pok tcg 0.0.3

Milestone 3 is here.

New this milestone:

• Deck builder! You can build your own deck instead of using the starter decks. I released a 0.2.1 for a reason. It makes the game way more fun. A few minor quality of life additions are also there since that release as well. I know it can be intimidating if you've never played before but after getting a hang of the rules please consider giving it a try.
• All (but two) of the cards from the base set have been implemented! Including most of the promos from the era.
  • Fossil Ditto and Base Set Electrode are the only two non-promo cards missing from this milestone and it might stay that way, unfortunately. There are many use cases that make their Pokémon Powers especially difficult to account for. If you're that curious I'd be happy to give you a taste of that madness. Since the Gameboy game also didn't include these cards for probably similar reasons, as much as I would have loved to have every card I decided to not be a hero for the sake of my sanity. I'm sorry. I've failed you.
• There's player portraits and you can choose between a few different coin options.
• There's damage and status condition animations now. It should help to follow what's going on with attacks. Additionally more attack effects have icons.
• The AI makes much smarter attack choices now. Previously it would just choose the second attack if it could use it. On the back-end, it does way more to access if an attack is useful.

What's next?

Milestone 4 will focus on finalizing* the ai. At present it still makes a lot of sub-optimal decisions as far as Pokémon selection and trainer usage. The new AI will score cards in its deck based on how useful they are in the current context, and will make way better decisions on picking an Active Pokémon, how it decides which Pokémon to set up, and what cards to search for from the deck.

*"Finalizing" is probably a strong word. I'm sure the AI will continue to be tweaked and improved throughout the life span of the project. But card priority should be the final stretch of what I know for sure needs to be fixed about it. My philosophy behind a lot of the AI to this point has been "Good enough for now." For this milestone, no more placeholders.

It's also the beautification milestone! Gone will be all these Unity-standard buttons and panels, the default blue background, and yes, the Arial font.  I like to tell people I'm good at UI/UX and it will finally be time to actually prove that.

Also now that the first three sets are finished, with Milestone 4 comes the important and difficult question of what other sets to add. Base Set, Jungle, and Fossil are considered by many to be the true "original" Pokémon TCG experience.  I at least want to keep the out the power creep of later sets, but intelligent minds can disagree on when that creep became noticeable. Milestone 3 was the main milestone for adding new cards, so there will be less of a focus on it, but what cards to add will be something I continue to consider for the foreseeable future of the project. Each new milestone I will probably add at least a few, if not entire sets even.

Finally, this is also the first upcoming milestone where I'm really not sure what comes after it. Milestone 4 is everything I explicitly set out to do two months ago. It could very well be 0.1.0. I have some ideas for actually starting to make a gbc fan game, but a full-on rpg overworld would be very far removed from what I've been working on so far. Unless maybe Milestone 5 is the all move animations milestone? Or maybe adding the tutorial? ...I don't know. It's something I'll be further considering as I work on this milestone.

As usual let me know if you find any bugs. I admit I didn't do the full job of qa-ing every new card I've added, so I'm sure there are some to be found.  If you do, please hit me up and I'll most likely hotfix it.