Over the past few months, I've been hard at work on a simulator for the Hearthstone game by Blizzard.
This turned into a full-blown reimplementation of the game logic pretty fast.
As it turns out, working on this has been the most enlightening and rewarding experience I've ever had in programming. Hearthstone is a very well designed game with very few hacks (much unlike other Blizzard games) and extremely logical rules it has a lot of respect for.
Working on this, more than anything else, has been the most fun I've ever had working on a project. While it is still incomplete, I'm hoping it is of interest to someone as I would love to welcome others to the project. I'm available to answer any questions about it or the Hearthstone's internal design.
Is the end goal to implement AIs and try to come up with interesting decks via something like genetic algorithms? Because that does sound like a fun project.
There's a lot of end goals! This is something that did cross my mind, yes. I think Fireplace is more of an enabler for this kind of thing. Writing an AI that would directly interact with it would be easy and I'm also posting here so that if anyone has a cool idea for something they want to do with it can poke me and I'll accomodate!
This turned into a full-blown reimplementation of the game logic pretty fast.
As it turns out, working on this has been the most enlightening and rewarding experience I've ever had in programming. Hearthstone is a very well designed game with very few hacks (much unlike other Blizzard games) and extremely logical rules it has a lot of respect for.
Working on this, more than anything else, has been the most fun I've ever had working on a project. While it is still incomplete, I'm hoping it is of interest to someone as I would love to welcome others to the project. I'm available to answer any questions about it or the Hearthstone's internal design.
Edit: For those looking for an entry point to what this all looks like, since this is very much programmer-oriented for now, the docs I wrote on the wiki (https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/wiki) and the tests (https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/blob/master/tests/te...) are the best ones.