Multiplayer corporate strategy card game with verb-grammar engine, AI opponent, batch simulation, and spreadsheet-driven content pipeline.
7 lessons
When building an AI opponent for a strategy game, express its decision-making as a single weights table that scores every legal action. This table simultaneously defines AI behavior and serves as a balance tuning surface — changing one number shifts both how the AI plays and how the game feels.
A circular advantage mechanic (A beats B beats C beats D beats A) creates asymmetric matchups from symmetric starting positions. The modifier can be small (+1/-1) and still be load-bearing if it touches enough systems — attacks, defenses, public effects, SWOT traits, and upgrade synergies.
Define a small, fixed grammar of mechanical verbs and make every game effect a data declaration using those verbs. This keeps the engine small and testable while allowing card variety to scale independently of code complexity.
When mid-project discoveries require new work that doesn't fit the original phase structure, insert interstitial phases (3.5, 6.5) rather than renumbering downstream phases. This preserves commit history references, plan file anchors, and team communication while accommodating scope changes.
For games and complex interactive systems, unit tests verify correctness but batch simulation verifies balance. Run N automated games, record metrics, and treat the first run's numbers as a baseline. Future changes must either match the baseline or explain the deviation.
When game content is authored by designers in spreadsheets, build a one-way generator script that converts the spreadsheet into schema-validated data files. The spreadsheet stays authoritative; the generated files are artifacts. This separates content authoring from code and catches errors at genera...
Model every distinct "what is the UI waiting for?" moment as an explicit state in an enum. The state machine eliminates the most common game UI bugs — wrong input handled at the wrong time, dialogs that don't dismiss, and turn phases that skip or repeat — by making the set of valid transitions expli...