09.02.2024

Well this is looking (and sounding) much better! I'm going to go ahead and call this a milestone 0.1 version release. The game is fully playable (in the classic sense). I've got lots of plans for the future but the "basic" video poker game is live. How much money can you make? Check the stats on the right hand side to see if you can beat your high score.

I am finally getting comfortable with Godot as a former Unity user. I knew I was maturing when I was watching a tutorial video and noticed an error before the speaker did (perhaps it was a softball to show common errors).

Big implementation - sounds and music (most helpful tutorial). Implemented a settings menu to change the volumes and an amusing (to me) animation to show and hide the settings menu. For some reason this looks like trash on Itch.io so sorry about that. Very happy with having a bit of a sound track and some audio feedback for most items. As I've added buttons I'll need to incorporate those sounds. I am using buttons a lot which fit the theme alright - but there are some items that I would rather have as an image. Godot does have a Texture button which I'll need to investigate. Would be handy to use for a quick "mute" button for example.

Fixed most of the bugs from the previous version. I had some issues with managing cards as they moved from the deck, to the hand, to a discard pile, and then back to the deck. I implemented these as arrays rather than dictionaries which are slightly less friendly for my use case (removing specific cards, adding new one, managing order, etc.). I was able to manage this by creating new arrays etc. but it is probably more trouble than its worth and I should have used a Dictionary or a Stack. I spent much too long trying to debug a loop through an array that was concurrently trying to modify the array.

Shaders are awesome. Seriously - go look at the black magic these geniuses have conjured. I am very happy with how the background turned out which was very easy to implement and modify. I made it a bit slower and made the color a bit more green (believe the default is more red) which I think fits the casino theme better.

Statistics / trackers are implemented. One of the big deals with video poker machines is being able to discern your likely return based on the pay table. Naturally casinos don't advertise this unless it's a high rate. I think it will be fun to see your own progress as you play the game.

The economy is 50% baked. Credits are implemented as is money. These are simple variables and easy to implement but conceptually are pretty cool. The ratio between money and credits is based on the denomination of the machine you are playing. If you are playing a dollar machine, then each credit is worth $1 so easy conversion. In this current build, each credit is worth one penny ($0.01) and you start with $5.00. This will tie into the story in coming releases.

I implemented a Kanban board another genius released which dramatically improved my organization (two .txt files, multiple notebooks, and whatever I hadn't yet written down). If you are working on your own game in godot, I cannot recommend this highly enough. I don't want to share all the future plans just yet but will try to post a screen shot of how I am using it. There are 3 main sections and I think about this as:

1. "On the list to do at some point" - this is a catch all for everything that I want to do.
2. "Currently working on" - what items I want to work on in the immediate future.
3. "Done" - after items are finished they get archived here.

The color coding is also helpful so I have sections for "UI", "bugs", etc. You can reorder and move cards around at any point - very user friendly.