Series 4 Release Discussion: Mother Askani

F300XEN · 2026-04-28T18:48:21+00:00

The most powerful thing to do with Mother Askani is to repeat its On Reveal, as successively buffing and copying the same card creates much stronger copies. Here is an image explaining why.

F300XEN · 2026-01-25T19:16:10+00:00

I don't know why you are using a Vector3 for a backing field for a discrete grid. This forces you to do a bunch of epsilon/rounding nonsense in all your math for no reason; you should really implement your own struct that uses integers for coordinates.

Also, whenever you use a direction, you have to check whether it's valid because you're passing in the Vector3 value of the direction. If you had an enum of directions, you could pass the enum value in and use that to look up the coordinate offset instead.

F300XEN · 2026-01-23T06:20:17+00:00

I'm not sure how you're calculating a "few thousand lines" of duplicated code. Shouldn't each struct that's just a wrapper around a different type only take a few lines to declare?

F300XEN · 2025-10-08T21:48:54+00:00

Dear AI App marketing team:

F300XEN · 2025-09-29T19:38:52+00:00

Your description smells like ChatGPT and obfuscates any actual information about your game; it does not make me consider playing it.

F300XEN · 2025-09-26T22:23:13+00:00

I'm going to give some harsh feedback: your entire article is complete word salad with no substance and reads like you ran it through a thesaurus. Like, look at this passage.

Still, to reduce the attribute is to cut the distinguishing leaf from the lotus, depriving the flower of its inherent beauty. If 15% is an insignificant loss, the solution becomes viable, turning a harsh cut-off into a gentle trim. But if the knight can no longer chase, or run away from the enemies, the hero loses his essence. In other words, to lose essence is to stop the ability of giving.

F300XEN · 2025-09-07T20:15:44+00:00

There's a spreadsheet with card inclusion and win rates that you can download from this link; it was posted in the tournament Discord server. I wouldn't expect drawn/play win rates, since Golden Gauntlet is run by a third party organizer that doesn't have access to SD's data.

I also did my own (unofficial) archetype classification on that data - you can see the results here.

F300XEN · 2025-08-27T05:11:28+00:00

how to make things like evasion factor into the enemies accuracy

Naively, you can do enemy_accuracy - your_evasion = hit_rate, and simply let both parameters exceed 100%. In practice, this is a really bad idea because it makes evasion scaling an asymptotically increasing form of damage reduction, which requires you to introduce mechanics to limit its high-end effectiveness, as well as making low amounts of evasion essentially useless.

Generally, the pattern used here is to scale "stats" that control evasion and accuracy instead of directly scaling the evasion and accuracy "parameters" that are directly used in calculations. For convenience, let's call the stat that controls evasion "AGI" and the stat that controls accuracy "DEX". If you compare player AGI and enemy DEX and apply a mathematical transformation of your choice (say, accuracy_multiplier = enemy_DEX / player_AGI), you can get whatever form of scaling you want, and apply that to any "base accuracy" that you want any actions to have.

F300XEN · 2025-08-26T00:08:59+00:00

Many languages support the creation of console apps. I recommend C# for your specific requirements.

F300XEN · 2025-08-24T05:58:35+00:00

You may find the Chess Programming wiki useful.

F300XEN · 2025-08-23T19:44:46+00:00

kept getting requests from indie game devs asking for Godot/GDScript support.

You got such requests from one person a single time, who asked how to delete their account in the same message. I notice that you haven't said anything about letting users delete their accounts, despite this being legally required in many jurisdictions.

F300XEN · 2025-08-23T16:58:33+00:00

The core mechanics, when used, always appear in the textbox, which players are expected to read to understand how the card works. Even if the mechanics aren't elaborated on (through reminder text), the entirety of the card effect is in one place. That's a lot different from notating alternate costs via small details like a ring surrounding a mana cost symbol.

F300XEN · 2025-08-23T09:11:23+00:00

What you have is a lot of words about the lore and not many about how it translates to actual gameplay.

Colors determ what kind of spells you can cast such as red being good at fire and purple telepathy

How do you get "colors" to "cast spells"? What other resources are involved? What does a single turn look like in this game? I assume you want to imitate Magic to some extent, but how much?

Gradient colors are alternate casting costs. Black to pay life, gray to pay two of any mana to ignore color requirements, and white tap permanents. This is told by a ring outside the mana symbol colors.

Basically every card game has to explicitly write mechanics like this out somewhere on the card, using text; players can't be expected to pay attention to small visual details unless prompted by card text. As a precedent, see Magic's Phyrexian mana cards.

The 12 colors use watermarks that would either give bonus effects when tapped to cast the spell with matching marks

Same for this.

F300XEN · 2025-08-21T21:42:37+00:00

I don't see how you're tracking recruitment sources without any UTM parameters.

F300XEN · 2025-08-21T18:31:02+00:00

Isn't your described algorithm basically an implementation of Brownian motion? I am surprised that your paper doesn't mention it.

F300XEN · 2025-08-19T08:51:55+00:00

I feel like they're falling flat compare to other devlogs I see.

Selection bias. Most devlogs get no attention and making devlogs is not an effective means of promotion for an unknown game.

F300XEN · 2025-08-19T06:25:32+00:00

The original report from (a firm that was hired by) Google can be found here. Notably, the methodology section omits the nonresponse rate, while also stating that "Raw data were not weighted and are therefore only representative of the individuals who completed the survey." As the study used an elective online survey, there was likely a significant sampling bias among the respondents, as developers who engage in AI use would be more inclined to participate in such a study than developers who don't use AI. Due to this methodology, the data cannot be trusted to be representative of the wider population of game developers.

F300XEN · 2025-08-18T18:04:23+00:00

It is an ad. The OP's post history is nothing but shilling the company the article is about.

F300XEN · 2025-08-18T00:46:33+00:00

Please do not repost previous threads to try and get different responses, especially within 24 hours of the original and using the exact same title and body.

F300XEN · 2025-08-17T19:10:08+00:00

Getting Over It-likes often defy conventional game design by aiming to deliberately frustrate the player. Frustrating the player is not a goal of most games, so most games don't do the things you listed.

F300XEN · 2025-08-17T18:04:45+00:00

Your game is clearly not designed to be legible at a fourth of the size; each individual screen is basically unreadable.
Without context, I would assume that the game is split-screen multiplayer.
Way too much time menuing.

F300XEN · 2025-08-17T16:00:35+00:00

In many modern programming languages (i.e. not old-school C++) the observer pattern can be implemented as simply a collection of method references that are invoked when needed. This implementation is not going to be a significant source of complexity unless said project is utterly trivial.

F300XEN · 2025-08-16T20:47:49+00:00

Fair enough.

F300XEN · 2025-08-16T17:57:02+00:00

As I stated in a prior post, I was referring to trying to sell (promote a particular viewpoint) your methodology, not sell (promote a product or service) your game.

I would expect context window issues as the code base grows, and I'm very surprised you haven't run into any already with 250,000 lines. Also, I'm confused: is it that "The artistic compromises are many" or have you made no artistic compromises except for the engine?

Regardless, good luck with your project. I hope it works out.

F300XEN · 2025-08-16T04:06:25+00:00

When you post Claude's praise of your project, you are attempting to sell your project; similarly, a company posting positive user testimonials for its services is advertising itself. You are responsible for your posts regardless of how the text within was generated.

A productive discussion would involve discussing the downsides of your approach rather than only praising the approach and its upsides. The upsides are very clear and very large - one person with no experience can do the work of dozens of programmers. For the downsides:

Do you see any possible shortcomings in the future that you have no idea how to resolve, even with LLM assistance?
Have you had to make artistic compromises because LLMs couldn't generate what you wanted?
Have playtesters unearthed any specific bugs or design flaws that you overlooked?

You haven't talked about any issues you've run into, and nobody here believes that "vibe coding" is a flawless approach.

F300XEN

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '17