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Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

app.wordbots.io

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Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#21

Post by alnis »

digging wrote: post #20

Weird bug I noticed (and I might have missed a better place to report it): The parser got stuck on the word "praction" in the phrase "When this robot deals damage to another robot, prevent all damage that would be dealt to this robot." "Praction" comes after the comma in that phrase, apparently?

Hah, this is the keyword substituter incorrectly substituting "event" -> "action" (Action cards were called Event cards in an earlier version of the game). I'll fix that, but in any case, there's not any notion of preventing future damage currently.

P.S. Discord (https://discord.wordbots.io/) or GitHub (https://github.com/wordbots/) would be the best place to report issues like this at the moment.

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#23

Post by habitue »

This is really cool, and actually I think LLMs would be a great fit: they can generate your constrained language from more freeform language input by the user. Might make it easier to get into, and you've done the hard work already by specifying a language for the card rules

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#24

Post by alnis »

digging wrote: post #19
alnis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the poor parsing around "moved this turn" is a known issue that I'm going to look into fixing this week. (Someone actually mentioned it yesterday on our discord – they were attempting to make a card with the text "At the end of your turn, if this robot didn't move this turn, restore 2 health to this robot": https://discord.com/channels/301800217055985665/301800217055... ) "At the end of your turn, destroy this…

Glad to hear it's not only within the ruleset, but will be addressed!

I believe this is fixed now, with this parser commit: https://github.com/wordbots/wordbots-parser/commit/f713e5a68...

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#25

Post by stonegray »

alnis wrote: post #7
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #4

I don't like competing so my first thought was to make a card which says, "You win the game." Is that possible, ostensibly with great cost, or is there some restriction on the effects? I believe MTG card effects often directly translate to a certain "mana" cost so it can be determined (in most cases) if a card is "overpowered" for its cost. Does this have some mechanism which ties effect to cost? (I also appreciate t…

You can definitely make an Action card with the text "You win the game" :-) Wordbots doesn't have a built-in mechanism to enforce cards being at a "fair" power level. We initially had a few ideas for how to do it: some kind of machine-learning approach to determine how much "energy" a card should cost to play based on its text and stats, or having a server constantly simulating games between AI players with various c…

Could be interesting to see if you can make cards that only one player can use, such as “win the game if this card is played while the seconds of utc time matches the following hmac sum, otherwise lose the game”

Then you’ve got a 1/60th chance of your opponent using it.

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#26

Post by _raoulcousins »

alnis wrote: post #6
mdaniel wrote: post #3

That looks neat, thanks for sharing. Speaking of sharing, it seems your repos are missing a license file (and the source files themselves don't have a licensing block that would also serve the same purpose). I would also recommend linking to https://github.com/wordbots/wordbots-core/blob/v0.20.0-beta/... since the app.wordbots.io version seems to boot up some horrific amount of javascript or something, because the ge…

Regarding M:TG vocabulary, Wordbots's syntax is a little bit different but a lot of the same effects are possible. For example, M:TG's Flametongue Kavu's "When Flametongue Kavu enters the battlefield, it deals 4 damage to target creature." becomes "Startup: Deal 4 damage to a robot" in Wordbots. Some of the cards that people have been making so far in Wordbots are rough reinterpretations of cards from other games (M:…

This would work in Magic: Arena digital-only formats using the perpetual mechanic plus a variation of the text on a card like Magical Hack.

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#27

Post by Tourniquet »

Hi, My son has taken a shine to this after I sent him the link (he's up to 100 cards now...). Online, drafting, and the most important bit - user created content (he'd have been as happy with a traditional editor for the cards rules, but has had fun trying to convince the parser to do his bidding).

The Discord link is timing out for me. Hopefully you don't mind a brain dump here.

He had one feature request - the ability to restrict the number of Rare/Uncommon cards to be included in a deck built off of a given set (if that makes any sense).

Also, we hit a few bugs. One time we had a major state desync - on one player one team was entirely wiped out with a given card play, whereas on the other it had no/limited effect. From that point, the games diverged in their entirety - including the log. It was only because we were sat next to each other we even knew.

Some form of hashing of the engine state and comparisons every play could ensure that at least a desync identified (which would hopefully lead to a fix).

Another time, the 'End Turn' button was unresponsive for one player, and we instead had to force a draw.

He had an issue with a card he created that read "when you draw a card, ...", which was triggering when the opponent drew too.

The final thing is more of an irritation, which is the 'Activation' overlay can make it hard to move/attack to the hex immediately to the right.

Otherwise, great game and it's obviously a labour of love. Jist hope for a bit more interest and player activity.

Re: Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

#28

Post by alnis »

Tourniquet wrote: post #27

Hi, My son has taken a shine to this after I sent him the link (he's up to 100 cards now...). Online, drafting, and the most important bit - user created content (he'd have been as happy with a traditional editor for the cards rules, but has had fun trying to convince the parser to do his bidding). The Discord link is timing out for me. Hopefully you don't mind a brain dump here. He had one feature request - the abil…

Thank you so much for the feedback! Unfortunately I screwed up the Discord link in the post – it's http://discord.wordbots.io/ , not https:// – but it was too late to modify the HN post after I noticed that.

Glad that you and your son have had fun playing it! He's definitely made the most cards in Wordbots of any user so far, so that's pretty cool :-)

I'll respond to each issue in turn:

Re: decks and card rarity – I hadn't thought of this when implementing card rarities (which right now take effect only in draft mode), but it's a good idea. I'll make an issue for it.

Re: state desync – I've never noticed this issue in testing, but I will admit that the multiplayer code is pretty sloppy (this part isn't exactly my strong suit). In theory the game should be fully deterministic (and the RNG is seeded identically for both players and the server), but it's possible that either a socket message got lost somewhere or there's some nondeterminism in some card behavior that I neglected to notice. If you encounter this again, please let me know what happened right before the desync – it'll help us narrow down the issue. And hashing the state and checking it periodically seems like a good measure to take for now; I'll make an issue for it.

Re: End Turn button unresponsive – This is a bug we've had in the past, and it was caused by an error occurring during combat, resulting in the game state thinking that an attack animation was still happening (so the turn couldn't end yet). I'm pretty sure that it's fixed now, but if you encounter it again, check the game debug log and JS console to see if anything weird happened right before.

Re: card draw trigger – Oops, this looks like an issue with how `afterCardDraw` is being triggered, should be an easy fix on my end. I'll take a look.

Re: Activate popover – Yeah, this is feedback we've gotten in the past, and we're looking into what a better UX for object activation could look like.

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