Inafune and Starcraft Genetic Algorithms (unrelated)

Inafune Leaves Capcom

Here's a long interview with Inafune about leaving Capcom. He was, until recently, their head of development. One of his main points is that having a huge burn rate is bad. A burn rate is the amount of money you must pay to keep paying your team. This is exactly the point I've made for years, and I've kept my own company at the smallest possible burn rate I can.

If you have a large payroll to meet every month, the good part is that you probably have a lot of great workers who can accomplish a lot of great things. But there is a real bad part too. It means you must have projects going all the time. If it would be better for a project to do a long planning phase of several months before going into production, you'll be wasting everyone's salary by having them sit around and wait for planning. If you are a company that sets up deals with other companies for development (for example, you are a developer who gets paid by a publisher to make a game, or you're a publisher who looks for developers to make games for you), then a high burn rate means you need to make those deals by a certain date or there is going to be a disaster. If you have a horrible deal on the table, you might be forced to take it because waiting 2 months might be astronomically expensive.

Also, a high burn rate means that a huge return is needed to break even. If you need to sell a huge number of copies to just break even, it means you're going to be more afraid to take risks. Even if you say otherwise as you sit in your comfortable arm chair right now, free from any actual responsibility, if you were in such a position, you can't help but think that a risk could destroy the whole company when the stakes are that high. And if you aren't thinking that, your executives are. Being forced into "hit or die" is not great for creativity, and we'd hope that our industry is about creativity. In short, I totally agree with Inafune on that particular point, that a high burn rate is a very dangerous.

Starcraft 2

I thought this use of genetic algorithms looking for build orders in Starcraft 2 was really interesting. It seems like a good area to apply genetic algorithms, and I've imagined such a thing for years, but I never heard of anyone actually doing it.

The idea is to have a computer try a whole bunch of build orders and rate them on "fitness" (how close they are to a desired outcome of like "build a lot of marines by time X" or something. The ones that are fit, the computer tends to keep; the ones that aren't, it tends to discard. There are mutations over time that test if this or that variation helps or hurts. There are also several "villages" of these algorithms that are running independently, so if one stagnates at some evolutionary dead end, the whole thing is replaced by a new village that's based on the most successful other village.

The algorithm found a new (or at least previously not popular) build order to create 7 Roach units very, very quickly. The build order is kind of unintuitive, so it's exactly the kind of thing that a genetic algorithm would be good at finding. Pretty cool!

End of First Run Puzzle Strike

Orders for the current version of Puzzle Strike will end around October 31st, and then I'll transition to taking pre-orders for the second printing (and for Yomi, by the way).

A few things about the current and second printing. Both versions have the same game data on the chips. The latest sets from the current run switched to a different printing method after hearing many complaints about blurry chips or wrong-colored chips. Now, large sheets of wood are covered with a white label sheet , and printing is on THAT, so that it turns out brighter and less blurry. Then whole thing is cut into circular chips so that the image is exactly edge-to-edge with nothing hanging off the edge or anything like that.

Also, every single chip back is now laser engraved! This upgrade is partly to avoid using the printing hardware that had such variation in quality, but actually the original plan was to laser engrave them anyway as a perk. The regular version has a fancy "PS" engraved while the bigger chips of the deluxe have the Puzzle Strike logo engraved.

Orders for the current version of Puzzle Strike will end up shipping in the first, second, and third week of November, depending on when the order was placed and where you happen to live.

The second printing will be on chipboard, not on wood like the current sets. It's pretty thick chipboard though, 1/8th of an inch, and still very sturdy. It will be $59.99, which is $15 cheaper than the current regular version, and also have free shipping in the US, so that's actually more than $25 cheaper for most people in total. International shipping will be more expensive than before for several countries (sorry), but the game will also finally be available to retailers through standard channels, so if you tell your local hobby shops (in any country) to carry it, they'll be able to stock it like any product. sirlin.net/contact to get info on ordering as a retailer or distributor.

The ship date has kept slipping due to the specs being being refined and iterated several times. At first the Yomi cards were going to be printed on very thick cards, but after consulting with players, I changed the spec to a thinner card with a sturdy core (similar thickness to playing cards), and with playing card coating. Playing cards are they way they are for a reason, and it makes them easy to shuffle and more durable than the standard uncoated, less bendy CCG cards.

There was also some iteration on getting just the right material for Yomi playmats, for aligning the box art just right on Puzzle Strike, getting the internal storage tray for Puzzle Strike to go exactly to the top of the box so that you can turn it upside down without making the chips go everywhere inside, for revising the rulebook of Puzzle Strike at the last moment to match www.sirlin.net/ps/rules (with a change to a FAQ entry for Lum's Poker Winnings), and like 100 other details that all needed approving. It was honestly long and grueling.

Because of all that, the ship date might end up being January. I think December is still doable, and it might be before Christmas if we're lucky, but it would be safer to just claim January and then be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be early. Whenever it is, all orders of Puzzle Strike and Yomi will ship at the same time though, it won't be a trickling out of orders over time as the current Puzzle Strike has been. It will be so great to have lots of inventory and reasonable shipping times once this new stuff is ready.

So again, you have until around October 31st for orders of the current version of Puzzle Strike, then you can expect pre-orders for the second printing to replace that. And Yomi pre-orders at about that same time.

Advantage Time in Fighting Games

When I see new players try a 3D fighting game such as Soul Calibur or Virtua Fighter, they often have trouble understanding advantage time. The concept matters in 2d fighting games like Street Fighter and Guilty Gear as well, but because 2d games tend to have so much emphasis on zoning and controlling space, advantage time is more of a concept for intermediates or experts, rather than a thing beginners get crushed by. (They are too busy getting crushed by fireball traps or rushdown!)

What is Advantage Time?

In a fighting game, advantage time is the length of time (usually measured in 1/60ths of a second, called frames) that you recover from your attack *before* the opponent recovers from blocking (or getting hit by) your attack. If you do a kick, then the opponent blocks it, you have to recover from your kick (that takes some time) and your opponent gets briefly locked into "blockstun" (a state where they are stuck blocking) and that takes time for them to recover from, too. If you recover 3 frames sooner than the opponent in this situation, we say that you have 3 frames of advantage time. If instead the opponent recovers 3 frames first, most charts of frame data will call that "-3 advantage time" though in spoken English you could just say the opponent has 3 frames of advantage time.

Why does this matter so much?

If after a blocked attack, you recover a few frames before the opponent, that means if you both immediately do a move, yours will probably win. Your move will come out sooner and get to the active/hitting part before his, if the moves were the same speed.

In 3D fighting games, beginners can get totally destroyed by advantage time tricks without even knowing what's going on. The opponent does some moves, then it seems like it's the beginner's "turn" to do something, but whatever he does gets beat out. He's probably attacking in a situation where he has frame disadvantage, but he doesn't even know it. 

Nitaku / Forced Choice / 2-Choice Situations

In 3D fighting games, there's a term called 2-choice (or "nitaku") situation which means you put the opponent in a bad situation where he must choose between 2 things, and the deck is stacked against him, so to speak. If he's attacking from

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Flash Duel Review and Sale

Here's a review of Flash Duel from what my Finnish friend describes as "the biggest boardgame website and authority in Finland." You might need Google Translate.

And for an American take, here's Fortress Ameritrash's review. Both sites said 4.5/5.

And while we're talking about Flash Duel, both versions are on sale at Amazon for a week for US customers. Deluxe version $39->$29. Regular version $15.99->12.99. Usually I'd say it's better to buy from my site, but Amazon has this crazy policy where they automatically disable your seller account over the holidays unless you sell 25 copies of something during September and October. I can't sell Yomi there yet because it's not manufactured yet, but I won't be able to list it there over the holidays unless I sell some Flash Duel there now. So now would be a good time to help out! Yeah it's weird. And again, this is only a US thing.

Thanks!

First Puzzle Strike Review

Ken who runs Fortress Ameritrash was actually the only reviewer so far to receive a copy of Puzzle Strike because supply has been so limited and I've been filling orders from real customers before reviewers. Anyway, his review says, among other things:

"This is, hands down, the Game of the Year thus far for me."

Check out his full review here. Thanks Ken and the FA community!