RE: CEO v0.54 Unit Preview - [Gluttony]
in terms of code, the hardest part has been resolving the million edge cases where certain combinations of move types create new behaviors. Some examples are:
- moonfox + samurai/giantslime/comet
- anything involving multiple ability targets
- lifestone, butterfly, gemini, or other 'unique' move types.
these examples alone were a nightmare to resolve on a basic technical level, but even then the ability triggers are still kinda busted in their behaviors sometimes creating scan-order ambiguity. It will also have a heavy development cost moving forward where each new move type needs to pass through the filter of this effect, similar to hostage/lifestone but more extreme. I have concluded it will be impossible to cover every possible outcome in the first iteration, but also would rather no specific scenario actually manages to crash the game so it has required an abnormal amount of effort to create a stable version of this unit. However, after testing started, I immediately decided it was worth that effort. This unit is insane.
Ah, I can see now ! This is a smoke and mirror thing again, another mind trick game of yours Grand. Although this time, much more understandable without substance abuse (at least the bait part), and therefore effective on more of us.
We all were fooled and drooling over the possibilities of one single unit, which supposedly consumes movesets of other units. No, wake up, and see through it, my friends !
This is a real soul eater, disguised so well we were inviting him with open arms. It's an elaborate abomination, and it's not destroying and feeding on other units. It devours and banishes into void countless game features, quality of life upgrades, suggested improvements or even a port / rewrite to technology that isn't lying on it's deathbed ! For time is the essence for all of creation, even the one by and from the Grandest of them all :) .
/impersonatingGrandsMindGamesOff
On a practical part of this little roleplay jab: I wish there was way (or maybe your will ?) to utilise other people to help you with (at least some) parts of development (above mentioned sacrifices). Seems that quite a few people playing CEO have developing background / skills. I'm sure you know devs of other games too, and there is not nor ever was shortage of wishes, suggestions and ideas from players. Have you given thought to involving someone to help you ? This might be the best addition to both speed up things you have planned, or add new ones you can't stack on top of already required / filled time.
I mean, don't you wish you could enhance yourself with skillsets, morale, tempo gain and tactics of other champions and / or minions ? And don't tell me you're guilty of Pride (7th and last to be added of the sin series), assimilate and gain some virtues on the way. :)
lmao
As much as I would like to have someone helping me with code, I think my programming style is probably not compatible with other people. I have completely made-up conventions and methods, because all formal programming education was largely ignored in favor of just making games myself and disregarding any proper development styles while learning through experimentation and attempting to reach astronomical goals (such as the undefeated spider sequel having millions of passive skills). This has put me into a position where I am doomed to work alone, but also if working in AS2, I think it would take an army of developers to match me. CEO AS3/C# however is a lot more snail-paced, mostly due to it being multiplayer, but the fragmented and chaotic coding style mostly remains making it seem very risky to have anyone tinkering with it.
Since CEO is the only AS3/Multiplayer game I've made, there is also some multitude of variance within the source from changing or adapting these methods across the years, and the final factor is that it's a live game - meaning there isn't much room for messing around with it to progress along any learning period while adjusting to my coding style. I think I would need to make a test server before anyone else modifies the code to avoid risk, or have someone extremely talented involved in which case they probably have a project of their own.
I may or may not also just be one of the types that works best alone, since it eliminates a lot of logistical concerns if everything is done by the same person, more thought can be put into each of those individual things by skipping past any chance of overlap or synchronization issues. There are probably 100x more disadvantages to working alone than in a team, but as is my standard I like to twist negatives into some advantage whenever possible and amplify it to whichever maximum there is to find, and I think that applies here since I've worked alone for 15+ years.
If I were to guess, there is some possibility of community-made unit art being used in the game, but I am not sure how many people are around that would be willing to attempt it in the flash vector format, and it seems strange to even ask people to try that when I am so picky. However, a huge amount of time in making new units is spent drawing and re-drawing a unit 100 times to have them look correct at every zoom level, because some units look great up close then on another monitor they're a tiny blob of static noise. If there were already art made with that in mind for some particular unit, it would drastically reduce the time it took to add them into the game (unless its gluttony send help) I also think that after some time, these forums will show their true colors, and contributions such as auxiliary tools (piecemaker) or vector unit art can start to be more properly rewarded.
Speaking of proper rewards, do you know that ABC spent all of his contribution on units targeted for testing/confirming reported bugs? He never really played much, he just worked forever on piecemaker and bug reports, but I was too poor to ever pay him, and he was usually not treated very well by the community. If he shows up here, things will be different. I have been told this blockchain forum idea is useless and crazy, but the people saying that have no idea where it leads. By the time anyone notices what is happening, this community will have already become a blockchain leviathan.
How would this work then?
This is the moveset of Nexus+++, Gravity Mage+++, portal +++ and Summoner+ (++ and +++ cover Nexus' ability target).
I wanted to make it beautiful.
Does it really matter how it works? It looks monstrous. Besides, if your opponent was running Nexus+++, Gravity Mage+++, portal +++ and Summoner+ you prettymuch win the game without even doing much to begin with.
Kidding aside, I have no idea which ability target it would port things to. Default answer is the normal one for the moveset it took the squares from but clearly that might not be the whole story.
It's beautiful and cursed and beautiful.
it works in a very convoluted confusing yet technically predictable way - some combination of scan order and searching for valid targets, so portal effect would snap to occupied target based on scan order and beacon summon would snap to empty target based on scan order... or something like that anyway, it's kinda nonsense but that behavior is the least buggy version of gluttony stealing ability targets I have made so far.