Blog - Player Thoughts : Mancala

18th May 2019

Crikey, RSKGames has already sent his Player Thoughts..
Guess I'd better hurry up and get those last few tweaks in place..

@RSKGames

I have never played this game before so it was fresh and fun for me. After 2 defeats and some reading of the rules I got the hang of it and was able to beat the AI few times.

-=-=-

Thankfully this game's a lot easier to play than I originally thought when looking at the rules.
I guess it would have to be, to have been played for as long as it has.
The History of Mancala apparently could very well date right back to about 6000 BCE, which is alarming!

Capturing the opponents pieces makes the game very interesting to play.

Captures are a house-rule, so head into the Rules to turn that off, and have quite a different dynamic to the game.
There's a second house-rule that I haven't yet implemented, which is "Laps". In a Laps based game, if you land on a pit with seeds in it, you then lift those seeds, and continue to move onwards.
This sounds like it could be a massive change to the feel of the game, and I'm looking forward to adding it to the options!
.. But then I also have to rewrite AL's AI to cope with it, which is one reason why I haven't attempted that yet!

Liked the sound effects of the pieces getting placed.

Same sounds as .. Um.. I know I've used them elsewhere. Is it Leapfrog?! Four In-A Row?! *shrugs* These sounds are all going to get rather repetitive, but thankfully they're nice and plain and don't get in the way.

The icon for the game is very well done. I went and checked out the other games icons and found that all of them are able to convey the essence of the game in a nutshell. I guess good amount of time went in designing them.

The hardest part of drawing these icons is making them still recognisable over the top of the blue circle. A lot of the icons are blue dots over the top of blue!

I keep wondering if I oughta change that blue circle..
Hmm..

Is there a favorite games feature planned so that players can select a game into their favorite game list(Listed as a item in the main menu) and navigate to the favorite game list to play the games they like more.

I hadn't, no.
.. But yeah, that sounds like something I should maybe consider.
It should be relatively easy to implement, as the games are simply numbered. In fact, I've now started to number the javascript files, too, since I'm finding it much easier to leap to file "Game_033" than try to remember what category the game was in when I first added it..

Previous games are, eg, Board_Ludo... Except the Board category no longer exists!! So, um.. Derp!!

Yeah, numbers are easier for me to keep track of, and the save file is almost exclusively numbers, so making a "favourites" list should be fairly easy to do.
I'll definitely look into adding that.

Once I have figured out the initial moves to capture the opponent pieces in my second turn I am able to easily win over the AI.

Yes, AL needs a rework to his AI. I was pretty sure it would be "good enough", but once I started playing.. I'm not sure. Either I got really good, really quickly, or he wasn't very good to start with

I'll definitely upgrade him over the next day or so.

Why is player always getting the first turn.

I'm not 100% sure!
It should be as random as every other game mode, but it certainly doesn't feel like it.
I'll probably just set a "Rand(0,1)" up at the start, and use that, instead.

...
Now.. Back to coding.
Mancala isn't quite ending properly, all the time. It's supposed to wait until it's "the start of the turn of the player that cannot move" before ending the game, but it's currently occasionally ending at "the end of the turn of the player who is no longer able to move after this turn."

.. So, I need to fix that!!
That, and add in the laps. Should be easy enough, except the AI will need a rejig for those to work properly.

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Player Thoughts , Mancala , Shoebox

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