I'm programming the Pokémon TCG base set

[Novale]

I'm not sure if maybe this rule has changed since then, but in your latest version on itch I went first and was able to also attack on my first turn, which in modern formats is not allowed

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

I'm not sure if maybe this rule has changed since then, but in your latest version on itch I went first and was able to also attack on my first turn, which in modern formats is not allowed

Yeah I based the whole thing on the original Gameboy game, in which players could attack on the first turn. I'm planning for a future milestone to add togglable variant rules.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Milestone 7, finally done. This was more or less finished like two weeks ago but then I got a new job and things have been weird.

A lot of general improvements in this one. The tutorial now exists. If you've never played the Pokémon tcg I would love your feedback on how it works. There's also some minor improvements to the overworld: the club is a bit larger now that the screen can scroll to follow the player. There's also the world map which allows you to travel to the lab, though there's not much there yet.

 

[ziuam]

i dont know if this is only my issue but whenever i fight lexi and i win against her after i win and im about to get the booster it doesnt appear and the game pretty much stops working

 

[Dymdez]

Are you still working on this? I found this thread while trying to learn how to hack the GBC ROMs for the original two TCG games. Definitely checking this out now!

 

[Regi_Grass_mk2]

I'm back. I'm actually the same guy from earlier who made all those bug reports, had to make a new account because I forgot which email/password I used to make the original one. I did a "casual" run of the game and a bit of testing beyond that, haven't gotten around to testing every card but I still found several things to report.

Spoiler: Bug reports

-Perhaps most importantly, the debug option doesn't seem to work. I checkmark the box outside of battle, but then in-battle the debug button still doesn't do anything, and then when the battle's over I check the options menu and it's unchecked again. Testing individual cards gets really luck dependent without the ability to draw cards until I get the thing I want.

-Beating Emmerich (the guy in front of the lightning club, off to the right) gives you a blank dialogue box after opening the card pack and softlocks you. Same thing happens after getting the lightning medal from beating the boss.

-If you go back and fight Trey again after beating him the first time (the dude you need to fight to be allowed into the lightning club), the game tries to give you two card packs. But instead of opening the first, it goes straight into the second and softlocks.

-Aside from the softlocking, Emmerich had another quirk I noticed where he never makes use of his Drowzee's long-distance hypnosis.

-I see that you made the deck-editing menu able to be scrolled through even when your mouse is on a card, that's good. However it still won't scroll in battles while your mouse is on a card, when you're using something like a Pokeball.

-Speaking of which, the Master Ball doesn't have a top-7-cards restriction, you can just pick a Pokemon from wherever in your deck. It's just a Pokeball without the coin flip!

-The AI doesn't seem very capable of using vending Porygon's conversion2, it probably wanted to change its resistance to water here but instead set it to psychic... when it already resists psychic.

to be fair I have a psychic type on my bench here, but I doubt that's really why the AI did it considering the context. Tried using Vending Porygon myself and Conversion2 worked just fine, so it's an AI problem and not a card problem.

-There was a moment where I used an Oak and tried to attach an energy, and was told I already had attached one that turn when I could've sworn I didn't. I checked the log and almost wrote it off as a bug since there was no record of me attaching an energy, until I realized that while the log reports the AI attaching an energy, it doesn't report when you do it. I try it again, intentionally not attaching an energy before using Oak, and it worked as intended so maybe I just misremembered. Maybe the log should report the player's attaching of energies though.

-Jungle Pidgeot's Hurricane sends the target and all its cards to the discard pile, regardless of whether or not they were knocked out. This happens on both the player's and AI's side. A less game-breaking version of the bug happens if the target IS knocked out, where it zooms across the screen to the discard pile from the opposite corner rather than its actual starting position.




-You should make the cards bigger when opening a pack, so that you can read them. There's plenty of room on the screen above the text box.


-When you lose to this guy, one of his lines is randomly a different font and size than everything else in the game.


-The AI had no reason to not TRY and attack here, it COULD have got 2 heads in a row and done some damage. But instead it just passes its turn.



-Some text cutoffs.


-A typo

-When the AI uses base set Ninetales' lure it never selects a benched Pokemon to switch in, softlocking the game.


-Very questionable AI choice here. He could've given a second energy to Ratticate and attacked, but you see, at the start of the turn that Ratticate was a Rattata. It seems he went through his "attach energies" step before his "evolve Pokemon if possible" step, meaning he instead gave it to that other Rattata on the bench instead.

-And finally, I suggest you add a "confirmation screen" or an "undo" option if you click "clear" on your deck screen. It's very easy to click it on accident when you meant to click "edit".

I know it's been a while since you worked on this, and I understand, I haven't been here in a long time because real life's been keeping me busy too. Just leaving these here if you ever do come back, I hope you do. TCG fangames might start getting more attention soon now that Nintendo's releasing a TCG mobile game.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

I'm back with 0.7.1. Or more accurately, I'm done lurking. Rest assured I've been keeping an eye on both this and the itch.io page near daily since I last posted. Over the past month I've been getting better at developing a new work-life balance, and so I've gotten back to work on milestone 8. That starts with fixing all the bugs found in that time, and there were many. I also added the first new feature of the Milestone: the enhanced deck builder. It's definitely an improvement, though I may still need to get used to it. I already have some ideas for how to improve it. If you have any feedback in that regard let me know.

 

[Regi_Grass_mk2]

Good to see it's back! There are still bugs to be found of course. These were the results of a "casual" playthrough followed by a quick test of each grass type:

Spoiler: Bug reports

- First and perhaps most significantly, my game would sometimes enter a strange bugged state where whenever I drug a card around, it would leave that spot highlighted while the card itself either teleported back to my hand or the corner of the screen. It looks like this:

other than that, the game can be played as normal... up until the point when someone gets knocked out. Whether it's me or the opponent, when the game prompts me to either pick a prize card or send in a new Pokemon, I am unable to do so. It's not a complete softlock as I can still concede the duel from the menu, however the next duel will still be in this bugged state as well. There have been 2 or 3 occasions where this weird game state appeared and disappeared without softlocking me, but 9 times out of 10 when it happens the only cure is to reload the page. And it turns out, saving your progress just doesn't "count" when the game's in this state, when you reload the page you'll be sent back to your last save BEFORE the glitch happened. As for what causes it to happen, I've seen it occur most often the duel after I use the debug menu (even if I don't actually do anything but open and then close it). However, it doesn't always happen, and rarely I've seen the game enter this state when I had never even touched the debug option.

- Speaking of the debug menu, the "show AI card priority scores" option doesn't appear to do anything.

- The little icon that indicates which deck you've selected is still slightly on screen at all times in the overworld.


- When testing the grass types, there was this weird thing where the game only let me put 3 Paras cards in my deck instead of 4, and then it happened again with Grimer. But later when I went back to them at another time, the game let me put all 4 in. No idea why that happened.

- When you use Charizard's Energy Burn, the game log says the opponent did it and not you. It's just the log though, you're still the one benefiting from it.

- Speaking of Charizard, one time when I used Fire Spin the animation and game log showed him discarding 4 energies when he only discarded 2 like he's supposed to. The log also showed the enemy taking 100 damage twice, but I'm not sure if that actually happened in-game either. It's worth noting that neither were actual fire energies, they were both lightning energies that had been energy burn-ed. I tried some more testing to see if I could nail down an exact cause, but was unable to replicate the glitch even when I did everything the exact same. I know it happened the first time though, here's a screenshot.


- There's a minor visual bug where if you attempt to retreat while confused and fail, the on-board icons of the energies you discarded stay there until the start of your next turn.

- When the AI uses Promo 1 or 3 Mewtwo's energy absorption and there are 1 or 0 energies in the discard pile, the game softlocks. I assume this is because you didn't think to write a function for the AI to click "cancel" if it can't complete the move it's using.

Of course, you don't want to JUST add a cancel function and call it a day, or the AI would get stuck in an infinite loop of trying to use the move and cancelling. It should either check beforehand if the move's possible, or if it tries and fails the first time it either tries the second move if it can, or if it can't, ends its turn.

- Nazim, the guy in the club's side room with the fire/water deck, is pretty buggy. He can randomly crash the game mid-duel, and one time when I defeated him I spawned outside of the room after the duel (I was able to walk back in no problem though). And remember that glitched game state I talked about earlier, the one where the cards act funny when you drag them around and the game won't proceed past the first knockout of a duel? The only time I've seen it happen even when I had never touched the debug menu, was when dueling Nazim.

- Rika, the girl in front of the club with the water deck, can also crash the game mid-duel but it's less common than with Nazim.

- Dark Raichu has 90 HP instead of 70.

- Dark Weezing's Mass Explosion causes the main attack's damage to each Koffing and Weezing in play, instead of 20. So for example, if there are 2 Koffing/Weezings in play, the attack does 40 damage to the opponent and 40 damage to each Koffing/Weezing, when it should be 40 damage to the opponent and 20 damage to each Koffing/Weezing.

- Neither of Vending Zapdos' attacks inflict self-damage on a tails... but only when the AI is using it! When I use it the self-damage works as intended!

- The AI now ALWAYS uses Rocket Drowzee's long-distance hypnosis, even when it has no reason to and only stands to be hurt by it. Such as when I'm already asleep, or when Drowsee himself is active and has enough energy to use Nightmare which is a guaranteed sleep anyway.

-Every effect that I've tested so far that takes a Pokemon out of the deck and places it on the bench has been bugged in the same way, so I think it's a safe bet to say they all suffer from it: The Pokemon is placed on the bench but not removed from the deck, duplicating it.

- The AI could have won the game right here by switching Dewgong in and attacking, but instead stayed in with Staryu for seemingly no reason and ended up losing for it.


-Similarly, the AI could've won the game right here if it had just attacked. But since it was at low HP and on its last prize card, it's hard coded to run away if possible. So it did, into a Pokemon who couldn't attack, and turned what would've been a win into a loss.

In fact, it COULD'VE switched into Charmander, still attacked, and won, but nope. It seems the AI only ever switches to whoever's in the left-most bench slot.

- The "rare" star symbol in the deck builder is missing.

And I do have a suggestion for the deck builder: It's slightly annoying when I want to search for a trainer card, and initially nothing comes up because I previously I was looking for Pokemon by type, and now I gotta go back and click "all types" again in the menu. Very minor thing but I suggest making trainer cards count as all types instead of as none.

A non-deck building suggestion I have is to have a way to see what you get from a booster pack instantly, skipping the animation of all 10 cards sliding across the screen. Currently if you try to do that by clicking "Done", it just exits the screen and you don't get to see what you got.

 

[Regi_Grass_mk2]

Here's the bugs I found while testing the Fire, Water, Electric, and Fighting types:

Spoiler: Bug reports

- The AI could've gotten a kill here if it attached the energy to Seaking and attacked, but since it seems to do its "attach energies if possible" step before "evolve Pokemon if possible" step, it gave the energy to Bulbasaur instead.

I remember a similar AI quirk happening in the last version of the game.

- On a related note, when the AI first evolves Gloom into Vileplume it won't use heal until the next turn after. I guess it does its "use abilities if possible" step before its "evolve if possible" step as well!

- At some point the game had stopped accepting inputs from my keyboard, something that I didn't notice until I tried to rename a deck I had cleared out. No idea when it happened or how, but it's worth noting that it did. It was fixed by reloading the page.

- Dark Wartortle's doubleslap has a cost of 2 energy when it should be just 1. Similarly, his big brother has a cost of 3 instead of 2 for Hydrocannon, although it still calculates its "extra damage" normally. So you do 50 damage with the "minimum" amount, and it caps at 70 like it's supposed to.

- Dark Golduck has a retreat cost of 1 instead of 2.

- Vending Omanyte's Fossil Guidance softlocks the game whether you get a heads or tails. In the case of the heads, you get stuck infinitely drawing fossils out of the deck, and in the case of tails you get stuck waiting for the game to end the effect.

- Fossil Zapdos has the wrong icon in the "deck" tab of the editor, it uses Fossil Raichu's. There is also sometimes a very minor visual error in that list where when you add or remove cards, other cards in the list have their orders flipped around.

- Gameboy Marowak's Bone Attack doesn't have it's "Leer" effect, it just does 10 damage and nothing else. And yes, Wail has the same bug as all the other bench summoning moves. So does Jungle Marowak's Call for Friend.

- Vending Magnemite's Magnetic Call softlocks the game in a similar manner to Vending Omanyte's. Also the game log calls it "Radio Static" for some reason.

- Remember that old bug where the game log would say "player uses Moltres' wildfire" once for each card milled? Yeah that's back. It's only a log bug though, in the actual game it seems to work as intended.

- I don't know if PokemonAaah.com is the one who did this translation, but whoever did made a little oopsie:

They forgot "if heads". So if you really want to take the card literally, then you flip a coin that does absolutely nothing and deal 50 damage regardless of if it's heads or tails lol.

- The little status icon for Dark Wartortle's Mirror Shell stays there forever, although the actual effect lasts 1 turn like it's supposed to. Also, the damage it deals to the attacker ignores the defender trainer card, which I don't think it's supposed to do.

- There was one time where when I tried to start a duel with Kim (the girl in front of the club with the fire/fighting deck), the game stopped in between one of her dialogue lines and I couldn't do anything until I refreshed the page. I think it was when I said "yes" to her challenge? I don't remember exactly. EDIT: I had it happen a couple more times with other NPCs while testing the other types, it seems to rarely happen when you're clicking through the dialogue too fast.

- Promo Pikachu 2's recharge still doesn't let you take an electric energy out of the deck, and just forces you to cancel and waste your turn.

- Promo Magikarp's Dragon Rage crashes the game.

- Rocket Mankey's Mischief doesn't end your turn, allowing you to use it and then a second attack. Or shuffle your opponent's deck an infinite amount of times, if that's more your style.

- Some minor textbox oddities:


- Tentacool's cowardice shuffles the deck for some reason.

- Electrode's Chain Lightning is acting naughty again. Now, for every matching Pokemon on the opponent's bench it deals an extra 10 damage to the defending Pokemon, and for every matching 'mon on your bench it deals the damage to Electrode himself.

- Dark Golduck's Third Eye says "draw up to 3 cards", implying you have the choice to draw 1 or 2 instead. Currently the game just makes you draw all 3.

- Similarly, Vending Vulpix's Foxfire says you "may" switch the opponent's Pokemon, implying you have the option not to, but the game forces you to.

- When you use an attack, there's a window of time you can still click "end turn" and things get a little crazy when you do. In the same vein, when you switch your Pokemon you can click "confirm" again mid-animation for some weird shenanigans.

- The tooltip for the defender's on-board icon says it reduces damage by 10 instead of 20.

actually, it says "10s". Don't know why there's an "s" there.

- There was a crash when dueling Trey (the guy who blocks the club entrance). Granted, it was a rather extreme case where I knocked out a bunch of Pokemon on both sides of the field with selfdestruct. I think it had something to do with the AI having to draw multiple prize cards?

After all, you can see the log reporting Trey picking up his prize cards twice.

- Vending Charmander's growl reduces damage after applying weakness and resistance, when it's supposed to be before. You probably copied the code from cards with similar effects, not realizing that this one's an exception.

- Vending Dewgong's Aurora Wave does 20 instead of 30.

- Vending Diglett's Trip Over doesn't flip a coin and just does 30 damage automatically. Also in the deck list it's called "Promo" instead of "Vending".

- Vending Hitmonchan's Mach Punch doesn't flip a coin and hits a benched Pokemon automatically.

- Vending Krabby's Bubble doesn't attempt a paralysis.

- Vending Shellder's Water Spout caps at 30 damage instead of 40.

- Vending Voltorb's retreat cost is 1 when it should be 0.

- Vending Squirtle's Aqua Power just does 10 damage. It seems you accidentally put the same code as Pound there.

- And finally, to contradict what I said earlier about the AI being too trigger happy with switching when it's close to losing, here we see it refusing to switch at all when it's on the brink of losing! I even passed my turn a couple times to see if it ever would, and it didn't!

 

[Regi_Grass_mk2]

And finally, the Psychic types, Colorless types, and remaining trainer cards.

Spoiler: Bug reports

- When the AI uses Pokemon Breeder, it can evolve multiple Pokemon at once. It also doesn't consume the evolution cards in its hand. So for example, let's say it has 3 Charmanders and a Squirtle on the field, and a Charizard and Blastoise card in hand. With Breeder, it turns all those Charmanders into Charizards at once, AND the Squirtle into Blastoise, and still has both Charizard and Blastoise in its hand afterward. None of this applies to the player, it works as intended when I use it. As a side note, when testing this bug I noticed that the AI was refusing to use Charizard's Fire Spin. It might be an effect of this bug, or it just might be that the AI can't/won't use that attack in general.

- If Mew uses devolution beam on a Pokemon evovled using Breeder, there will just be an infinite number of identical evolution cards underneath the current one. Devolution Spray works as intended though, and just to be clear this bug happens whether it's me or the AI that used the Breeder.

- Speaking of Devolution Spray, there's a bug where if you click on a basic Pokemon with it, the "confirm" button lights up. Clicking it won't do anything in the moment, but trying select and confirm an actually evolved Pokemon afterwards won't work anymore. You'll have to cancel and use it again.

- I've noticed this long ago but never brought it up for some reason: The AI will never make use of moves with an "attach more energies to do more damage" effect like Blasoise's hydro pump. Now, I'm sure that making the AI always go for it will lead to some very stupid plays. Maybe put a clause in the code that if it can see that it'll get a kill from attaching one more energy, it'll do so instead of giving it to some other Pokemon.

- As expected, Gameboy Jigglypuff's Friendship Song has the same bug as all the other bench summoning moves.

- Dark Hypno's bench manipulation applies weakness and resistance, which the card's text says not to.

- Both of Vending Haunter's moves are bugged. Poltergeist leaves the enemy's hand revealed for the rest of the game, or at least until some effect un-reveals it. Bad dreams, instead of flipping a coin, just hits a second time for 20 more damage.

- Vending Alakazam also has both his moves bugged. Psycho Panic hits twice, and only the second hit applies the whole "double base damage if the target is psychic type" effect. Trance Damage seems to mostly work fine, except it doesn't end your turn.

- The damage inflicted by Digger doesn't update on the board. It does still appear on the "expanded view" you get when you click on a card, though.

- Speaking of that expanded view, there's a minor bug with gust of wind where the newly-switched in Pokemon with appear to have all the same energies as the switched out one. It doesn't actually have those energies, and updating the expanded view by clicking off the card and on again fixes it.

- Dark Dragonair's evolutionary light is not once per turn. Neither is promo Dragonite's special delivery, and Fossil Dragonite's Step in just doesn't seem to work at all.

- For some reason Clefairy, Clefable, Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff are out of Pokedex order in the deck editor. Clefable comes first, then Jigglypuff, then Clefairy, then Wigglytuff.

- I did a number of duels against Kyle (the guy in the club entrance room with the starter deck) and discovered he can sometimes crash the game too.

- Sometimes, when I concede against Jess (the girl next to the entrance of the main club room, with the "after dark" deck), the game softlocks after her dialogue ends.

- Gameboy Mew's mystery attack requires 1 energy instead of 2, and using it causes that bugged state where it's both your turn and the opponent's at the same time. Also worth noting that I've used it quite a lot of times and never got any more than 10 damage, there might be a bug there too. Otherwise I'm just VERY unlucky.

- If Gameboy Pidgeot's Gale knocks out the opponent, the self-switch doesn't happen. If it doesn't, then the OPPONENT's switch doesn't happen, and your turn doesn't end.

- Max Revive, instead of requiring you to discard 2 energies, instead flips a coin and allows you to revive a Pokemon on a heads. To make matters worse, the revived Pokemon is at half health! It's just a regular revive but worse! And to add insult to injury, the game softlocks on a tails.

- Minor quirk with the "show opponent's hand" debug option: If an effect causes the hand to be revealed and then re-hidden, like the Lass card, it'll stay hidden. You'll have to go back into debug, un-select "show opponent's hand", and re-select it.

- Mirror move still does the result of the opponent's last attack, whether or not it was actually on Spearow. Also I noticed it doesn't copy the self-healing properties of moves like leech seed. Should it? I dunno, the card's wording is pretty vague.

- Pokemon retransfer works on any type of card, it's just Recycle without the coin flip.

- Remember that bug with promo Pikachu and its recharge move? Same exact thing happens with Rocket Slowpoke's afternoon nap.

- Strange audio quirk with the club's main room: If you play a duel in there, go outside, then open and close the pause menu, the music will suddenly get substantially louder. It'll reduce back to its normal volume when you go to any other room, until you re-open and close the pause menu at which point it'll jump up in volume again. Playing a duel in any other room will return the game's audio to its normal state.

- Slowbro's strange behavior will deal 20 damage to him if the Pokemon he's healing is psychic type. In other words, the game's applying weakness and resistance to this ability. If only he had a resistance, he'd be able to heal Pokemon of that type infinitely with this bug...

- The AI doesn't know how to use base set Alakazam's damage swap. Instead of just not using it like usual, it gets caught in some sort of logic loop that causes my computer to go into overdrive for a couple minutes before eventually giving me a "page not responding" message.

- Also, while testing this I had encountered a bug at one point when the AI used a computer search and it stayed on the board permanently.

This happened before it got stuck on trying to use damage swap, just to be clear. I took the screenshot after it got stuck. Unfortunately I forgot to include the log in said screenshot.

- Super energy retrieval uses the image of super energy removal instead. When used, it'll let you pick energies in the discard pile as intended, but when you click "confirm" nothing will happen, forcing you to cancel. It's also called "super energy retrieval (1181)" for some reason.

- When Dark Haunter uses disgust and gets a heads, the game will always say the opponent has no trainer cards in his/her hand, even when he/she does.

- Speaking of Dark Haunter, remember the bug I mentioned last post where a couple cards would only let me add 3 to the deck? Well it happed in reverse with Dark Haunter, the game let me add 5. Like with before, closing and re-opening the deck editor fixed it.

- Vending Dodrio has a retreat cost of 1 instead of 0, and it accidentally has the same retreat aid ability as its Jungle counterpart. Wait a minute, that means its retreat cost is actually 2!

- If Vending Hypno uses Mind Shock through a Clefairy Doll, your turn doesn't end. It's also worth noting that if you do enough damage this way to knock out the opponent, they won't actually die until you end the turn.

-Speaking of Clefairy Doll, it and Mysterious Fossil's protection against status effects have a couple issues. When Vileplume uses petal dance on one, the code protecting the doll/fossil from confusion accidentally applies to the Vileplume, meaning it won't get confused. Similarly, when Jungle Gloom uses foul odor neither he nor the doll/fossil gets confused. I don't know how many other moves that inflict self-statuses also have this glitch, maybe all of them. But wait, we're not done yet. Imakuni? is so powerful that he bypasses the code entirely and will confuse the doll/fossil anyway! It may not seem like a big deal, since they can't retreat or attack anyway, but since the "discard this card" option is counted in the code as an ability, it's disabled by confusion. This is Imakuni?'s revenge for you not playing him as a basic Pokemon!

- Vending Mewtwo 2, the one with complete recovery and psycho blast, has a retreat cost of 3 instead of 2.

- Vending Pidgey has 50 hp instead of 40.

- Vending Wigglytuff's helping hand softlocks the game, whether it's a heads or a tails.

- When the AI uses Vending Abra's psychic beam, it doesn't choose a target and just ends its turn.

- When you use a computer search, choose 2 cards to discard, and look into the deck, you're able to click "cancel" which wastes all 3 cards accomplishing nothing. I guess this isn't really a bug; of course you can't just refund the cards if the player cancels, otherwise you'd just be looking into your deck for free. I'm sure disabling the cancel button here will cause other problems, particularly if there's no cards left in the deck... I dunno it just seems wrong, it's easy for players to accidentally click "cancel" when they meant to click confirm.

 

[ROMANREIGNS599]

Hi. What do I have to do with the files once I download the game? So then I tried finding it in the Itch.io app, but it doesn't show up. I tried a few different names but no luck

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Hi. What do I have to do with the files once I download the game? So then I tried finding it in the Itch.io app, but it doesn't show up. I tried a few different names but no luck

to be honest I've never tried it directly... You should be able to extract the files and run the html file, assuming you're on a desktop. This is the first time I've heard of the itch.io app, but I imagine it's a launcher for exe versions of downloaded games. I build my games to html5 because most people are more willing to playtest a game if they can play it in browser rather than trust a random exe file. The downloads are mostly for archiving anyway. It should be playable from the zip folder, but I definitely recommend playing it in browser instead.

 

[ROMANREIGNS599]

to be honest I've never tried it directly... You should be able to extract the files and run the html file, assuming you're on a desktop. This is the first time I've heard of the itch.io app, but I imagine it's a launcher for exe versions of downloaded games. I build my games to html5 because most people are more willing to playtest a game if they can play it in browser rather than trust a random exe file. The downloads are mostly for archiving anyway. It should be playable from the zip folder, but I definitely recommend playing it in browser instead.

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll keep playing on the brower. Btw, I was battling the first character in the 2nd area and my game isn't letting me pick a prize card. I can click on all other cards to zoom in on them but I can't pick a prize card. I was able to just fine before this battle. I have ublock, would that be causing it?

 

[ROMANREIGNS599]

to be honest I've never tried it directly... You should be able to extract the files and run the html file, assuming you're on a desktop. This is the first time I've heard of the itch.io app, but I imagine it's a launcher for exe versions of downloaded games. I build my games to html5 because most people are more willing to playtest a game if they can play it in browser rather than trust a random exe file. The downloads are mostly for archiving anyway. It should be playable from the zip folder, but I definitely recommend playing it in browser instead.

Oh and also, does the game select any of my decks for play at random?

 

[Regi_Grass_mk2]

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll keep playing on the brower. Btw, I was battling the first character in the 2nd area and my game isn't letting me pick a prize card. I can click on all other cards to zoom in on them but I can't pick a prize card. I was able to just fine before this battle. I have ublock, would that be causing it?

Seems like you fell victim to this bug I reported earlier, it's unfortunately pretty common in this version of the game:

- First and perhaps most significantly, my game would sometimes enter a strange bugged state where whenever I drug a card around, it would leave that spot highlighted while the card itself either teleported back to my hand or the corner of the screen. It looks like this:
View attachment 161727
other than that, the game can be played as normal... up until the point when someone gets knocked out. Whether it's me or the opponent, when the game prompts me to either pick a prize card or send in a new Pokemon, I am unable to do so. It's not a complete softlock as I can still concede the duel from the menu, however the next duel will still be in this bugged state as well. There have been 2 or 3 occasions where this weird game state appeared and disappeared without softlocking me, but 9 times out of 10 when it happens the only cure is to reload the page. And it turns out, saving your progress just doesn't "count" when the game's in this state, when you reload the page you'll be sent back to your last save BEFORE the glitch happened. As for what causes it to happen, I've seen it occur most often the duel after I use the debug menu (even if I don't actually do anything but open and then close it). However, it doesn't always happen, and rarely I've seen the game enter this state when I had never even touched the debug option.

You'll have to reload the page when you see it happening. Try to remember to save in between each duel in case it pops up again on the next duel.

 

[abcd_z]

Out of curiosity, how did you structure the code for the pokemon attacks/powers/trainers? I'm working on something similar in Python, and I've been spending a lot of time working out the structure ahead of time so I don't end up with a huge tangle of spaghetti code.

 

[abcd_z]

I cannibalized the three starter decks and made a deck with Blastoise, Dewgong, Lapras, Machoke, and Hitmonchan that's been wrecking the NPCs pretty consistently since I got a few more trainers. I have no idea if this is because the AI isn't that great or because I'm just that awesome, but I choose to believe it's entirely due to my mad skills, yo. ;)

Vick: "You're deck it" should be "Your deck is"

"Player recieved a booster pack" should be "Player received a booster pack". EI, not IE.I think collecting the coin also spells receive wrong.

My Lapras was confused, tried to retreat, and failed. The energy was discarded, but the Lapras still showed that the energy was on it until the turn ended.

Please, please, let the player force the text animation for the current box to complete instantly by clicking on it a second time. Or just don't include any animation and have the text display instantly. I actually like that idea better, though that's a personal preference.

I got a mutual KO, clicked on Grimer, giving it the white edge, then selected a prize card. The game didn't register me clicking on Grimer again to bring him out and I had to choose a different Pokemon.

Was it a stylistic choice to leave the GB cards pixelated? Because Bulbapedia has non-pixelated images for all but six of them (https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Category:Pokémon_Card_GB_cards), and I could use the pixel art upscaler hq2x to upscale the remaining six for... eh, moderate improvements. Not great, but a little better than just leaving them alone, I think.

Actually, I went ahead and upscaled the 6 Game Boy images that didn't have a print analogue.

https://imgur.com/a/miidWM3

Let me know if you want me to do the same for the rest of the GB images, or if you'll crop the print images yourself, or neither. It wouldn't take me but a few minutes.

I would prefer to have some way to know which cards are in which boosters.

When using a pokeball, if you click on one pokemon, then click directly onto a different pokemon, the game doesn't register the change. You have to click the first pokemon again before the game will let you select a different one. Confusingly, it still shows the second pokemon when you click it, even if the first one is the one that is actually selected.

I did 40 damage to the vending machine pidgey, the listed amount of HP, but it wasn't knocked out.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

Out of curiosity, how did you structure the code for the pokemon attacks/powers/trainers? I'm working on something similar in Python, and I've been spending a lot of time working out the structure ahead of time so I don't end up with a huge tangle of spaghetti code.

To be honest it is probably spaghetti code. I'm definitely a designer first and a programmer second. For the attacks each generic pokAttack points to a List of compontents that are attack effects (deal damage, deal a status effect, flip and if heads to these effects and if not these, etc). If I was smarter I would've probably hard coded trainers and powers to use the same system but instead I need to hard code every trainer. I never planned for this to go beyond Neo so all told that's a few dozen so whatever. For Powers, those that have to be individually activated are basically trainers, but those with passive ones have to be checked for every time and I see no way around that. Every damage calculation checks for Machamp. Every retreat checks for both Dodrio and Dark Muk. And in turn, every check of a pokemon power checks if Muk is in play. I'm not sure how to make that more efficient.

I'm sure you've already figured out for yourself that some cards are much harder to implement than others. That's why about a third of the Vending and Rocket sets aren't available yet. I figured I'd get the easy cards out of the way first and add what is harder more slowly.

I cannibalized the three starter decks and made a deck with Blastoise, Dewgong, Lapras, Machoke, and Hitmonchan that's been wrecking the NPCs pretty consistently since I got a few more trainers. I have no idea if this is because the AI isn't that great or because I'm just that awesome, but I choose to believe it's entirely due to my mad skills, yo. ;)

Yeah that's generally how I do it. Improving the AI will I'm sure be an ongoing struggle of this project. For the most part it makes ok decisions. From what I know of the gameboy games that's mostly how the game works, you're supposed to be struggling with a bad deck early on but once you get a decent one you should be able to take care of most of the generic trainers pretty easily. The club masters actually have strategy in their decks that the ai can carry out (and also cheat) which I haven't implemented.

Was it a stylistic choice to leave the GB cards pixelated? Because Bulbapedia has non-pixelated images for all but six of them

I did 40 damage to the vending machine pidgey, the listed amount of HP, but it wasn't knocked out.

It was. I got upscaled images from https://pkmncards.com. The illustrations on Bulbapedia looked bad in comparison when placed on the upscaled cards. Imo I find the pixilated look to the upscaled versions more charming anyway, it makes it more apparent a card is from GB.

I did 40 damage to the vending machine pidgey, the listed amount of HP, but it wasn't knocked out.

I got the Vending cards from pokemonaaah.net I've found some of the cards have typos and Vending Pidgey is one that I didn't catch before the build. I've been trying to get them to fix it but it's been slow. I'll probably just eventually fix them myself.



Most of the rest of those are either features that I'm planning on eventually adding or bugs/issues I know about.

 

[abcd_z]

Every damage calculation checks for Machamp. Every retreat checks for both Dodrio and Dark Muk. And in turn, every check of a pokemon power checks if Muk is in play. I'm not sure how to make that more efficient.

I don't know if this helps you, but the plan for my game is to use an event-driven approach. I don't know if it's too late for you to implement something similar without a horrendous level of refactoring, but here's what that will probably look like in my program:

An event manager is a class that's basically a list of the active effects, which are functions or references/pointers to functions (depending on the language). The event manager also contains functions to add or remove effects from the manager list, as well as some way of keeping track of what phase/event connects to what effect/function/event listener/event handler (they're all the same thing), possibly with separate lists, or even separate event manager objects, for each phase.

Each phase of gameplay (draw phase, attack phase, etc.) would be considered an event. When the manager is told that a phase/event happens, it goes down the list of functions/effects/event listeners/event handlers that have been mapped to that phase and calls each function on the list, including access to game state information that the functions would need to know and/or modify.

So Dodrio evolves, which automatically calls the function to add the Retreat Aid function to the Retreat phase list in the event manager. Then somebody decides to retreat their Pokemon, which triggers everything on the list, which in this case is just Retreat Aid.

As a side-note, I solved an issue I was having, where an attack ended prematurely or ignored existing effects on the enemy Pokemon (e.g. Transparency/the baby rule and Swift), at least theoretically. I haven't actually implemented any of this yet. The solution was to add a pointer indicating the current location in the effect list as well as adding functions to the class that are effectively commands for the list, such as run_next(), skip_next(), skip_all(), skip(effect_name), skip(type, location, etc.) skip_to(effect_name), etc.

So the player attacks a Haunter with Transparency, fails the coin flip, and the effect triggers the skip_all() function to push the pointer all the way to the end of the list, ending the attack phase. It also passes some information along to the rest of the program to not to run the damage calculation phase, but I haven't put as much thought into that yet.

Or the enemy attacks with Swift, which ignores weakness, resistance, and all other effects (and weakness and resistance are already effects on the list), so it triggers skip_all(location="enemy_pokemon"), which skips all the effects that are on the enemy pokemon and likely jumps straight to the damage calculation step.

Although, technically a function with associated information is more of a class than a function. I'll have to think some more about how I store the information for the effect's location.

Alternatively, I could include damage calculation in the attack phase, in which case Transparency would just skip_all() and Swift would skip_to(damage_calculation). It would make passing the information around easier, but it risks cluttering up the phase. I dunno, that's an implementation detail and I'm not there yet.

Anyhow, I don't know if any of this helps, but I hope it does! : )

Improving the AI will I'm sure be an ongoing struggle of this project.

I don't entirely understand the math behind it, but I'm planning to use Monte Carlo simulations, where you randomly simulate the possible outcomes a bunch of times and use that to select the best outcome. I'm likely to either use UCB1 algorithm or UCT to balance exploration (options that haven't been tried much) with exploitation (options that have done well in previous iterations of the simulation). UCT is more complex than UCB1 but gets better results. UCT builds a series of nodes and travels down them until it gets to the end, where it randomly simulates the rest of the game and uses the results of that simulation to update the node values. The biggest downside to UCT is that, because of the high branching factor of the unknown cards, I'd need to cheat a bit and make all the cards visible to the AI to make it work.

For your game, you've already got basic AI code up and running, so you might be able to just use the results of that to create a probability score for each choice, then refine that with a few dozen or hundred random simulations. If you wanted to save processing time, you could tell the simulations to end as soon as a prize card is taken, though obviously the resulting AI wouldn't be as strong.

 

[Hey I'm Brian]

The powers, yeah, would definitely be more efficient that way. The most I care about it is that it's not inefficient enough to cause any lag. (the bigger problem would be my deck builder. Repopulating after searching takes like half a second) I have something of an event system that works well enough that querying it for a list of active power effects vs querying it to check every bench spot for a specific pokemon name is kind of six-of-one, or at least is equivalent enough that I don't want to go back and redo everything. That type of improving for efficiency is the exact type of programming I hate.

And uuh yeah. AI algorithms... I definitely know what those are. I am more or less doing that in a few areas. It does calculate priorities for deciding to switch, which pokemon to switch to, which attack to use, which cards to discard and search for... I think where my system is mostly falling apart is that it doesn't combine all those decisions together. It decides to switch, then decides to attach energy, then decides to attack. As I think Regi_Grass has pointed out a couple times there are times where it has a ko but switches out instead. It works most of the time, and for now I choose to be ok with that.

I guess I choose to be ok with that because, to reiterate, I hate this kind of programming. So much. To be honest I started this project to try to work on middle-tier development, not this. And finally after on-and-off a total of a year of development I'm starting to work on other things besides the duel simulator. So yeah, aside from copious bugs to fix I'm kind of ok where it is now. I'm happy to work on the dialogue speed. I'm happy to make way to show what cards are in each pack. But yeah, I probably do have to fix that issue with that card selection window huh. Things will be improved eventually, but I'd like to focus on other features to have a real presentable game first.