2017-05-08 00:44:46

Now I want an echo... big_smile
the echo or the dock?  I'm a bit unsure, as I already have a bluetooth speaker.

2017-05-08 03:25:17

cant go wrong with an echo......unlike your blue tooth, you can talk to alexa plus play a lot of games on it

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-08 04:08:22

I'll try this on my fire tablet which has alexa

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2017-05-08 09:27:51

First of all, I'd like to congratulate the developer for the game. It is, as far as I remember, my first experience with a voice-controlled game. (Have not found one for Android yet and don't have Echo here, so the web version was my choice, even it sometimes saying it is having trouble accessing the skill.)
Second of all, I will try not to be too rude in my argument, but I find it interesting how people don't mind playing a character who runs around killing and even stealing Money from their kills, but are all uncomfortable to play a character who gets a blessing from alternative gods. Isn't killing one of the things you shall not do if you follow the tem commandments? (Considering you are christian, of course.) How about stealing?
And no, I am in no position to judge others' behaviors, but I have a good argument for playing a character without guilt:
Imagine someone who needs to interpret, in an audio story related to the bible, a person who has to say

2017-05-08 09:32:31

Well, continuing since the message was cut off:
Imagine someone having to say, "I don't believe in God!" to interpret a text from the bible:
Does that person really mean it or is he/she only telling the story as it is written?
So what I'd say is: "Don't worry, be happy!" and roleplay, because this isn't what you really are! And to the developer, keep up the good work and make the game as best as you can!

2017-05-08 12:54:19

malavox valid argument......I guess its just one thing to see a religious phrase in a game vs tapping into a role as a char in a game

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-08 12:57:49

jjaquinta quick question that's off topic. when you start developing another game for the echo, can you make a card game such as harth stone, magic the gathering, or yugioh? I would love to play something like that on my echo. we don't have to many of those type of games for the blind, so playing a game of that magnitude would definitely be a dream come true

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-09 04:59:41

Oh, hey! I didn't see it had spilled onto a second page. :-)

I did do "21 Blackjack", but I'm not sure that really counts!

Someone asked me to do chess once, but I was afraid that it would be hard to craft a good user experience. There's just too much going on. One of the most challenging things, so far, in Six Swords was giving the results of a combat. You've got 20 to 40 lines of A hits/misses B with a C for D damage and does/not kill. That was really tedious to listen to in the first draft. So I put a lot of work into trying to condense it down into a much easier to listen to narrative discourse. And, even as it is, it still needs more work.

So with a chess board, or a hand of cards, you need to be able to list everything in play so that if you lose track you can work out what your options are. If you have a whole bunch of things that can, potentially, be in play at any time, it gets problematic. And that's the thing. It's not hard to program, it's hard to make playable.

That being said, I played Magic the Gathering for a while about 20 years ago. I'm not that up to date on card games. If you want to point me at a card game or board game you think might be suitable, I'll take a look. Ideally a game that is either open source, or someone who has said it is OK to use their intellectual property in other mediums. (Six Swords is based on the "Old School Reference and Index Compendium" because it has an open license.)

If someone here has written a card game or something they think would make a good audio game, I'm happy to look at that too.

2017-05-09 18:17:58

Hello !

  I would like much to give a try to this game, but I can't find it in the skill section of Alexa, so, I can't enable it.

  I tried various spellings "6 swords, six swords, 6swords"; but he finds 0 result for my research.

  Does someone else encountered this probleme ?

Any tips ?

Thanks

2017-05-09 23:13:57

You can always enable it right from the web page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GVGVSM0

2017-05-10 05:20:31

tony the first way you wrote out the game is the correct way to find the skill. sometimes the alexa app can act non responsive and clunky with voice over, so I recommend to close the app from task manager, or the double tap feature on ios, then reopen it

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-10 05:25:54

jaquinta wow I didn't know you made that black jack game lol, I played that months ago. as far as card games, if you don't mind I have one written up that I wanted to make if I ever learned programming, I can let you read it over, and you can tell me if its a project that you wouldn't mind taking over. its similar to a magic the gathering game just not as complex. I will even try to condense the rules down a bit, so a lot wont be going on at once so the player can keep track of the game progress

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-10 09:04:15

Hello

  First, thanks for your answers.

  I have finally identified my probleme, I juste had to change my country settings on amazon.com. As I live in France, Alexa was set up to amazon.co.uk, and 6 swords is not available in the UK version.

  Now it's done, the only more thing I have to do is to play !

Thanks

2017-05-10 19:45:09

Sure, smoothgunner, send me on your rules. I'll have a look and say what level of complexity I think it is, and how well it might work as an audio game. There's a few techniques I rolled out with 6 Swords around dealing with complexity that I'm pretty happy with. We can probably do something more complicated than Blackjack now!

Glad you are up and running, Tony78. I really need to get around to porting 6 Swords to the UK market. I just need to spend 30 minutes doing cut and paste! German is a bit more difficult. The code is ready to go, but I need a bunch of stuff translated...

2017-05-11 18:40:21

ok, so I came across a game that a few of us have been wanting someone to code for a while now. it is a card game that is played with a normal set of cards(52deck). its called battle cards. im not sure if its an open source, but here are the rules of the game and how to play. let me know if you can code this for the alexa, it would be great
http://battlecards.org/index.php

can i get a peace double harmony burger? no chaos

2017-05-12 01:00:27

Hi all, and major thanks to the Six Swords developer!
I have a couple of issues and or questions. First question is. I'm not getting any gold from the mobs I kill, is there a specific way to make gold on this game?
Second sort of dove tails with the first. Is there a questing system set up already? I've gone into the various temples, but no way to get a quest or job, or even a blessing heaven forbid,  assigned to my group, so I'm kinda lost as to what to do.
Finally is there a way to check how much experience my group mates need to level up? Everyone is still level 1 naturally. Also, is there a way to check what individual group members are proficient in, weapon wise? Perhaps if I said stats member name, I can be prompted what info I wanted, character stats like strength and so on? or abilities

I probably have dozens of questions/ideas for this, but that'll be all for now, don't wanna bombard you in my first post to this thread. lol

Thanks again for your hard work and making yourself available to us for questions, its greatly appreciated!
smile

2017-05-12 22:39:35

Hey smoothguner. I had a quick look at Battle Cards. I need to dig into it more, but I caught a line that said an "Any" card could be played at any time. That's kind of a problem. Alexa is call-and-response. You can't interrupt her. I have to see if that's essential to gameplay, or if I can work around that.

Hey MikeFont, questions are good!

Gold: some monsters drop gold. Some do not. Animals like horned cats and baboons, for example, don't. Thinking organized creatures, like Dwarves, do. Keep at it, and you'll find gold!

Quests: There is a bounty system right now. Follow the roads until you find a castle, for or outpost. Go into the courtyard, and to the west is an office where bounties are listed. Kill the monsters at the given location and return there to collect your bounty.

Experience: This is based on the OSRIC version of 1st Edition D&D. I don't currently list the amount of experience needed to go up a level. But that's a good idea. (Added issue #137 for that) When you gain experience, and a character crosses the 25/50/75% threshold, it will tell you.

Character info: If you say "about Bob" it will give you all the details. That's where I'll put in what you need for the next level. (I've added a note, #138) to give hints about that.

It's easy to change what the game says, but it's a bit harder to change what it can hear. First of all that needs a re-certification with Amazon/Google. Second of all, the more things it can recognize, the lower the quality is of recognition. So I'm a little conservative about adding in more recognition.

Questions: please ask as many as you like. There is an official forum here: http://starlanes.freeforums.net/board/5 … discussion I can't vouch for how accessible it is, so if it is easier to post here (and the moderators don't mind) I'm happy to answer them here too.

Today is Friday, and I've just dropped this week's release. It's mostly linguistic changes (combat reports should be more compact and less repetitive). A new game play change is that monsters may run away if they think the fight is going against them.

2017-05-13 11:11:38

Hello

  First, thank you for developing this game. I find this one verry nice to play, I apreciate exploring, encountering and fight the various kinds of monster. Also the territory seems to be rather huge.

  I have one question cuz I'm encountering some issue in buying items. Sometimes in a shop we have two items which have the same name but not the same quality : for exemple, if there is short bow and 1+ short bow, how to buy the 2nd one. He automatically buy the simple short bow even if I say 1+ in my request.

  Thanks !

2017-05-14 04:47:24

Hi, I can't get very far before I get something like, I'm sorry, but I can't access your 6 Sword skill right now, this also happens with starlanes and subhunt. This happens both on my fire tablet, and on the web service at echosim.io.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2017-05-14 05:09:21

Good catch Tony78. I've logged an issue (#140) to recognize +1, etc, when identifying an item. However, changes to what the skill can hear have to be tied to major versions, since that requires re-certification by Amazon. So that's going to be for 2.0. For now (#139) I've updated it so the same time of item won't appear in the shop together. That doesn't help you with equipment and inventory, but it's what I can do for now.

ironcross32, I'm sorry to hear you've been having trouble accessing the skills. Google has been complaining to me a lot about "service unavailable", but I've never found it to be down. This is the first I've heard on Alexa. The Google reported outages are sometimes in the middle of the night. So maybe something is going on with AWS. I will write a little monitoring tool and try to get to the bottom of this.

Note, if you hear a "the skill is in maintenance mode", that means I'm in the middle of updating it. That should normally only take five minutes or so.

If you, or anyone else, is interested, I can invite you to the "beta". This will let you run "six swords test", which is on a different server. So if one is down you can use the other. (You account will be the same on both.) You can also were all updates go before the weekly update to production. So you can see the new stuff (and new bugs) earlier.

2017-05-14 15:27:34

Yeah I'd be interested in that. I don't know really that its your stuff, I have sort of suspect its on my end, but I don't know. I thought maybe at first the tablet was dropping wifi, then I tried it through the web service an echosim on the laptop, which if that dropped, I'd know it. I haven't gotten that with other skills, but the only ones I have besides that are not games that you are in for a while.

Well, at least its not the tablet, that would piss me off if I somehow got a defective one, lol. One of two things will happen, either A, as I said in my previous post, I'll be in the middle of it, I will not get very far, like maybe 4 to 5 moves or whatever, and then it will do its thing. Well, on the tablet, whenever you open one of the three, either star lanes, sub war or 6 swords, it will come up with a card, which by the way if you touch, its all over, thanks amazon for that, lol. But anyway, the screen will sort of dim and you'll hear a tone when you can talk, well once you get that, you say what you want to do, and then it just stays dim, stays that way for about 3 to 4 seconds then comes back and says sorry can't access your xxx skill now. lol, xxx, oh god I'm in squirrel chasing mode today what's wrong with me...

The second thing that will happen is it just plain won't open, I'll hold down on the home button, or the space bar on the web service, and say open starlanes, 6 swords, or sub war and it will say the spiel about not being able to access it.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2017-05-14 18:24:57

Hello

  I have the same probleme, with the message : "Sorry I'm having trouble accessing your 6 swords skill right now". Sometimes the game runs rather well, but other times I'm so often kicked out of the game in this way that I almost can't play.

  I'm using only echosim.io cuz I don't have an echo.

  Anyway, thank you for having modified the shops.

2017-05-14 19:38:05

Right, this happens less than two minutes into the game for me.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2017-05-14 22:59:32

That's a terrible user experience! I'm amazed you have stuck with it this far!

I will take the outage reports from Google at face value then. I'm not a wizard at AWS and servers are not my strong point. I just tried quadrupling the memory for the server to see if that helped, but I seem to have crashed everything instead. :-( So, instead, I've switched everything to running on my "B" server. Normally this is the beta server and I've never had a problem with it. But, then, I've never had the problems with the main server you are reporting. But let me leave it for 24 hours and see if it performs better.

Let me know if you still get the same terrible response. If so, I'll try another trick. I'll direct half my skills to the A server and half to the B server. That will tell me if load balancing will help.

Thank you so much for sticking with it!

2017-05-15 13:15:35

Hello,
I should probably open a new topic for this question, but since a card game was mentioned on this one, I thought about asking, and this of course when the disconnection problem gets solved, how about a card game in the same style that the developer(s) of Crazy Party made?
There are no trap cards, but there are reaction cards that play without the practical intervention (or choice) of the AI since when there is a reaction card in your hand, it plays automatically. Of course you would have to talk to Crazy Party's developer(s) to see if there would not be a problem if the game was ported to a voice version, but aside from that, it could be easier to program...?