Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Thanks for trying it out! I really appreciate it. In voice, you can only support a limited vocabulary. If you try to recognize too many different words, it gets confused and accuracy falls off. So you keep the vocabulary limited. That isn't a problem in typed text. So I've got a lot of work to do to improve the usability by adding in more aliases. I've gone through the transcripts and started adding issue to the issue tracker! I don't know how accessible GitHub is, but I'll link to the issue tracker below if anyone wants to enter their own bugs or follow them. But also feel free to post them here and I will transcribe them over.https://github.com/jjaquinta/AudioGames/issues URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/589974/#p589974 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I've put a temporary web sever up with access to Six Swords. It's a bit rough. Feedback appreciated.http://72.74.34.225 URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/589868/#p589868 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Sorry for the radio silence. The lack up updates has mostly been due to Amazon and Google being less than supportive of audio assistant development.So I'm experimenting with taking a different direction and have produced a version of Six Swords ready for play testing that can be run standalone on your own machine. You will just need to have Java installed for them to work.Download and extract the zip file in the release below. You can then run six_swords_gui, six_swords_web or six_swords_telnet for the interface of your choice.If you get the chance to playtest, please let me know if they work for you, and which interface you find best.github.com/jjaquinta/AudioGames/releases URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/588862/#p588862 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I posted a remediation to Starlanes today. About 50 systems got flipped by an exploit. I've plugged the hole and since people are so keen on playing, I've also increased the regeneration rate, so people can play more legitimately. :-) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/474380/#p474380 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Head's up: there have been some reports of cheating on Starlanes. I'm currently investigating. If you play the game and have noticed anything unusual, please let me know. (Or if you want to confess, I'll offer an amnesty!) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/471351/#p471351 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo My apologies! I think the server must have rebooted or I didn't run my "kickstart" script. I've created an issue to tie its initialization to something more reliable. Sorry for the inconvenience. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/471349/#p471349 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Just Google. Some applications have come back already. I'm not sure where in the queue my apps are. They've been pretty opaque about it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/469813/#p469813 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Head's up: Google is experiencing an outage with 6 Swords, as well as tens of thousands of other applications. They've given no real explanation why, but they say it could take a "few weeks" to resolve. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/469280/#p469280 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Sorry, the "nothing happened" was me failing to kickstart the production server. That's up and running now.I did see from my error logs the first-time-user rearing it's ugly head again. And, once more, I've utterly failed to reproduce it. I'm going to go bang my head against the wall. Let me know if you have any troubles. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466159/#p466159 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade OK. I've updated the telnet server. It is now running on port 5500. That should make it compatible with MUDRammer. Please let me know if it works. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466003/#p466003 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo The telnet server has been updated to run on port 5500. This was necessary for compatibility with MUDRammer. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466002/#p466002 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Quentin, I heard back from MUDRammer. The problem is the port, not the name. So it is going to fail on the production one as well. :-( However, the port is easier to change than the name. Let me work on that today. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/465818/#p465818 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade This is a very annoying bug. I put in more instrumentation and *poof* it disappears again. But I've tested it with your ID so the user creation has run. Even if the bug comes back, it shouldn't affect you.Qentin, changing the hostname is problematic. However, the "production" host name is api.111george.com. Is that short enough?I'd try it myself, but I don't have an iThing. I will put an enhancement request onto their forum though. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/465774/#p465774 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I managed to create a unit test that replicates this problem. I added in some debug messages... and the problem went away. O_o I'm still rather suspicious, but give the pre-release server another go. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/465358/#p465358 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Thank you! I'll try to get that sorted tonight. For some reason it thinks the starting world has no mainworld starport. O_o URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/465162/#p465162 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I've added cargo purchase to StarTrade. You can check out the pre-release on telnet at api-staging.111george.com port 65500. Next I have to do cargo selling! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/464803/#p464803 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Sorry, folks. Looks like my telnet implementation is less than perfect. I don't know what went wrong, but I gave it a kick and it came back. Please try now. I'll see if I can stick on some monitoring to test and warn me if it goes down again. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/463737/#p463737 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade You can access the telnet version from anywhere. Starlanes is available in all English speaking countries, Canada included. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/463213/#p463213 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade SLJ: It is possible for me to link account across devices. If you are already playing StarLanes on Alexa, and want to link your telnet account to it, let me know your call code. Similarly, in the future, when we release on Google Assistant, we can link any telnet account your start now to a future Google Assistant account. JansonBlaze: Thank for the report. I'll see if I can re-create it. I did a broad, rather than deep, wrapper. So it is going to miss a few things.And, because it is broad, it has, technically, done all of my games. I've generally been trying to do some basic testing on each before I announce it. But feel free to try anything listed. If you have any problems with it, let me know. I think the power game and sub work work pretty well. And, from the logs, I saw someone play Six Swords for about an hour. So it should be workable! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/462954/#p462954 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I have a much better telnet version of StarLanes now available. If you connect to telnet:api.111george.com:65500 you can create a login, and then select Star Lanes from the list of games.It's not wonderfully adapted to telnet play. It's probably a bit verbose. Please give me feedback on any bugs you find or areas that could use some simplified commands. Also let me know how well it plays with your favorite telnet client. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/462895/#p462895 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo The Six Swords Editor is open for use!If you connect to telnet:api.111george.com:65500 you can create a log in, and then run Six Swords Editor. You can use this to create locations in Six Swords for people to experience. If you created castles during the castle building competition, I can connect up your telnet account to your voice app account, and you can tweak and customize your castle. Just drop me a line with your telnet ID and the name of your adventuring party.Let me know about bugs and how well it plays with your favorite telnet clients. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/462893/#p462893 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo A hat tip to Gamemaster for suggesting to connect "all my games" to telnet. It kind of clicked with me that they all use the same base level libraries. Instead of trying to wrap a telnet interface around each one, I could do it at a base level and do them all at once.And so I have.You can now telnet to api.111george.com port 65500 to connect to my games. The first time you should register an ID. After that you can log in with that. You can then list the games that are there, and pick one to play. (If you are already a player and want to connect up your telnet account to your Echo/Assistant account, drop me a line.)I'm not sure how well they will work. I've tried Six Swords and 5 Draw Poker a bit and they seem to do OK. The matching is pretty brutal though. It is case insensitive, but that is as far as it goes. Right now you have to spell anything out fully. I'll work on that, but please post any particularly laborious phrases and I will put in custom short cuts. And please report any bugs. I'm sure there will be lots. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/459703/#p459703 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hey bookrage. Finally worked it out. Same symptom, different problem. You weren't teleported to the saltwater dimension, you were teleported to the middle of the ocean on the same dimension. Doh. That explains why I *thought* I fixed, but it wasn't. I've moved you where you were and created issue #476 to fix it properly. Thanks for spotting this, and sorry for the time it took to correct. If there is anything I can do, please let me know. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/459433/#p459433 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I found the "Partnership of Federal Fighters" that appears to be you, but it doesn't looked trapped in the Saltwater Dimension. But I did find "One Kittens Academy" and "Sure Swords of Hunters" who were. Very annoying. It isn't supposed to do that anymore. I've reset those two. Try again and let me know if you are still stuckLooked a bit deeper. I think I found a soft coded place where that can happen. I'll roll out a fix for that right away. Very sorry for the inconvenience. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/459325/#p459325 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo FYI: I've done an update and "flattened" the shops. You can now buy things by walking to a cardinal direction. Too many people were having problems with the system recognizing the names of items. You can still sell things the same way. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/459028/#p459028 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo KenshiraTheTrinity wrote:What about letting people write new locations and build them up that way, kinda like a mud?Yes. That's how the location editor would work. Right now there is a fairly primitive system where you can use "land deeds" to make new areas, but with fixed titles and descriptions. The minimalist location editor I have works by letting you walk around in edit mode, digging new rooms and setting their title and descriptions. But there are plenty of ways it could be extended past that once working. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/458996/#p458996 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo So, a long overdue update. I have been doing a lot of unproductive thrashing of late. My problem right now is that I keep changing direction. I started Six Thieves, but no one seemed that enthusiastic. Then I found an open source version of Traveller, and started doing Star Trade. But I also worked out that I could do telnet interfaces, and that would be a good way to broaden participation. Star Lanes would benefit the most from that, since it is inherently multi-player. But it is on an old code base, so I started porting that. Then I got distracted trying to get my latest novel finished and out the door.But, now, I'm kind of gravitating towards another idea. I've tried to port my location editor for Six Swords to an audio or simple-web interface. I really want to put content creation into the player's hands. Especially blind players. You guys are audio natives! But the voice recognition of the platform just isn't good enough for location dictation. But it just clicked with me that a telnet based editor would avoid the problems voice transcription.I do kind of feel that I'm mostly going in circle and not really achieving much. So I'm giving you a long explanation here to solicit your input. What do you think? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/458944/#p458944 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Based on your suggestion I've focused on increasing the breadth of availability for StarLanes and I'll come back to StarTrade after that. I've been moving it to my modern code base which will be better for telnet support, but it also gives Google Assistant support. I'm close to being ready to roll it out for Google Assistant. If anyone would like to beta test it drop me a line with the e-mail you sign into either Google Home or Google Assistant on your phone. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/447699/#p447699 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade There is still a cadre of die-hard players. QXQ has taken over Futatsu and made great inroads against Hitotsu. But Hitotsu is still ahead in conquered systems with 641 to 398. But Futatsu is considerably ahead with factories. If they can leverage that production capability and move those drones out to the front, they could turn the tide.On voice there's an average of only about 10 active users a day, but, collectively, they clock up about 1500 exchanges a day. Additional telnet players won't boost the voice numbers. But it will make the game more interesting for everyone. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/442018/#p442018 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade OK. New version of StarLanes posted on api-staging.111george.com, port 65501. At least some commands are now parsing. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/441889/#p441889 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Sounds sensible. StarLanes could certainly use the players, since it's a team based game. I'll focus on that then. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/441882/#p441882 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Well, you are inspiring me. I put some time aside last night to see if it was practical to wrap the same sort of interface around StarLanes, since it's an already running multi-player game. I got basic connectivity going, but it doesn't seem to recognize anything said. So it needs more work. (You can try it on port 65501, but you can't really see more than the intro.) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/441772/#p441772 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Thanks for the stack trace. Between that and the error logs I was able to replicate it on my Windows machine. It is one of those "this should never happen" errors. But when I turned on the extra debugging I have, it went away. Shrug.Give it a go again and I think it should be OK. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/441632/#p441632 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I got system and star movement working. So you can explore the area. I'll try to get buying and selling cargo working next. Then there will be actually something you can play and actually do something.The style of the app is something I've developed for audio games, where discovery is very hard. The functionality of the game is conveyed through geography. So you find out what the game can do by exploring. So stumbling around is perfect! But I can see how right now that's a bit frustrating. There are other mechanics that aren't there yet to make that easier. I just turned on reprompting. Which means that after a few seconds, if you haven't typed anything, it will suggest a command. The other thing I have to add is contextual prompting. E.g. when you pass a fellow crewman in the corridor, there should be a chance it tells you about the "select" command. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/441508/#p441508 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade TELNET!I've wrapped an experimental telnet interface around the development version of StarTrade. It probably lacks a lot of the features you expect from a text adventure game. Since it was designed for voice, it isn't abbreviation friendly. I've only used it with the command line telnet in Windows. I'm not familiar with what telnet based text adventure game clients are popular these days. I'd really appreciate it if anyone wants to try it out with different clients and make suggestions. On the back side I've tried to do it in such a way that I can easily enable most of the other games I've released for Alexa/Home. Server: api-staging.111george.comPort: 65500 URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/440774/#p440774 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade Looks like Solo is specifically written for Cepheus Engine. I'll have to see if the budget covers it!The universe is a galaxy roughly the same size as the Milky Way. The settings is based on one that I've used for several of my novels. It's about 100,000 years in the future, and humanity as spread, more or less, everywhere. However galactic empires rise and fall. Currently it fell apart several hundred years or so ago. A local pocket has started to get things together again and is called "The 40 Worlds".Right now I haven't enforced a local pocket of civilization surrounded by outlands. But I may get to that. People explored far further than I expected in StarLanes though. Maybe I had better put in a function to create multiple pockets throughout the galaxy! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/439969/#p439969 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: StarTrade
Re: StarTrade I hadn't see Star Traders before. From the Wikipedia description, yep, it's probably going to be pretty similar. The mechanics for the game are mostly based on Cepheus Engine, which is an open source version of the classic Traveller Role Playing game. From the trailer you can see how this plays into crew creation. They are fully fledged RPG characters. Many people considered the character creation process of Traveller a mini-game in and of itself (since you could die during it). At some point I may open that part up and let you roll up your own characters.The next feature I am working on is system navigation, followed by stellar navigation. Ports are on planets in fully expanded star systems. Most systems just have one port, but some systems may have several. So you can fly around the system visiting other ports or worlds. Initially there won't be a lot of reasons to fly around systems if you are just trading. So most people will focus on stellar travel, which will let you move between entire star systems.After that, I'll implement trade. So you can buy and sell cargo in each port. At that point we'll have a playable game and I'll do the first release. Features beyond that will be allowing you to upgrade your ship. I have fully implemented the Cepheus ship design system, so, literally, any sort of ship could be made. Like with character generation, however, I'll probably start off with various stock types. But since many Traveller players just play it to create ships, I have kept up the ability to create custom ships.Of course at some point there has to be ship-to-ship combat. And since the basic mechanics are there, it could eventually support character-to-character combat (like Six Swords). I'd like to put in upgradable scanners, and allow exploration for zero-volume information cargo, to make the rest of star systems relevant.The original aim for Star Lanes was to create three more companion games: Star Squad, Star Scout and Star Trade. The audio interface for Star Lanes got too complicated to add additional features so the adaption was to split it into separate, but related games dealing with strategic combat, tactical combat, exploration, and trade. I got some way into the project, with Star Squad getting the closest to being playable. But the code got complex, existing Star Lanes players started to complain about the mechanics being perturbed, and it just kind of fell apart. So I shelved the project and wrote Six Swords from the ground up.I've learned a lot making Six Swords. Enough that I have new techniques for audio interfaces to deal with the problem of too many features. As you can see from the teaser trailer, functionality is activated by going to places in the physical geography. So more functionality can be added by expanding the physical geography, rather than the linguistic complexity. This gets a little cumbersome, but a new technique is that you can switch your point of view between characters, giving you the ability to "bookmark" certain locations by leaving a character there. We may still hit a playability barrier at some point of complexity. But at least I now have the technical structure to add in all the features I wanted in the original Star Lanes concept.Currently the game is linked to Star Lanes solely in terms that it shares the same geography. Star Lanes is purely strategic, and so you could only see the main port in each star, and could not see the stars with no ports. Star Trade gives you more visibility into the entire system, but the gameplay is not currently linked. The original idea was that you could join the same factions in Star Trade and your trading could influence the supply of raw materials available for strategic play in Star Lanes. I will see how the game grows and decide a little further down the road if I'll link them up in that way, or else migrate the strategic game play to Star Trade.All opinions welcome! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/439795/#p439795 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
StarTrade
StarTrade Hey Folks, I've been working on a sequel game to StarLanes on the Amazon Alexa. The working title is StarTrade, and it is, surprise surprise, focused on running a merchant space ship. I've just cut a teaser trailer demonstrating the mechanics for hiring and firing crew. You can hear it here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VYUgQVk840QThere are some obvious bugs there and several more major features to go. But it is starting to come together. Feel free to post any input here. We're aiming to be available on Amazon Alexa and Google Home. But I could also possibly do a telnet like text adventure like interface, if there was demand for it.The first question I have is about the name. I've been frequently getting misfires with Alexa launching "Star Trek" instead of "Star Trade". So I'm considering if I should release it as "Trade Lanes", or even "Merchant of Venus".Cheers,Jo URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/439681/#p439681 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I'm glad you guys are having fun.Yeah, I'd like to be more sensible about the monsters. I was trying to get it done quickly and the monsters get populated just like any other feature. I'd like to cycle back and maybe create a special category of dungeon monsters. There's a lot of creatures that don't make sense to have on the surface anyway. And this would be a perfect place for them.Chests, Pools and Thrones give random payouts on a bell curve. Mostly nothing happens or you get a slightly good or bad things. But there are some really good (and really bad) effects. So look forward (and beware) of them!I never liked the idea of an exit at the bottom of a dungeon. A lot of this is inspired by Nethack, with its 40 level deep dungeons. You had to spend a lot of time slogging up and down stairs. That being said, Skyrim always had an exit at the the bottom. And I probably could do worse than to copy them. So I've done it. (It was actually pretty easy.) It will be there in the next update.Thanks for the feedback! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/432103/#p432103 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Oh! That helps me narrow it down. There is a forum you can post on linked below. It isn't as accessible as this forum though. So you (or anyone else) is welcome to post bugs here as well. I monitor this thread too.http://starlanes.freeforums.net/board/5 … discussion URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/431010/#p431010 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Thanks for reporting that, Jimmy69. It was a big, complicated update, and I have been concerned that there were going to be unanticipated consequences that I didn't find in testing. I really didn't mess with the combat area, so it's a confusing one. But I'll see if I can recreate it and fix it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/430937/#p430937 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Beta test is over. New content released for 6 Swords: new features have appeared across the freeplay and premium worlds offering classic dungeon crawls. Some chests in the dungeons offer keys to unlock chapters of the novel Red Queen. A new library feature in outposts, forts and castles allows you to listen to unlocked chapters from within the game. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/430654/#p430654 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Classic dungeon crawls are coming to 6 Swords. Along with incremental discoveries you can make in them to unlock chapters of a full length novel. This is a big expansion so I want to do a beta test on it first. If you are interested, drop me a line at j...@111george.com, let me know if you use Alexa or Google Home, and give me the e-mail address you have linked to your device.This won't affect your normal characters! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/429161/#p429161 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hey Folks! I've done some work on a parallel game call "6 Thieves", where you play thieves in a big medieval city instead of fighters roaming the country side. I'm at the point where I'm going to open it for Alpha use. There isn't much gameplay yet, but there is a massive city to explore. A quick question first: would people prefer I started a new thread for that and kept this one exclusively about 6 Swords, or should I use this thread for both? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/406532/#p406532 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hey Simon. Just say "OK Google, open Six Swords". We've been on Google home for about a year and a half. I was looking through my top 100 users and about 20-30% of them are on Google Home. So you are well covered! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/post/404580/#p404580 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Erk. Sorry about that. That's not supposed to happen. I've entered a bug to fix that and moved you back to the Enuma Elish dimension. I also bumped up one of your companion's hit points a few as a bug finding bounty!If you have gotten an odd error in the last 24 hours it may be because I've been doing an old user purge. We had 100,000 user records in the database. 83,000 of them were clearly inactive, so I started deleting them. Although I did a sequenced delete, that still pushed the database load up. It should finish in the next hour or so and after that things might be a little faster.Also I just pushed a fix for a bug someone found for buying a house. The price was 10,000, but it wouldn't let you buy it unless you had at least 100,000. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/post/404307/#p404307 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Huh. That's kind of odd. I'll look into it. I've got an update to post (just bugfixes) but I'm in change freeze mode due to the holidays. December 26th is the biggest traffic day of the year. So I'm waiting to watch the hump pass before I do an update. So I've got time to look into this. Thank you for reporting. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/post/401857/#p401857 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hey Chris, in large towns (or just to the North of the starting point) you can find a tri-form arch. Entering this will give you an opportunity to move to the premium content area. There's a bit of back-and-forth with Amazon and you have to approve a subscription of $1 a month. After that you will be teleported to the premium content area.I think you get a week or two for free. If you cancel before that time, you won't be charged. You can cancel through the companion app or, I think, by saying "cancel subscription", in the game. If you have difficulty with it, drop me a line and I'll sort you out. I don't want anyone to pay of they don't think it's worth it. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/post/391828/#p391828 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo You should be able to activate by voice. But it doesn't really matter either way.Don't worry about paying. You do that from within the game. And it hasn't been turned on yet anyway. I keep asking Amazon if they are ready to go, but they aren't so good at responding. And, as for breaking things, that's a great skill! Quality Assurance is an underserved field in programming. :-) Please, do break as much as you can, and give me the feedback so I can fix the stuff. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=359642#p359642 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo This week's update has gone out. There's some behinds the scenes work on better integration with the premium content area, but I had to comment that off since Amazon hasn't rolled out their monetization stuff yet. Most of the rest was stuff that hasn't surfaced or bug fixes."About mission" and "About location" should work better now, at least on Google Home. Surface location descriptions are now more context aware, and take into account what direction you entered from. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=359462#p359462 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo At some point there will be tri-form arches to the premium area in each town and city in the starting world. I'm still waiting for details from Amazon about when I can release the new stuff and if it requires certification. There is, indeed, a Mezoamerican region. It is called Yucatan, and it's an almost-island, only accessible by a narrow land bridge and by ferry. Head for 4 degrees 20 minutes South latitude and 7 degrees 16 minutes East longitude when you are in Enuma Elish. To address your balance concerns, I've tweaked the system where monsters are assigned challenge ratings. Before it assigned, say, challenge rating 5 if an average group of those monsters would defeat a part of level 5 about 50% of the time. Upon reflection, prompted by your comments, I've moved that to somewhere around 30-40%, which seems more reasonable. When the next release comes out, let me know if you think it's made a difference.And we just fought some Bugbears in the face-to-face D game I play and I thought the DM had his finger on the scales. But when I looked them up I found they really did do 2d8 damage. So I agree, they hurt!I've just finished an internal re-vamp of the combat system. If I've done things right, there will be no obvious change. Rather the effort was to introduce the capability for there to be "monsters" on the player's side. I did a test run and created the sword "Stormbringer" which has a 20% chance of summoning a minor demon to fight for its wielder on every hit. This should allow for some fun things! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=358862#p358862 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I'm afraid I'm going to have to walk back some comments I made earlier!6 Swords has been invited to participate in Amazon's monetization trial. We have accepted because it also comes with a promotional package, which is what we really need to get more users into the system.We're still plotting out the changes, and since this probably won't change our decision to be non-commercial, our primary focus will still be on making a great game for the visually impaired community. At the current stage of discussion we're looking at creating a subscription model, where you pay a modest of fee (currently looking at $2 per month) for access to the premium area. Play in the regular overworld will always be free. We'll probably also look for opportunities to add in other in-game purchases. Things like if a character dies you have a resurrection option right after the battle, and things like that.We want to grandfather in existing players who have spent quality time with the game and given us valuable feedback. We're talking about something like a number of months free proportional to the time you have been playing the game. That nicely gives our most dedicated players the most time. I've got to run some numbers and see how that all adds up.We welcome any feedback on what you think would be good options! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=358567#p358567 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Just pushed the latest update. As above, the big new feature are more interesting cities in the premium section, including revamped temples. Temples in smaller cities may not have the healing pool in them. Larger cities are more likely to, as well as a confessional, in which you can choose to dedicate your team in service to the god or goddess of that temple. Once you have done that, some temples will have a nave which you can now enter. On one side you can tithe one tenth of your wealth to your god. Or you can go on a mission and deliver a message to a hermit. These will earn you "prestige points". Right now they just earn you badges. But in the future there will be a supplication room where you can ask your deity for favors and get your holy weapon improved.To your suggestion of benefits you can't buy, I've been thinking of support additional monsters being summoned in combat. My first thought was a curse to a weapon so when you use it a creature is summoned. I have to admit, the original aim was comic: "Where are all these chickens coming from?" But if I can support monsters fighting on the player's side, it could be a blessing. For example, when in battle and using your holy weapon creatures are summoned to your aid. Probably not chickens. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=358219#p358219 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I mean to look up the location yesterday, but I normally deal with the internal coordinates. It game coordinates the tri-form arch to the beta area is at 0 degrees 10 minutes North latitude and 0 degrees 10 minutes East longitude. If you need to be moved, let me know.A new feature coming out this week is that in larger temples you can go into the confessional and take on the god of that temple as your patron deity. Once you do that, you will be allowed into the nave in larger temples. One room in there will let you gain prestige with your god by tithing your wealth. Another will give you missions to perform. Right now the only mission implemented is to take a message to a hermit. that's the "hermit mission". I have other missions planned, and further rooms in the nave to do things like trade in prestige for more powerful weapons from your god. But I had to iron out some difficult bugs and that took up some time. But they will come up the next update.Sorry about your insomnia. I've had waking-up-tired problems for a while now, even though my kids have been sleeping through the night for a few years now. So I feel for you! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=358048#p358048 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Right now there are a number of new features that are present in the premium area. Roads come in multiple flavors, from paths to paved. There are also rivers. The geography is set, not generated, so there are mountain ranges, seas, lakes, and so forth creating a continent to explore. There are several countries spread across this landscape, each with their unique naming style, hierarchical structure, and gods. Large cities have tri-form arches that let you teleport between them. Coastal towns run a ferry service that lets you cross bodies of water.The geography is about 2000 miles wide and 1000 miles high. Beyond that is the outer wasted and vortex storms.Right now there is a tri-form arch due east of Veritas that will take you there. That's the biggest city near the starting area. It will take you there, and there is an arch on the other side that will take you back. I have in my list to remove that and replace it with an arch in the big cities of the overworld that will take you on a one-way trip there.Originally you were only going to be given access to this area if you paid. However, we haven't been able to get enough users to make monetization worth it. Our non-commerical aim is to make as substansive and cool a game for the visually impaired community as possible. As such, the permium area was where we planned all the high value stuff, so that's still where a lot of the focus is. Maybe someday we'll be able to monetize. If we do, we'll probably grandfather you all in. But for now it's only premium in terms of quality of content! At least I hope.I had some difficult bugs to work out with the temple missions. I thought most of them, but it looks like this week's release will only have hermit missions. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=358039#p358039 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I've gone ahead and reduced the damage from Dragon's breath weapons, reduced the frequency they use it with, and made Dragons more rare. See what it's like after the update and let me know what you think.This week's update is going to be a doozy anyway. Towns (in the premium area) are going to get a lot more interesting just like ruined temples got interesting in the last update. More layouts with back alleys and bridges. And in-city temples will also be more interesting. You can choose a specific God as your patron deity and then go on missions for them. I think your idea for wishes might work better for spells. Under the covers there is a way for an effect to be imparted to a character for a set amount of time. This is how potions work. I've wanted to have spells-as-a-service for a while; where you can buy a spell to be cast on you from a shop. So maybe something like buying elemental resistance for a day or more. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=357675#p357675 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I like the idea of temples infested with demons or devils. Maybe that can be a focus for Patron Deity based missions. There could be an interesting tie in with the civil war. The first novel in the Six Books of Magic deals with invading the demon planes.Wizard labs would need more curating. The special places right now are category driven. So I'd need to do some work and sort of create ad-hoc categories. Could be interesting though if they tended to hold magical loot.You can currently say "more" in a shop and get more info on items. Other than that, I've tried to introduce the "what is XXX" command. That's proved linguistically complicated though. Alexa and Assistant don't really like open ended questions. So technical problems have been holding those up.If you notice in the last release notes I implemented "autoEnter" and "visibleIf" tags on a feature location. These are the underpinning so that I write better quests. The next step is to create a sort of overlay so that I can create a location that's really a dialog graph. Saying "yes" sends you east, saying "no" sends you west. Then I can have proper NPC encounters. It's going to take a bit of time to get there. But I'm working on it.An aegis of Minerva is a +2 shield I think.Castles and forts are along roads. Outposts can be anywhere though. Try saying "what is nearby". It works reasonably well on Google Home, but I think less so on Amazon Echo. That will help you in your search for interesting places.I'm glad you noticed the temples! I re-jiggered some interior mechanisms when I create dragon lairs and giant halls. I didn't want to just have the hodge-podge of random rooms like for animal dens. I had a more structured way of doing temples. So I improved that, and in so doing, also added a few new templates for temples as well.I hope to do something similar with towns and cities. Right now they only have three basic patterns. They are a little trickier than fixed locations (since streets have unique names and run over several points). But I think I can extend the same mechanism.Keep the ideas coming! They help a lot. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=357381#p357381 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo New release today! The biggest update is "wizard shops". In major cities you should now be able to find a wizard shop that sell wishes. For the princely sum of 100,000 gold pieces you can increase one of your stats, or bring a fallen character back from the dead.If you have other suggestions for wishes that can be sold, let me know.We had a planning meeting yesterday and discussed a few new major features. I like the idea of buying shops, founding towns and so forth, but that's going to take a bit of time to get the underlying stuff in place. But we did come up with two ideas that will be quicker to deploy and I'm interested in your opinions on them.Idea 1: Arenas. Large cities will have a new magical arena location. This will have rooms for three fighting companies. If there is an empty room, you can enter your team to be the resident challengers. This creates a magical copy of your characters in this arena. If a room is occupied, you can choose to fight against the magical copies in that room. We're still working on the details. Thinking of something like if a team fights another 5% of the loser's gold gets transferred to the winner's team. Idea 2: Patron deities. After being blessed by a god a certain number of times, a new room in the god's temple opens to you and you can enter to choose that god as your patron deity. After this you can choose to tithe money to your god and, hopefully, go on special missions as well. Doing these things will earn you further badges for that god. Maybe also for the pantheon.Further out, we're looking at doing more with the outposts/forts/castles in the premium area. These will be aligned with civil war factions, and you can join factions there, go on missions, etc, etc. (This is where we got idea 2 above, for gods.) We have to do some groundwork first to work out how player actions can "flip" outposts from one side to another. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=357333#p357333 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Surviving characters automatically loot the bodies of any fallen comrades. I think you only lose equipment if your entire party dies. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=356280#p356280 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo First up: latest release is live. Dragon treasure is adjusted and they can breathe fire, acid, lightning and so forth. If a beloved character gets permanently toasted, talk to me and I'll arrange a resurrection for 100,000 g.p.Those other ideas are great. I like them. What you've done is push me in the direction of a highly accessible web site. That's really the only place to do open format data entry. I've made a start, and hopefully in the next week or so I'll have something to point you at to do an accessibility review. I'm brushing up on what to do to make it as screen reader friendly as possible. I've been looking for way to make the game more social, and I think being able to build towns and create spaces for other players would be really good for that. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=356262#p356262 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo To be clear: the deaths in my dragon testing were by pure physical damage. It can already happen now, it's just rare. By straight D rules, if you get knocked down to -10 hit points, then you die. It's just that there are very few things that do more than 10 hit points of damage, so few opportunities for that to happen. The only time I've seen it in testing has been when a Wight has drained my level way down, and then hit me hard. Dragon breath does the same damage as a dragon's full hitpoints. One of the blue dragons I fought had 40 hit points. So that was a pretty big hit. However, if your character saves, it does half damage. Also they only have a 50% chance of using their breath each round, and they can only use it 3 times per day. And, for simplicity, they only breathe on one person, instead of the entire party. So it can still be pretty brutal... but it's also high reward. I probably should add in a "dragonslayer" achievement!I now have the structure to add in regional dungeon types, as you suggest. Right now I only have Demon, Devils, Dinosaur, Dark Grove, Giant Hall and Dragon Layer as specialty dungeon types. But the changes I've made will make it easier to add more over time. There are lots of things that can be done with a wish shop. Things like buying the naming rights to cities and so forth. But I just can't do voice data entry with the platform at its current quality level. So they are mostly going to be "buy this thing, and then send me an e-mail". I have to work out the details.I really wish I could solve the voice entry problem. I had a whole location editor written that I wanted to open up to the community. So we could start having community driven content. But the quality just wasn't there. I couldn't even dictate a two sentence description without there being annoying errors. I'm tossing around some ideas with a sort of mixed voice and e-mail system. But I haven't got a design I like. Maybe I should just make a highly accessible web site. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=356108#p356108 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo There's no technical reason I can't port 6 Swords to Cortana. I haven't looked into it before because they didn't invite me onto their beta, and there seems to be a pretty low adoption rate. (My wife also thinks it is creepy!) If you think it's popular among the visually impaired, I can talk to some of my friends who have developed for Cortana, and get a better idea of the effort.Game Development Update:I think I have definitively fixed the wimpy dragon problem. Their treasure now skewes across the age categories proportional to their experience point value, rather than linearly. Their challenge rating was too high, because of a bug, making you always meet ones that were much weaker than you should. (There was another bug that overrated challenges on all monsters that I fixed too.) Lastly dragons now have breath weapons.I can seriously say they are pretty brutal now. In my test fights, if there was just one dragon, my whole party got to go first and usually was able to kill it before it could attack back. If there was more than one, and the rest got to fight back, and one of them chose to breathe, and the character did not make its saving throw... it died. Not "fell unconcious". Died. Permanent death.Now, because I know some of you put a lot of time into your characters, I've also altered the code so that permanently dead characters are kept on file. I some point I'll put in some way that you can buy a wish spell for 100,000 to bring back a permanently dead character. For now if you let me know, I'll do it manually. Just be very careful approaching dragon lairs when I roll them out later this week! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=356044#p356044 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I expected there would be a few mal-adjusted monsters with the new batch. Thanks for reporting this. I could nerf them down, but there are a few reasons I'd rather not.1) If I start now, I won't know where to stop. I'm trying to use the rules verbatim, with the assumption that they are reasonably balanced. if I start modifying things, well, there are 400+ monsters. That's a lot of work.2) The problem isn't really that the reward is too generous. The problem is the monster is not challenging enough. Right now, with the features implemented, a Dragon is just a lizard with wings. What these dragons really need are breath weapons! 3) I really do need a gold sink. You are right. After playing for a while, gold ceases to be much of a problem. I could make even more powerful weapons that are even more expensive, but that would just make it easier to make EVEN MORE money. What I really need are prestige purchases. Things you can buy as a player to show off that don't really come into game play. Castles were my first attempt at that. We brainstormed a bit at our lunch meeting and thought of things like buying titles, or even towns. I'm open to ideas.I'm just finishing up adding Giant Halls and Dragon Lairs. I also revamped the feature system so they are related to terrain. It's kind of dump to have a Dark Grove turn up in a Desert. I will try to slip in dragon breath as well. That might help remedy the Green Dragon problem.Slightly longer term, I'm going to short list what I need to do in order to move the main activity to the premium area. That's really were I want to focus on long term features. This doesn't mean we're going to start charging anytime soon. After we missed our goals in December it became clear we can't really commercialize this at this point in time. That's partially why the pace of feature addition has slackened off recently. We're been looking how to transition this project to a non-commercial basis. Today we decided since we've had the most engagement from the visually impaired community, we'll go with that. So, from today on, you guys are officially our main customer. Maybe someday we'll be able to look at a commercial direction again. (I'd love to hire three people to work on this full time!) For now we're going to focus on increasing our user base. So, to that end, if anyone can recommend other forums, web sites, or publications that target the visually impaired, and accept advertising or might be willing to write an article about us, please pass it on. And, please, do talk it if up if you are happy with your experience with the game. Write reviews, recommendations, etc, and pass it around. Any effort is appreciated! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=355899#p355899 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo OK. new release pushed. Please let me know if you find any bugs or wildly unbalanced monsters. Technically you can now say "about achievements" and it will give you your achievements, and after the "more" it will describe each achievement. But this is hard to trigger on Amazon. They aren't as good as Google on open ended requests. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=355439#p355439 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Issue #327 was "Dragons should be multiplexed differently". So we will, indeed, get Huge Ancient Red Dragons, along with Young Small Silver Dragons, and so forth. I have "Dragon Dens" on my list, and we need that variety to make it so all parties can encounter them.The aquatic monsters are mostly a place holder right now. You can meet some of them in swamps. But at some point I will introduce a ring of water walking and potion of water breathing. Then you can travel over water squares. This will be handy in the premium map, where there are oceans and islands.I was going to release it this morning, but in testing my first level adventuring party just meant 10 Treant, and got its butt handed to it. There was another parsing error that lead it the challenge rating for Treants 1 instad of 10! I think I'm going to do a little more testing first!In addition to 100+ monsters and the dragon varieties, there also will be Faerie inhabited Dark Groves as special locations. There's also a bug fix where monsters that occur in great quantities (e.g. bandits) were also biased to occur in great frequency and were crowding out other monsters of equivalent rarity. Overall this should create a greater diversity of foes to fight.I do hear you, Ironcross32. I try to split my time between game plot and game mechanics. Right now it's mostly mechanics, because that's easier to do with limited time. I need to shift focus at some point and do more plot stuff. It is just each time I think of some interesting plot point, I want another mechanic to support it! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=355334#p355334 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I reformatted this out of pity for those with screen readers. Found a really stupid parsing error which stopped over a hundred monsters being loaded. Expect the monster diversity to go up a lot in the near future.The full list of added creatures is Afreet, Albertosaurus, Allosaurus, Animated Tree, Anklyosaurus, Apatosaurus, Archaeopteryx, Archelon, Argentinosaurus, Assagim, Babau, Barbed Devil, Baron Sahuagin, Barracuda, Bearded Devil, Behir, Black Dragon, Blue Dragon, Bone Devil, Brachiosaurus, Brass Dragon, Bronze Dragon, Brownie, Buccaneer, Buffalo, Bulette, Bull, Camarasaurus, Camel, Centrosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Cetiosaurus, Charonosaurus, Class A Demon, Class B Demon, Class C Demon, Class D Demon, Class E Demon, Class F Demon, Cloud Giant, Compsognathus, Copper Dragon, Deinonychus, Demonette, Devilcat, Diceratus, Dilophosaurus, Dimetrodon, Diplodocus, Dretch, Dryad, Dunkleosteus, Edmontosaurus, Ekivu,Elasmosaurus, Erinyes, Euparkeria, Eye of the Deep, Faun, Female Sahuagin, Giant Portuguese Man O War, Giant Sea Turtle, Giant Squid, Gorgosaurus, Horned Devil, Hypacrosaurus, Ice Devil, Iguanodon, Kraken, Kullule, Lemure, Leviathan, Monoclonius, Mosasaurus, Nothosaurus, Nymph, Ornitholestes, Pentaceratops, Pit Fiend, Pixie, Plateosaurus, Plesiosaurus,Polar Bear, Pteranodon, Pterodactyl, Quetzalcoatlus, Quickling, Rhamphorynchus, Rhinoceros, Saurolophus, Saurophaganax, Shaitan, Shantungosaurus, Shub, Soul Worm, Spiked Devil, Sprite, Stegosaurus, Storm Giant, Styracosaurus,Succubus, Tarbosaurus, Telmatosaurus, Titan, Treant, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Uduk, Velociraptor, Whale, and Wild Cattle. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=355305#p355305 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo 20 Giant Wasps is the maximum! So I expect it is tough. Monsters are rated by fighting a trial mock combat against a team of six 'average' adventurers. The thing is the team is average, and the number used is the average appearing. Since it happened to roll max number, it was tougher than usual. I'm glad you survived!The computer tries to deploy your characters in the best way possible. But it also deploys the monsters in the best way possible for them too. If a player has a missile weapon, it is provisionally put into the second rank. If it has a hand held weapon, it goes in the first rank. (If it has no weapon, it goes in the second rank.) Monsters all go into the first rank. Then it pairs off monsters against characters based on their size. Six small creatures per character, four medium, and two large. If there are more monsters than there are front rank characters, then characters are pulled out of the second rank.So, if there are a lot of monsters, then everyone will end up fighting hand to hand. If there aren't as many, then your hand to hand fighters will hold the line and your missile fighters can attack without being attacked. By selectively activating characters you can control the "marching order". Players are deployed in the ranks in this order.The Castle competition ended in January. Monsters stopped dropping deeds at that point, but you can still buy them from shops. You can continue to use them to build castles if you like. This isn't going to be removed from the game. At some point, they will be a form of strategic interplay in the premium area. Building fortifications will allow you to create bases for your side in the civil war and make them stronger in that area. But it will probably be a while before we get there. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=355121#p355121 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Well, I'm glad there are still some surprises there that can scare the crap out of you. :-) I some point I'll be adding in Giant based locations and Dragon based ones. Those should ensure there are always challenges to overcome!There are many gods in the world. Not all of them good. So pilgrims are not necessarily guaranteed to be good. However, it's a great idea to align pilgrims with gods and for you to get negative god points for killing their pilgrims!I'm glad you like the elite humanoids. I want to make it more general so that, for example, stone giants often come with cave bears and stuff like that. But I got bogged down adding in monster descriptions. You are supposed to be able to say things like "tell me about goblins" and so for to get a description. But it started to mess with the audio model.I believe the elites are spread out among the normal creatures in a sort of regimental way. Or it may be random. Or something in between. I can't quite remember. Monster morale is derived each round by comparing the total levels they started off with and the total levels left, and it also mixes in your total levels. So they typically won't fight to the last person, unless they are doing well and you are also nearly down to your last person. But, since it is based on levels, killing an elite does have an outsize effect on their morale.Frost and flame brands are straight out of the book. They are +1 magical weapons, and so have an extra 5% chance of hitting and do an extra one magic damage. But they also do an extra 3 frost or flame damage. So they aren't top tier weapons, but they are pretty nice against certain creatures. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=354547#p354547 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo This game is available on Google Home (OK Google talk to 6 Swords) or Amazon Alexa (Alexa, open 6 Swords). We were kicking around the idea yesterday of making a web version using some off-the-shelf speech to text and text to speech technology from Watson/BlueMix. Chime in if you have opinions on that!The main plot involves a civil war. As such, each side thinks they are the good guys and the other side the bad guys. So it's more point-of-view than good-vs-evil. I could do more with religious factions, which are very important later. The problem is that the setting takes place before a bunch of novels I've written, which kind of ties things down. (The first novel is at the very end of the civil war.) But I'm trying to to be constrained by that, and to just let the game go how the game goes. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=353416#p353416 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I've been talking with Google about the party ID problem. It appears they have a "feature" of recognizing individual voices. The problem is that if it doesn't recognize an individual voice, it generates a random ID. It's not clear to me yet if things will be better with this feature on or off. I'm seeking permission from them to go back to how I had the skill originally, where it asked the user for their e-mail and then used that as the common user ID. That was much more reliable. It broke some rule of theirs and I have to find out if there is a way to use it, or get permission, so it doesn't break their rules. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=353366#p353366 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Apologies for not replying sooner. It scrolled onto a 5th page and I hadn't noticed! Anyway, some good news and some bad news...Google Home seems to have a problem retaining your user ID. Your game identity is indexed based on this. For privacy reasons, if you disable and re-enable the game, your user ID changes. It appears that Google is doing this inadvertently. I will report the problem to them and see if they can fix it.However, they also had a bug that you noticed. When you say "enter" it exits the game. After four months of reporting this they have finally partially fixed it. Enough that I was able to code a workaround. This is great, but it means I have less confidence they will deliver a fix for the user ID problem quickly.I do regret not making the game multi-player from the start. StarLanes was created that way, and did well until it outgrew its user interface. I hope to get back to that some day. For now, technically, I believe I have it so that two people can be in the same dungeon, and actually affect what is going on. But you won't actually see each other. Going forward I hope to have plans so that in the premium space all players make take actions to influence the civil war going on. No direct actions with each other like a good D session. But at least some interactivity.I have found Special Serpents Club. What I need is your current party name. Then I can merge the old values into the new values, if that's what yous till want.I know it is awkward to move through areas you have already been in. When you hijack the playback by using the system level interrupt, as you are doing, what happens goes out of my control. My code will react to the commands sent. What is probably getting scrambled is the commands sent. I'm not sure what I can do about that.I'd like to do something like in the old text adventure games where you can say "go west west north east". But that is, unfortunately, actually rather hard to do with an audio assistant with any accuracy.Swamps are, indeed, confusing. Much like a twisty maze of passages! They are not necessarily connected in a direct fashion. Treat them like mazes.It isn't very good at the compound names, like Dagger of Thunder. However, it does recognize all basic names, and is careful enough not to place two items of one type into the same shop. So you should be able to say "buy dagger" and it will work it out. As a fall back for both this and the hiring hall, you can say "one", "two", etc to pick the first, second, etc, option. I have seen the evaporating encounter happen before. I thought I had fixed it. I guess I have to look at it again.Thank you for your feedback. It helps establish direction. Right now fixes are a little delayed. We had set ourselves a goal of December 26th to reach a critical mass that we could expand commercially from. I'd, seriously, like to have three people working on this full time rather than just me doing it part time. Unfortunately neither Amazon or Google have created an environment that solves the business needs of getting enough publicity to an audio app like this to get it to the point where a return on investment can be achieved. Google have expressed a desire to, but just haven't delivered. Amazon appear to prefer a minecraft like setup where people adding value to their IP do so with free labor and no expectation of recompense. We aren't winding down 6 swords or our other games. Right now promotional credits cover current monetary costs (other than the fancy voices from the Bardic college, but I'm trying to do a deal on that). It's just our time costs that we see no hope of being recovered. We're trying to work out a good plan to transition our model and approach to a non-commercial basis. And that, for now, mostly means that I get to spend less time on it.You guys have been a great community and I appreciate your support and loyalty. We will certainly keep the game alive for the foreseeable future. If there are any Java programmers out there who are interested in helping out, drop me a line. It is a rather large and complex source base. Making it open source is problematic, as there is a crap ton of our intellectual property in there we aren't quite prepared to give up on yet. But we have no problem giving individuals access with agreement on a "gentleman's NDA". URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=352683#p352683 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Just give a potion to a character and they will drink it. They work for a limited time, depending on the potion. Most combat orientated potions will work for 10 to 40 in game minutes. Each round of combat takes one minute. Moving from room to room takes ten minutes. And moving from outdoor location to another takes 60 minutes. So it should last at least one combat. Possibly two if you roll well and there is another combat quickly.More things I need to put into "what is potion of speed"... URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=347097#p347097 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Sorry, thought I replied. A potion of speed doubles the number of attacks the user gets in combat. Definitely a nice potion!The quests I have planned for the premium area are not so much alignment based, but politics based. The Empire or Romitu crashed and burned about 70 years before the present. The remaining core became the Republic of Romitu since then, and the rest loosely banded together into the Amphictiony in joint support of the travel gates between capitals. The main political parties of the Republic have been the Blues and the Greens. But recently a charismatic leader of the Reds proved very popular and broke a number of deadlocks between the Blues and Greens. His crowning achievement was getting a contract for new gates between new countries in the Amphictiony to be built fulfilled. However, in doing so he also, as a private citizen, funded the creation of many more gates in secondary cities. This earned him great respect from those overlooked cities and enmity from the major cities. Not long afterwards he left Romitu politics, and rose up in rebellion, with the stated goal of reestablishing the Empire.So... backstory aside, the quests will mostly be aligned with either supporting the Republic or the Empire. Both will have armies roaming the field, much like caravans do in the normal world. If you are neutral or aligned with one faction, you can enter the army camp and receive quests. These will usually be to go and fight other armies and scouts. Doing so will destroy outliers, weaken that army. Unlike caravans armies can meet and fight, or be picked off. As they move they suborn territory for their side. So while the players don't control armies, their actions affect how the armies do and thus their activity affects how the war plays out in game.But we're a bit of a ways from that yet. This week I've been revamping the item selection code. It's not going well, (and I'm currently traveling on business), so it might not be out till after the weekend. But at that point I hope that "what is a goblin" and queries like that will work. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=347077#p347077 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Oh, Dark, the audio model update should now be live in the UK. See if "news" and "sleep" work now. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=346186#p346186 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo This week's updates include new feature types. And, now that we have a coordinate system, I can tip you off to where to find them!Latitude 0 degrees 1 minute south, Longitude 0 degrees, 9 minutes east: narrow cleft to dinosaurs.Latitude 0 degrees 26 minutes north, Longitude 0 degrees, 11 minutes west: flaming pentagram to devils.Latitude 0 degrees 34 minutes north, Longitude 0 degrees, 21 minutes east: demonic portal.Working now on adding leader types and descriptions to monsters. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=346160#p346160 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Ridgedale. Names for towns are randomly selected from a list of about 3000 per culture. But, because it is random, you may get duplicates. Maybe I should change that name slot to Springfield!Elixir of Mercury. It's a potion of speed. The whole winged sandal thing. I was in a bit of a rush doing the divine gifts. I haven't even done the gifts for the non-Roman pantheons yet either. If you have suggestions for gifts, (or even tiered gifts) I'm happy to take them.Elven chainmail. The advantage of this is that it is quiet and encumbering. Both of which have no effect, currently, in the game. So, right now, it's just a prestige piece. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=346156#p346156 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Exploration is definitely part of the game. I learned that in StarLanes where some players just loved roaming the outback to see what they could find. My aim is that there are enough places that you can easily find, but also hidden locations you can stumble across.I've just been adding some today. This week's update will include three new area types inspired by your suggestions: Demonic and Diabolical portals, and Hidden Valleys full of dinosaurs. They are pretty rare though. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=345521#p345521 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Wooly Rhinos in a den? Too funny. That's what you get with all the procedurally generated stuff. And that's my dilemma. You've got good ideas there and I've noted them down. My choice is to create, say, a "dark fey grove" generation routine and have them generate as a type of random feature. Or to custom craft a specific "dark fey grove" in one location. Generation is good because you will get them all over and are more likely to run across one. But it's bad in the sense that once you've seen one, you've seen them all. Even if I make them varied there will be still be a certain "sameness". The alternative of hand crafting is great because I can do very detailed and custom content that tells a real story. The downside is that I can only put it in one location and have to put in signs and rumors pointing to it so that people can discover it. It's not always easy to work out which direction I should put the effort into.Castles. So, the best thing is to first find a location. Somewhere that you either note the longitude and latitude of, or that's a known distance from a known landmark. Once you have picked a spot, use the "entry" land deed. That will prompt you to confirm, and WOOSH you should have a one room castle.To expand, enter your castle. Pick another deed of a room that you want to create. Use that did. You will then be prompted for a direction. Give a direction and WOOSH, that room will appear in that direction. You now have a two room castle.Keep going and flesh out your castle with what you want. It is going to be kind of linear because you can only extend from a room you already have. If you want to cross connect locations you need to use the mark permit and a door permit. Go to the first room in your castle that you want to connect. Use the mark permit there. Then go to the room you want to connect that room to. Then use the door permit there. WOOSH, those two rooms should now be connected.There are also one way door permits, and doors that only let certain level characters through. You use those on existing doors between rooms to add more interest. Be careful, though, because you can cut yourself off. I haven't got the logic in there yet to warn you when you make a closed loop. If you get stuck, let me know and I'll sort it out.Oh, if anyone here is a you tuber, or a podcaster, wrapping up some of these guides into podcasts would be super wonderful. I'd promote them as much as I possibly can!Progression. I really don't like the idea of progression in games. The first versions of 6 Swords had difficulty firmly tied to how far you were from the road. That was more realistic, but, unfortunately, resulted in more boring game play. The monsters you met along the road were really just nuisances, and you had to hike all the way into the mountains to find anything interesting. So, reluctantly, I changed it so the monsters get progressively tougher as your team gets tougher. You can think of it as that as you get stronger, the lesser monsters don't even bother to come near you, and we're saving you the trouble of continually running away from tough ones.Monsters scale in terms of numbers. A goblin is always a goblin, with the same armor class and hit points. But at low level you might meet them in single digits, where at high level you will meet dozens of them. And, I tell you, there's little as fulfilling as having six character fight a hundred and something kobolds and to wipe the floor with them!Bounties don't scale, however. So it's probably a good idea to collect them as early as you can. Eventually you will be meeting monsters with enough money that the bounties aren't all the exciting anyway. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=345363#p345363 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Ammunition. I've opened an issue to look into it to make sure things are working as expected.Werecreatures. There are Werebears, Wereboars, Wererates, Weretigers, and Werewolves. They just aren't very common, so you don't meet them all the time.The Breastplate of Juno is, in fact, a fancy name for Banded Armor +2. Alexa isn't the best at recognizing exactly what you say, so I have to do fuzzy matching to try to connect the two. It sounds like it got something like "Breastplate" if it tried to match against "Benjamin". I'll try to create this problem and see if there is a tweak I can do. In the meantime if you say "banded armor" it will probably work.Shop item prices. OK. I thought it was just me. But since you have seen this, I'll write it up as a bug. And, please, pointing out this stuff gives me something valuable I can't replicate myself: priorities. I have to divide my time between writing new features, writing new content, fixing bugs, and trying to play the game to discover the bugs. It isn't always easy to work out what it is best to spend my time on. Having feedback from users like this is extremely valuable in helping me work out the best thing to spend my time on to make it a better game. So, many, many thanks.And, yes, because Gypsies sell anything, it can't do the same data dump that you get in specialty shops in town. If it's a weapon shop, I know I can tell you the damage that each item does. But potions don't do damage, so when it's a mixed lot, it has to go with the common denominator. Hopefully the "what is" command will take up some of that slack when that rolls out. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=344686#p344686 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Ammunition. I thought it was too much of a headache and no addition to game play to make you independently equip each character with ammunition. Instead characters pull the best ammunition available from the common pool and use that. Ammunition used is retrieved at the end of a fight, unless you run away. So if you've never run away, you probably won't lose any ammunition. The Moon. YES! YES! YES! Someone noticed! It is a pet peeve of mine when I read books to my kids where they talk about the sun being up during the day and the moon being up at night. Look out the window! That's not how it works! And, worse, in a game like minecraft, the moon goes through phases, but still only comes up at night. Drives me crazy!Anyway, editorial aside, you might slightly tougher monsters at night compared to the day time. I thought werecreatures were nastier, but I can't find it in my code. I better put that on the to-do list.I've noted some oddness occasionally about fights recurring. But I hadn't tracked it down. I think with your input I have an idea what is going on. I clear the encounter data structure when a fight is over. I think I may not be doing so when you run away. I put another issue on the tracker to look at that.Many thanks for the help! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=344391#p344391 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Blessings are not used up. You need to have been blessed at least once to be able to use the healing pool. If you have been blessed three times (I think) then you can get past the pool into the infirmary. They will cure you of level drains there. (Handy after fighting wraiths!)Right now only undead are in temples. More likely I will add in other feature types with themed monsters rather than make temples different. There are demons, devils, giants and even dragons in the game. But they are mostly very rare. I don't think I've ever seen a dragon outside of testing. They're that rare.I've rolled out this week's update. There are a few new human monsters: Bandits, Brigands, and the like. Just more monsters to fight for now, but I have an open issue to make them so that they will be lead by higher level commanders. Also, when you say "more" after a "look", you will get your longitude and latitude. I've been convinced that a confusing map as interesting game play was fine for StarLanes, but not so much for 6 Swords.Please pass on any bugs you find with this! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=344169#p344169 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo At the start of my time on Echo I tried many different games. Of late I have decided to mostly focus on doing one game very well. That being said, if there is an easy port that could be interesting, I'm happy to take a look. Many text adventure style games don't actually work well on these devices. It only waits 8 seconds for input, and long streams of text get boring very quickly. But if it's been popular with screen readers for some time then it might be past that.If Rich wants to reach out to me that's fine. I'll happily give him my opinion on the level of effort needed for a port. I had a look at the page and saw where to get the games, but it does not appear the source code is available. Or maybe I just missed it.The background sounds and different voices you hear in some games are not a feature of the platform, but mostly come from a service called Talestreamer. This is produced from the people who brought you The Magic Door. They have opened it up for use by others for a price. 6 Swords is currently using this till at least January. Then we'll negotiate price and see if I can find a cost model that works for me.I think you've caught just about all the miscellaneous noises that are in 6 Swords. They are really just there to add color and depth, and not to convey information. But I like that idea. Just created an issue in the backlog to see if I can find "signature themes" for certain monsters. Which monsters most fill you with trepidation? Wraiths freak me out now, because I added in level draining! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=344153#p344153 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Time for the long response.Combat. As far as optimal choice of weapons, your characters will chose what makes the most sense for the combat they face. I couldn't really come up with a good interface that let you make tactical decisions that wasn't painfully awkward to use. So, instead, the computers makes the best decision possible. Monsters are paired off against characters based on size. Up to six small creatures can fight one character, 4 medium sized, and two large sized. Engaged characters use hand to hand weapons, unengated use missile weapons.So your best bet is to make your toughtest character your active character, and to equip all characters with one good hand to hand weapon, and one good missile weapon. The computer will make the best tactical decision after that.Descriptiveness. The problem here is that if it is too verbose, it gets tedious. Some of you guys play this for hours. Once you've heard a line of description, you are going to hear it over and over again. So I've tried to make what is there short and sweet so it does not get tedious. I do try to have at least three different ways of reporting the same information, so that it isn't too boring. But I do try to keep them all short. One thing I am trying to put into the audio model is the "what" function. That will let you say "what is a goblin" or "what is a bastard sword", and it will give you a longer description of the item or creature. It will take me a little time to add those descriptions in. (I think there are 400 monsters!) I like your idea of more description of the surroundings. I've put a task into the tracker to create geographical distribution of plants to add to descriptions. That will be another way to track what region you are in.Money. You have given me some interesting food for thought about monetization. What I have been struggling with is the point in time to throw the switch and charge for premium features. That's hard because there is no firm boundary between "no enough there to pay for" and when there is. Subscriptions are the easiest thing to do, but I always thought it was kind of slimy to charge a recurring subscriptoin and make your money off of hoping that people forget to stop renewing. I kicked around an idea with my managing partner today about having people buy a premium currency. This could be used to buy perks and novelties, as you suggest, but also could be incrementally used for, say, specific premium features like Bardic College voices, play in the premium geography, and stuff like that. It has the advantage that you only pay for what you choose to experience. If, say, you take a week off, it's no loss to you. There are a lot of kinks to it. But we'll keep thikning about it.Inventory. It's a mess. Audio apps are terrible at lists. I know what we have is inadequate, and I'm really trying to work to make it better. Things work a little better on Google Home, because there are some intrinsic features there that make it better at recognizing minor differences such as "short bow" and "+1 short bow". I'll look at my audio model again and see if I can support something like "inventory weapons" to, at least, filter the list. I will also try to see if I can improve my fuzzy matching so that if instead of matching a single item, it can say that there are multiple items that match. Then the program can do a followup question to ask which one you meant. It's a hard problem to solve. And to Honk. Thanks for your words of appreciation. I've been a professional programmer ever since I left college. But I've only ever been an amateur games programmer. My hard drive is a graveyard of countless games I've written over the years that no one has ever played. (Star Lanes actually has code in it that is a direct descendent of some of my programming projects in college 30 years ago, and elements of 6 Swords use concepts I first explored then!) This is really the first time that I've created games that people have really played and enjoyed. The visually impaired community has been extremely supportive of this and that means an awful lot to me. I was very taken by the movie Tomorrowland. It didn't do that well in the theaters. But having grown up in Florida, been a frequent vistor to Disney World, and a great fan of the US space program, it hit a very strong chord with me. One of the biggest parts was the idea of people being selected and praised for using their gifts and skills for the betterment of humanity. It's always challenged me and made me feel I could do more than just write stupid games that no one plays. But one day I got an e-mail from a mom about 6 swords and her son. He is blind and has two older brothers who are very into computer games, and that this gave him a chance to participate and play in a computer game like his older brothers. It still brings a tear to my eye and makes me feel like I'm achieving something and might someday deserve a pin like
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Quick response. (I used all my vacation on a big summer trip, so I actually have to day-job work between Christmas and new year's, but still get the kids sorted and host a party today!) Dark, you're not crazy, you're just British. You are hitting a bug I only found out about last week. They rejected my Canadian and Australian English submissions because they were out of sync with the American English ones. Looking at it now, it looks like my British and Indian English models are also out of sync. So you are right, it just isn't hearing "news" or "rest". I'm VERY sorry about that. If you can be a little more patient, I'm going to try to quick a quick implementation of "what" and "where" as suggested on the StarLanes forum. Amazon have to approve audio model changes, so it can take a few weeks. So I try to squeeze in as many as I can. I'll do a full reply either later today or tomorrow, depending on how day-job goes... URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=343777#p343777 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Thank you for such positive comments!Sadly the skill is currently not in the German store. I wish it was. And I've set it up so that it can be localized. So far all I've done is change the names to Indian names in the India geography. There's a lot of text in 6 Swords and we've yet to make money on it, so we don't have a budget for translation. Also it is a moving target. There is still content being added weekly, which means I'd have to have a translator on hand.Starlanes is supported, but is in maintenance mode. I'd really like to get back to it. But it really needs to have the audio interface updated with a lot of stuff we've learned since we first did it. Right now we have limited resources and are devoting our time to 6 Swords. Your continued interest is good to hear, though. We're looking for funding and it helps us to point out that there is interest in it.Inventory management is a problem. I've seen that some users have a ton of stuff in their inventory and I've been struggling with a good design to let you view it. I did change it recently so that it only tells you the top items in your inventory, and you can then use "more" to page through them. I know this isn't adequate. But I'm stuck for ideas to make it better.I have to think of a way to let you call up information on objects and the like. Hmm. I just added a ticket based on some other feedback to add a "where" function, so you could say "where am I', or "where is the nearest village". Let me add a ticket for a "what" function. So you can say "what is a potion of speed" or "what is a goblin". That might also cover what the magical effects on weapons do. Hmm. I could also have it so if you have any of the object in question, it tells you how many you have. That gives a sort of inventory search idea.The Bardic College is kind of fun, isn't it? I'm not sure how much longer it will be there. The fellow who created the service (the author of The Magic Door skill) very generously has let me use it for free for November and December. In January we're going to see what sort of price we can work out that covers his costs, and fits in my budget. My aim has been, when the game is good enough, to have certian features be "premium" features, and charge a small monthly fee. (There will always be a totally free version though!) That would cover stuff like this. Depending on what price model we come up with, the Bardic College might have to go away for a while.Human monsters are a good idea. The mechanics for the game are based on OSRIC a sort of open source version of first edition Dungeons and Dragons. The monster list did have all sorts of human monsters in it, but I took them out for simplicity. But it's easy enough to add them in. I've created an issue to track this. I may even get it in this week's update.As for other gods, I'm pleased to say they are already there! The beta world has a non-procedural geography based on a series of fantasy novels I have written. There are regions with distinct cultures and gods. In addition to Roman, historical religions represented area Aztec, Indian, Babylonia, American Indian, Celtic, Japanese, Norse, Finnish and Egyptian. Fantasy religinos represented are Lizard Man, Gnome, Dwarvish, Halfling, Elvish and one from my novels. For historical religions still worshiped, I have created gods inspired by the historical gods rather than the actual gods, so as to not give offense.If you go due east from Veritas (the big city near the start) you can find a Tri-Form arch which will lead you to the beta area. There are some fun new features there, but some are still a little half baked. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=343676#p343676 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Sorry for not responding sooner. I couldn't get through to the forum for a few months.Firstly, yes, 6 Swords is still in active development. We introduced a "news" feature to keep people abreast of the new things we've added. If people want me to start a thread here and post about the weekly new features I'm happy to do so. Current in addition to the news we also post to the Amazon Alexa games facebook group, and the game forum. But we're very appreciative of the support we've gotten from the visually impaired community and I'm happy to update things here as well (as long as the admins and patrons don't think that's too commercial).Right now the only quests in the game are the bounties. If you find a non-ruined castle, tower or outpost, just to the left of the main entrance is where you can pick up a bounty. It will tell you how to get to a nearby ruin, and if you kill the boss monster there, you can return and get paid.We have opened up a beta area, with a geography based on a series of fantasy books that I've written. The aim is to have much more structured quests there. In the time period there are two main factions in a big civil war. You will be able to undergo mission for either side, or build up their defenses, and actually affect how the war plays out. I had hoped to have the open in time for Christmas, but we didn't quite make it.The castle you found is probably one that a player has built. You can find or purchase "deeds" in the game which you use to create and expand strongholds. Right now they are just of decorative value, but we hope to add more so you can fully flesh out interesting areas. Our original plan was to have a companion "game" that was essentially an editor, to let you build and share your own custom content for the game. Unfortunately in testing we worked out that the voice transcription in both Amazon Alexa and Google Home wasn't good enough for content creation. (That's some of the reason we missed our Christmas goal.) The land deeds (and permits we added last week) are our second attempt to allow users to create content.I have my own content editor that I use, but it's graphical based. I'm not as keen on distributing that because I want to keep user content on par for both visually able and impaired people. I am super keen on that because I really, really want the visually impaired community to be able to contribute. I think that you guys will demonstrate an unique insight into creating these sort of audio only experiences, and I want to empower that. The land deeds and permits aren't great, but they are a start. I am very open to other suggestions you might have for adding to the game. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=343602#p343602 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I just pushed this week's update. They major part is the first (mini) module to be released: Batrachian City. It's located due north of Village of Achnasheen. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=311831#p311831 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I had a talk with some people who know AWS better than me. Apparently I was running on a server that was the equivalent of a TRS-80 or something. So I've upgraded my production server. Let me know if that improves things. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=311598#p311598 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo It's been 24 hours since I shifted servers and I haven't seen an outage message yet from Google. So I think things are looking good there. Please report any outages you experience.supermalavox, thanks for the suggestions. Amazon just announced that they are doing a revenue share with developers of games for Alexa. This is incredibly important news for games on this device. There is now, finally, a financial reason for people to create interesting and compelling content for this device. My strategy up till now has been to create a system where I can get a return through in-app purchases, merchandise, or downloadable content. Now there is a shorter on-ramp for developers to get some return for their efforts and it should spur much more interest in developing games for this platform.I have directed those in the Alexa development community to this board and suggested it as a great resource for ideas for new and better audio games. Now that Amazon have opened th e checkbook I hope that we'll get more and better audio games. I welcome the competition! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=311224#p311224 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo That's a terrible user experience! I'm amazed you have stuck with it this far!I will take the outage reports from Google at face value then. I'm not a wizard at AWS and servers are not my strong point. I just tried quadrupling the memory for the server to see if that helped, but I seem to have crashed everything instead. :-( So, instead, I've switched everything to running on my "B" server. Normally this is the beta server and I've never had a problem with it. But, then, I've never had the problems with the main server you are reporting. But let me leave it for 24 hours and see if it performs better. Let me know if you still get the same terrible response. If so, I'll try another trick. I'll direct half my skills to the A server and half to the B server. That will tell me if load balancing will help.Thank you so much for sticking with it! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310981#p310981 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Good catch Tony78. I've logged an issue (#140) to recognize +1, etc, when identifying an item. However, changes to what the skill can hear have to be tied to major versions, since that requires re-certification by Amazon. So that's going to be for 2.0. For now (#139) I've updated it so the same time of item won't appear in the shop together. That doesn't help you with equipment and inventory, but it's what I can do for now.ironcross32, I'm sorry to hear you've been having trouble accessing the skills. Google has been complaining to me a lot about "service unavailable", but I've never found it to be down. This is the first I've heard on Alexa. The Google reported outages are sometimes in the middle of the night. So maybe something is going on with AWS. I will write a little monitoring tool and try to get to the bottom of this.Note, if you hear a "the skill is in maintenance mode", that means I' m in the middle of updating it. That should normally only take five minutes or so.If you, or anyone else, is interested, I can invite you to the "beta". This will let you run "six swords test", which is on a different server. So if one is down you can use the other. (You account will be the same on both.) You can also were all updates go before the weekly update to production. So you can see the new stuff (and new bugs) earlier. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310871#p310871 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hey smoothguner. I had a quick look at Battle Cards. I need to dig into it more, but I caught a line that said an "Any" card could be played at any time. That's kind of a problem. Alexa is call-and-response. You can't interrupt her. I have to see if that's essential to gameplay, or if I can work around that.Hey MikeFont, questions are good! Gold: some monsters drop gold. Some do not. Animals like horned cats and baboons, for example, don't. Thinking organized creatures, like Dwarves, do. Keep at it, and you'll find gold! Quests: There is a bounty system right now. Follow the roads until you find a castle, for or outpost. Go into the courtyard, and to the west is an office where bounties are listed. Kill the monsters at the given location and return there to collect your bounty. Experience: This is based on the OSRIC version of 1st Edition D I don't currently list the amount of experience needed to go up a level. But that's a good idea. (Added issue #137 for that) When you gain experience, and a character crosses the 25/50/75% threshold, it will tell you. Character info: If you say "about Bob" it will give you all the details. That's where I'll put in what you need for the next level. (I've added a note, #138) to give hints about that.It's easy to change what the game says, but it's a bit harder to change what it can hear. First of all that needs a re-certification with Amazon/Google. Second of all, the more things it can recognize, the lower the quality is of recognition. So I'm a little conservative about adding in more recognition.Questions: please ask as many as you like. There is an official forum here: http://starlanes.freeforums.net/board/5 … discussion I can't vouch for how accessible it is, so if it is easier to post here (and the moderators don't mind) I'm happy to answer them here too.Today is Friday, and I've just dropped this week's release. It's mostly linguistic changes (combat reports should be more compact and less repetitive). A new game play change is that monsters may run away if they think the fight is going against them. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310690#p310690 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Sure, smoothgunner, send me on your rules. I'll have a look and say what level of complexity I think it is, and how well it might work as an audio game. There's a few techniques I rolled out with 6 Swords around dealing with complexity that I'm pretty happy with. We can probably do something more complicated than black jack now!Glad you are up and running, Tony78. I really need to get around to porting 6 Swords to the UK market. I just need to spend 30 minutes doing cut and paste! German is a bit more difficult. The code is ready to go, but I need a bunch of stuff translated... URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310373#p310373 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo You can always enable it right from the web page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GVGVSM0 URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310250#p310250 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Oh, hey! I didn't see it had spilled onto a second page. :-)I did do "21 black jack", but I'm not sure that really counts!Someone asked me to do chess once, but I was afraid that it would be hard to craft a good user experience. There's just too much going on. One of the most challenging things, so far, in Six Swords was giving the results of a combat. You've got 20 to 40 lines of A hits/misses B with a C for D damage and does/not kill. That was really tedious to listen to in the first draft. So I put a lot of work into trying to condense it down into a much easier to listen to narrative discourse. And, even as it is, it still needs more work.So with a chess board, or a hand of cards, you need to be able to list everything in play so that if you lose track you can work out what your options are. If you have a whole bunch of things that can, potentially, be in play at any time, it gets problematic. And that's the thing. It 9;s not hard to program, it's hard to make playable.That being said, I played Magic the Gathering for a while about 20 years ago. I'm not that up to date on card games. If you want to point me at a card game or board game you think might be suitable, I'll take a look. Ideally a game that is either open source, or someone who has said it is OK to use their intellectual property in other mediums. (Six Swords is based on the "Old School Reference and Index Compendium" because it has an open license.)If someone here has written a card game or something they think would make a good audio game, I'm happy to look at that too. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=310141#p310141 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Alexa isn't always the best, especially when it comes to names. I use fuzzy matching internally to resolve when a direct match does not work. So a tip is to say a more common name that starts with the same letter. If you say "hire harold", then it should match "hasan" (if there are no other names beginning with "h").Sadly Alexa does not have the feature to have "background music". I kind of cheat in the into to StarLanes for this, but it isn't really possible to add that in across the entire application. I'd love to, and have been asking for the feature for two years.More battle sounds can definitely be done. (Tracked as issue #130)You can say "help" to get general help. I have an issue (#97) to give better contextual help. I will see if I can do this as part of this week's batch.You can review the game from it's page in the companion app, or on the Amazon web site: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GVGVSM0Reviews are greatly appreciated, as they directly influence the applications ranking. Unfortunately their ranking is very primitive and is strictly based on the average. So a skill with 99 5-star reviews and one 4-star review gets ranked behind a skill with one 5-star review. So anything less than a 5-star review can tank a skill. It is annoying and a source of grief between Amazon and the developers. But they haven't budged on that. You should give the skill an honest review you think it deserves, but keep that in mind. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=309935#p309935 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I did my big update today. I put release notes here: http://starlanes.freeforums.net/thread/94/release-notesI was able to put in the "no religion" switch. Right now it's manual and done by admin request. So if anyone wants it turned on for their account, drop me a line with the e-mail address your account is set up with and I'll flip the switch.It has been approved for Google Home, but isn't published yet. Hopefully it will appear over the weekend.Let me know about any bugs! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=309782#p309782 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hmm. Leave this with me. I've been thinking on this off and on over the day. I think there are only two places in the code where temples-in-cities and ruined-temples are generated. I've created an issue (#123) to spend a bit of time looking at this when I'm home. If I can put in a switch in that time frame, I'll do it. It will have to be manually requested for now, but it is a start. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=309700#p309700 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo I identify as a Christian, but I attend a Unitarian Universalist "church", so I do try my best to be sensitive to other views and perspectives. It is a bit challenging to create a fantasy setting with no references to the supernatural. A game is fiction, a story, or, at best, a metaphor. I think maybe the anti-religious tolerate the prevalence of "god" in games in the same way a very religious person tolerates "not-my-god" in games. There will, certainly, be people at the far ends of that spectrum (some related to me!) who can't make this mental accommodation. And that's why it is hard to please everyone.Thanks for your input. It is worth hearing opinions like this. I don't think I can put in a switch exactly as described, but I take your point. I'll do what I can within the genre to keep the religious aspects thematic and "fairy tale" like. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=309686#p309686 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo
Re: 6 Swords - Fantasy Adventure game for Amazon Echo Hmm. That would cut a fair amount out of the game. I picked the Roman gods because they aren't currently worshiped in the mainstream, yet they are a familiar part of Western culture. They are really just decoration in the game. There isn't any active religiosity. Is there any particular phrasing that you are finding at issue? I did hesitate briefly over the description in Jupiter's temple of "the god of the highest heavens". I'm happy to tweak descriptions like that. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=309670#p309670 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
