Since my last post, I’ve now added an analysis mode to the game. The primary function of the analysis mode would be for post match review, but I will look into some ways of integrating it into gameplay in a limited/optional fashion. I also plan to implement showing the win rate updates as well as the AI suggested following variation when hovering over a move.
I also made some updates to the campaign map and have it setup to allow the player to conquer territories by winning Go matches. The campaign also now saves the match history for each location and allows previous games to be reviewed. I will be exploring ways incentivize reviewing matches, especially after losses by giving the player additional “resources”.
Did some further work with AI analysis data this week in order to visualize territory and win rate based on live data being received during analysis. Both of these can be toggled on or off in addition to the optimal moves visualization I posted last week. In the future, I also plan to implement showing the AI suggested variation when hovering over an AI suggested move. These features are mainly intended to be used during game review or one off matches, but I plan to have them as a limited optional ability during campaign mode that can be used but also come with tradeoffs.
Traditionally, macOS players make up a small fraction of the overall user-base on steam. In a perfect world, I would like to support it, but it’s just not as feasible, and it is commonly a lesson learned from other developers releasing on Steam that supporting macOS was financially a bad investment.
So I guess it will also not be available for Linux?
My hope is that it would be Wine compatible at least. Linux is an even smaller population, at .82% of users on Steam for 2019. Testing and ensuring compatibility is especially difficult with the number of ways Linux can be setup. The devs of Descenders, a game released last year, reported that their Linux sales were less than 1%, but the percentage of support for tech issues for Linux ended up being closer to 50%. Again, the audience for that game is pretty different, but its still a smaller population.
Two new updates since my last post. The campaign will now show the final state of each match when clicking on them in the battle summary. From there you can decide to review the match, and optionally use the AI features. I plan to build upon this in the future an populate the battle aftermath (final match state) with buildings inside of the territories.
A couple new AI features were added as well, logging the score estimates and also showing variations for each AI suggested move. The score graph can be more useful than win rate estimates, especially in the case of handicap matches, where making a suboptimal move which results in a loss of points may not even affect the win rate if the player is too far ahead.
I began integrating with the OGS API this week for online multiplayer. In this clip you can see the interaction of a player on the OGS website playing against a player within the game. There are still many features to implement, but authorization, gathering game details, and sending/receiving moves are functional. The intent isn’t to reproduce every OGS feature, but at least the main ones allowing for gameplay, chat, etc.
I’ll need to disable obvious things such as AI assistance during online play, but I am wondering your thoughts on other features that may give an unfair advantage to players in the game vs. players on the website. One that comes to mind are the graphics for the castle theme which shows stones connected to each other with walls, and also changes the stones graphics while in atari. The other that comes to mind is the shape detection summary to the right which shows the name of a shape if it occurs, and when hovered over it will give some information about the move/shape. I think at a certain level these features are pretty much meaningless in terms of advantage, but at a beginner level, being told a stone is in atari when you don’t immediately recognize it yet could give the player an advantage. I could implement it either way (leave as-is or remove features for online play) but I’m curious as to how you guys feel on that topic.
Thank you for the concernes, that is very considerate. Personally I would not really mind either of the functions, but am sure some players would and they have every right to, so disabling them might save a lot of unpleasantries.
the atari detection is probably the most objectionable advantage.
the shape info kind of depends I guess. If it just tells you the name of of the shape after you have played it, I would not see anything too bad about that. If it also lists potential weaknesses or poking points, that might be a divisive topic.
I would not bother changing the graphics of connected stones personally.
Those are my opinions anyway, hopefully more people will voice theirs.
Thanks for the feedback! It is indeed tough to please everyone, so going the disable route will probably lead to less unpleasantries, and would be the safer route. The shape information is intended to give a short description and some pros/cons to the shape. It also lists atari as one of the shapes, so it’s probably in the same realm of advantage as the atari graphics being shown.
It looks really cool. I was always wondering why no one work on a RPG game about go. (After all, many SLG games are similar to the chess style.) This is wonderful initiation. I will keep eyes on it.
Ps. SRPG/TRPG genre may also fit the your (future) plan.
This week I put together the UI to connect to OGS and look through the live and correspondence matches that are active, with the ability to join and spectate them. The match count and move numbers for each match update live similar to the website. I also added icons for bots and OGS supporters, so hopefully some people may want to get that icon next to their name too when they start playing. For spectating, I will leave the features such as atari graphics and shape detection enabled since you’re not an active player in the game that would be getting an advantage from the features.
This week was focused on implementing chat for online matches as shown in the clip below. It also includes the list of users that have joined the chat (match players or spectators) which updates as people come and go. I also began development this week on the system for creating and accepting challenges for online matches, which I hope to share next week.
Thanks! It’ll be a mix of both. The original goal was solely offline and was intending to be a way to learn the rules of Go, terminology, and basic strategies to play against AI in a way that rewards improvement by playing matches, reviewing matches, and completing tsumego through a campaign mode. I’ll still be following through on the offline features, but more recently I’ve decided to integrate with OGS for online play, as playing humans is important. So it’ll have local play, a campaign mode, and online play. It’ll be up to the player to decide which area they want to focus on.
This week was again focused on online multiplayer, and a new UI was built to show the available challenges, allowing the player to view and accept them. This is similar to the functionality found on the OGS “Play” page. I still need to build the UI for creating a game/challenge though. I also did some extra work on the active games list in order to shorten some of the length match names for tournaments and ladder matches (seen at the end of the clip). I’ve replaced some of the verbiage with icons and tooltips in order to keep things a little more concise.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been seeing their development posts on the /r/baduk subreddit for about a month or so. There are definitely some similarities, but two big differences are that theirs will be a web-based experience, and will be a new Go server, not integrating with an existing one such as OGS.
I’ve decided to change the name of the game to The Conquest of Go and have made the corresponding changes to the main menu this week. The clip below also shows a new feature, the Community Spotlight, which I plan to use to periodically promote Go community members and content creators, such as Go Pro Yeonwoo who is shown in the clip. It’ll probably be mostly focused on educational content creators to help people find new avenues to learn about Go. The buttons at the bottom are links that will open the corresponding social media site in a web browser. Once the notification is dismissed, it won’t come back until a new content creator is featured.
Along with the new name, I am hoping to publish the Steam store page next week after I’ve completed the trailer and Steam has reviewed the page.
Now that the name has changed, does anyone know if mods are able to edit forum post titles? “The Conquest of Go - A Videogame featuring Go Gameplay” would be what I’d like to change it to, but if not, I can always start a new post.
