Diana Update Part III
Hi there!
So whoops, it's actually been three weeks since the last update. In my defense, last week my sister came home, and she only had the week before she had to leave again for pre-season, so we spent all the time playing video games. She also installed a pull-up bar (temporarily) over my bedroom door. I learned that I am the only person in my family that cannot do at least 3 pull ups, in that I can do 0 pull ups.
It was also eclipse day today! I hope you all got to see at least a partial eclipse (unfortunately NJ is not in the total eclipse region) - my uncle brought eclipse glasses so I think my eyes are still operational.
Finally, my birthday is tomorrow :O Although knowing how Tinyletter is, by the time you get this email (or read it) it's probably passed. But I'll be 22 and I'm still surprised that I'm no longer a teenager.
Also, I thought this email would be short, but then I went on a digression and it turned into a huge math problem. Whoops.
What I've been working on
Still spending my time trying to make games (slooowly), though I've been slacking off a bit. I've been playing a lot more video games lately, both as 'research' and also just to pass the time.
Farsider Corner
Most of the work on Farsider recently has been on the level editor, which has gotten a lot more robust. It's all work that improves the framework greatly, but isn't all that interesting visually. By the end of the week, this should all be playable, and then I can finally start putting together a demo.
This is what the level editor looks like now, which I think is a pretty good improvement for a week and a half of work:
I also drew new concept art for some of the characters along the way.
Here's Selene, the protagonist. She's a high school student, but was turned into a ghost upon entering the Farside, and has found that she doesn't actually mind her new form too much (hey, she can float and use magic and stuff.)
And Gail, Selene's old friend, and a dancer. She's less happy about the 'suddenly a ghost' thing, and really wants to find a way home. Also, dancing is kind of hard without legs.
Misc. Rambling
I ended up spending a lot of time playing a strategy game called 0 AD - it's a sort of Age of Empires clone where you build a civilization and command an army. It's incomplete, but very playable - and the incompleteness has been more amusing than not (for example, none of the bears are animated, so they move by sliding across the ground.)
I've learned that I am not good at real-time strategy games. I like thinking about moves before making them. Also, I really like making my entire army cavalry. I got used to Fire Emblem where all the cavalry and horses are great units, because they can move farther per turn than any other unit, and that has carried over to pretty much everything.
Which actually brings me to a somewhat-related-tangent about game design: oftentimes in strategy games, regardless of whether you're playing on a map or with cards, the most important factor for winning games is having more options than your opponent(s).
For card games, this usually translates very neatly to how many cards you have in your hand. If one player has 5 cards in their hand and the other has 2, the player with 5 cards has a lot more options, and so has many more opportunities to react to an opponent's moves, or set up their own plays. (This is particularly obvious even in games where the objective is to get rid of all the cards in your hand - the fewer cards you have, often the fewer options, and the easier it becomes for your opponents to 'catch up' to you.)
As a result, in a lot of collectible card games (where the goal is usually not to get rid of your hand, but rather use the cards to build up points or attack an enemy), the ability to draw cards is very powerful, especially if you can reliably draw more cards than your opponent.
I think the most extreme example I am aware of is in Megaman Battle Network. The battles were turn-based, where every turn you could choose from 5 random chips (from a deck of 30) to send to Megaman, which would then become his attacks for the turn. However, in the first game, you could also choose to not use any chips at all for a turn, in which case for every turn after that, you could choose from 10 chips. And you could do this again for a choice of up to 15 chips a turn.
The best choice for almost every serious battle, then, was to go through the first two turns without any chips, so that the rest of the battle you'd have 15 to work with. Uh, something something probability (sorry. this gets extremely math):
Let's say in your deck of 30 you have 1 chip that is extremely good for a particular battle.
On each turn, you draw 5 chips from your deck. The probability that the first draw is not your good chip is 29/30 (since there is a 1/30 chance that it is the good chip.) The probability that the second draw is not the good chip is 28/29, since we'd previously removed a not-good chip from the deck in the first draw, reducing the total not-good chips to 28, and the total chips in the deck to 29. We do the same for the third to fifth draws, bringing the total probability that the good chip is not in the starting hand to:
29/30 * 28/29 * 27/28 * 26/27 * 25/26
...or 5/6, which is roughly 83%. So the chance that the good chip is in the starting hand is 1/6, or 17%. (This should make sense - if you're drawing 5 chips from a 30 chip deck, you're drawing 1/6 of the deck, so there's a 1/6 chance that your good chip is in that 'section' of the deck.)
But if you're drawing 15 chips, you're drawing half the deck in one turn...which is a 50% chance of drawing your good chip. Turn after turn, the probability of getting a chip that is useful right now becomes a lot better, so the chips you get in turn 1 and 2 must be incredibly good to rival the worth of having a 15-chip draw on turn 3.
For strategy games on a board or with a map, then most often, the idea of increasing options translates to how many spaces a piece or unit can end up at the end of the turn. Let's look at Fire Emblem as an example, which uses a square grid map:
In Fire Emblem, your foot units can move up to 6 spaces, while cavalry can move up to 8. Even if the cavalry unit's other stats are weaker, its ability to reach more of the map quickly means that it has a lot of utility: it can weaken further enemies before they can reach the rest of your forces, they can rush in from other parts of the map to reinforce against an attack much faster than foot units, and even move out of the range entirely of enemy foot units.
Of course, options alone don't guarantee victory. A player needs to understand the rules of the games and be able to see their own options and opportunities to take advantage of them, and (ideally) a skilled player would beat an unskilled one. But for skilled players, any move that increases the options space is often an incredibly powerful move, even if at first it might seem weaker than moves that directly take you closer to winning a game. And for game designers, if there is a means of increasing those options, even with a penalty, that often becomes the 'optimal' move to take.
Anyway, that went on much longer than anticipated, oops. I also don't remember probability all that well, so forgive me if my math is off. It probably is. If you're interested in the math of nerdy card games for whatever reason, someone wrote an article on the probabilities for opening hands in the Pokemon Trading Card Game here: https://sixprizes.com/2013/01/13/themathtcg-the-probabilities-behind-the-opening-hand/
That's all for now.