Within 24 hours, Forgotten Lore will be launched as a 1.0 product, and be free to play. I hope everyone who plays it has a good time, and can give me some constructive feedback! This patch before release includes the following changes:

• Some minor bug fixes and text fixes
• A convolutional neural network trained by every player is now powering the bots.

wait what

So I've spent some free time getting my feet wet with AI stuffs. tl;dr I implemented what I've learned so far in Forgotten Lore.

How it works

When any player starts up a match and is connected to the internet, they automatically download a "brain" package, which Forgotten Lore can decrypt and parse as a neural network. When players make any move at all, their movements are back propagated through the network, to slowly train it to become more like a human player. If the bot loses, the player must have done something right! Their weights in the network are delta'd, encoded, and sent back to the server to be weighted as real changes to the AI that all players can face. The idea is that, given enough matches, the bot will actually be a viable opponent. If the bot becomes to strong, I'll go in and make adjustments to give it variety. If you're offline, the game will generate a brain file that is stored to your local PC, and playing against the bot will actually train your own personal bot. This isn't really meant to be a big feature, just a quick fix in case your internet goes down before you start a match with a bot. However if there is demand I could turn this into a more fleshed out feature of the game.

so, yeah

I hope you guys like this change. If it turns out to not work out, I can revert back to the traditional game AI and work from there. But if it does, we'll end up with some of the best card game AI in modern gaming. I hope you guys are having fun. Thanks for reading!

[ 2017-09-28 04:15:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

What is Forgotten Lore?

Forgotten Lore is an online trading card game. It features dueling with random matchmaking, playing with friends, in game chat, and of course card trading between players. Every card is a Steam Inventory item, which can be traded and/or put on the marketplace. Players set their own rules - we will stay out of trading as much as possible.

Collect souls to summon spirits, use your spirits to crush your opponents. Take their tomes both to gain power and to learn more about the story. The game is based in a world far away from our own - in another time. So far away that most of it's lore has been lost to time. Battle after battle, the secrets of the world will reveal themselves to you.

Gameplay

Each player can create their own deck of up to 64 pages, or cards. Place your pages into a Tome, and your deck will be born. Each Tome has it's own unique ability. For example, the default tome card is Leech - which hurts the user by 1 HP every turn, but giving them 2 souls (for summoning cards) in exchange. Another is Mill, which allows summoners to eat away at their own deck for souls. Nothing gained or lost each turn, only what they choose to sacrifice from their own hand.

On a player's turn, he/she is able to summon cards, use magic cards, attack the other player's cards or the other player directly. Each player starts with 64 HP, so the goal is to get their HP to zero. With a wide variety of cards with their own unique abilities, the ways to go about it are endless.

The game features a sacrificial system, to summon powerful cards at the expensive of weaker cards (or alternatively - just summoning the stronger cards at a super high soul cost). There are status effects, such as poison, burn, freeze, etc. Overheal also is a big part of the game - healing beyond the normal limitations of a card's abilities.