Aljakun

The Project

I’m building Aljakun solo, acting as programmer, systems designer, and (out of necessity) AI researcher. It’s the project I use to build things properly from scratch rather than reach for a plugin: a hand-rolled search-based AI, procedural generation with a deterministic seed, and a balancing pipeline driven by real simulated match data instead of gut feel.

I also built, and later retired, a full imitation-learning AI pipeline: state encoding, ONNX inference, an external training loop. It’s documented below alongside everything that shipped, since cutting a system you’ve invested months in is its own kind of engineering judgment, not just a footnote.

Design: Core Concept & Battle

Aljakun is a single-player tactics battle wrapped in a roguelike run: two controllers, a player and an AI, on a shared hex board, with tokens that move and attack under imperfect information. Each match is meant to read as a small, solvable puzzle rather than a stat-trading slog, closer to Into the Breach’s “solve the board” tactics than Hearthstone’s combat math, with a genre neighborhood that also includes Inscryption, Slay the Spire, Blue Prince, and the old Yu-Gi-Oh! board spin-offs.

Each side commands tokens on the hex grid to defeat the enemy Keeper. Positioning is the game: tokens are placed and moved deliberately, and the board itself (terrain tiles, hazards, snares) is as much a piece to read as the tokens are. Every critter token has its own move-set and attack-set, so knowing the shape of a token’s reach before you commit to a placement matters as much as its stats. The AI plays under the same rules as the player for the most part, with a few extra buffs (better deck synergies, stronger tokens) that scale in as a run progresses to keep it challenging.

AI Opponent: Heuristic Beam Search

The AI is a from-scratch decision engine (~8,800 lines across 35 files), built as a best-first beam search over sequences of actions within a single turn rather than a classic minimax tree. Each turn it generates every legal action, expands a priority-ordered frontier capped by beam width and branching factor, under a time budget and a hard node cap, then commits to the best sequence found.

A few pieces push it past a textbook beam search:

• Transposition table: hashes states so duplicate positions from different move orders aren’t re-explored, while better re-arrivals still update the best-known score.
• Quiescence extension: extends depth through “volatile” positions (a tactical exchange mid-resolution) instead of stopping mid-sequence.
• Limited-discrepancy search: biases expansion toward the top-ranked branch at each node, concentrating the time budget where it matters.
• Admissible upper-bound pruning: cuts frontier nodes that can’t beat the current best outcome even in the best case.
• Flat heuristic fallback: kicks in if the tree search times out or degenerates, so the AI never stalls.

The evaluator is a hand-tuned scoring function: material value, discounted hand-card value, per-unit exposure/threat penalties, win-condition-tile proximity, and a dynamic aggression curve based on how far ahead or behind the AI is. Supporting utilities add game-specific awareness: threat propagation along movement paths, danger from hidden pieces, terrain-conversion decisions, and a watchdog that recovers from turns that stall.

The ML Experiment: Attempted and Retired

Before landing on the heuristic search above, I built and iterated on a full imitation-learning AI pipeline over several months, tracked through versioned commits, and eventually cut it once the heuristic search proved faster, more controllable, and simply stronger.

What it actually did:

• State encoding: a full game-state snapshot into fixed-size tensors: a multi-channel board grid (piece presence, team, normalized attack/health, keeper/snare/hidden flags, a card-vocabulary index), a global feature vector, a hand-slot tensor, and per-legal-action features.
• Inference: a policy-scoring network run through Unity’s Sentis package from an exported ONNX model, masking illegal actions and picking the top legal move.
• Training loop: a headless build runner self-played thousands of matches, logged every decision, then handed the log to an external Python pipeline that trained the model and reimported it into Unity.

This was a real, working system with a genuine train/infer/deploy loop, not a prototype that never ran. What beat it wasn’t a lack of effort but the tradeoffs of the approach: the heuristic search was faster to iterate on, easier to debug (every decision traces back to a readable score breakdown instead of a black box), and stronger in head-to-head testing. I pulled the ML runtime, the Sentis dependency, and the training tooling in one commit, and the self-play infrastructure it left behind got repurposed for the balancing pipeline below, so the experiment’s most reusable part survived even though the model didn’t.

Card & Deck System

The run deck is a persistent list of card data plus a parallel per-card list of “embues” (stacking buffs picked up mid-run). Cards are either static ScriptableObject assets or runtime-instantiated clones (needed when a card is duplicated or modified in a fight), and the deck is snapshotted at the start of each fight so clones are discarded and the deck reverts cleanly on a loss or retry, without touching the shared source assets.

One edge case worth calling out: a “Keeper Substitution” event lets a Keeper (a special win-condition unit) legitimately sit inside the drawable run deck between fights, but it must never come up as a normal draw. Getting that right needed dedicated draw-index logic that skips Keeper-flagged cards, now pinned down by two regression tests guarding against that bug class.

An “embue” is the run’s main deckbuilding lever: sacrifice a token to grant another token its attack-set, move-set, and highest resource cost. It reads as a simple combine-two-cards event on screen, but it’s doing real work underneath, swapping out the same move-set/attack-set data the AI search and battle-grid system query, so an embued token behaves identically to a native one in every system downstream rather than needing special-cased handling.

Every critter belongs to a “kin” (Avian-kin, Grub-kin, Grim-kin, Fae-kin, Briar-kin, Brood-kin, Therion-kin, or Kinless), which groups the roster for draft pools and synergy reads without constraining move-sets to a theme. The full roster is hand-drawn:

Creature and card art by Matchbookbaby and Kaiju_Tattoos.

Procedural Map & Hex-Grid Systems

Two separate procedural systems, built for different purposes:

• Roguelike overworld map: a node graph generated row by row. Nodes connect to the next row through a lane algorithm: shuffled processing order, candidate next-row nodes within a max column distance, and randomized outgoing edges while tracking connectivity to avoid orphaned nodes. Node types (Fight, Event, Shop) are assigned under spacing rules, no two Fight nodes back to back, soft limits on events between fights. The layout is deterministic from a run seed, so any map can be regenerated or replayed exactly.
• Battle-grid hex system: full axial/offset hex math (position/grid conversion, six-directional neighbor lookup, distance calculations) backing a terrain-type system (movement cost, obstacles, damage-on-landing hazards) used by both the AI search and live gameplay. It supports switching between a legacy square grid and a true hex grid at the data level.

In the shipped node set that’s Rest, Exchange, Fight, Path, Embue, and Mirror nodes, each reachable from the row below through however many lanes the generator drew, with unvisited nodes fogged out until a connecting path is revealed. Between Fights the deck evolves through whichever of those nodes a run visits, so a late-run Match is played with a meaningfully different deck than the one the run started with, not just a harder copy of it.

Terrain layouts are hand-painted in a custom editor tool rather than placed tile-by-tile in the scene: hotkeys assign a terrain type (Ground, Wall, Air, Abyss, Thicket, Bridge, Lava, Keep, Ritual) to a hex under the cursor directly over the layout data asset the battle-grid system reads at runtime.

These are the two largest gameplay systems in the codebase by line count, and both the map layout and the battle board get queried heavily by the AI search above.

The Sanctuary & Unlocks

The table now sits inside a Gothic sanctuary, and the player isn’t stuck in the chair. From the hand view, between fights or on their own idle turn mid-fight, one key stands them up and hands the camera to a first-person walker; the board simply waits. Pressing back, or just walking up to the table, sits them down and blends the camera straight back into board view, in the spirit of Inscryption’s cabin or Blue Prince’s mansion. The board keeps its own key light while you’re seated and hands the room back to the baked sanctuary lighting when you stand, so the table stays readable without the roof and tracery throwing shadows across it.

The side chapels hold the game’s unlockable tokens. Each one is sealed behind a door with glowing hint glyphs, and the hint is a puzzle: get a specific combination of tokens onto your side of the board at the same time, whether summoned, spawned by an effect, or taken over. Solve it mid-fight and the prize token appears next to the one that completed it, while back in the sanctuary its door sinks into the floor and the token stands in the chapel for good.

Under the hood a locked token is only filtered out of the player’s pools (deck, hand, offers, summons). The AI and the analytics self-play still draw from everything, so balance data always covers the whole roster no matter what a given save has unlocked.

Puzzle Unlocks

Sealed chapel doors hide new tokens. Read the glowing glyphs, then solve the puzzle mid-run: field the right tokens together, hold the right ground, or make the right move. The door opens and the token is yours to keep.

Succession (Keeper Upgrades)

Your Keeper doesn’t have to last. At a Succession, pick a critter to take its place. Some arrive carrying Auras, rare kin bonuses that can change a whole run.

Analytics-Driven Balancing Pipeline

This is the piece of the ML era that survived. During self-play matches, a static analytics system records about 20 per-card metrics: damage dealt, kills, times summoned, board presence at a win, eval-swing per decision, and more, merging them into a cumulative dataset across thousands of auto-restarted headless matches, gated behind a minimum-match-count threshold before results are trusted.

Brand-new cards without enough data fall back to a heuristic estimate (attack/health/mobility-based) so they aren’t ranked on statistical noise. The loop (headless self-play, CSV accumulation, reload, rebake) is the same self-play infrastructure the ML pipeline used, repointed at a simpler, more durable goal.

The rebake lands in an editor window that lists every card sorted by power percentile alongside its live deck-draw chance, so a balance pass is a scroll through one sorted list rather than hunting through 60 separate assets.

UI Toolkit Interface & the 3D Scroll Panel

The card-inspector panel is built on Unity UI Toolkit rather than the older uGUI/IMGUI, swapping between two layout trees at runtime depending on card type (one for creatures, one for non-creature cards like snares, runes and terrain) and layering 3D-rendered card art and hex move-range visuals beneath the 2D panel via explicit depth ordering. Animation blends DOTween with UI Toolkit’s own transition system, with hover/attribute interactions and clickable settings links routed through string IDs.

The more distinctive piece is presentation: the panel is a scroll of paper that physically unfurls and rotates in 3D world space, tracking a target pose with safety clamps against runaway transforms and a blended transition between open and closed states rather than a hard cut. Combining screen-space UI Toolkit panels with a 3D-space physical presentation isn’t common; most UI Toolkit work stays purely screen-space, and it’s one of the more visually distinctive pieces of the project.

Developer Tooling & Engineering Practices

• In-game dev terminal: command history, autocomplete, and roughly 30 commands covering forced match outcomes, grid/game-state dumps, revealing hidden info for debugging, live-swapping gameplay-settings profiles, save-state snapshotting, and more.
• Custom editor tooling (46 scripts): a headless build-and-run runner for self-play/training, bulk card-data editors, procedural mountain-mesh generation for terrain, automated PBR material import, terrain texture-splatting, full game-state JSON dumpers, and a build gate that blocks builds unless edit-mode tests pass.
• Crash forensics: a full undo/redo history system doubles as an automatic error-replay recorder; on an unhandled runtime error it writes the action history plus a JSON replay file with AI-phase context, so a crash can be reproduced and stepped through after the fact.
• Test suite: NUnit/Unity Test Framework coverage over the AI search engine, pathing/threat routing, save serialization, undo history, and card mechanics, including the two Keeper Substitution regression tests above.
• Repo hygiene: a custom pre-commit hook strips known-volatile, auto-regenerated blocks (like font atlas churn) from staged assets before diffing, and reverts a commit automatically if the only real change was that noise.