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Very interesting! This kind of game is right up my alley, though against the AI it feels weird. It feels like the second player has an advantage, as approaching the other player is way worse than being approached. If you're the one who comes into range, your opponent gets the first strike which is deadly. The AI just kinda sits back and waits for me to walk into its trap. Thankfully it's dumb and falls for my same cycling 1 trick to boost the rest of my team to 9 easily, but it feels very weird. Even against another human I feel like this game would just stalemate we both sit on either sides of the board doing nothing waiting for the other, there's no real incentive or drive to be an aggressor like that, it seems.

And it's often very difficult to tell what happened during the AI's turn because it all just happens instantly after you make your move. If you attack an AI tower, dealing damage to the tower and potentially yourself (changing two values already and possibly deleting either tower), then the AI instantaneously makes their move, which could be to attack with someone else, swap around their pieces, place down the piece you just defeated, etc. which can be really confusing very quickly. There were a lot of points where even with careful examination I had no idea what even happened in the enemy turn.

Your splash says "Welcome to the ugly landing page of Half-Pipe Mega Star." BTW ;)

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Thanks a lot for your detailed review! I agree that in the end it didn't work out. I tried to get around the stalemate problem by rewarding attacking, but I didn't realise soon enough that you have to put a tower in danger first before you are able to do some damage. So you always have to use one tower as bait/pressure and have one ready as backup to retaliate any attack. I haven't figured out yet how much strategy is possible with the current rule set or how to improve it without changing it completely.

At some point I had thought about towers of higher levels being able to move farther, but from the beginning I had the AI as a key concept in mind because I never have implemented a computer player before. And I was very aware that increased movement options would add so many possible moves the AI would have to consider, so it would possibly be several orders of magnitude slower. So I figured I'd have to go for a more sophisticated approach, one that would never fit within the 9 hour limit.

I also agree about the confusion you bring up. Wanted to include some animations so you see what's happening, but didn't have enough time to do so. Well, next time I'm definitely going back to something more simple. Lesson learned I guess. :D

And thanks for spotting that left over in the landing page!

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I still think this was a very successful prototype, it's very cool and impressive :)

The AI implementation is really awesome, that's not an easy task!