#pokermans

[potabo]

Heartwarming:

[seamless-socks]

ok so youve heard of team rocket.

ok so now youre gonna listen to what i have to say:

GROUP SPACESHIP

Brace for mild inconveniences!

And make it to the power of two!

To abstain from global catastrophe!

To combine all the islands of the archipelago!

To describe the facts of fondness and bondness!

To stretch upwards in the hopes of getting physically closer to the stars that reside skywards!

Jesser!

Jimothy!

Group Spaceship entering the atmosphere at increased velocity!

Forgo attacking or make preparations for an onslaught!

Persian! Woof. That is factually correct.

bonus:

we got Soot Retrevit, Bstone, and Foggy on a quest to "retrieve the majority"

[igotbrainwormed]

dogy attack

NOOOOOOOOOO I AM DEFENSELESS HOW COULD YOU or am i.....

THAT'S RIGHT

[ pleas be awre. tjos car d is noT real. []

[defness]

🔥Icarus, Team Flare🔥

[kerontheking]

[cartoon-gushes]

I live

[geddy-leesbian]

i didn't post a weed morty edit yesterday and i don't feel inspired to make one today but im in the er currently so that's my excuse and im sticking to it

[zeravmeta]

ended up getting pokerman crimson from a friend since they were reselling for a discount, played it for 20 minutes and realized you cant even wonder trade or gts trade without nintendos online subscription, and just turned it off

[leilani-and-kass]

BIRTHDAY DRAWPILE LET'S GO!!

Heyyyy everyone, long time no post!! I know I'm still on hiatus but today's the mun's birthday, so I thought for the heck of it that I'd do a little birthday drawpile featuring Leilani and Kass!! So go ahead and feel free to add your Pokermans doing whatever dumb thing you want to this and let's see just how chaotic this gets.

[fenydreamz]

Felt like drawing a very old oc, he's a Megaman oc made long ago, I changed his name now he's Pokerman :>♥️♠️♦️♣️

[glitchypsi]

ENDTHOUGHTS: CA-6 & POKERMAN23

Pokerman is the codename for the underlying card-game engine (not Unity's parts) of the GLITCHYPSI CA-6 game, which was made for Artfight as a means to challenge myself in a gamejam-esque fashion. I was kind of soured by the fact it didn't garner attention by the Artfight staff despite the effort I put into it, but even in light of that, I have employed techniques that I had not used before which have increased my confidence as a game developer, and I kind of enjoyed it even if I pulled an allnighter to complete this one in time, with my job and all...

Pokerman started as an exclusively CLI application, as my approach this time was to separate the actual card game logic from the game itself. Kind of an engine-frontend separation, which would allow the engine to be extensible and also ported to many other "frontends" if so I wished, so the game could exist in Unity, maybe even MonoGame, as a webapp with a C# backed server, and so on.

I worked on the "dealer" and card values first. The way the engine is set up is that every hand is its own instance that checks a hand's cards, and if it matches, it puts itself as the "Hand result" for that hand, and that is used to determine the weight of the hand, which can be compared to other hands to decide which is stronger.

This approach makes it easy for me to add new hands, for instance. Currently, the only existing Hand Results are all the results that pertain to the 5-card hold rules with no jokers.

What the engine does is use a set of hand instances and check from strongest to weakest until the first one yields true. The last one will always happen, as it is the bogus hand. The only chain is, as expected, the 5-card hold one.

This, the hand weight comparisons, and the tie mechanics were perhaps the places I debugged in the most to check for potential pitfalls. With the console and specific non-automated tests, it was kind of easy and fun, although... the code... might use some work.

Next I worked on the AI. With all the ML fuzz I must state that this AI is merely a random chance AI. No machine learning is involved in this AI.

All this AI does is look at a chance table given a number of cards to replace which determines the chances of getting the wanted hand with X cards to replace. The table is precomputed. (1 = 100%)

Some of the values may be probabilistcally wrong. My combinatorics aren't as polished as they used to be, and instead of using raw math I took a simpler approach and used the engine itself to generate 10k pseudorandom (System.Random() .NET 6 implementation) draws to determine a percentage. However, for the purposes of the game engine, and given extreme precision was not necessary, it's acceptable.

Risk and Contentness were a pair of values that determined whether the AI would risk discarding their current hand for a stronger one. Contentness was tested for first. If it met the margin, it would draw no new cards. Riskiness was tested for last. If it met the margin, it would go up one hand in terms of hand weight to aim for. It then gave back the result evaluation that it desired to get the cards for, or, if content, the actual hand (signifying contentness with the current hand).

It would've made a fair game with a degree of difficulty that wasn't ever the same, and the AI risk and contentness parameters can be changed at any moment during runtime.

This was all for the underlying engine. Next was to actually link all these faceless bits of data to something the player could interact with...

...and while at work, when I had completed all my assigned development projects (under supervision of my boss, so I was not just slacking!!!) I made a placeholder set of cards.

These were used to make a Unity ScriptableObject. This was also my first time working with ScriptableObjects themselves, but a dear friend had shown me their power before and I was raring to try them out for this project.

The data is reminiscent of the Pokerman Engine Card (structure below), with added relevant Unity information.

The approach of using ScriptableObjects with their own methods I could call to, for example, get the sprite for a particular Card, was extremely useful, because I could write code once and make seven thousand themed decks if I so wanted.

I used this to make the world-space and GUI space cards that you can touch in the game.

Yes. they DO flip, literally. It was the easier way to do this, and in the context of the game (and shader used) you couldn't just cheat out of that.

After the cards were set in place, it was time to make the dealer..................................... oh mama

The assets often are the hardest part of these things. They take so long because animations are something else. The first dealer was

hm

this.

Yes, that is positively a Henohenomoheji.

It was simple, sketchy and scratchy, which was perfect to test out animations with. Lord, it did take some time still. Animating is hard. Praise animators.

I had some fun playing with it, not gonna lie.

After all this, it was time for the real deal.

Oh boy. Remember when I said animation was hard? With such tight timeline to work with and having to work in my usual artstyle?

Yeah. Look at this.

This took me a relatively mean amount of hours (entire afternoon), and it was the final day I could work on this game by the time I had started making this spritesheet.

It is composed of individual parts to make my life easier and then put together in Aseprite. It was probably the part that took me the most time out of everything else asset related. It even still has some flaws, such as the body sometimes shifting positions between frames. My bad.

After that I worked on the cards. They were abstract-ish representations of the characters I had chosen to become cards as part of my Arfight gimmick for this year, and a Casandra themed cardback.

Fun fact. Card with value 1 was gonna be somebody different.

After everything was put together......... it was time for the audio. I left audio for last. I suck at music. I have said it once I will keep saying it and it does NOT seem to be getting any better, and it was not going to improve within the remaining 12 hours I had to work on the game. I could not afford time to laze off in FL Studio when I had to polish some stuff to make the game get out there. I wasn't confident in my music skills at all (in contrast to my programming and graphics skills).

I got some sfx from freesound and edited it to match, and used some of the stream assets for other sound effects related to the coins (taken straight from Mario Party 3, ha ha)

The music track... I had asked another dear friend about it when development was still in the console-app stage, but they said they wouldn't be available for such. So, I just left it for the very last moment. I was then SCRAMBLING to find a nice track to use that would not get me in trouble (I did not use Luigi's Casino's track for this reason), so I looked where I get some of my tracks I play while programming, and settled on this one...

I liked it for the ambience (background) I pulled at the last minute (because I HADN'T even drawn the background then yet!!!) and with that, it just needed to be polished and uploaded to itch and Artfight (most importantly Artfight!!!!)

I pulled an allnighter finishing the final details of the game and authoring the page for it in itch. I had done allnighters before for other games I had made for people I cherished (although those are... probably better left in the past now.)

And so while at work I published the game and posted it on Artfight.

It sure was a ride and yes I will mention again I am sort of mad I was not even mentioned among the games that were highlighted in the final Artfight blogpost despite all the effort I put into it. However... the people the game featured really liked it, and that warmed my heart and justified my effort, as well as what I learned while making it.

This game was a promise to myself to complete, since in 2021 my computer was stolen while I was making a Subway Surfers clone for the same reasoning. I wanted to get it done by all means necessary, and I can now reliably say I have completed my goal.

Hope you enjoy the game. I am going to polish it a little bit more and upload it to Newgrounds at a later date... but no more allnighters over it.

It's done. It's cute, it's small, and it's something I should've done when I first started my gamedev career instead of trying to lift the big pumpkins first without any muscle.

Maybe I'll make Pokerman open source... or make another game using it, extending it to be able to properly handle Hold'Em Poker.

Want to play the game? Click "CA-6" in the title of this post.

[sistercara]

Trick or treat :3

treat!

itd pokerman card pack

what did you get ?

[incubabe]

Ms. Riley Cross. VLFS Battle Frontier's Battle Factory Chief. 28. Hailing from a town southwest of Aspertia (not technically incorporated in Unova), Miss Cross is considered a diamond in the rough -- a battling ace with no professional pedigree. No trainer schooling laurels, no badges, and yet, in the confines of the Factory, she has triumphed over former Champions -- big names. Wallace, Alder, Peony.

Of course, she chalks this to a strong degree to those trainers being out of their element, used to their proper teams. The environment of the Pokemon League simply doesn't cultivate ad-hoc strategies like the Factory does. Riley has otherwise gained no ranking in various local leagues and most paper-trail information regarding her began only five or so years ago.

Because she's a Faller, those unlucky few plucked out of space and simply shunted elsewhere. She's lucky enough to retain her memories and identity, but it's a small comfort. Still. Turns out when your back's up against the wall and you need to construct an identity quickly, charm magic helps. Yes, it's not Pokemon-world Riley, it's Riley-ass Riley, doing the best she can after a blink gone very wrong. It's not an isekai thing, she wasn't aware of Da Pokermans before, and there's no cheat skill other than those with which the Accounting Hellspawn class starts with. But approaching a world with the mindset of it not being your own -- and the things that dominate it -- allow for a certain removed perspective.

Though skilled in battles, Riley has difficulty with Pokemon handling and rearing. Her removed perspective allows her to break down Pokemon into strengths and weaknesses, figures on a spreadsheet. She lacks the innate comfort many have with their Pokemon. Her usual on-hand team, therefore, consists of little more than a Porygon-Z; an innately unnatural thing, so no problem. If such a trainer could be considered to have a signature move, hers would be to empower Porygon-Z with a Normalium crystal, boosting its Conversion move to boost all of its stats by a stage and becoming Electric type. This pseudo-Terastal would of course be banned under Frontier official rules, and her Factory doesn't allow personal teams anyway, so it doesn't get pulled out often.

She has also taken custody of two Lilligants -- that of the standard phenotype, and a rare specimen that markedly exhibits the fighting-type and an alternative appearance. These were once under Thorton's care, but were left behind when he left. Presumably, these were used for testing of some kind. Her few captures -- using the Lilligant duo, natch -- were of a Zorua and Ditto. Later, she was given an Egg from a Factory challenger that hatched into a Wooper. It's named Spot in recognition of her 'back-home' dog, who she hopes is okay in her absence.

[rhobi]

hee hee drawing pokermans is fun :)

[booty-uprooter]

i know about computers and it turns out the new pokermans are glitchy because the numbers are doing this the whole time

[agoobersretreat]

examine: ur favorite pokerman

That is such a tough answer! There is only one try answer, but everyone you've ever told either gives you a weird look or just doesn't get it. Not that they have to, it's your favorite for your own reasons!

It's Krabby, obviously~.