{"id":585,"date":"2012-07-31T13:39:53","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T13:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/?p=585"},"modified":"2017-03-04T06:21:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-04T06:21:03","slug":"ambition-version-8%e2%99%a6-is-now-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/?p=585","title":{"rendered":"Ambition: version 8\u2666 is now out."},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest rules for Ambition are here<\/a>. Mostly, the changes are simplifications to the scoring system in order to increase the game’s mass appeal and, hopefully, virality. I don’t believe that I’ve compromised on the game design in doing so; the intrinsic<\/em> strategic complexity remains, but the cognitive overload associated with the scoring system has been trimmed back a bit.<\/p>\n

I’m planning, after years of delinquency on this matter, to release an online version late this year, but I’ve wanted to get the rules to a steady state before doing so. This iteration, I am pretty sure, is or is near the final one, at least as far as the core rules go. There are a few unresolved questions that I have about the scoring system, but I’m going to wait until I have real data (from players, not simulations) before making those calls.<\/p>\n

The roadmap from here looks like this. Currently, I’m working on a command-line console version– an embarrassing minimal viable product (“MVP”)– that I plan on releasing this August. The source code will be on Github and open-source; card games themselves are rather trivial to implement, so there’s no point in hiding that code. The first iteration will be a tutorial (with players making random legal moves) more than a game, designed with the intent of helping people learn Ambition interactively rather than from a dry rules document.<\/p>\n

After “launching” this MVP, the next project will be to create real players for a single-player version. As for AI, I have a machine-learning approach in mind that I think will work. That might take a month or two (since this is purely a weekend side project) to implement and run, but I’d like to have that together by mid-autumn. This means there\u00a0should be real AI players. I have no idea whether they’ll be any good at the game. I may crowd-fund this by creating a KickStarter project to solve the AI problem and giving a percentage away to the person who writes the best player.<\/p>\n

After that, I’ll start working on the front-end (like, a real app) of the game, noting that most people are not interested in downloading a command-line card game, and also that people prefer to play against real people rather than AI. I’ve been doing back-end software for my whole career so I have no idea what that will entail or how difficult it will be, but I look forward to the learning experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest rules for Ambition are here. Mostly, the changes are simplifications to the scoring system in order to increase the game’s mass appeal and, hopefully, virality. I don’t believe that I’ve compromised on the game design in doing so; the intrinsic strategic complexity remains, but the cognitive overload associated with the scoring system has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sep-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasamat.xen.prgmr.com\/michaelochurch\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}