Week 3: Not So Lonely

I did a lot this week.

In fact I probably did too much considering that I rushed a lot of the code and implementation and totally spaghettified everything. I took some time yesterday to clean up the code a bit but it still a bit messy.

- I Ordered Too Many Chips -

Last week I was very proud about the implementation of the stacks of poker chips that would automatically change to reflect their value. Only this week did I realise that have ~100 chip game objects on screen at once suddenly made my computer fan turn on. Considering I am aiming to make this game run in the phone browser I decided that it probably not a good idea to cause the device to overheat.

As part of my clean up at the end of this week I re-did the chip system so instead of game objects for the chips I made the chip piles procedurally generated textures instead. It runs much faster now since I basically condensed the calculations unity was doing every frame with deciding how to do render the many many game objects, into only one frame. While it does have a slight dip on the frame that textures are generated, since I cant get away with nearly as much parallelization as unity can when rendering the scenes. The fact that unity doesn't have to worry about all the other baggage that comes with game objects makes it a superior system.

-  Cards in a Card Game -

Who would think cards would be important to a card game? Me. Thats who. Either way this week I added all the actions to the cards (in some capacity at least) since betting works now it was easy enough to add functions to the cards that do simple betting manipulation like Strength, Temperance, and Sun. Adding some of the other card abilities like Emperor where it nullifies a cards action wasn't hard either since I encoded each card action as a delegate function in the card class. Some cards though like Hanged Man, Hermit, and Hierophant needed special attention. Hanged man requires I made a visual representation of the shadows pile so that hanged man could flip the top card over. Hermit and Hierophant were even messier since they required extra UI elements for their prompts to ante again, and reveal a card respectively. Im still not very happy with the UI in general, mostly because it feels hard to read the message text that appears when a card is played since it doesnt contrast the background. At the very least I want to add a drop shadow to the card title.

Regardless all of the cards work now! At least for 4 players. As part of the spaghettification I tried my best to make all of the functions work for an anonymous number of players, but im sure when I get the full game flow implemented and players start leaving the table when out of chips everything will fall apart.

- Friends :3 -

They are canonically not your friends. This section title is a lie.

As part of this whole game I decided to do quite a strange color selection. I wanted to play around with how colors looked when in contrast with other hues and so I limited myself to 10 different hues, with each hue having 2 saturation levels. When I designed the cards I choose high brightness colors, but for the actual game environment I have a different color palette of ten new hues, all at a much darker value. All of the colors where chosen using the OKLAB color space since it visually looks much nicer in how it splits the color wheel.

This limited color palette leads to some weird results when it comes to character design. I only had one color that remotely look like any shade of skin color, but unfortunately that color I used for the table. So rather than having all of my characters table colored they all have very weird skin tones. (It also makes their design somewhat more inclusive. If it wasn't for the fact all of the characters being kind of white coded... sorry). At the table you have 3 characters, the Boss, a Mafioso, and a Thug. While the cards are designed to have a 1920s mafia theme, the actual game is a post war 1950s style. But, they are still part of the mafia. I haven't finalized their personalities yet, but the vibe is that the boss will be the player to beat, since im going to give him the best strategy, while the mafioso and thug are going to have different play styles that are unbalanced. The Boss is supposed to be a quite shell shocked character, who takes his role with dead seriousness and prefers to let his lackeys do the talking. The mafioso is going to take his role as a mafia member way too literally and will be comedically evil, and the thug will be a bit of a meat head.

- Coming Soon To a Next Week Near You -

I think last week I had said I would get the AI in this week, which got kind of side-lined by needing to clean up the code. But this coming week I have a lot of free time to work with. First on the docket is to finish my clean-up, make my new texture piles fit in the scene, and then finally finish the detailed view. Next I will probably work to make the AI I was planning to do this week. Then I think I want to make the game a title screen and give it the proper game flow, with win and lose states, and make it so the NPCs get removed from the table so that you can play with different numbers of players. Finally I will try and make the NPC text box system and write some simple dialogue. Depending on how much time I have after that I will add in the second harder LSD round where I actually implement the hallucinations part of the theme, but mostly likely that will be the week after.

Im getting there.

-TDS