I've got some ideas I'm going to play around with for the new poker system. Primarily I'm thinking of the following:
- No more chips. For a few reasons
- 1: Creating a poker AI that plays the game 100% optimally and perfectly is easy, especially if you give it unfair knowledge of the player's hand. But most people playing this game don't want to play against a 100% optimal AI. Most people probably want it to be pretty easy. And it's hard to make an AI that is the right level of difficult to be fun. But difficult enough that the player can still lose and be stripped.
- 2: Strip poker doesn't traditionally have chips.
- 3: Getting rid of chips means I can also get rid of: raising, calling, and the potential chain of "raise, call, raise, call" which again, exacerbates the AI problem.
- No more Texas Hold 'Em
- The current system in the game is texas hold 'em. 5 community cards and 2 private cards. If I get rid of chips, this game doesn't really make sense anymore. You would just be dealt cards, and then have nothing to do.
- I will swap to traditional Five Card Draw poker
- You are dealt 5 cards
- You can discard 0 to 5 cards
- Whomever has the worst hand, loses
- I'm pretty sure this is the variant that SPNATI uses
But there will be some modifications to the overall system
- Each player will have a pool of lives. Eg: 6 lives
- When you lose 1 hand, you lose 1 life
- Certain lives will have designated events (usually stripping) eg: Life 5, 3, and 1 might each result in loss of a piece of clothing.
Why I think this system is better:
- The current chip system would not really work for an extended strip poker game. It would just take too long.
- This new system has some strategy but is overall mostly RNG. You can pretty much bullshit your way through it if you don't want to play it.
- Right now I have in-match dialogues that trigger based on how many chips you have, but this doesn't really work, since you can conceivably lose all your chips in a single hand, skipping all dialogues.
- Working multiple players into this system may be feasible. With the current system, multiple players is just too complex.
- The AI is simple, it will just play optimally.
I don't have any personal problems with these suggestions, as I always lean to the focus of strip poker is on the stripping, and not sliding around chips back and forth. And yes, traditional five card draw is what SPNATI uses as its well, really easy to understand.
As for the AI's intelligence, SPNATI does use some 'personalities' here, with some opponents actually do play poorly - or they maybe try to go for really risky hands for no good reason. Could always include that, just to reflect how some opponents are probably better/worse/riskier/whatever then others.
A "life" system seems easy enough, and it could still just be clothing at each step. With only the major articles needing an art change, potentially. All depends on how the display looks, I suppose.
I did briefly notice in the intro that it seems the dialogue was tied to chips, so you can end up stacking a bunch at once for sure.
It also goes against the intro with the girl saying she's only going to 'play one hand' with you, and actually can go several as a result. But that's just a minor nitpick in the grand scheme of things.
As my mind wanders to 'lives', if you don't always want clothing off each time, lives can always be flexible things. Covering up, as an example is a way to 'extend' the situation without having to take something off.
