bloggie

Dear Bloggie: sorry I haven't been very sociable lately. I have been working on a new game, titled Dashabooja, for months now.

I have a prototype of Dashabooja at the hyperlink above, and I am asking y'all to play a few rounds and send me your comments.

Dashabooja is a game of chance, played with a deck of cards. An animated brass statue deals ten hands of (a popular card game beginning with P that the comments filter doesn't like) at once, and pays you based on the luck of the draw. There are no puzzles to solve or anything like that. It's a slot-machine-type thing.

Being a prototype, the game is not yet finished. There is no music or sound yet. Several of the "extra" buttons (like "Rules") don't even do anything yet. Nonetheless, the game really plays; it's a working build.

Report any bugs, errors, compliments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement. You may reply here in the Bloggie thread, or email me (sean@gleeson.us). Thanks!

I love the brass statue. Nice work, Sean!

I have kind of a stupid question. Why are all the cards showing when we're only betting on the last two and we get to see which ones they are? (The last part reminds me of three-card-monte, it's very cool :-)

Actually you're sort of betting on all of the cards. The thing is, you bet on 50 of them before the deal. When you click "Deal" you are placing a wager on the outcome of all ten hands. That's why your "Score" goes down by the amount of your bet when you click Deal, and only goes up again (if at all) after the round is resolved. It's just like a slot machine, in that regard.

The two leftover cards are a little optional bonus round, allowing you to place all of your earnings for that round on a single even-money bet.

Oh, okay, I get it. Oops :-)

This is really cool, it's an addictive game (now that I understand what I'm doing).

Since I understood how to play it, I keep missing the last part though, because I'm too busy looking to see what I got.

The brass statue is really cool. I like the game; it's easy to play. Just watching the deal is mesmerizing!

OMG the creatures in the background move too!

Report any bugs, errors, compliments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement. You may reply here in the Bloggie thread, or email me (sean@gleeson.us). Thanks!

Bug report:

In one deal, I managed to get a payout of zero for all ten hands. This by itself is OK, it can happen, bad luck, but possible - but then the statue won't let me chose high card to double the payout.

The game just freezes: all the buttons are disabled.

Good job lewy!

Thanks, Lewy! I fixed it. We just went from Beta 00 to Beta 01. Keep up the good work.

Sean, it's so beautiful and intricate. Truly marvelous work! You've outdone yourself. I only wish I knew what I was doing while playing. I hope you get the Rules thing working soon!

I only wish I knew what I was doing while playing.

Psst-[Invis-O-Text™: ON]
I'm glad you made her face more feminine :-)
[Invis-O-Text™: OFF]

OK, now I get it! I'll play again some with this new understanding.

Oh man, this is so fun!

P0ker without the stressful strategy, just that pull-the-lever mechanical addiction insinuating itself deep into my reptilian hindbrain, plus a chance for double or nothing on a high-card-wins contest in each round. It's like gambling was cocaine, and Sean just invented crack!

I keep losing it all on the hi-lo.
Oh, well. (past) Time for bed.

Since this is the casino thread, I suppose it's ok to drink here? L'chaim, Sean! To your new game!

There are no puzzles to solve or anything like that. It's a slot-machine-type thing.

L'chaim, zorkie, Sean, and bloggie! Layla tov joem :-)

Great graphics, Sean! It will be cool with music too, you could add all kinds of sound effects.

My high score was 980.

But FWIW here's my heuristic that kept me playing for a pretty long while:

Bet MAX every time. Anything else is a waste.
If score get below 100, go for the double.
If you score 100 or above, keep it - don't risk it.

That's almost exactly the heuristic I'd hit on, lewy. But in mine, I'll risk it if I won exactly the same 100 I'd anted. Your heuristic is a >=100 while mine is just >. I figure, I'm gambling, so if I won the same 100 I'd risked back, it's a 50-50 chance of doubling it, so why the heck not? Yours is probably winninger though.

To devise a winning strategy, or at least a slowest-possible-losing one, I guess you'd want to know how many decks of cards there are, and what the odds are of the various p0ker hands being dealt, and figure it out from there. Probability makes my head hurt, but it would be an interesting exercise.

The lewy heuristic is a pretty decent approximation though.

There is one deck of 52 cards, and she deals the whole deck every time. (10 five-card hands for 50 cards, two leftover cards for the bonus round.)

Think of a ten-dollar bet as betting a dollar on each individual hand. Each of these hands may get dealt one of 2,598,960 combinations of cards. So calculate the odds as follows:

There are 4 possible Royal Flushes (one for each suit), so the probability that a particular hand will be dealt a Royal Flush is (4/2,598,960) = 0.0000015390771693.

There are 36 possible Straight Flushes, so the probability of a particular hand getting a Straight Flush is (36/2,598,960) = 0.000013851694524.

And so forth...
48 ways to get Four Aces. (48/2,598,960) = 0.000018468926032.
576 ways to get Four of a Kind (that aren't Aces). (576/2,598,960) = 0.000221627112383.
3,744 ways to get a Full House. (3,744/2,598,960) = 0.00144057623049.
5,108 ways to get a Flush. (5,108/2,598,960) = 0.00196540154523.
10,200 ways to get a Straight. (10,200/2,598,960) = 0.00392464678179.
4,224 ways to get Three Aces. (4,224/2,598,960) = 0.00162526549081.
50,688 ways to get Three of a Kind (that aren't Aces). (50,688/2,598,960) = 0.01950318589.
123,552 ways to get Two Pair. (123,552/2,598,960) = 0.04753901561.
84,480 ways to get a Pair of Aces. (84,480/2,598,960) = 0.03250530982.
1,013,760 ways to get a Pair (of non-Aces). (1,013,760/2,598,960) = 0.39006371779.

Multiply all these probabilities by their respective payouts, add up those products, and the sum is your Base Expected Value of each hand. Multiply that by ten, and that's the Base Expected Value of the entire ten-dollar bet. These are not independent combinations (because all the hands come from the same deck), but they may be treated as independent because their influences on one another will cancel out, so adding the values is valid.

But you're not done yet. You then have to take that Base Expected Value, and multiply it by the expected value of the multiplier in the bonus round, to get your final Expected Value. There are 1,326 possible combinations for those last two cards.

6 ways to get Matching Aces, which pays 10 X winnings. (6/1,326) = 0.00452488687783.
72 ways to get Matching non-Aces, which pays 2 X winnings. (72/1,326) = 0.05429864253.
1,248 ways to get non-Matching cards, which initiates an optional high-low round. (1,248/1,326) = 0.94117647059.

Again multiply each probablility by its value (calculate the non-Matching pair as having a value of 1), add up those products, and that's the Expected Multiplier. Multiply that by the Base Expected Value, and that's your final Expected Value, which turns out to be about .99 for every dollar bet (it's actually .99055), meaning the game is what we gamblers call pretty "loose."

Or, you could just fire up my Dashabooja Payout Calculator app, which does all that math in one click. But I know you like a good puzzle.

(it's actually .99055),

Multiply all these probabilities by their respective payouts, add up those products, and the sum is your Base Expected Value of each hand.... These are not independent combinations (because all the hands come from the same deck), but they may be treated as independent because their influences on one another will cancel out, so adding the values is valid.

In such a game, the probability of any one spot winning would be 0.1, and its expected value would be 0.1 times my payout of $9.90, or .99. The expected value of all ten spots together would be the sum of all of their expected values: 0.99 x 10 = 9.90. In this case, it is easy enough to verify, because if you played all ten spots you would in fact win exactly $9.90 every single round. So even though the samples are not independent, adding their expected values is valid. QED.

very nice. very addicting. it scares me. i have an addictive personality.

License it to a manufacturer of video-p**** machines. It's impressive.

I'm looking forward to having the time to learn how to play. The animation looks fantastic.

Man, those hips of hers are bewitching.

Sean, if I may recommend a change in phrasing? It says "Bonus declined" when you just take your winnings, which made me panic a little the first time I saw it because I thought I'd inadvertently turned down free money. Maybe "Bonus round declined" or "bonus bet declined"?

My original phrasing was, "You have chosen neither of the bets, opting for certainty of possession rather than the possibility of loss, yet fully cognizant that this decision also precluded an even greater victory, a truth which will haunt your timid soul (perhaps not prominently, but only as a spark of doubt) to the end of your days, which are numbered even as these cards," but I couldn't make it fit, so I shortened it to "bonus declined."

Your way seems like a middle-ground. I'll try it and see how it looks, thanks.

LOL! Loquacious.

6 ways to get Matching Aces, which pays 10 X winnings. (6/1,326) = 0.00452488687783.

By the way, Sean, if you'd like to be able to quickly add generated text-to-speech, for instance to have Dashabooja say your winnings out loud (since it would be tedious and expensive to record a female saying every possible amount, especially if you haven't sold the game yet and you're on a budget), you can use say on Mac OS X or flite on Linux to do it. If your server runs Debian you can just apt-get install flite and you're done.

say is really easy to use. Just open a Terminal and type say hello, and it'll do it. man say for documentation. If you have a Leopard beta, the text-to-speech voices are supposed to be much better than Tiger's voices. I don't have it, but I remember Jobs saying they'd be much better in a keynote.

I'm becoming mesmerised by it....

Sometimes I think I could do with that number of arms.

You'll have to say 'hello' in a high voice, of course. Not a deep gruff one.

These folks sell some higher-quality voices than the Mac comes with, for $30 apiece.

I love the graphics, and can tell you've put a lot of time and effort into it.

But the best part of gambling (especially when no money is involved) is the stress and strategy.

Um... ev/zorkie, are you reposting this hippo link? It seems to be the top one all the time, which rather fooled me--I thought it was strange that no-one was feeding the hippo anything new.

Now I've got a lot of threads to catch up with...

cba, we decided to change the hippo item's date to Friday since the hippo moves so fast, often pushing 60 links a day, and since Sean's a friend and we'd like people to see/play his game and give him their comments. He originally posted it at 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

Okay, people. I made some improvements and took us up to "Beta 02." (If you go to the game and it still says "Beta 01," that's a cached copy, and you should refresh.)

• I fixed some weirdness that was happening when the player runs low on money. (She was allowing bets that the player couldn't cover, and we can't have that.)


• I refined the animation of the cards, but it may be too subtle to notice, or even to describe. Forget I mentioned it.


• After a high card bet, she doesn't just reveal the two cards, she now also raises the high card slightly. It's much more dramatic.


• I reworded the "BONUS DECLINED" message to "BONUS BET DECLINED," so as not to alarm Evariste.

(By the way, I also lined up my first Dashabooja licensee yesterday, so I think the game will do well.)

Congratulations, Sean!

What a beautiful game Sean Gleeson! I can't say it's better than one of Zork's game but it comes very close! ;) The Indian Lady has wonderful aerobic abilities. I was hitting the buttons over and over again to see that part! Good luck to you and your future projects.

Mazel tov, Sean! That's great news!

I can't say it's better than one of Zork's game but it comes very close!

Sean, this is fantastic (and so fast!) Congratulations!

Updated to Beta 3, the game now displays some words in Sanskrit at appropriate moments. For those of you who have forgotten your high school Sanskrit, here's a little glossary.

• ABHAVA: nothingness


• DATTAVARA: a choice of rewards


• JAYA: victory


• NAASHA: destruction


• NETI-NETI: neither this nor that


• SAMATVA: sameness


• UTTAMA: the highest

I just got the Jaya. You've added more animation in the background, it's very nice.

Naasha...

Love the Sanskrit, Sean! What's with the Xbox logo at bottom left and the iTunes logo at bottom right? Trying to set up a bidding war between Apple and Microsoft? ;-)

Oh, they light up on hover and are buttons! I guess the iTunes one turns the music on/off. Wonder what the X does.

I hadn't noticed those until you mentioned them.

The 'X' will quit the game. There will be some kind of "tool tips" text explaining those buttons on hover.

I keep getting naasha, pfffft!
My guesses aren't goog this go-round.

Nice work, Sean!

And they aren't good either :-)

(Looking back, I think that game may have been a little hard.)

(Looking back, I think that game may have been a little hard.)

Not that I'm complaining, zorkie! I can't wait for the newest game...

You can both blame evariste for that. He told me it was hard but I didn't believe him.

Wow, this game is insanely addictive. I played it for a couple hours last night. Good job, Sean!

Oho! LOL!

That's gotta be an RT!