Yeah I gotta do something about that. I have already changed the level generation so that the single wide bridges (that are bishop traps) do not appear at all in the early levels and are much rarer later on too. Ideally I would like to detect the states where it's impossible for either side to win but it's not all that easy to do. Like usually a queen can't catch a bishop 1 on 1 but sometimes they can depending on the terrain. And of course card effects add a lot more complexity on top of handling the normal cases.
This happens a lot. The opponent can't move and I can't reach them, so I have to give up. I also end up in a stalemate a lot. The game should recognize when no action can be taken.
Yeah, that sucks. But it should happen that much really, maybe you were just very unlucky. Detecting stalemates would be a bit tricky. With just the chess pieces it would be pretty doable but with all the different possible effects and their combinations, it seems safer to leave it to the player to decide. And I already changed the island generation to do way less of these 1 wide choke points and completely avoid them on the first islands too. But I guess it's gonna be a bit of a wait before I can patch the game again.
I am surprised that stalemate detection would be challenging. Iterate over the current player's pieces and count the number of available moves. If they are fewer than 1 -> stalemate. What could I be missing? I assume that you have something that detects valid moves as the board tiles are properly highlighted when a piece is selected.
In terms of priorities , probably not the most urgent issue.
Oh yeah of course just finding out situations where you have no moves at all would be a piece of cake. But I was thinking more of detecting cases where you couldn't win no matter what even if you had loads of different moves to make.
Wow great concept and the title gave me a chuckle.
You really love your tarot cards, haha.
I was able to break the game on the third attempt. I was already on island 16 or 18. I had 4-5 queens and a king. I was stacking a lot of extra turns, sometimes reaching 5 turns for a single piece. I had reached over 100 souls. The last thing that I did was rearranging my cards before leaving a friendly island. As I pressed embark some of my pieces disappeared and the game froze. (web build)
Still - had a good fun. The tarot upgrades make for some unusual puzzles with the enemies. Some of the upgrades are more troublesome than others. Does the difficulty progression account for that?
Haha, I don't know why I keep going for tarot cards that often. I decided kinda fast that I wanted the items to be cards as it synergizes thematically nicely with chess being a board game and obviously after the classic playing cards, tarots are the first thing that come to mind. And they really offer a nice well rounded and decently numbered set of pretty abstract and versatile themes to plan the effects around.
The difficulty, if you can call it that, is just the enemy counts increasing and they getting more and more cards and effects. So the real difficulty really is all about what kind of random stuff they get really. There was probably some weird random error happening on the level/enemy generation, I gotta do some more testing on the higher levels. I didn't really test at 10+ that much at all really. You should have still at least saved some of your souls even if it froze as it does save that periodically?
But I still do like the concept of the game and plan on keeping working on it for a bit at least. Gotta still work on balancing everything better, fixing bugs and adding more stuff.
Is that the downloaded or web version? Looks like it's doing everything mirrored, everything that should be on the right is on left and vice versa. Except for the menu "opening direction" which is correctly moving it right (from left though, instead of off screen from right edge). Is your system/browser using right to left writing mode by any chance?
Awesome, good to know that it worked and maybe I'll know to sidestep this land mine in the future. Patch coming right up to fix the logo fully too. Huge thanks for pointing this out and quick reply/re-test!❤️❤️
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idea to call a draw as long as one of your pieces are at the end (my bishop was trapped)
Yeah I gotta do something about that. I have already changed the level generation so that the single wide bridges (that are bishop traps) do not appear at all in the early levels and are much rarer later on too. Ideally I would like to detect the states where it's impossible for either side to win but it's not all that easy to do. Like usually a queen can't catch a bishop 1 on 1 but sometimes they can depending on the terrain. And of course card effects add a lot more complexity on top of handling the normal cases.
This happens a lot. The opponent can't move and I can't reach them, so I have to give up. I also end up in a stalemate a lot. The game should recognize when no action can be taken.
Yeah, that sucks. But it should happen that much really, maybe you were just very unlucky. Detecting stalemates would be a bit tricky. With just the chess pieces it would be pretty doable but with all the different possible effects and their combinations, it seems safer to leave it to the player to decide. And I already changed the island generation to do way less of these 1 wide choke points and completely avoid them on the first islands too. But I guess it's gonna be a bit of a wait before I can patch the game again.
I am surprised that stalemate detection would be challenging. Iterate over the current player's pieces and count the number of available moves. If they are fewer than 1 -> stalemate. What could I be missing? I assume that you have something that detects valid moves as the board tiles are properly highlighted when a piece is selected.
In terms of priorities , probably not the most urgent issue.
Oh yeah of course just finding out situations where you have no moves at all would be a piece of cake. But I was thinking more of detecting cases where you couldn't win no matter what even if you had loads of different moves to make.
Wow great concept and the title gave me a chuckle.
You really love your tarot cards, haha.
I was able to break the game on the third attempt. I was already on island 16 or 18. I had 4-5 queens and a king. I was stacking a lot of extra turns, sometimes reaching 5 turns for a single piece. I had reached over 100 souls. The last thing that I did was rearranging my cards before leaving a friendly island. As I pressed embark some of my pieces disappeared and the game froze. (web build)
Still - had a good fun. The tarot upgrades make for some unusual puzzles with the enemies. Some of the upgrades are more troublesome than others. Does the difficulty progression account for that?
Haha, I don't know why I keep going for tarot cards that often. I decided kinda fast that I wanted the items to be cards as it synergizes thematically nicely with chess being a board game and obviously after the classic playing cards, tarots are the first thing that come to mind. And they really offer a nice well rounded and decently numbered set of pretty abstract and versatile themes to plan the effects around.
The difficulty, if you can call it that, is just the enemy counts increasing and they getting more and more cards and effects. So the real difficulty really is all about what kind of random stuff they get really. There was probably some weird random error happening on the level/enemy generation, I gotta do some more testing on the higher levels. I didn't really test at 10+ that much at all really. You should have still at least saved some of your souls even if it froze as it does save that periodically?
But I still do like the concept of the game and plan on keeping working on it for a bit at least. Gotta still work on balancing everything better, fixing bugs and adding more stuff.
w
option menu offset, unplayable.
Is that the downloaded or web version? Looks like it's doing everything mirrored, everything that should be on the right is on left and vice versa. Except for the menu "opening direction" which is correctly moving it right (from left though, instead of off screen from right edge). Is your system/browser using right to left writing mode by any chance?
browser, and yeah, that probably the issue.
Pushed a patch now forcing everything to be left-to-right. Is it better now?
titles still wonky, but otherwise yes.
Awesome, good to know that it worked and maybe I'll know to sidestep this land mine in the future. Patch coming right up to fix the logo fully too. Huge thanks for pointing this out and quick reply/re-test!❤️❤️