Notices by Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club), page 8

6% yes, 4% kinda, 90% no.
Interestingly when I ran this on Tumblr, they were 12% yes, 5% kinda, 82% no.

The quick explanation: the Vela Hotel Incident (or Vela Incident) was a 1979 event where a single satellite detected the double-flash of a nuclear explosion in the Indian ocean.
No country officially took credit, but the current consensus is that it was a joint South African-Israeli test.

wow the interface has managed to get even worse somehow

I just checked the logs for a simple HTTP request to their top level site and it defined a content security policy for 92 separate domains.
Including a lot of fun ones with names like "sandbox.company.egg" and "debugging.company.egg" and "embedded.demo.company.egg" and "debug-preview.company.egg"

all of which is pretty questionable when you already defined a *.company.egg policy!

hey, web administrators: be careful with your content-security-policy headers. yeah it's nice to set up a good cross-site-scripting policy, but you shouldn't be leaking information to attackers with it.

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.

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

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"

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Like if you recruit Hernando de Soto, the goody huts on the map only return positive results, and every unit's scouting radius increases

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.

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.

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

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)

How do you implement that without this becoming a nightmare of endless difficult-to-test specialized code?

That's the challenge