magic

One of the things I enjoy the most in Wagic is when the AI surprises me with extremely clever moves.

The AI in Wagic is driven by randomness, logic, and a bit of revenge. It basically “learns” which cards in your deck are a threat to it, and tends to target these cards more than others with its spells.

Today I got owned in something like 6 turns by the AI deck Depletion, and the moves were so good I have to talk about them.

On its first turn, the AI cast “Tome scour” on me, making me moving 5 cards from my library to my graveyard.

Unfortunately, the best card of my deck was in there: Ob Nixilis, the Fallen. That card is sooo unbalanced that it’s a great game finisher.

On its second turn, the AI cast Animate Dead on my beloved creature.

3 turns later, I was dead. (On top of the AI’s excellent moves, I had a very crappy starting hand, but even without it, such a powerful creature on turn 2…what can you do?)

Owing to its “revenge” mechanism, the AI in Wagic can be extremely good against combo decks, or, in my case, decks that mostly rely on one card to win

If you have good stories about the AI owning you in a way that seemed “clever” don’t hesitate to share them

You can already play Avenger of Zendikar in Wagic 0.10

I’m happy to announce that thanks to the terrific work of Dr. Solomat, Wagic already handles 56 cards of the new Worldwake set.

Yes, that means you can already playtest some cards of this new set in Wagic.

Some of the cards will only work with the SVN version of Wagic, but most of them are working with the current 0.10.1 release.

You can get the file on our SVN, here. To install it in your Wagic folder, just save that file as Res/sets/WWK/_cards.dat (of course you have to create the WWK folder) in your Wagic installation, and you’re done.

You can discuss this set in Dr.Solomat’s release thread

The Wagic team is hard at work to provide more playable cards, bug fixes, and cool new features in next Wagic release, so stay tuned

Wagic is not published or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.

I was recently looking for good homebrew games on the PSP (I might start a subject on that in future posts…), which reminded me of games I used to play on the PSP when I started seriously thinking about Wagic.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it is funny how these games inspired me when I started coding my game.

But before talking of PSP homebrews, I’ll start with the obvious inspirations. Of course, Wagic is inspired from Magic the Gathering, but more specifically, the two following games:

Shandalar

Shandalar is an old Microprose game that allowed to play quests in an heroic fantasy world, while fighting against other sorcerers with Magic cards. Although I never played the game, I was always impressed by the idea of “progressing” in a game, fulfill quests, visit shops to buy cards, and stuff like that. This game was much more than a MTG simulation, it was a real game relying on the rules of MTG with goals to achieve, which is why I think it was (and still is) succesful. The whole idea of  the shop in Wagic (buying cards/unlocking sets) comes from this. Actually, the initial goal for Wagic was that you’d travel on a map and fight ennemies with your cards… I haven’t given up on this idea yet, but it clearly means creating a whole RPG, which is a huge task.

Shandalar was made to run on screens that didn’t have the cool resolutions we have nowadays. Keeping this in mind helped me work on the initial designs of Wagic. With the size of the PSP screen, we always have to have an interface that allows to show lots of information on a very limited space.

For those who don’t know, Shandalar is maintained by a group of fans, under the name Manalink. Manalink handles Momir Basic, which is where I got the idea of implementing it in Wagic as well

Forge

In 2007 when I started working on Wagic, Forge (it was called MTG Forge at the time) was the only “mainstream” open source game that allowed people to play MTG against an AI. Other solutions existed, such as MagMa – Magic Machine – but weren’t easy to access – at least the source. Forge is written in Java while other freeware programs were either closed source or not portable. My initial goal was to see if I could port an existing freeware game to the PSP. Forge doesn’t have the best interface or the cleanest code in the world of open source, but it was the proof that creating an AI to play MTG was doable. I quickly gave up on porting it though, as I needed to rewrite it in C, and I disagreed with most of the design choices mades in the code. In the last months, Forge has been getting lots of improvements. I must admit I haven’t played it in a while. The screenshot above is neither recent nor old. The version I played two years ago couldn’t show the card pictures on the board. Forge lacks eye candy, but it’s getting better, and it’s probably the most active open source MTG project currently.

Defense Station PSP

DSP was a PSP homebrew made by coder Danzel. Not only was it quite fun to play, it didn’t use any fancy 3d and was a full game with lots of customization. By “full game”, I mean it was more than a proof of concept. A problem with most homebrews on the PSP is that they only have one level. Or no end. Or no goal at all… which makes you play them for 10 minutes then throw them away. DSP wasn’t one of those. You could play it, play it again, download packs with different levels. It was extremely fun, and if you like tower defense I recommend it. (I also recommend Comet Crash on the PS3 if you’re into tower defense, by the way). When I saw lots of people contributing to DSP with maps and new graphics, I new I wanted Wagic to allow the same kind of customization

Spider solitaire

I’ve spent countless hours on this game. It made me realize that it was possible to do a fun game without any incredible graphic skills (which is my main issue). While playing this game I realized creating a card game on the PSP wouldn’t require me to draw anything but rectangles. Yet I wanted more strategy in my game, which is why I went with the concept of TCCG. The very simple gray tone was clearly the inspiration for the main menu in the first versions of Wagic (I can’t show them to you because they used copyrighted graphics, but people who played the early releases back in 2008 probably remember a gray gradient with mana icons. It was very sober and I loved it).

If you enjoy Wagic, but think you could teach us how to build better decks, or if you happen to have created a deck in Wagic that you want to measure against others, then this is for you! The first “AI Deck competition” was just announced on the forums.

There’s nothing to win, but the pride of showing your MTG deck construction skills. This is a very casual tournament, just for the fun of it.

You have 11 days to build a cool deck and submit it. The decks will then be automatically tested against each other through Wagic’s AI in several thousand matches. We will include the best performing decks in Wagic’s next release

Rules and subscriptions here, many thanks to Psyringe for organizing all this!