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coderKillo15 days ago(+1)

Very cool idea for a poker game. I just think the AI and balancing need some work.

1. After initial bet Abe always calls my stuff a bluff.
2. Abe not seem to use the reroll mechanic (at least in my playtrough)
3. Adding chips to the pool for re rolling is pretty broken. Because I could just re roll till I get a better hand and not lose anything because I win the chips back. Of cause this only works If I have a lead but it was my go to strategy and worked every time.

I like the art work of abe and the mix of 2d and 3d elements :)

Great work for the short time span!

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checkmate10115 days ago

Hey thanks for the feedback! I did the code on the AI decision script, and I can see where you are coming from. Abe tends to call aggressively if he thinks a certain claim is not "believable" - what this often translated to is that anytime you get a "good" initial roll (like a 3 of a kind even), Abe won't believe you.

It could be that you got lucky and had pretty good rolls throughout, but also his reroll action is pretty noiseless - partly because the dice are far away (lol) but mostly because I should have had a big UI banner that announced the various turns and actions. 

But also your comment on the reroll being broken is probably accurate too - if you reroll enough, you are likely to get the higher hand, but also your bluff becomes more believable on a math standpoint - so a human would see you on your last couple chips and conclude you were bluffing (even without body language tells), but Abe sees you rolled 7 times which makes it more likely to him that you ended up with a Full House :) So you kinda win either way with that strategy.

I'd be curious to compare notes further on how I can improve this, but don't feel obligated.

But thanks very much for the feedback and the compliments too!

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coderKillo15 days ago(+1)

First I think the game needs to be balanced and then you can work on a AI.
in the game of dice + poker I see a few problems:
1. Poker relies on the concept that you can "guess" what the enemy has based on 2 factors: The cards on your Hand + Table and how they bet. This only works because the cards are limited. So you don't can have 2 times 4 of Kings. This does not work in a dice game.
2. In Poker you reveal the card on the table one by one giving each player the opportunity to Bet
3. The cards in Poker have far more combinations then dices. So it is harder to tell if your hand is "bad" or not

I would suggest to either change the game to a other dice game with lying or add some meta mechanics outside the dice poker.
E.g. instead of making rerolling a part of the game, make it kind of a cheat. The player could distract Abe and reroll the dice, this needs to be balanced with a kind of downside if he got caught of cause. Or If you lie you have to win a kind of starring contest mini game.

Other dice game that comes to mind is Meier. 
https://redcupshop.com/en/pages/trinkspiel-maexchen-meiern

It is a common party game in germany and uses dices + a believe/lie mechanic. The game also has very few rules which can make it easy to implement.

Good AI in my opinion has 2 criteria: 
- Deterministic so  the player can s strategize around it
- Random so the player can not predict it

Depending on the game these need to be balanced. 

For a strategy game the AI must strategize. So think a few steps ahead. Then validate it by a criteria (in this case for example if he wins or losses chips). This can be done for X amount of times for a random decisions and then choose the best strategy or for all possibilities (if this is not to resource heavy) and then randomly select out of the best X.

There is alot of stuff to learn when it comes to game AI and I also only touched the surface :D so there is probably better methods out there.

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checkmate10115 days ago

Hmm this is good to go through, thank you for taking the time. Thanks for sharing the Meier game, I'll look to see what I can learn and emulate from that idea. There are actually 2 different implementations of dice bluffing games here in the jam that I've found that both have slightly different rules - but they follow your pattern in that they are more based on the total numbers of dice rolled vs the combination of hands.

I didn't invent my rules - actually I modeled the game off a variation of Liar's Dice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_dice#:~:text=%5B3%5D-,Common%20hand,-edit

In my current implementation there are only 36 possible outcomes of the two private dice, and a limited number of hands possible. This was small enough to be easy for a game jam, but probably has a lot of balance issues and lack of combinations. Staying within the confines of these rules, some things I could add would be the ability of a player to reroll 1 die instead of both, or the ability to reroll part/all of the pool dice in certain circumstances, or allow same-rank claims that could be decided by strength of the dice or a kicker. If I leaned a little farther outside, I could implement a larger system of betting that makes more sense outside of reroll, or introduce outside systems like different abilities or types of dice, minigames or cheats to try to distract either player.

You've given me a lot to think about too, in that maybe the premise of this game is flawed - could be good experience in the game jam to take into the next project without trying to turn it into anything by itself.

Regarding the AI - this one was a completely deterministic algorithm, but with the constraint of time I tried to make it as not-stupid as I could, so it looks at a couple different factors based on the probability of the hand, the believability, and the chips at stake. But it is completely lacking any randomness. 

The major flaw is also a lack of strategic awareness - every round is its own calculation. 

If I were to redo everything from scratch:

  • Hand definitions would have built in ranking (don't ask, the code is gross)
  • Probabilities would be retained in numeric value that can be operated against at a granular level (I precomputed and bucketed possible hands into decision points)
  • Personality would have an impact on calculations
  • Player behavior would weight certain decisions
  • There would be strategic decision making to allow the AI to fold on a bad hand early to get better initial luck, downplay claims to drive up the pot for a good hand, read player intent to bluff.

You are right that there is a lot that can go into it. It's probably pretty clear that most of my wishlist comes back to a good architecture to calculate hands etc. and better balance on how chips are risked in the pot and won. Then interesting decisions can be made when that is solid.

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coderKillo15 days ago(+1)

Ah yes I know Lair's Dice. You could also just use the basic version.
I don't know the Common Hand version but it seems like the player has 5 private dices and no table dices.
I also don't know about the rerolling part. I could not find a kind of video online but in my head rerolling as part of the game makes it kind of broken.
 

The cool thing about the normal version is that it uses all dices, so also the enemy dices. So you could have 4 fours but still lose because there where 5 fours. And you have to taken into account the enemies bets for strategy. The common hand version is a bit more guessing and luck.

There are also other games that uses Lair Dice (Red Dead Redemption had it as mini game if I remember correctly).

The re implementation of the AI sounds pro messing. If you want any playtest for futur iteration, just dm me. I maybe not checking my itch every day if there is no active jam so response might take a while :D

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checkmate10115 days ago

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I learn a ton from participating in the jams, especially from all the feedback!

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