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Ludum Dare topic for other games

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TaoPhoenix:
Haha!

Far and away Undermined is my favorite game out of this Ludum Dare! The deep concepts are fantastic!

Admins, how exhausting is it to move all these undermined posts into a new thread? This is my only outlet for my findings, but it threatens to wipe out the more general thread!

Deozaan:
I was actually intending the other LD29 thread I created to also include posts about other LD29 games, and not just my own participation in the event. But before I had a chance to make a post about some of the other cool games I'd found (since I basically slept for 36 hours after LD29 ended) you had already created this thread. (c:

All that to say that--at least in my opinion--I don't think it hurts to post a lot about Underminer here. Though I suppose it also wouldn't hurt to create a new dedicated thread to your analyses and tips and tricks for it either. :Thmbsup:

TaoPhoenix:
Oh. Dear. Gawd.

I could practically write a college essay paper on this goddamned instructive game! Seriously, some 80%+ of the LD games didn't interest me because I'm not in the player audience for the top ten categories. But this one, holy cow. "Onion Strategy" but it has bounds, it's only 12 turns long with modestly limited branches.

But talk about emergent stuff, of all things my *Old School* days when I used to play medium hardcore Solitaire are coming back (and I don't just mean Canfield on Windows, I mean David Parlett and the Penguin Book of Patience (Solitaire)). That just hit me subconsciously a few minutes ago. Here we go, minor tangent:

"Solitaire" (Def 2) is the name for the broader *class* (Yay Programmers!) of single player card games. I'm getting old but the one on Windows is either Canfield or Klondike. (And some games have two names!) In the history of cards before it became a lost art, there's *easily* two to three hundred more, and then the counting gets fuzzy because people put in little mini house rules.

That's where the theme of my prior posts came in (see also that Bunker Simulator.) When you set out to design a game, the balance question is *evil* because you have to both guess your audience and decide what impact you want it to have through "how easy to solve". Dev spent tremendous time fixing polish and it shows. Except that Random Number thing we went over earlier, at top most I *might* have found 1-2 more bugs but ha'ell no don't quote me on that. For whatever rules it wants to play, it seems to play them, aka no non-sensical weirdness.

But this is where the topics explode! Just like Erno Rubik, it's "easy" to design a game and "almost" know how it works. (And don't forget this was Ludum Dare, I forget Compo or Jam, doesn't matter.) Dev just nailed this. On pure instinct without even knowing much how to beat it (see prior posts from him here) he *damn near* got the balance right. (And of course no silly mouse glitches etc.)

I'm up to a couple of 3-Miner wins now. Back to David Parlett and Solitaire(Class). When you design a game, the simple mechanics are often really easy to whip up. On the spot and I bet it's ruinously broken but to show why, try this little game that I am making up on the fly.

---

Typical pack of playing cards, pull out the 2's, put them out in front of you, those are called Foundations. (Some games make you look for them, I'm being nice!) Then you deal yourself a hand of 11 cards. If you can place the next card of suit on top of the 2's, have at it because you get to draw a new free card. Otherwise place the next numeral of any suit on it. Then of the remainder, you pick any six cards and put them in Hold/Keep #1. You put two card left from your hand in the "Recycle bin" way to one side. The rest you get to either put on the bottom of the deck (preserving a new draw) or shuffle them in (if you want more flex.)

Then you deal yourself a new 11 cards and a special bonus (Face up) 2 cards in the "save grace" zone. Same thing, build up aces, Six cards in Hold Keep #1 (from your hand), 2 cards (From your hand) into the Recycle Bin.

Repeat a bunch of times. Then when you are out of a deck, you pick *either* the Recycle Bin *or* the Save Grace zone to go first, and keep working on your Aces-base stacks. You unlock the Hold Keep after one of the piles is fixed. Then the other special pile comes (whichever you didn't choose) next. (And your wrecked hand at any time as needed.)

You get one "Super Redeal" of a fresh 11 cards, as many cards as you had in the recycle bin, and the grace zone.

If you can't complete at least two Ace-King sets, you lose.

See how fast that was? I smashed that out adding "Graces" along the way as I went. I have no idea how hard that is. I kinda tried to make it "Tao Medium Hard" but if you ditch bad hands early it should become a shade easier every five hands. For example if you landed a hand of 10's and Queens ditch it, just start over. It's a mind game. But it's a "class type". I am confident that if you slowly tweaked each of those numbers, it becomes a range from "barely beatable" to "beatable in a day" etc.

Whew! Back to Undermined.

I'm now getting into non-linear gradients of damage vs opportunity cost, gambler's fallacy vs (self given) rights to redeals, max benefit per action, and more. I still don't think it's possinle to save all five miners *without a tremendous lucky draw*. And that's the problem. I have assigned myself the right to ditch bad draws forever. But the range of a "awesome draw" vs "any non-crappy draw" is the problem, and part of my old post about difficulty. I've been working/playing on this game off and on for about two weeks now. There should be a little flexibility if players want that "1 perfect win", vs "having a ghost of a chance in a day" to beat it (5 miner win).

And this is way too much text, so I shall stop here and run it a few more times! : )

TaoPhoenix:
I was actually intending the other LD29 thread I created to also include posts about other LD29 games, and not just my own participation in the event. But before I had a chance to make a post about some of the other cool games I'd found (since I basically slept for 36 hours after LD29 ended) you had already created this thread. (c:

All that to say that--at least in my opinion--I don't think it hurts to post a lot about Underminer here. Though I suppose it also wouldn't hurt to create a new dedicated thread to your analyses and tips and tricks for it either. :Thmbsup:
-Deozaan (May 26, 2014, 12:01 PM)
--- End quote ---

Well that was my thought, and stay around with a coffee because I'm posting a doozy post under yours!

It really feels a case where this one game sorta risks overwhelming the lighter post of "Look I'm a Barbarian with missing limbs" thread. : )

Edit:
Forget just some random forum poster posting about a game here, I think this game might be sniffing at powerful educational theory concepts. And the hard part of a "proof" is making sure you know absolutely all the rules of the studied system. A new one just popped at me after today's nine (yikes!) hours of playing it. A Simulation is only as good as *all the info*!

I have no right to ask this because it's way over that Snack boundary, but this game is just screaming for a comp analysis program!

TaoPhoenix:
...
The bug with not detecting all actions being spent, I believe, is probably a result of having time leftover to open up to more miners. I had considered letting the player skip using these without getting a warning, but decided that it is still useful to know about the problems of one additional miner, even if you can't do anything about them. That extra info can come in handy the following round.

The question of difficulty, I'm afraid, isn't one I have an answer to just yet. I'm struggling to find a sweet spot where it's actually possible for everybody to survive while still constantly having the threat of complete failure. I'm going to keep at it, though, I assure you that much.
-Burgerdare (May 09, 2014, 09:55 AM)
--- End quote ---

In the following days, this "talk to extra miners" is now a key part of my system. Especially, way at the end, there is a case when exactly one miner dies, you still get six actions but can only talk to two miners instead of three. So you need your prev talk history to see who's been brewing trouble the prior couple of rounds.

More briefly on that last point, to summarize my big posts elsewhere, we need a further distinction of "possible to survive" which includes ultra perfect (non) random draws and flawless play, and how much slack we give the player before everyone croaks. I've been making detailed notes of my runs and a couple of times now one mis-play of an action about like turn 8 can mean a miner dies. That's a bit tight. And that's still in the 1-2 miner range. I *think* there's like X/100 cases where you can save four miners, but *only with really favorable draws*, far beyond my initial tips to ditch just the truly awful ones. A couple of times now I've had a really good start, only for a bad spread of about three turns in the middle to sink it.

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