Alpha 1, IMG jam 39

I’ve worked on what became Companhita on and off since I came up with the idea for Ludum Dare 2023. It's a role reversal of deckbuilder grid tactics games like Alina of the Arena and Fights in Tight Spaces. 

The boss is the one who plays cards (and does a little deckbuilding during the fight.)

Whereas you control a small team of simple characters, who automatically attack at end of turn and in response to stuff the boss does.

I’m particularly proud of the boss AI, which uses the rewind function to efficiently search through all the possible states the board could be in at the end of its turn. If you happen to film it acting stupid (except when it’s cornered and going to lose anyways), please show me. The way it calculates how good a board state is is still pretty up in the air.

Clarity and Quality of Life

Made a lot of improvements that Hopefully will let people play it without me being involved.

Tutorial + glossary + advice document.

Better threat visuals.

Made sprites for one person per class. Some characters use just darkened copies of other people of the same class. Sprites definitely aren’t final.

Made Rush! More user friendly. (you used to need to toggle it off again to use other actions)

Added tooltips for buttons.

Health bars resize to match max health.

Basic animations:

moving, getting pushed.

dodging (Alleycat ability)

(An important thing I didn't have time to is, animations for attacks. To make particularly reaction attacks clearer. But there’s no time to add that in a way that’ll continue being useful after I start adding custom animations to different actions.)

Error checking

This one is gonna need some background.

The boss AI functions by making a copy of the game state and then playing out all possible versions of the boss’s turn. It uses the rewind system to make that faster. Like it can do three actions, check, rewind the last, do a different last action, check, rewind again, etc. Instead of making many duplicates and running one sequence of actions in each.

So I need to be very sure that doing an action and then rewinding it doesn’t change the board state, and that when running an action in the background like that, it will act the exact same way as it will when it’s run in the state the player sees.

Recent and future changes require these checks to be more thorough and tidy.

- There were some asserts failing, that I couldn’t figure out the reason for.

- There’s no animations and other bells and whistles on actions yet, but as I start adding those, that means there’s more difference between how actions are done in the visible version of the state vs in copies, easier to make mistakes.

- I want to add a system for characters entering and leaving the board, and resting outside the board.

The new thing is that actions the player or AI take, as well as things that happen as part of the turn order (e.g. health recovery, reaction attacks), go through a node that makes sure the same things is happening in a copy of the game state state, and then checks that they still look equivalent afterwards. Practically, this means:

- it checks at a lot more different times than before, so it’ll usually tell me closer to the thing that went wrong.

- it only resets the copy once per round. That means there’s time for errors in things that aren’t checked to stick around and affect things that are checked.

- it now properly tests rewinding. Before an action is taken, it makes a copy of the board state. If you rewind afterwards without taking any other actions, it checks that the rewinded state is equal to the copy.

- All of this should be disabled if the game is not in debug mode.

Small fixes

Fixed removed cards sometimes staying in the deck, but with no associated UI object, so it would look like the boss drew too few cards.

Fixed characters removed from the board (and put off-screen) affecting each other. Now they’re super far apart.

Fixed the game not properly registering changes to the reaction attack triggers of characters.

Added a menu on Esc. For now it’s just credits and licenses.

Improved the process for making previews of actions

It’s still lacking a lot, but I improved the system for positioning the sprites a lot. The card Divide would have been impossible to show in the old system.

Known bugs

Characters will sometimes turn to face the boss when they shouldn’t (polearms before they’ve been turned), or fail to turn when they should (Assistant after she’s used Langrage Cannon). This doesn’t affect gameplay.