Milestone 4 - UI and AI (old)

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Milestone 4! Finally! 

New this Milestone:

• The UI looks way better now! Like really, looking back at Milestone 3 I can't imagine how I ever thought that looked ok.
• Massive opponent AI improvements. A lot of them will probably be hard or impossible to see, but behind the scenes the AI is a lot more robust. The AI is now able to use all trainer cards and Pokémon powers, and is now much smarter about the ones it already could use. It prioritizes the cards it its deck and will search for cards based on priority. It will assess the duel more in choosing active Pokémon. Really so many changes, trust me, it took forever. While it may not be completely "finished" all that should have to be tweaked now is individual numbers.
• Technically a downgrade, there are a few less options on the duel setup screen. You can no longer change your opponent's avatar directly, though now each deck has an associated avatar. Also you can no longer choose a number of prize cards, in playtesting I got the feedback that people would just pick 6 cards anyway. The feature is still in place, and will return later, but for now 6 prizes works fine. In exchange the main menu looks much less cluttered.
• Bug Fixes. SO MANY bug fixes. Like god damn so many. I knew adding so many cards in bulk would cause some bugs but wow I can't believe I thought milestone 3 could even be considered stable.  A big thanks to Regi_Grass on pokecommunity for running a pretty thorough QA on pretty much every card.
• Over 30 new cards. These coming from the Rocket set, and the Japanese-exclusive Intro and Expansion Sheet sets. There are now more cards in this than there were in the original gbc game. You may notice that nearly all of these cards have effects that are simple or similar to those already in the game. When new sets are added in the future, simpler cards will usually arrive first as they can be added without any additional coding. As mentioned in a previous milestone, I won't be focusing on adding new cards for the foreseeable future, still you can expect each new update to add at least a few.

What's Next?

I did say Milestone 4 would be all of what I initially set out to make, but I've since realized there's still a lot of final touches to add. This time for sure. ...Probably... There's a lot still to do:

Music and sound effects! I should be able to do some passable foley work but the music will probably either be ripped from the gbc game or be creative commons tracks. I'm not a composer.

Card animation! Cards will move around the screen as you place them. This will make following the opponent's turn much easier without having to look at the duel log.

A better UI for showing cards to an opponent. I've sort of been waiting for card animation to work on that.

Fixing the glow and shadow on cards. I'm still using the Milestone 1 solution for that which now looks pretty ugly. The fix in Unity is harder than you'd think. I'll try to get to that this time.

Increased resolution on the cards. Some cards are grainy. Some cards are crooked. Nearly all of them have non-transparent corners. Next milestone all of that will be fixed.

Deck save slots. Just like in the gbc game, you will be able to save four decks at a time and switch between them. This will probably mean not being able to choose from as many deck options as the opponent anymore, though some default decks will be available.

A start on card inventory. Right now you have 99 of each card, but soon you'll have much less and only be able to add a few of each card to your decks. Once we get to v0.1 (probably milestone 6 or 7), you won't start with all the cards and have to play trainers for booster packs to get more. This is the start of working towards that system. Milestone 6 just might be the start of the overworld! Hoo boy, expect that to look awful! I've already begun to fall into the trap of thinking about what I want the macro game to be. I have to at least get there before I do that. Soon though.