Haxity News

Last week we talked about the AI in Haxity. Some of its shortcomings and what we are aiming to improve. You can read the article HERE

We are now deploying the new and improved AI(full patch notes at the bottom). This patch is the first, with more to come, to address some of the issues the community have discussed.





We have changed a lot of the algorithms to make the AI “smarter”. The AI will now place higher value on certain modifiers like Starter, Finisher and Adjacent making their general placements stronger. This will lead to the AI being more consistent and therefore more predictable in its behavior.

In addition to this certain AI opponents will put specific preference on certain card color, meaning they will lean more into their primary color if possible with their given hand. This will again make it so if you face a Skill/Yellow heavy opponent(like Sewer Rat) it will not be uncommon to see a full Skill/Yellow placement.

We also did an overhaul on how the AI utilizes hacks. We have many examples where the AI was using a “Momentum” Hack on a temporary card or using “Lock” after you have already passed. The AI is now playing smarter with the Hacks they have, and are now mimicking a human opponent to a larger degree. You can expect the AI to do proper setups, baits, feints and in general not waste hacks.



That said, we have noticed that many people found the campaign to be harder than intended. When we initially made the different AI decks we had certain synergies in mind and made them lean heavily into that. Since this is a deckbuilder you will not always be able to build as strong synergies as the AI had at different points in the run, making it feel like you were “cheated” out of a win. Since we are now making our AI smarter in a lot of ways, we are also taking measures to make it much more predictable and less overpowered. We are tuning down the Threat 0 and Threat 1 decks with less hacks and more skewed towards a certain color. This meaning that you can more easily counter draft and placement predict based on the sheer amount of one color in the AI deck.


We will continue improving every aspect of Haxity, and we would love some more feedback on this patch and how the game now feels. If you want to chat directly with the developers, most of us hangs out on DISCORD, and we also check Steam discussions daily.

Hope you all have a good day, and see you in Haxity.

• Improved algorithms on how the AI values card slotting, value of card positions.
  
• AI is now better at playing hacks, and understands the effects of hacks much better and can also try predict some opponent responses.
  
• AI is now open for specific preferences, as in we can define a specific AI opponent to prioritize some cards above all else.
  
• Campaign opponent (AI decks) changes:
  
• Tons of changes to AI opponent decks for Tier 0 and Tier 1: AI has slightly fewer hacks.
  
• AI has much more skewed color balance in their decks, making them always have much more of their strategy's main type of moves (easier to counter play).
  
• Updated AI opponent descriptions.
  
• AI opponents have a stronger preference to play key moves of their given strategy.
  
• Updated Banshee starter decks for Versus, half of them got changed to now better reflect Banshee after her changes.
  
• The Ripper and Cyber Rats now display number of hacks played.
  
• Eruption scaling nerf: 8 dmg with +1 dmg per infect stack (from 6 base dmg, +2 dmg per stack).
  
• Hardsuit nerf: 6 shield instead of 8 (we don't want it to be mostly just strictly better than Combat Shield).
  
• Corporate Coverage disabled (will be changed) Beefcake now +16 health fixed (circumventing an issue we have with % health).
  
• The Ripper has expend when it's a finisher (was always intended, just forgotten to add)
  
• Tutorial is now an option available from the main menu, not campaign
  

When we launched into early access some weeks back, we knew we wanted to give some love to the AI in Haxity (Artificial Intelligence, just in case you wouldn’t know).

While it was fun to fight the AI, good players immediately realized their AI opponents were pretty ‘dumb’. The card and hack choices sometimes made no sense, perhaps similar to the newbest of Newbs when entering the game. Obviously, we wanted to improve this to make the game more fun. Now we have, and it’s coming in a patch in the near future!

To shed some light on what we did, we got some sagely words on the matter from guru coder Christian Tellefsen, who has done a lot of AI in games throughout the years. Here is what he had to say on the work he did over the summer holidays:

• The main improvement is that the AI now tries to predict which hacks you might hold, while using that knowledge to figure out a good play sequence.
  
  For example, it might see that you could have an Adjacent Swap on your hand that would be really damaging, leading it to preempt your possible play with an Edge Lock. It doesn't cheat in cases like this, though - any hidden information that would not be available to a human opponent, is never made available to the AI either.
  
  
• The AI now has an improved algorithm for determining how strong its position is, compared to yours. Before, it mostly tried to get an immediate health advantage, or a win, but many other considerations have now been added to the calculations.
  
  The AI will look at the predicted deck quality after its turn - it will often prefer buffing already strong cards, or removing weaker ones. It understands that temporary cards will disappear, so it's less likely to give those cards permanent buffs. It will also look at which fighter buffs you end up with, and how many. It will prefer plays that leave it stronger for the rest of the fight. In the beginning of a fight the AI will give high priority to improving its overall position - like fighter buffs, card advantage, or improving card stats.
  
  When fighters get low on health, it will look less at permanent gains. It will switch to try to take you out as quickly as possible.
  
  
• In addition, an AI can now gain specific preferences. Some AIs might like playing particular cards or combos, even if they are perhaps not the strongest possible. Watch out for this, and use it to your advantage!
  

The AI should now be stronger, more predictable, and less prone to making nonsensical or suboptimal moves.

This is something we need to keep on balancing out as the game continues, so please remember to give us feedback on Discord so we can hone it further!


Team Haxity

Version 0.7.7

• Fixed an issue where tutorial content was showing up in campaign runs.
  
• Our database had a hiccup, and we lost some MMR progress. This issue has now been fixed.
  

We are a little more than 2 weeks past our Early Access release. And we now have our first major patch for Haxity. With a lot of feedback from the community we are now addressing some of the issues that have been highlighted. This is an ongoing process and as we have said we are developing this game with the community for the community, so if you have any sort of input feel free to join our DISCORD COMMUNITY






One of the earliest feedback we got after releasing in Early Access was about the new-player experience. Haxity has a lot of complexity, tons of cards and mods, and is also doing something new to the genre that even experienced card players might be puzzled with. With that in mind we are now expanding our new-player experience with a tutorial to teach the player the basics that is needed to understand the game. This is a first version of the tutorial where we teach the players the basics of fighting in Haxity.

In addition to the tutorial we have done several UX/UI improvements to make it easier to understand what is going on in a certain turn and convey more of the relevant information to the player with better visual communcation.







We asked Game Director Thomas Sørensen for some sagely words on the matter, and he made some words for what the changes means, and how you as a player will be positively affected.

[h2]Vision[/h2]

Banshee is an assassin on rollerblades! She has high burst damage, lots of tricks and very little tools in terms of mitigating damage.

Why a revamp?

• First of all, to give Banshee a stronger overall identity.
  
• This will make it easier for new players to start playing banshee, by having simpler common cards)
  
• We want to allow players to not be locked into a specific character when they start playing the game. Banshee had too many, situational and/or complicated cards which didn’t provide a good starting experience for (in particular) new players.
  
• We wanted to revitalize the Banshee hack archetype (Hackshee)
  
• After many rounds of card adjustments, and conflicting ideas, we felt that the archetype had lost its way, of sorts. It got so complicated it lost some of the the funnest combo/control playstyles she used to have.
  
• Re-purpose unused or underused cards.
  
• Banshee had multiple cards that were considered unplayable for most players.
  
• We were not happy with the way the Charged mechanic worked, and we have received feedback from multiple people that it was confusing.
  
• We also wanted to enable more card-specific strategies
  

What are the moves we have made for this update?

• We have simplified the Charged mechanic since the mechanic was too convoluted. Also added more cards that supported the "charged matters" archetype.
  
• Charged is completely removed when card fails to execute.
  
• The keywords Recharge and Uncharged have been removed.
  
• Gave the hack archetype more tools and a stronger direction
  
• More ways to gain temporary energy
  
• Cost reduction on hacks created during a fight
  
• Removed or repurposed cards that were confusing or underplayed.
  
• Strength matters and expend are no longer considered “themes” or fully supported builds for Banshee anymore.
  
• Enabled more card-specific strategies and cards that change your strategy
  
• We felt some of the rares were either too weak, or didn’t provide any interesting play-patterns. We have added new rares, or adjusted some of the rares we had to hopefully provide more interesting rare picks.
  

This is the first big patch of Haxity, but not the last. We are still working on improving this game, every step of the way throughout the Early access and beyond. We have a lot of plans going forward which you can see in the Roadmap



The next few weeks is holiday season here in Norway, and we will have fewer people in the office actively working on Haxity, but we are still preparing more content for you. The next patch will not be as big as this one, but will contain the following:

• More Campaign events
  
• More UX changes - for better gameplay communication
  
• More MODs - character and campaign specific.
  

In August we are also looking at hosting more PvP related events for all the players that are roaming the streets looking for a worthy opponent.

Thank you all for playing and enjoying Haxity, we in Megapop are thrilled to bring you more content in the months going forward. If you want to be apart of the discussions regarding the direction of the game, please join our Discord Community

It has been 5 days since Haxity finally released for Early Access. And the response we have received from the community have been great. We clearly have a great game on our hands that you love. And we are very happy to continue to work on Haxity until its completed.

To give you some insight in what we are working on, we have developed a roadmap.



Here you will be able to see what we are working on right now, and what we will be working on later down the line. This roadmap will be updated frequently so you always have a source of information of what to expect in the near and far future.

Alongside this roadmap we will be doing frequent balance changes to cards, mods, hacks and so forth to keep the competitive integrity intact.

If you want to have discussion about Haxity or our direction for the game, feel free to join our Discord Community. Here you will meet players, new and old, alongside several of our developers.