I'm programming the Pokémon TCG base set

[Hey I'm Brian]

So hey, for the past two months I've been implementing the Base Set of the Pokémon TCG. Mostly to see if I could, but maybe to eventually make a proper fangame of the old gbc games.

6/25/24 Here is the most recent build. (0.0.7.1) You can play it in browser.

10/8/23 Milestone 7 (0.0.7.0)
8/20/23 Milestone 6 (0.0.6.0)
7/13/23 Milestone 5 (0.0.5.0)
4/30/23 Milestone 4 (0.0.4.0)
3/23/23 Milestone 3. (0.0.3.0)
3/19/23 Original build. (0.0.2.2)


I've implemented all but two of the cards from Base, Jungle, and Fossil, including most of the Promos from around that time. In recent days I've been struggling with Base Electrode and Fossil Ditto, and it might be time to postpone them and move on. (They also weren't in the original gb game for what I assume are similar reasons.) It's ugly but it should be functional.

I'm just about done with my milestone 3, which was implementing all the cards, the deck builder, plus a few fixes from milestone 2. From there I'll want to improve the ai a bit so that it can at least play all the cards and prioritize searching for cards properly. Milestone 4 may also be the UI overhaul.

Somewhere between Milestone 4 and 5 comes the question of what other cards to add. I want to add as much as I can of the original sets before power creep began to be noticeable. By my calculation, that's somewhere in Gen 2. Even that has questions though, I'm debating whether to add the Gym Leader sets at all, I've thought about translating the japanese cards that were in gb2, I may or may not include pokemon tools, stadium cards, and baby pokemon, since they're not strictly base set mechanics... A lot of loaded and subjective questions there still. I'm also considering adding my own cards that match the balance, I'm not sure how into that other people would be...

An online mode may happen but it's not something I'm focusing on in the near future. What I loved about the original gb game is the adventure of going around to clubs, facing ai opponents and building your collection, which is something the modern tcg games lack completely. That's what I wanted to focus on. (...The real reason is that I'm not a backend programmer, I don't know how hard that would be on my own. Probably doable but I don't want to focus on it.)

So...Let me know if you find any bugs.

 

[superharvio]

I love this! Played a game and had fun (even tho I lost lol). Here's the only bugs I noticed that aren't just aesthetic:
1. Computer Search gave me the wrong card from my deck. I chose Professor Oak but it gave me Bill (pretty sure that's why I lost, too haha). I think it was because I may have looked at Bill first.
2. Click your active pkmn, and the attacks you can use as well as the retreat cost are magnified, but then if you click another card on the board those magnified images from the old card remain, obscuring the new card. This is an issue since it unintentionally hides card information that may be critical in the player's decision-making.

Mad respect for this development achievement, too. I have a really hard time building software even of this relatively-small scale, so this inspires me to keep trying.

And I love the gbc tcg games, as well, and I've definitely tossed around the idea to make a fangame of them a little bit, myself...

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

I love this! Played a game and had fun (even tho I lost lol). Here's the only bugs I noticed that aren't just aesthetic:
1. Computer Search gave me the wrong card from my deck. I chose Professor Oak but it gave me Bill (pretty sure that's why I lost, too haha). I think it was because I may have looked at Bill first.
2. Click your active pkmn, and the attacks you can use as well as the retreat cost are magnified, but then if you click another card on the board those magnified images from the old card remain, obscuring the new card. This is an issue since it unintentionally hides card information that may be critical in the player's decision-making.

Mad respect for this development achievement, too. I have a really hard time building software even of this relatively-small scale, so this inspires me to keep trying.

And I love the gbc tcg games, as well, and I've definitely tossed around the idea to make a fangame of them a little bit, myself...

Hey thanks for letting me know.
- I couldn't find the Computer Search bug from what info you gave. From what I've tested, I have noticed that the card searching state is slightly unintuitive in that highlighting a new card doesn't automatically select that card if you already have one selected. You have to click on the card again, either in the deck window or the selected cards window to remove it. My guess is that you highlighted the card thinking you were selecting it when that wasn't the case.
- Thanks. Not sure how I missed that. Easy enough to fix. It will be fixed in milestone 3 (probably in the next few days) In the meantime you can get rid of the attack buttons by selecting your active pokemon and selecting it again to clear the card preview.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Milestone 3 is complete. The main parts of it were complete in the unstable version, but since then I've added some animations and customization options. Milestone 4 will be about further improving the AI and getting a proper, non-Unity-default UI. Expect it in few weeks probably? That's more or less how long these milestones have been taking me. As usual, let me know if you find bugs.

 

[mgriffin]

This is awesome! :)

 

[Regi_Grass]

Really excited to see where this goes, I feel like the main reason there are no TCG fangames is that nobody has really bothered to make an engine for it yet (like how essentials allowed for a flood of mainline Pokemon fangames). Maybe this will change that!

Speaking of floods, brace yourself because I found a lot of bugs.

Spoiler:

- So, let's start with something that's already been brought up earlier.

Hey thanks for letting me know.
- I couldn't find the Computer Search bug from what info you gave. From what I've tested, I have noticed that the card searching state is slightly unintuitive in that highlighting a new card doesn't automatically select that card if you already have one selected. You have to click on the card again, either in the deck window or the selected cards window to remove it. My guess is that you highlighted the card thinking you were selecting it when that wasn't the case.
the card preview.

To add on to this, it does this if you're switching to a Pokemon on the bench as well. There's more too, only for bench switching as far as I'm aware: If you double-click the second Pokemon this happens:

Clicking confirm here switches to the first Pokemon you clicked.

-Energy retrieval requires you to have at least three cards (including itself) in your hand, or you simply can't play it. It should still be usable when you have two cards.

-The Recycle card isn't Recycle at all, it's Gambler. The Gambler card is also Gambler.

-If the player uses a Pokeball and lands tails, the game softlocks. If the AI uses it and lands tails, it flips again, and again and again until eventually it lands heads. It appears to work as intended when it lands heads for both player and AI.

-If a confused Pokemon tries to retreat and fails, the game softlocks.

-Pokemon Breeder duplicates the evolution card, if you use it to evolve your Abra into Alakazam you'll still have an Alakazam card in your hand.

-Speaking of that Alakazam, I assume his and base set Venusaur's abilities aren't implemented because you haven't gotten around to programming that yet. Promotional Venusaur's isn't either, but I'm not as sure that's intentional since...

-When typing the above I figured "You know what, Slowbro's ability may or may not be implemented yet either. I should check real quick". I do check and his ability IS implemented, but he has a different mistake: His Psyshock requires 3 energy instead of 2.

-Gloom's foul odor only confuses the opponent, not himself.

-Vileplume's heal ability softlocks the game if you get a tails. If it's a heads, it works but acts wierd. First of all the log says "Heal was unsuccessful" but it lets you choose a Pokemon to heal, and actually does heal it. However, the board still displays said Pokemon as having the damage (you'd only know it was healed if you clicked on it for the larger view), and the heads-flipped coin stays on the board indefinitely until another coin is flipped for whatever purpose.

-Speaking of Vileplume, his petal dance doesn't flip 3 coins. It flips infinity coins.

-Execggute can't evolve into Exeggcutor.

-Venonat:

To make matters even weirder here, the first move is actually Stun Spore like it's supposed to be... but the second move is Execggute's Leech Seed.

-Venomoth can shift into types that aren't in play. Also the type changing menu is kind of unintuitive, not having a "confirm" button but only "end turn". Same goes for other type/resistance/weakness changing moves like conversion.

-Speaking of which, conversions 1 and 2 both have the same problem: the "weak/resistant to X type" status they impose last forever, even if the Pokemon switches out, even if it faints. So if I use conversion 1 to make my Porygon water resistant, now ALL of my Pokemon are water resistant for the rest of the game, unless I use it again to change the type.

-As for Cool Porygon's texture magic, it just straight up doesn't work at all. It only prompts me to choose a type once, and when I do nothing happens.

-Oh and going back to Venomoth, it has a retreat cost of 1 when it should be 0.

-This Mewtwo card's got several problems:

Most obvious is the wrong move displaying. It actually IS psyburn when you use it, but it does no damage. Energy absorption does work, but when you click "confirm" the log just repeats "Psychic Energy is attached to Mewtwo" and does nothing else, allowing you to spam the log with that one message over and over by repeatedly clicking "confirm". When you click "end turn" instead, the game continues as normal. Additionally, when he and his attached energies get knocked out, they display as blank in the discard pile:

-The other version of this card displays the correct moves:

But has all the same problems.

-Pinsir's Guillotine only requires 3 energy instead of 4 like it should be.

-This Zapdos card.

I gave it a few extra lightning energy just to see if you had accidentally raised the cost higher than it should be, like with Slowbro, but the second move still isn't there. The move that IS there doesn't work right either: It just does 30 recoil damage without a coin flip.

-When you take your last prize card at the same time your own Pokemon faints, such as Weezing blowing himself up, the game requires you to choose an active Pokemon before declaring you the winner. I made it so that Weezing was my only Pokemon when I took my last prize card with selfdestruct, and the game declared a draw. Actually... IS that how it's supposed to go? I'm not sure... EDIT: Not long after posting this I tried recreating this scenario in the Gameboy Color game, and what do you know, it was a draw there too. So disregard this bullet point, you actually had it right here.

-When Vulpix is the AI's active Pokemon, it can act strange. Twice I've had it just not do anything, effectively softlocking the game, and another time it took a very long time to make its move. Other times it works just fine. No idea why.

-There's probably an entire case study to be done regarding Spearow's mirror move. A few things I've noticed: When the attack that hit Spearow inflicted poison, Mirror move tries to inflict it in return... but screws up and re-inflicts it on Spearow instead of the opponent. You'd think it does the same with confusion, right? No, it just... does the damage and that's it. I've also noticed that it doesn't copy the card drawing effect of Meowth's pay day, although I'm not sure if it's supposed to. What I DO know is a bug, is that if you switch Spearow in before using Mirror Move, it'll copy the effect of the attack that last hit the Pokemon who switched out. That's definitely not supposed to happen.

-Here, the enemy Meowth hit himself in confusion but didn't take any damage from it.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he's poisoned at the same time?

-Scyther's two moves are switched around, but beyond that slash (which is supposed to be swords dance) acts strangely. First of all, the log calls it Irongrip. Secondly, it hits twice, and the second hit does 60 damage, unless you used swords dance (which is supposed to be slash, and also the log calls it slash) in which case both hits do 30 damage.

-Muk's sludge doesn't even attempt to poison.

-When you use a trainer card that requires you to select a Pokemon (such as a potion) and click "cancel", the card disappears from your hand but doesn't go to the discard pile. It just vanishes from existence.

-Horsea is weak to water instead of electric. But Horsea's type weirdness doesn't end there: Bulbasaur is, of all things, weak to Horsea. No, not water types. Not even Seadra. Just Horsea. There may be more of the random one-off incorrect weaknesses that I just didn't stumble upon. Aside from Horsea, Bulbasaur is weak to fire types like he's supposed to be.

-The game should let me switch by just discarding the double colorless energy, instead it requires me to discard both:

-A couple of misaligned move boxes:

-And Victreebel here goes a step beyond and displays the wrong move box:

Although the move itself is actually correct.

-You may have noticed that most of these bugs are about grass type Pokemon, it's because I playtested each one and the non-grass bugs were stuff I found incidentally along the way. Any grass types not listed here work as intended, or at least they seem to from the amount I played. I'll get to the other types later.

And yes, I made an account here just to post this.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Yeah, I definitely didn't check each individual card so this amount of bugs isn't remotely surprising. I figured this would be a stage where people will test every card and get back to me about exactly these kinds of mostly data-entry error bugs. I've already found a couple of these in my own casual playtesting since then. There's a lot there which I'll address over the course of today, but most of them are minor fixable issues. Thanks a lot. This is exactly what I was hoping people would do.

Spoiler:

-Energy retrieval requires you to have at least three cards (including itself) in your hand, or you simply can't play it. It should still be usable when you have two cards.

-The Recycle card isn't Recycle at all, it's Gambler. The Gambler card is also Gambler.

-If the player uses a Pokeball and lands tails, the game softlocks. If the AI uses it and lands tails, it flips again, and again and again until eventually it lands heads. It appears to work as intended when it lands heads for both player and AI.

Found all these. Fix'd.

-If a confused Pokemon tries to retreat and fails, the game softlocks.

Yep. Guess I don't retreat when confused often. Fix'd.

-Pokemon Breeder duplicates the evolution card, if you use it to evolve your Abra into Alakazam you'll still have an Alakazam card in your hand.

Fix'd

-Speaking of that Alakazam, I assume his and base set Venusaur's abilities aren't implemented because you haven't gotten around to programming that yet. Promotional Venusaur's isn't either, but I'm not as sure that's intentional since...

This one is especially annoying because I did spend quite a good deal of time programming the swap state, but then tripped at the finish line and didn't plug the power effects into the card. Same with promo venusaur. Easy fix.

-When typing the above I figured "You know what, Slowbro's ability may or may not be implemented yet either. I should check real quick". I do check and his ability IS implemented, but he has a different mistake: His Psyshock requires 3 energy instead of 2.

easy fix

-Gloom's foul odor only confuses the opponent, not himself.

I could've sworn Gloom was working last milestone. Turns out it broke when it accounted for Snorlax wrong. fix'd

-Vileplume's heal ability softlocks the game if you get a tails. If it's a heads, it works but acts wierd. First of all the log says "Heal was unsuccessful" but it lets you choose a Pokemon to heal, and actually does heal it. However, the board still displays said Pokemon as having the damage (you'd only know it was healed if you clicked on it for the larger view), and the heads-flipped coin stays on the board indefinitely until another coin is flipped for whatever purpose.

-Speaking of Vileplume, his petal dance doesn't flip 3 coins. It flips infinity coins.

Turns out the problem was playing Vileplume was throwing an exception that caused everything else to break. Fix'd, I think.

-Execggute can't evolve into Exeggcutor.

Turns out I mispelled Exeggcute. fix'd.

-Venonat:
To make matters even weirder here, the first move is actually Stun Spore like it's supposed to be... but the second move is Execggute's Leech Seed.

Yep. Both sprite and attack effect issues there. fix'd.

-Venomoth can shift into types that aren't in play. Also the type changing menu is kind of unintuitive, not having a "confirm" button but only "end turn". Same goes for other type/resistance/weakness changing moves like conversion.

-Speaking of which, conversions 1 and 2 both have the same problem: the "weak/resistant to X type" status they impose last forever, even if the Pokemon switches out, even if it faints. So if I use conversion 1 to make my Porygon water resistant, now ALL of my Pokemon are water resistant for the rest of the game, unless I use it again to change the type.

-As for Cool Porygon's texture magic, it just straight up doesn't work at all. It only prompts me to choose a type once, and when I do nothing happens.

-Oh and going back to Venomoth, it has a retreat cost of 1 when it should be 0.

Saw and fixed all of the type selection issues.

-This Mewtwo card's got several problems:

Fixed the attack button and the damage issue. Working on the absorption one.

-Pinsir's Guillotine only requires 3 energy instead of 4 like it should be.

fix'd

-This Zapdos card.
I gave it a few extra lightning energy just to see if you had accidentally raised the cost higher than it should be, like with Slowbro, but the second move still isn't there. The move that IS there doesn't work right either: It just does 30 recoil damage without a coin flip.

Turns out I didn't plug the thunderbolt attack effects in, and maybe assumed there wasn't a coin flip on that recoil. Easy fixes.

-When Vulpix is the AI's active Pokemon, it can act strange. Twice I've had it just not do anything, effectively softlocking the game, and another time it took a very long time to make its move. Other times it works just fine. No idea why.

So I think the issue might actually be that the AI softlocks when it tries to play energy search. I fixed that. The long pauses might be maybe you clicked off the game and paused it? Pretty sure it's not Vulpix.

-There's probably an entire case study to be done regarding Spearow's mirror move. A few things I've noticed: When the attack that hit Spearow inflicted poison, Mirror move tries to inflict it in return... but screws up and re-inflicts it on Spearow instead of the opponent. You'd think it does the same with confusion, right? No, it just... does the damage and that's it. I've also noticed that it doesn't copy the card drawing effect of Meowth's pay day, although I'm not sure if it's supposed to. What I DO know is a bug, is that if you switch Spearow in before using Mirror Move, it'll copy the effect of the attack that last hit the Pokemon who switched out. That's definitely not supposed to happen.

I'll look into Mirror Move. It might be that other sources of damage are being factored in, could be a separate bug, we'll see. It's another one I thought was working though. If you think that's bad, I can't wait for you to see how broken Metronome probably is.

-Here, the enemy Meowth hit himself in confusion but didn't take any damage from it.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he's poisoned at the same time?

Not a lot to go on there but I'll look into it. My guess is maybe it had a defender on it?

-Scyther's two moves are switched around, but beyond that slash (which is supposed to be swords dance) acts strangely. First of all, the log calls it Irongrip. Secondly, it hits twice, and the second hit does 60 damage, unless you used swords dance (which is supposed to be slash, and also the log calls it slash) in which case both hits do 30 damage.

-Muk's sludge doesn't even attempt to poison.

Plugged these in wrong. Fix'd.

-When you use a trainer card that requires you to select a Pokemon (such as a potion) and click "cancel", the card disappears from your hand but doesn't go to the discard pile. It just vanishes from existence.

Ok I think I know why that is. I can fix that.

-Horsea is weak to water instead of electric. But Horsea's type weirdness doesn't end there: Bulbasaur is, of all things, weak to Horsea. No, not water types. Not even Seadra. Just Horsea. There may be more of the random one-off incorrect weaknesses that I just didn't stumble upon. Aside from Horsea, Bulbasaur is weak to fire types like he's supposed to be.

Yep, turns out Horsea was fire type. Fix'd/

-The game should let me switch by just discarding the double colorless energy, instead it requires me to discard both:

Unless I'm totally wrong about how DCE works, that's as intended. You have to discard cards, regardless of cost (...right?)

-A couple of misaligned move boxes:

-And Victreebel here goes a step beyond and displays the wrong move box:
Although the move itself is actually correct.

Easy enough to fix.

Update on milestone 4: The new UI is mostly done. I was debating whether or not to make another build. I figured I wouldn't because only the AI improvements are left to do for the milestone, which will be pretty unnoticeable and will make the release of the full milestone pretty anticlimactic. But if there's this many bugs to fix maybe I will make another halfway build soon.

 

[Regi_Grass]

Unless I'm totally wrong about how DCE works, that's as intended. You have to discard cards, regardless of cost (...right?)

In the gameboy color games at least, double colorless energy counts as 2 for the retreat cost.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Looking around you're probably right. That complicates things but I'll figure it out.

 

[Regi_Grass]

Fire, water, and electric types:

Spoiler:

-Charizard's energy burn works fine, but it's worth noting that in the gameboy color games the developers made it a passive ability rather than a player-activated one.

-One time when beginning a game against against the "brushfire" (my deck was custom), the game crashed on the first turn:

The rest of the crash report:

Spoiler:

-Promotional Arcanine's flames of rage requires 4 energy instead of 2.

-Fossil Moltres' Wildfire forces the opponent to switch his Pokemon out instead of what it's supposed to do. This is ironically a buff because who EVER used wildfire for it intended purpose anyway?

-Blastoise's Rain Dance lets you attach water energy to ANY type of Pokemon, and attaching a non-water energy to anyone "cancels" the ability, preventing you from attaching any more water energy until your next turn.

-Psyduck's headache gives YOURSELF the "can't use trainer cards" condition. Also, the fact that it's displayed on the board as a status on Psyduck makes me suspicious that it could be "cured" by evolving him or switching out, which it shouldn't be. I can't test that because it goes away when my next turn comes up.

- When you use Poliwhirl's amnesia, it seems you didn't program in a capability to select opponent's moves, so the game does something interesting: It has you choose one of your benched Pokemon's moves, and "translates" that to choosing your opponent's move. So if you have a Pokemon on your bench with two moves, choosing its first move will select the opponent's first move, and choosing its second move will select the opponent's second move. If you have a Pokemon on the bench with only one move, choosing it selects the opponent's first move. If you have a Pokemon on the bench with one move and a Poke-power, no options show up. If your opponent has only one move, choosing your benched Pokemon's second move does nothing. If you have no Pokemon on your bench (or your only Pokemon have one move and a Poke-power), it's effectively a softlock. Speaking of softlocks, that still happens even if the move "succeeds".

-You'd think Clefairy's metronome would work the same way, right? Well, only if the opponent has one move. If it has two, you just automatically use the second. Also unlike amnesia, it doesn't softlock the game when it succeeds.
In fact, to my surprise every move I've copied worked perfectly! I tried to get the AI to use it to see what would happen, but it would only use sing.

-Clefable's metronome works differently: Only the left-most Pokemon on your bench has its move selectable, and I said "move" in the singular sense because even if both the opponent and your bench Pokemon have two moves, only the first is usable. If you have no Pokemon on the bench, or if the left-most Pokemon has a move and a Poke-power, then you're softlocked. Like with Clefairy's metronome, the copied moves seem to work just fine.

-While in a mirror match with the "grass chopper" deck (when I was trying to get the AI to use metronome), the game crashed on two separate occasions, once on the first turn and again in the middle.

Spoiler:

This was the crash on the first turn

I didn't save the screenshots for the other unfortunately

-Remember what I said about some trainer cards disappearing into the void when used and then canceled? Well depending on the circumstances it can go a step further and disable the "end turn" button, meaning if at any point your active Pokemon can't attack or retreat to someone who can you're softlocked. For example: If you use a potion, select a Pokemon, but hit cancel instead of confirm, the "end turn" button will still work. But if you cancel before clicking on any Pokemon, it'll be disabled. This also goes for retreating and cancelling: If you click cancel before selecting energies or after selecting energies but before clicking a Pokemon to switch to, it'll be disabled. If you click on a Pokemon and then cancel, it won't. If for whatever reason "end turn" is disabled, it can be re-abled by causing one of these scenarios that doesn't disable it.

-Poliwrath's water gun crashes the game.

Spoiler:

-Tentacruel's retreat cost is 2 when it should be 0.

-Omanyte's clairvoyance doesn't "activate" until the next turn begins. Similarly, when he evolves/faints/whatever the ability doesn't "deactivate" until the next turn.

-Mysterious fossil and Clefairy doll have a retreat cost of 0, in reality they shouldn't be able to retreat at all. Also they're susceptible to status conditions when they shouldn't be.

-Promotional Electabuzz's light screen effect lasts forever, until he switches out or dies.

-When first movie promotional Pikachu uses recharge, the electric energy in your deck isn't counted as a valid choice, forcing you to cancel without doing anything.

-When fossil Raichu uses gigashock and the opponent has 4 or 5 Pokemon on the bench, the move works as intended... except for the fact that the GUI to choose the 3 benched Pokemon never goes away. Also he has a retreat cost of 2 when it should be 1.

-Base set Raichu's thunder only does 20 damage, and then crashes the game.

Spoiler:

-When flying Pikachu uses fly, the log says he used "thunder jolt". The opponent takes 30 damage, then there's a coin flip, and if it's heads he does another 30 damage and gains invulnerability.

-It's good that you programmed the game to save your custom deck, so that you don't have to re-make it every time you refresh the page or something. There's a minor issue though: Even though the game remembers what your cards were, it doesn't remember what your cards were relative to the maximum of 4. That is to say, if you have 4 potions in your deck and refresh the page, the game will allow you to add 4 more. Doing it again will allow you to add another 4, and so on.

-The Magnetons themselves worked fine, but I ran into a rather interesting bug that they can bring about: With selfdestruct I was able to knock out 3 of the opponent's Pokemon at once, but I only had 2 prize cards left. After picking up my last 2 cards, the game still wanted me to pick up a third, and so I was softlocked. Speaking of Magneton, he's got a bit of a misalignment:

-There's several things wrong with jungle Electrode. First of all, you have base set Electrode in the deck builder but it's actually jungle Electrode. And when you use one of them in your deck, after doing a battle and coming back to the deck builder you'll find an equal amount of the other in your deck too. As for the card itself, chain lightning displays the wrong text box:

The move itself is correct, but also has problems. When the opponent has same-typed Pokemon on his bench, nothing happens to them. When you have same-typed Pokemon on your bench, the log says they each take 10 damage, but the defending Pokemon takes that damage instead.

-When the AI uses super energy removal against me, the change isn't made on the board and it looks like my Pokemon still has its energy. Only when you click it for the enlarged view do you see the correct energy value, and/or attach another energy. This doesn't happen when I use the same card against the opponent, nor when the opponent uses regular energy removal.

-Some incorrect text boxes (they have the correct effects though)

-Other than the ones mentioned in the previous post, all the fire, water, and electric Pokemon not listed seem to be working as intended.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Spoiler:

-Charizard's energy burn works fine, but it's worth noting that in the gameboy color games the developers made it a passive ability rather than a player-activated one.

I'm fine with that. I may eventually add an effect to better see when it happens.

The rest of the crash report:

These crash reports don't really help, unfortunately. Whatever that syntax is it's not what I'm used to working in. If it crashes on the ai's turn a better thing would be to open the debug menu and "Show Opponent's Hand" When it freezes it's probably trying to play a card that's the problem.

-Fossil Moltres' Wildfire forces the opponent to switch his Pokemon out instead of what it's supposed to do. This is ironically a buff because who EVER used wildfire for it intended purpose anyway?

Yeahh Wildfire is one I didn't really check... (It's good in stall decks. It's the only card in the format that mills.)

-Blastoise's Rain Dance lets you attach water energy to ANY type of Pokemon, and attaching a non-water energy to anyone "cancels" the ability, preventing you from attaching any more water energy until your next turn.

Fix'd

-Psyduck's headache gives YOURSELF the "can't use trainer cards" condition. Also, the fact that it's displayed on the board as a status on Psyduck makes me suspicious that it could be "cured" by evolving him or switching out, which it shouldn't be. I can't test that because it goes away when my next turn comes up.

That's as intended, as long as the opponent can't use trainer cards, which it shouldn't. Looking through errata, if you are able to switch your opponent's psyduck in would cancel Headache, so it should count as an effect on yourself.

- When you use Poliwhirl's amnesia, it seems you didn't program in a capability to select opponent's moves, so the game does something interesting: It has you choose one of your benched Pokemon's moves, and "translates" that to choosing your opponent's move. So if you have a Pokemon on your bench with two moves, choosing its first move will select the opponent's first move, and choosing its second move will select the opponent's second move. If you have a Pokemon on the bench with only one move, choosing it selects the opponent's first move. If you have a Pokemon on the bench with one move and a Poke-power, no options show up. If your opponent has only one move, choosing your benched Pokemon's second move does nothing. If you have no Pokemon on your bench (or your only Pokemon have one move and a Poke-power), it's effectively a softlock. Speaking of softlocks, that still happens even if the move "succeeds".

-You'd think Clefairy's metronome would work the same way, right? Well, only if the opponent has one move. If it has two, you just automatically use the second. Also unlike amnesia, it doesn't softlock the game when it succeeds.
In fact, to my surprise every move I've copied worked perfectly! I tried to get the AI to use it to see what would happen, but it would only use sing.

-Clefable's metronome works differently: Only the left-most Pokemon on your bench has its move selectable, and I said "move" in the singular sense because even if both the opponent and your bench Pokemon have two moves, only the first is usable. If you have no Pokemon on the bench, or if the left-most Pokemon has a move and a Poke-power, then you're softlocked. Like with Clefairy's metronome, the copied moves seem to work just fine.

Turns out the select attack state broke in a few different ways. Should be fixed.

-While in a mirror match with the "grass chopper" deck (when I was trying to get the AI to use metronome), the game crashed on two separate occasions, once on the first turn and again in the middle.

This was the crash on the first turn

I didn't save the screenshots for the other unfortunately

Turns out the issue was Super Energy Removal. It softlocks when it tries to remove energies from the first bench spot but can't. fix'd.

-Remember what I said about some trainer cards disappearing into the void when used and then canceled? Well depending on the circumstances it can go a step further and disable the "end turn" button, meaning if at any point your active Pokemon can't attack or retreat to someone who can you're softlocked. For example: If you use a potion, select a Pokemon, but hit cancel instead of confirm, the "end turn" button will still work. But if you cancel before clicking on any Pokemon, it'll be disabled. This also goes for retreating and cancelling: If you click cancel before selecting energies or after selecting energies but before clicking a Pokemon to switch to, it'll be disabled. If you click on a Pokemon and then cancel, it won't. If for whatever reason "end turn" is disabled, it can be re-abled by causing one of these scenarios that doesn't disable it.

Fixed all this.

-It's good that you programmed the game to save your custom deck, so that you don't have to re-make it every time you refresh the page or something. There's a minor issue though: Even though the game remembers what your cards were, it doesn't remember what your cards were relative to the maximum of 4. That is to say, if you have 4 potions in your deck and refresh the page, the game will allow you to add 4 more. Doing it again will allow you to add another 4, and so on.

has since been fixed.

-There's several things wrong with jungle Electrode. First of all, you have base set Electrode in the deck builder but it's actually jungle Electrode. And when you use one of them in your deck, after doing a battle and coming back to the deck builder you'll find an equal amount of the other in your deck too. As for the card itself, chain lightning displays the wrong text box:

The move itself is correct, but also has problems. When the opponent has same-typed Pokemon on his bench, nothing happens to them. When you have same-typed Pokemon on your bench, the log says they each take 10 damage, but the defending Pokemon takes that damage instead.

Yeah, Base Electrode shouldn't be there, I forgot to remove it after trying to work on it.

-Some incorrect text boxes (they have the correct effects though)

I went through and checked and fixed all the attack button formatting issues. As of next build they should all be correct.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

New Build. (0.0.3.2) All them bug fixes have been bug-fixed (hopefully). But even more interesting you get an early look at the new UI. It is a world of better. From the player perspective this may as well be milestone 4, but I still have a lot of work to do on the AI behind the scenes. In the debug menu you can get a vague glimpse of my work so far on card priorities. A lot of that still has to be adjusted and implemented for specific cards still. Might take another week or two before Milestone 4 is officially complete.

 

[Regi_Grass]

Awesome work so far. In playtesting this new build I noticed some bugs that I reported earlier, and you said you resolved, but are either still there or not exactly fixed in the way you intended. They are:

Spoiler:

-Energy retrieval still requires you to hold 3 cards to use.

-Trying to retreat while confused and getting a tails is still kinda busted. The "confirm" and "cancel" options don't go back to "end turn" unless you do something else to make them change, like using a potion or something. Not that you can't end your turn, because the "confirm" option is actually the "end turn" button while "cancel" does nothing. Furthermore, the Pokemon in question can't attempt to retreat again the next turn, even if it has the energy to.

-Well, recycle is now actually recycle. It softlocks the game if you flip a tails though. It seems to work as intended if you get heads.

-While testing recycle I noticed that when you use a super potion, the energy you discard doesn't go to the discard pile and instead vanishes from existence.

-Pokeballs seem to work fine for the player now, and for the AI getting a tails seems to work normally too, for a while it seemed like they were still screwing up when the AI got heads. Sometimes it says "no Pokemon were found" even though there are still many cards left in the deck, and sometimes it re-flips the coin until it gets tails. Sometimes it works normally. That was before you updated the build though (I was in the middle of making this post when you did), and since then it seems to work fine, but I'm leaving this in just in case there's the possibility that the card's still broken in some way.

-Cancelling the use of a card now returns it to your hand, but the problem with "end turn" getting disabled is still there. It's still there when you start to retreat and cancel too.

-Gloom's fixed, but all of Vileplume's glitches are still there.

-Scyther's moves are in the right order now, but they still don't work right. If you use slash without swords dance, it does 60 damage. If you do use swords dance and then slash, it does 30. And sometimes when you use slash, things get weird.

That random 10 damage Meowth took was from his own attack, I tested this a couple more times and found that whatever damage the opposing Pokemon would have done to Scyther that turn, was done to itself. I don't know what causes this strange turn of events to sometimes happen and sometimes not. It's happened both with and without me using swords dance.

-Exeggutor's big eggsplosion flips only either 2 coins or 1, and I can't figure out what makes the game decide which. Also its text box displays as Nidorina's double kick.

-Venonat's leech life is still Exeggcute's leech seed. The log says it's leech life but the effect is that of leech seed.

-Venomoth's shift can be done multiple times when the card says once per turn. The ability itself seems to work fine though.

-This isn't a bug but it's something I feel needs to be "fixed": When Cool Porygon uses texture magic, the two type-choosing menus look exactly the same- this could confuse players into thinking nothing happened when they clicked "confirm" on the first one, not to mention not being sure if the first choice was for Porygon's resistance or the enemy's weakness. I suggest making the text box say "choose your Pokemon's resistance" and "choose the defending Pokemon's weakness" respectively.

-Mirror move's still got all its problems which I assume is just that you haven't worked on it yet, but I should clarify something I noticed since my first post: What I said about it re-inflicting poison on Spearow again was wrong, I just saw the between-turns poison damage animation and thought it was me inflicting poison on myself. In reality, mirror move only copies damage dealt and no status at all, be it poison, confusion, or something like smokescreen's "flip to see if you miss" effect. And yes, it IS supposed to inflict those conditions. Still not sure about Meowth's card-drawing effect though.

-Moltres' wildfire kind of works now, but it's worth noting that the log repeats the message for each fire energy you discard. So if I discard 4, it says "4 energy cards are discarded from Moltres and 4 cards discarded from player 2's deck" 4 times in a row. Also, the text box for choosing how many energies you want to discard says "choose (however many are attached to her at the moment) energy cards" when it should say something like "choose how many energies you want to discard" instead. And if you have too many energies attached to Moltres, 6 or more to be exact, the game crashes.

-Amnesia and Clefable's metronome seem to work as intended now, but Clefairy's is still glitchy: If the opponent only has one move it'll kinda work as intended, but won't immediately bring up the card's enlarged view like Clefable and Poliwhirl do. And if the opponent has two moves, it still automatically chooses the second.

-You fixed the doll's and fossil's ability to retreat, but they're still susceptible to statuses.

-Fossil Raichu's Gigashock is still bugged, and he still has a retreat cost of 2. To be fair, looking back on your previous post you didn't mention having fixed this one, so you might have just not got to it yet.

-Promotional Arcanine's, Omanyte's, and Jungle Electrode's bugs are still there, although similarly you may have just not gotten around to fixing them.

-Double colorless energy still only counts as 1 for retreating but again, that one might still be something you're still working on.

And some new stuff and/or old stuff that I didn't find earlier:

Spoiler:

-Adding "attach infinite energies" to the debug menu was a genius idea, but when I went to test Blastoise's rain dance I of course left it off. I then noticed something strange... I could attach infinite water energies even though Squirtle wasn't evolved yet! I had somehow caused "attach infinite energies" to become permanent, from playing with it on so long. Refreshing the page fixed it, but I have no idea how I made it permanent the first time. I thought maybe it stays if you win a duel with it enabled, but no, that's not it. Rain dance seems to work fine, by the way.

-Attempting to use a super potion on a confused Pokemon won't work the first time you try... sometimes? Sometimes it does, and I can't find any correlation between when it does and doesn't. But when it doesn't, you can cancel and try again and it'll work.

-Every time the AI's turn begins, you can briefly see the priority level of the right-most card in its hand, even when you don't have the appropriate debug box ticked.

-When the AI uses certain cards, you can see the priority levels of all its cards. I've seen it happen consistently with energy search, Bill, energy retrieval, energy removal, and... maybe Professor Oak? I say maybe because it played energy search right after that and I might have just seen the priority numbers from that.

-Machamp's strike back damages the opponent as intended, but the damage doesn't appear on the board at first. You'd only know it's there from the damage animation, and clicking on the card for the enlarged view.

-Meowth doesn't actually resist psychic. I came across this one completely on accident and haven't even been thinking to check if the Pokemon I've been testing actually resist what they're supposed to. I wonder what I've missed...

-I'm not sure if this is a misalignment or if you intended there to be a gap like that.

-Vending male Nidoran is messed up in similar ways that Scyther is. First of all, if you use it without using focus energy first then nothing will happen and your opponent's turn will begin, and if you did use focus energy then it does only 40 damage and no coin flip. Also, remember the weirdness that sometimes happens with Scyther's slash? Yeah, sometimes horn rush does that too:

Just to be clear, I wasn't doing anything during this chain of events. It all just happened on its own after I used horn rush. And like with Scyther, this only happens sometimes and I don't know why it does or doesn't. Another (much more minor) thing regarding this guy is that focus energy's text box is slightly bigger than horn rush's.

-If the AI uses Bill and then Pokedex immediately after, it gets stuck in an infinite loop:

-Another strange thing to happen with Pokedex, where the log says the AI uses it, but the "yeah it totally rearranged those cards trust me bro" message doesn't come, its turn ends, and the Pokedex is still in its hand.

-If rocket Koffing uses poison gas and gets a tails, the game crashes. If it's a heads it seems to work as intended.

-Rocket Squirtle's shell attack only takes 1 energy instead of 2 to use.

-

Rocket Voltorb's got a minor misalignment too, you can just barely see speedball's original text underneath the text box.

-The other newly-added grass, fire, water, and electric cards seem to work as intended. Fighting, Psychic, Colorless, and the remaining trainer cards remain largely untested for now.

And this isn't really a bug, but in the deck builder the scroll wheel only works if your mouse isn't on a card or the card's quantity indicator. Doesn't feel very good or intuitive to avoid touching the cards I'm building my deck with while building my deck. It's like that when you choose a card from your deck or discard pile, too.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Just dropped a hot fix that hopefully fixed most of those. Except for:

Spoiler:

-Well, recycle is now actually recycle. It softlocks the game if you flip a tails though. It seems to work as intended if you get heads.

...I may have just forgotten about that one. Maybe I fixed it? I don't remember...
edit: yes and no. It works but doesn't remove the card from the discard pile. will be fixed in the next build.

-Attempting to use a super potion on a confused Pokemon won't work the first time you try... sometimes? Sometimes it does, and I can't find any correlation between when it does and doesn't. But when it doesn't, you can cancel and try again and it'll work.

Fixed the other super potion issue, but couldn't find this.

-This isn't a bug but it's something I feel needs to be "fixed": When Cool Porygon uses texture magic, the two type-choosing menus look exactly the same- this could confuse players into thinking nothing happened when they clicked "confirm" on the first one, not to mention not being sure if the first choice was for Porygon's resistance or the enemy's weakness. I suggest making the text box say "choose your Pokemon's resistance" and "choose the defending Pokemon's weakness" respectively.

These are part of a bigger issue. I'll be adding a lot more prompts like this before the end of the milestone.

-Venomoth's shift can be done multiple times when the card says once per turn. The ability itself seems to work fine though.

Fixed, but there might be other powers that neglect to check for "once per turn". It was also an issue with Vileplume and I forgot to check them all.

-When the AI uses certain cards, you can see the priority levels of all its cards. I've seen it happen consistently with energy search, Bill, energy retrieval, energy removal, and... maybe Professor Oak? I say maybe because it played energy search right after that and I might have just seen the priority numbers from that.

I probably forgot to do that, but to be honest I'm not worried. It doesn't break the game and will need to be fixed by next milestone anyway.

-I'm not sure if this is a misalignment or if you intended there to be a gap like that.

Eh... I don't feel the need to get too anal about attack button placement. I fixed Magnemite, I may change these eventually, but for now it's fine. As long as the attack buttons aren't blatantly wrong.

And this isn't really a bug, but in the deck builder the scroll wheel only works if your mouse isn't on a card or the card's quantity indicator. Doesn't feel very good or intuitive to avoid touching the cards I'm building my deck with while building my deck. It's like that when you choose a card from your deck or discard pile, too.

Yeah this is an issue I know about with Unity's event trigger system. I've been having trouble finding a good solution for it, but I'll fix it as soon as I do.

Either way, unless you find something especially game-crashing that will be the last hot fix before the next milestone. I'm excited for what comes after I do the hard part of "finalizing" the AI, so really just want to buckle down and get that done. I've started to fall into the trap of getting ahead of myself and thinking about the actual fan game I want to make, knowing that even prototyping the overworld movement doesn't come until at least milestone 6.

 

[Regi_Grass]

Well I'll still test the rest of the cards so you know what bugs I find to fix at some later point. The fighting and psychic types:

Spoiler:

-A few things wrong with Mankey's peep. First of all, while a "cancel" button comes up when you activate the ability, clicking it does nothing and the only way to continue the game is to actually look at a prize card or deck. JUST a prize card or deck, because that's the other thing: it doesn't let me choose any cards in the opponent's hand. The final thing I'd like to say regarding this ability is that it uses the game GUI for when you search the deck or discard pile, which isn't wrong, it certainly does the job, but it also just looks kinda dumb with all that wasted empty space and the one card in the top left corner. I'd consider making a separate style of GUI for this and other future effects that just show the player one card.

-Rocket Machop's kick only does 20 damage.

-With Dark Machoke, you've got the bench-choosing status of his moves mixed up: With Drag off you have the AI choose the Pokemon that comes in, and with Knock Back you have the player choosing. In reality it's supposed to be the other way around. The rest of the effects seem to work fine for both moves.

-The aforementioned bug with Machamp's strike back is fixed, but on complete accident I stumbled across a bug... maybe? I don't think this is how it's supposed to go but I'm not sure... if the enemy uses a Defender and then attacks Machamp, it'll still take 10 damage in retaliation. I feel like it shouldn't but I may be wrong on that.

-Graveler's harden requires 3 energy to use instead of 2.

-Cubone's retreat cost is correct, but the button displays wrong making it look like it's free when it isn't.

-Marowak's call for friend should become unusable when the bench is full, but it doesn't. If you use it, and choose a basic fighting type, the log will say "_____ was added to bench" but in reality it won't be. It isn't in the deck anymore either, it vanishes from existence.

-Speaking of Marowak's call for family, it and many other moves that involve deck searching can be canceled out of by simply clicking "confirm" before you've chosen a valid card, but the turn will still pass. This could majorly screw up a player; for example, let's say I wanted to use call for family and forgot that it needs to be a basic fighting type Pokemon, and choose some other typed basic Pokemon instead and hit "confirm". Now, not only have I passed my turn without doing anything, but I'm also now thinking "What the hell? Why didn't it put _______ on the bench? It must be a bug!" You should make it that the "confirm" button isn't selectable until a valid card is chosen. But then make sure to add code for if there are no valid cards in the deck, otherwise that'd be a softlock!

-Hitmonlee's stretch kick requires 1 energy instead of 2.

-Kabuto's armor rounds up to the nearest 10 when it should be rounding down.

-

The move itself is correct though.

-Aerodactyl has a retreat cost of 0 instead of 2. His ability works, but the in-game message when you try to evolve a Pokemon while he's on the field is "Pokemon cannot evolve on the same turn they are played". Also that message is so long it prevents me from clicking the debug menu until I do something to get it to change to a different message.

-Alakazam can use damage swap to knock out his own teammates, something he shouldn't be able to do. Also they won't actually faint until your turn ends, allowing him to stack more damage counters on a Pokemon than it has HP before it faints.

-Jungle Gastly's Energy conversion is busted. First of all it's got a similar problem to what Mewtwo had earlier: It'll appear to work as intended at first, but the game will still be waiting for you to click "confirm" or "cancel" even after you've taken your energy cards. Clicking "confirm" adds another 2 cards to your hand (or 1 if you only chose 1, or none if you didn't choose any), but these cards will be blank. You can do this infinitely to give yourself infinite blank cards. When you click "cancel", the game goes back to your "before-using-a-move" turn state, and Gastly doesn't take any damage. Lastly, the energy cards are removed from the discard pile but not from display on the board if one of them was on top, so it'll look like the energy is still there. I wonder how many other taking-cards-out-of-the-discard-pile effects have this same bug and I never noticed.

-The game crashed when I tried to use Pokemon trader here, and I'm not sure why.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a blank card from the Ghastly bug, but I tested it multiple times in later duels and it wasn't consistent. Sometimes it crashed, sometimes it didn't.

-Jungle Haunter's transparency makes the opponent flip a coin and negates the attack if it's tails, it's supposed to be YOU flipping the coin and negating the attack if it's heads.

-Gengar's curse doesn't seem to have its effect plugged in, and dark mind consistently crashes the game.

-Hypno's prophecy automatically selects your deck when you should be able to choose either one, but that's the least of its problems. It brings up the GUI to rearrange the 3 cards, but ends your turn at the same time. So not only do you pass your turn effectively doing nothing, but you can't get rid of the GUI and it's in your way for the rest of the duel.

-Base set Haunter's Dream eater and Mew's Devolution Beam aren't there no matter how many energies you attach.

-Minor button misalignments on base set Machoke, rocket Slowpoke, both Ghastly cards.

-While testing resistances, I noticed that when the AI's Jungle Raichu used gigashock, it wouldn't damage any of my benched Pokemon I thought "maybe it's because my Pokemon resists it and took no damage? It's not supposed to be like that but let me switch to someone who doesn't resist electric and see". So I did, but it still wouldn't damage my benched 'mons. But then, in a later duel the same AI pulled out the same Raichu and used the same gigashock, and it DID damage them. No idea what could have caused it to not work right in the first duel. I wonder how many other moves and abilities are still bugged, but only when the AI uses them, and I just wouldn't know... Well anyway I checked out of curiosity if the GUI issue I mentioned earlier was fixed, and it was. So at least the move works right when the player uses it now.

-All other fighting and psychic-types seem to work as intended.

-Finally, I've noticed that at least some of the bugs you said you fixed are either still there or partially fixed. I didn't go out of my way to check them all this time, but the ones I did see are: Venomoth's shift is still multiple times per turn, mirror move doesn't copy status, recycle still softlocks the game when tails you flip a tails (as well as the bug you mentioned, which I hadn't even noticed earlier), Vileplume's heal also still softlocking when you get a tails, and while you fixed the button changing to "end turn" when you fail to retreat while confused it still won't let you attempt again the next turn.

 

[Regi_Grass]

And finally the colorless Pokemon, as well as the last few trainer cards I hadn't already tested:

Spoiler:

-Found another bug with the super potion, when the AI uses it the discarded energy is sent to MY discard pile. I wonder if any other cards/moves/abilities that involve discarding other cards do this, and I just never noticed.

-Pidgeot's hurricane sends the target back to the hand as intended, but the next two turns are screwed up. The log says that the AI ends its turn without doing anything, even though it still takes actions. If it attacks that turn, then its own Pokemon takes the damage because game thinks it's the player's turn. Then, when that turn's over, the game thinks it's the AI's turn now, so it gets an entire second turn (and this time the damage is done correctly). None of this happens if hurricane knocks out the target.

-Promotional Jigglypuff's first aid can still be used if it has no damage, and does nothing wasting your turn. This isn't exactly wrong, but considering that other self-healing moves just won't let you use them if the Pokemon's at full health then this one should too.

-Dark Persian's poison claws requires 3 energy instead of 2.

-Dodrio's retreat aid only half works, it subtracts 1 from the requirement to be able to select the retreat button but not from the actual cost. For example, Lickitung has a retreat cost of 3. With Dodrio on the bench the retreat cost will become active at 2 energies, but will still require you discard 3 energies when you click it. The exception is Pokemon with a retreat cost of 1, for some reason the ability works perfectly on them and they can retreat for free no problem.

-Something I noticed about type-selecting moves and abilities is that when you click one type and then another, the first type stays outlined as if it were still selected. Although in practice the game uses whichever type you clicked on last before hitting "confirm".

-Speaking of type-selecting moves, both base set and rocket Porygon's conversion 1 can be used even if the opponent doesn't have a weakness. Cool Porygon's texture magic gets it right though, and only changes your resistance if the opponent has no weakness.

-Not a bug but a design choice I think you should consider: Double Colorless energy works for retreating now, but when you select it in the menu it only fills one of the card slots in the GUI. This could confuse players into thinking the game's still requiring them to pick another card (you'd only know from the fact that the "confirm" button lights up, which they may not notice). This also makes it possible for the player to discard one more energy card than should normally be allowed. I suggest that you make it fill up two of those card slots.

-Rocket Dratini can use wrap with only 1 energy instead of 2.

-Imposter professor Oak doesn't seem to understand what "your opponent" means. He puts YOUR hand into the deck and makes you draw 7 cards. I say "put" your hand into the deck and not "shuffle" it, because it actually is the opponent's deck that gets shuffled.

-Lass shuffles your opponent's deck even if he doesn't have any trainer cards in his hand, which... actually I'm not sure if that's supposed to happen or not.

-When I try to put Imakuni? on my bench, some strange bug occurs where my active Pokemon becomes confused and Imakuni? himself is sent straight to the discard pile. This is an outrage! I spoke to Imakuni? about it after the battle and he demands that you fix this immediately!!!

-Energy removal and its super counterpart seem to work fine, at least when the player uses them, but I feel like when you use super energy removal the game should tell you "choose one of your own Pokemon" and "choose an enemy Pokemon" instead of just "choose a Pokemon" both times. Players might get confused.

-If you scoop up your active Pokemon while you have Pokemon on the bench, the game won't prompt you to send in a replacement and the game will enter a bugged state where your active Pokemon is nothing. You won't lose, but you can't do much unless you have some other means of forcing a benched Pokemon into play, and enemy attacks will do damage to your nothing. Nothing appears to have infinite HP, although funnily enough it is susceptible to status conditions... but only from attacks that guarantee those conditions. Attacks that inflict status on a coin flip softlock the game. I then went back and tested Tentacool's cowardice ability, and the same bug happened. That's weird because I'm pretty sure I tested Tentacool in a previous version of the game and he worked fine. I wonder if any other Pokemon have completely new bugs that I haven't noticed...

-If you use scoop up on a benched Pokemon, a different bug happens: The "confirm" and "cancel" buttons stay there, and won't go away or let you progress until you hit "cancel" at which point scoop up is returned to your hand. Infinite scooping as long as it's your benched Pokemon and not your active one.

-Pokemon center affects all your Pokemon, even those without damage, even those without energy. It's supposed to only heal those with damage (yes even those without energy), and leave the energies of Pokemon without damage intact.

-I don't know what caused it, nor do I remember all the details (I was waiting for my own Pokemon to get knocked out to test the revive card), but at one point the "end turn" button popped up even though the AI was still in the middle of its turn. I clicked it to see what would happen, and it triggered the same bugged "the game thinks it's your turn but also thinks it's the opponent's turn" state that Pidgeot caused.

-Revive does have a bug, by the way. It puts the revived Pokemon at half health rounded down but doesn't remove it from the discard pile, duplicating it. Same with Pokeflute, and you mentioned recycle doing this too. There may be other "take X card from the discard pile" effects that do this... Not all of them, though, I know for a fact that several effects do work correctly, such as Mewtwo's energy absorption and jungle Slowpoke's scavenge.

-Minor misalignments on Pidgeotto, jungle Jigglypuff, Kangaskhan, Rocket Eevee, base set Porygon, and Farfetch'd. Exeggutor has a much more substantial misalignment on big eggsplosion, although the move itself seems to work fine now.

- I tested a couple more old bugs (not all of them, though) and found that vending Nidoran male is still broken: Horn rush will do nothing at all unless you used focus energy beforehand, in which case it'll only do 40 and no coin flip.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Milestone 4 is finally done.. Compared to 0.0.3.2 the main difference you may notice is that the ai will sometimes switch out. Trust me when I say the ai is much more robust now.

Next milestone is more finishing touches towards completing the duel system. Mostly cosmetic ones that are a little more coding intensive than the general UI overhaul. Card animation, sounds, etc. There are more diverse goals but they're all individually less intimidating than the ai and ui were. It may be the last milestone before I start working on overworld movement.

 

[Regi_Grass]

I went through my list and found some bugs that are still there or only partially fixed, as well as some new ones. I wanted to get to this earlier but was busy IRL.

Spoiler:

-Failing to retreat while confused still won't let you try again next turn.

-Vending Nidoran Male almost works now, but the damage values are backwards. Horn rush does 80 without focus energy and 40 with it.

-When the AI switches out it ignores anything that could effect the switch. It doesn't pay the retreat cost, can switch while confused without flipping a coin, and can even retreat when paralyzed or (I assume) asleep.

-The AI's sometimes weird about when it'll switch, several times I've tried to "convince" it to but it just refused, even when at 10 hp remaining and against a Pokemon it couldn't damage, unless I also inflicted a status on top of that. Not to say the AI doesn't switch unless it has a status, it sometimes does switch when it makes sense to even without a status. It always ignores retreat costs or other restrictions though.

-That bug still occurs where if a card is removed from the top of the discard pile, it looks like it's still there on the board even though it isn't.

-Vending Pinsir's slicing throw has its damage values backwards, it does 10 damage with a heads and 20 with a tails.

-When the AI has Jungle Pikachu and uses spark, its bench damage only happens if I have only one Pokemon on my bench. If I have two or more, instead of choosing one the AI just doesn't damage any of them. I'm not sure how many other "choose one or more benched Pokemon" effects have this bug. It might be all of them, it might just be Pikachu.

-Mirror move copies status now, hooray. Still not quite working as intended though, it'll copy the opponent's last used move regardless of whether or not said move was actually used on Spearow/Pidgeotto.

-Rocket Grimer is the censored version which is kinda cringe

-Rocket Koffing has more than 40 hp, I'm gonna guess 50 but I'm not sure. I'll be honest, I haven't had time to test all these Pokemon's hp values to make sure they're all correct, I just found this one by chance.

-Double colorless energy still takes up only one slot in the "choose energies to discard so you can retreat" menu, meaning a player can potentially discard one more energy than needed.

-Vending Nidoran Female's tail whip flips 2 coins, and only if both are heads does the move actually work.

-When you have jungle Zubat in your deck, then leave the deck builder and return, you'll also have an equal number of vending Zubats. Same thing happens in reverse if you have vending Zubats in your deck.

-Vending Golbat's nosedive is the same damage and effect of his leech life attack, but with the added effect of a coin flip for 40 recoil damage.

-The actual bugs regarding fossil Moltres' wildfire are fixed, but the misleading text box is still the same.

-Both Clefairy's and Clefable's metronome have an incorrect effect that I didn't think of testing earlier: They copy the energy-discarding requirements of moves which is in direct contradiction to what's written on the card. In cases like Charmander's ember, you can't copy it if you don't have the required energy, either.

-Clefable's metronome, just Clefable's and not Clefairy's, usually crashes the game. Sometimes it doesn't, and I don't know what the deciding factors are.

-While testing mysterious fossil and clefairy doll I ran into a strange bug with itemfinder, where after choosing the card to take back from the discard pile it would enter this weird pseudo-softlock state where hitting confirm would just shuffle my deck and do nothing else. The only way to proceed was to cancel, which returned the itemfinder to my hand (the cards I chose to discard had never left it)

I think this had something to do with the fact that my deck had no cards in it, I was one turn away from decking out. Strange though since Itemfinder's effect has nothing to do with the deck... But that's the only thing I can think of that's unusual in this situation, I've used the card several times before and since and it worked just fine.

-Fossil Raichu still has a retreat cost of 2.

-Intro set Electabuzz's thundershock only requires 1 electric energy to use.

-If Dark Raichu uses surprise thunder when there are no benched Pokemon the game flips the coins anyway, which isn't entirely wrong but there's really no point.

-The game still softlocks if you knock out more Pokemon at once than you have prize cards left.

-Electrode's Chain Lightning is somehow even more broken than before. All the same problems as before except now it's YOU taking the extra damage and not the opponent!

-Mankey's peep lets me see the hand now but it still has the cancel button that doesn't do anything.

-While testing Marowak's call for family (it works fine now by the way) I found an exploit.

I have the enlarged view on Marowak, and call for family is currently usable. But then I move that Spearow onto the bench, without bringing up its enlarged view,

And now, since the usability of call for family doesn't update until I click off and back on again, I can now use it while I shouldn't be able to. There are probably more applications for this exploit to use abilities or moves in situations where they shouldn't be usable.

-Kabuto's armor still rounds up instead of down.

-Areodactyl's retreat cost is fixed but the message when you try to evolve someone else still says "Pokemon cannot evolve on the same turn they are played"

-You made it that Hypno's prophecy can be used on the opponent's deck, but when you do those three cards get put on top of YOUR deck instead of of the opponent's! You're stealing your opponent's cards!

-Mew's devolution beam works just fine when it's the opponent who's Pokemon you're de-evolving, but when when you try to de-evolve your own nothing happens.

-Cool Porygon's texture magic still gives the same "choose a type" text for both GUIs, not a bug but I noticed you changed the text for super energy removal so I just wanted to remind you of this one too.

-I saw the AI do a really silly thing where I knocked out a Pokemon, and on the bench was an evolved Seaking with all the energies equipped, but only 10 hp remaining, and a Goldeen with energy equipped and 30 hp remaining. There was a third on the bench but I don't remember what it was and it didn't matter. I expected the Seaking to come in but it sent in the Goldeen instead, and I thought "fair enough, the Seaking does more damage but is about to die, and it can't knock out my own Pokemon this turn anyway so I get that the AI would want to save it". But then you know what it does? It immediately uses the swtich trainer card to switch to Seaking! Lol then what was the point of sending in Goldeen, AI?

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

I'm back. I was in a Zelda coma for a while there.

Spoiler:

-Failing to retreat while confused still won't let you try again next turn.

-When the AI switches out it ignores anything that could effect the switch. It doesn't pay the retreat cost, can switch while confused without flipping a coin, and can even retreat when paralyzed or (I assume) asleep.

-The AI's sometimes weird about when it'll switch, several times I've tried to "convince" it to but it just refused, even when at 10 hp remaining and against a Pokemon it couldn't damage, unless I also inflicted a status on top of that. Not to say the AI doesn't switch unless it has a status, it sometimes does switch when it makes sense to even without a status. It always ignores retreat costs or other restrictions though.

-I saw the AI do a really silly thing where I knocked out a Pokemon, and on the bench was an evolved Seaking with all the energies equipped, but only 10 hp remaining, and a Goldeen with energy equipped and 30 hp remaining. There was a third on the bench but I don't remember what it was and it didn't matter. I expected the Seaking to come in but it sent in the Goldeen instead, and I thought "fair enough, the Seaking does more damage but is about to die, and it can't knock out my own Pokemon this turn anyway so I get that the AI would want to save it". But then you know what it does? It immediately uses the swtich trainer card to switch to Seaking! Lol then what was the point of sending in Goldeen, AI?

I've fixed the more obvious retreat issues. The AI's retreat algorithm is still an imperfect beast and will continue to be refined going forward. At the very least I see that when choosing a new active pokemon it doesn't prioritize evolved pokemon (It was based on each card's base perceived value in the hand. Evo cards have low base value but gets multiplied if there's a suitable basic pokemon in play).

-Vending Nidoran Male almost works now, but the damage values are backwards. Horn rush does 80 without focus energy and 40 with it.

-Vending Pinsir's slicing throw has its damage values backwards, it does 10 damage with a heads and 20 with a tails.

-Rocket Koffing has more than 40 hp, I'm gonna guess 50 but I'm not sure. I'll be honest, I haven't had time to test all these Pokemon's hp values to make sure they're all correct, I just found this one by chance.

-Vending Nidoran Female's tail whip flips 2 coins, and only if both are heads does the move actually work.

-When you have jungle Zubat in your deck, then leave the deck builder and return, you'll also have an equal number of vending Zubats. Same thing happens in reverse if you have vending Zubats in your deck.

-Vending Golbat's nosedive is the same damage and effect of his leech life attack, but with the added effect of a coin flip for 40 recoil damage.

-Fossil Raichu still has a retreat cost of 2.

-Intro set Electabuzz's thundershock only requires 1 electric energy to use.

-If Dark Raichu uses surprise thunder when there are no benched Pokemon the game flips the coins anyway, which isn't entirely wrong but there's really no point.

-Kabuto's armor still rounds up instead of down.

-Electrode's Chain Lightning is somehow even more broken than before. All the same problems as before except now it's YOU taking the extra damage and not the opponent!

-You made it that Hypno's prophecy can be used on the opponent's deck, but when you do those three cards get put on top of YOUR deck instead of of the opponent's! You're stealing your opponent's cards!

-Mew's devolution beam works just fine when it's the opponent who's Pokemon you're de-evolving, but when when you try to de-evolve your own nothing happens.

-Mankey's peep lets me see the hand now but it still has the cancel button that doesn't do anything.

-While testing Marowak's call for family (it works fine now by the way) I found an exploit.

I have the enlarged view on Marowak, and call for family is currently usable. But then I move that Spearow onto the bench, without bringing up its enlarged view,

And now, since the usability of call for family doesn't update until I click off and back on again, I can now use it while I shouldn't be able to. There are probably more applications for this exploit to use abilities or moves in situations where they shouldn't be usable.

-Areodactyl's retreat cost is fixed but the message when you try to evolve someone else still says "Pokemon cannot evolve on the same turn they are played"

-When the AI has Jungle Pikachu and uses spark, its bench damage only happens if I have only one Pokemon on my bench. If I have two or more, instead of choosing one the AI just doesn't damage any of them. I'm not sure how many other "choose one or more benched Pokemon" effects have this bug. It might be all of them, it might just be Pikachu.

-Mirror move copies status now, hooray. Still not quite working as intended though, it'll copy the opponent's last used move regardless of whether or not said move was actually used on Spearow/Pidgeotto.

Fixed all these.

-That bug still occurs where if a card is removed from the top of the discard pile, it looks like it's still there on the board even though it isn't.

-While testing mysterious fossil and clefairy doll I ran into a strange bug with itemfinder, where after choosing the card to take back from the discard pile it would enter this weird pseudo-softlock state where hitting confirm would just shuffle my deck and do nothing else. The only way to proceed was to cancel, which returned the itemfinder to my hand (the cards I chose to discard had never left it)

I think this had something to do with the fact that my deck had no cards in it, I was one turn away from decking out. Strange though since Itemfinder's effect has nothing to do with the deck... But that's the only thing I can think of that's unusual in this situation, I've used the card several times before and since and it worked just fine.

Pretty sure these are fixed. ...I started working on some of this QA a few weeks ago.

-Rocket Grimer is the censored version which is kinda cringe

I double checked this to be sure. No, that's the censored version. The only change from the original was the direction grimer was looking.

-Double colorless energy still takes up only one slot in the "choose energies to discard so you can retreat" menu, meaning a player can potentially discard one more energy than needed.

Eh. I'm going to leave this as is for now. This is a larger question of how I want to go about fixing that. For the time being it works well enough that it's a low priority.

-Both Clefairy's and Clefable's metronome have an incorrect effect that I didn't think of testing earlier: They copy the energy-discarding requirements of moves which is in direct contradiction to what's written on the card. In cases like Charmander's ember, you can't copy it if you don't have the required energy, either.

-Clefable's metronome, just Clefable's and not Clefairy's, usually crashes the game. Sometimes it doesn't, and I don't know what the deciding factors are.

Technically the whole card is mistranslated. It's meant to be that you do need all required energy (at least on clefairy, maybe not clefable), but at least that aspect of having to discard cards I know is accurate as is, according to errata. This is why a lot of Rocket and later cards say something like "if you don't discard, this attack does nothing" to clarify that for metronome.

I've fixed a few issues with Metronome. I was getting a stack overflow error at least with Clefable that I've worked around. (It had do with the ai checking its effects, which didn't work. This means that npcs won't be able to play or work around metronome. eh.) You also couldn't cancel out of the attack once you selected it which I fixed.

-The game still softlocks if you knock out more Pokemon at once than you have prize cards left.

I fixed the softlocking, though there may still be issues. I once found and odd bug where the opponent drew possibly twice the prizes they were supposed to after a Dark Weezing Mass Explosion that I haven't been able to replicate since... But at the very least it doesn't softlock and is more consistent overall.

-Cool Porygon's texture magic still gives the same "choose a type" text for both GUIs, not a bug but I noticed you changed the text for super energy removal so I just wanted to remind you of this one too.

-The actual bugs regarding fossil Moltres' wildfire are fixed, but the misleading text box is still the same.

It at least now clarifies in the text on the bottom right for these.

The next milestone is done. The main additions are the card animations and the sound design. Looking back on milestone 4 the card animations are the one change I can't believe I lived without, it makes the whole game so much easier to follow. The sound design is...subject to change. But the addition of sound really does a lot to make it feel like a finished product. I probably need to mix it better and change up some of the sound effects. Feedback on that is appreciated.

With that, the duel simulation is finally at a place where I'm satisfied moving on to the macro gameplay next milestone. Which isn't to say it's done, it just won't me the main focus for the first time in six months which is exciting.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Milestone 6 adds the overworld! There's actually some semblance of progression now, which is a massive step from turning it from just a tcg simulator to an actual fangame! Like there's actually goals and continuity and actual intrinsic reason to play duels now. I was tempted to make this 0.1, but I think the real indicator of it will be getting a splash screen, which may not happen for a few milestones.

Up next is the tutorial milestone. I've had a bit of feedback that even from players who know the rules the controls take a second to figure out. And of course the game does nothing to introduce players who have never played the game before, which is a step that the original game always did so well. Even if it's not played by new players, I want to at least honor that goal.