Week 2: Gambling

You can gamble now!

Well at least you can add chips to the pot, I haven't exactly added the way to get chips back yet. Its basically the same experience though.

- Cleaning Up Your Hand -

 Early in the week I was mostly focused on bug fixing to make the hand look a bit nicer. Most of it was focused on making it so when you are selecting cards from your hand, you actually select the right card. The physics 2D ra cast in unity is a bit finicky when it comes to stacked sprites. When in 2D mode the sorting order usually determines which game object is the most far forward, but physics 2D raycast doesnt  consider sorting order, it considers z-depth. Luckily in 2D changing the z-depth doesnt actually affect anything on the display side, but having to set the z-depth for every card as well as the sorting order is a bit annoying.

- Look At It Another Way -

 One thing I have been trying to do with a lot of my games recently is to make them playable on both desktop browser and mobile browser. As part of this I decided I wanted to have two different views you could switch between while playing. The perspective view which shows your cards nice and large, and the detailed view which puts actual numbers to the game. This makes it so that the perspective view can have lots of nice set dressing and themeing and would let you see the npcs so I can do some storytelling. The detailed view can be for hardcore players that actual want to win a game that will require all the knowledge you can get to stand a chance.

- Please Don't Eat The Chips -

 I decided that before I programmed betting into the game, I should spend some time making it so that the betting values actual showed up as piles of chips. This in hindsight was a lot more difficult to do than I was expecting. Since I added two different views I had to make art for the chips from both the top view and from a slight angle. Since I wanted piles of chips to be procedurally generated based on the value I had to do the math to make the chips align themselves into stacks, and then have the stacks in lines. This requires making a lot of game objects depending on the value of the stack, since I made the value prioritize lower value chips over the higher value chips to make higher values visibly look larger. This was an elegant solution until I tried making it update in real-time, so I could look at a bunch of different values, and could hear my computer audibly straining to make and delete so many objects at 60 frames per seconds. After that I decided I should probably just update it whenever the value changes.

After making the chip piles look pretty I added the actual values in the code that would track how many chips each pile would have. All said and done you can now click on your ante pile to change between a low, medium, and high ante, and can visibly see your pile of money chips draining while you do so.

- Next Week -

Betting was really the last major mechanic the game was missing for the minimum viable product so I should be able to start the next week by finishing all of the card actions that required betting, and then work on the special cards that require extra code to function. After thats done the minimum viable game should be playable, but I dont think I would show it to anyone yet. My main goal is for next week really is to make the NPCs real. That means making the art for them, giving them unique strategies of how they play and bet, and then making them talk to lay the ground work of the story.

Best of luck?

- Tatomite Lol