| I like the game itself - it feels well balanced when you are playing single-player mode with built-in cards only. But creating your own cards is an INCREDIBLY frustrating experience. This is a robot I tried to create (sumbot): "This robot's attack, speed, and health are the sum of the attacks, speeds, and healths respectively of all other robots in play." It didn't understand the words: "are", "sum", "speeds", "healths", "respectively". Very restrictive dictionary and grammar. It pissed me off at a deep level and I probably will step away from this game. Maybe integrate with an LLM (such as GPT4) to accept card descriptions? It seems I can set an arbitrary cost for my cards? How do you balance the game when it involves custom cards? One strategy would be to give each player a deck consisting of their cards and the opponents cards. So if someone made a really imbalanced card, they would have a 50-50 chance of having it used on them. |
Re: frustration of writing cards – yeah, I definitely feel you on that. The grammar is fairly restrictive and there's generally just one way to make a given card action parse (you could say it's more like Python than Perl). One affordance that we've put in to at least make writing cards a little easier is the Dictionary/Thesaurus feature in the Workshop, that lets you see all the words and phrases recognized by the parser and examples of how each of them has been used in practice.
Re: sumbot – You can do something like "Startup: Set this robot's attack to the total attack of all robots, and set this robot's speed to the total speed of all robots, and set this robot's health to the total health of all robots."