Space Poker Released! Woo!

After far too long, I've finally finished this game, and fixed up the bugs found in the original version I posted to the Pico-8 forums. Thanks to everyone who played the older versions and pointed out the bugs.  Especially user @Theophile who actually figured out why the trickiest bug was happening.

--Lessons Learned and Deep Thoughts--

1) I now appreciate why there were no good poker games during the 8-bit era.

2) I underestimated how much information needs to be onscreen to make a playable poker game. I finally managed to cram it all in, but it's not pretty. I wound up drawing my own 4px font for numbers. The cards had to be uncomfortably small to fit them all in a traditional layout. I would have liked the game to have four opponents instead of three, but there just wasn't any place to PUT them!

3) The four traditional suits were simply not readable at the small scale. I knew I'd need two new suits with new colors. I finally settled on planets and water-drops. I think they should be distinct enough that even totally colorblind players should be able to read them. (Thematically, those suits seem likely enough for a space-faring society.)

4) The word "Check" broke my UI in too many places. I ultimately went with the shorter "Pass", which is technically also correct, but very out of fashion for Hold'em games. Presumably the fashion is different in the space future.

5) The rules to poker seem straightforward, but there's a LOT of edge cases that need to be handled. I spent a lot of time debugging rules problems that only showed up in very specific situations.

6) It's surprisingly easy to use the Monte Carlo method to estimate (without cheating) the odds that you've been dealt the winning hand.

7) It's surprisingly hard to use that estimate to make a believable AI poker player!

8)  Eight years!  I put this project down to "finish later" and somehow eight years went by!  Lesson learned : Don't ever put down projects without a planned date to pick them back up unless you're ok with them being forgotten.   For those whole eight years I was thinking of this game as the project I just put down "a few months ago".   wow.