In November the new Pokémon games Sword and Shield came out for the Switch. I bought Pokémon Sword on release day and jumped straight to building a competitive Team and trying to climb the battle stadium singles ladder. The main inspiration for the team came from a Japanese team I played a lot in the…
Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those books I could devote my whole life to and still wouldn’t understand half of it. Many parts probably aren’t meant to be understood. Fortunately, there are also some math formulas: For an excellent explanation of the formula’s origin and a discussion of its meaning within the context of the…
The speed with which Earth is rotating is not something we think about every day. The only time I really noticed it was on a nightly hike in the mountains. It was a starry night, and at some point, the full moon was rising up behind a mountain massif. With the mountains as a reference…
In 6vs6 Pokemon games, you have up to 9 choices every turn: 4 moves and 5 possible switches. Sometimes there is also the option to mega evolve or use a Z-move which can increase possible options to 13. As your opponent has also ~9 choices to make, there are ~81 possible ways the next turn…
This year there were 512 different Trailers for the games that entered the Indie Games Festival Competition. As every year, I watched all of them to find my 10 favourites. I noticed a small uptick in detective and deck-building games. Maybe caused by the Indie hits ‘Return of the Obra Dinn’ and ‘Slay the Spire’? A…
This year was the first time that there was a Global Game Jam in Augsburg. Wildfuchs Interactive, a very young game studio located near the city centre, was hosting. There were just 5 members of the studio and me attending, so it was very different from bigger events. We could just make one game and…
In the last blog post, we learned how to make the best plays irrespective of what the opponent chooses to do. To make this work, it was necessary to look at a payoff-matrix listing all the possible moves that could happen. But what if you are unsure of what moves are even available to your…
New year, new Indie Games Festival and 460 new game trailers to watch. There were a little bit less submissions compared to last year, but I found the quality of the games were higher on average. Also some chinese games, which I never noticed before. Would love to see some good indie games coming from…
If you watch some YouTubers or Twitch streamers play competitive Pokemon, you will often hear phrases like this, after they made a choice that resulted in a bad outcome for them: Wow, my opponent is such a ****head, why did he klick Earthquake in front of my Zapdos. He’s such a bad player! And now…
The last post was about playing optimal Pokemon games by calculating the value function V(x) using Bellmann equations. Unfortunately, this was impractical, so we need another way to calculate the likelihood of winning games. One solution to this problem is called Value Function Approximation. The idea behind it is to not calculate the value function…
