spent the entire weekend working on the Fortunes prototype. Its gotten a little bit more work since then and this is what it looks like currently.
opening screen
Sadly I couldn't get my video capture working and the stills don't show off terribly much yet, as there is no art done yet. But the basic structure of the game is still there. We start the game, and east player lays down a card...
which card will I choose?
and our valid plays become un-dimmed and we choose a play. I've found a variety of free sound effects and from the unity asset store got a fantastic song called "Build me a future" by ADHMusic. Really appropriate I thought. It may get replaced later but it sets a good tone for what we currently have.
Yet Another decision
So if any of you know of good, free software for video capture, please let me know in the comments.
This window of filler text apparently drops the frame rate to 10! That'll need some fixing
Development #5 — Prototype!
This morning I got the fortunes prototype to a playable state and immediately began learning from it. Its an exciting time to go from looking at the flow of how code should theoretically interact and seeing it actually play out. It also reinforced my main lesson from work on Marco Polo. Mainly not to get bogged down in making something perfect, and get something testable done. 80% of the crippling problems with Marco Polo were ones I had no idea would be problems despite spending tons of time trying to make sure things were immaculate. Live and learn I guess.
Have any of you readers played the card game we designed that this project is based on? If you did leave us feedback in the comments or at lathomas@clichegames.com
No surprises here
So, SOPA is getting a lot of press online as of late, and today, and Ant asked me my opinion of it.
This may come as a shock, but I am not a fan.
First of all, because piracy is going to happen. It is a cost of doing business. Someone is going to take your stuff and you have to factor that into your business model. Personally, I do not think that others should bear the burden of an industry being unable to adapt.
But most of all, I believe in the rule of law. Laws such as SOPA strip people of the ability to redress grievances in our courts and allows people to punish others without any burden of proof. The right to trial is a a hallmark of a civilized society. Without the courts we are merely thugs.
And that is what the entertainment industry is asking for our government to do, become thugs on their behalf. This saddens me, because I like to be entertained, but what saddens me more are the people who are supporting this silly, asinine and wasteful bill that will prove to be ineffective at curbing internet piracy.
For our friends in the entertainment industry, please find better ways to deal with piracy than turning the government against your customers.
