Foone🏳️⚧️
Do you ever get the urge to program a deckbuilding game?
Because it'd be such an interesting challenge to architect! A good deckbuilding game is full of cards/item/units that essentially alter the rules for that one card, and that's gonna be very interesting to implement.
Charlie Stross
@foone I think you just reinvented SNOBOL4, only without the computed GOTO's as ternary conditions on every line? And the insane 1960s text pattern matching syntax ...
Foone🏳️⚧️
How do you implement that without this becoming a nightmare of endless difficult-to-test specialized code?
That's the challenge
Foone🏳️⚧️
Of course you could always just pull a Nethack and make every line of code endless ternary conditions like the very idea of OO is an insult to K&R themselves.
damage=weapon_damage*strength+(lane>0 && playfield[lane-1]==CARD_OXPECKER)?2:0)
Foone🏳️⚧️
Like you have
* the Rat: 1 damage 1 health
* the Wolf: 3 damage 2 health
* the Armadillo: only takes damage on even numbered turns
* the Oxpecker: the card to the left has +2 health
Foone🏳️⚧️
That sort of thing.
These sorts of "every option involves changing the game rules" things are always fascinating to me, both as a gamer and a game developer.
clarity flowers
@foone I call this “modular design” and it’s one of my favorites bc it lets you add pieces to the game without having to keep the whole thing in your head. ttrpgs like Apocalypse World have the same property with their “moves”
Foone🏳️⚧️
Like if you recruit Hernando de Soto, the goody huts on the map only return positive results, and every unit's scouting radius increases
Foone🏳️⚧️
Paul Revere makes it so that if a city is attacked when it had no army but it has muskets in the storehouse, it'll temporarily promote a non-soldier unit to soldier and have them defend
Foone🏳️⚧️
I've been wondering about this sort of thing ever since Sid Meier's Colonization. It's not a deck builder (it's a 4x a la Civilization) but it has a "founding fathers" mechanic where you periodically recruit historic figures, and they have similar game-rules-changing effects
Foone🏳️⚧️
Sorry I'm having to make really short posts because my mastodon client tends to crash and lose half-finished posts every time I tab over to Firefox
Foone🏳️⚧️
So you're effectively rewriting the rules written on a card as part of gameplay.
A very neat mechanic and you can see how the sigils-instead-of-rules made it possible
Foone🏳️⚧️
So they don't have to test the card individually, just all the sigils.
This also enables the game to modify cards mid-game: with special events you can copy the sigils from one card to another, making new combinations of sigils.
Foone🏳️⚧️
So instead of having the Ouroboros card have rules on it saying that it always returns to your hand when killed, it has an Unkillable sigil.
Foone🏳️⚧️
And you look up the Unkillable sigil in the in-game rulebook, and it says:
"When a card bearing this sigil perishes, a copy of it is created in your hand"
Foone🏳️⚧️
That times a billion. You can't do anything in the engine without checking 8 different conditions that only happen when you have some other rare item and it's in the right place
Foone🏳️⚧️
Inscryption has a neat bit of abstraction: cards have attack/health/cost and then some number of sigils.
There's no rules on the cards themselves, but each sigil has associated rules, which you can look up at any time.
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