How it's Going

Well, well, well, if it isn't another post!

I am currently afflicted with a most terrible curse. Every time I share a game I'm working on, I immediately lose all interest. A few weeks ago, I wrote a very long blog post about a card game that I already made and also want to make again. Well I technically already started making it again over a month ago, but I had to put it down to focus on something else. However, I recently was able to pick it up again and have been making exceptionally good progress towards a functional prototype.

Gameplay footage!

I'll try to explain how the game works, assuming no prior experience with card games or autobattlers. Skip this next paragraph is you've played a lot of card/autobattlers. I wrote a TLDR summary at the bottom.

How to Play

This is a player vs enemy game. This gameplay represents one match against a single enemy. The finished game would feature many matches against many different enemies. You, the player, choose a deck of cards to bring to each match. As does the enemy.

You start each match at rank 1 (I think I'm going to rename this to "tier" though). At the start of a match, all cards with a rank of 1 are removed from your deck and added to your draw pile. You can see the number of cards in each card pile (deck, draw pile, discard pile, deplete pile) at the bottom left and bottom right of the screen.

Matches are played in rounds, with two distinct phases: first the card playing phase, then the card battling phase. At the start of each each round, you draw 5 cards from your draw pile. Cards cost mana to play, which is replenished each round. I'm cheating and have 50 mana, but normally you would start with just 1. Max mana increases by 1 each round.

There are 3 types of cards: minions, spells, and battle spells. Minions are little guys that fight for you. They have an attack stat and a health stat. You can have up to 7 minions in play and can freely reorder them. Spells have a variety of effects and are put in the discard pile after being played. Battle spells get put into play and can be reordered like minions. They activate effects during battles and are put in the discard pile after each round.

When you're done playing cards, you can hit Battle! to start the battling phase, at which point the remaining cards in your hand are discarded. 

In the battling phase, the enemy will also have a team of minions and battle spells, which you'll be fighting against. You take turns attacking with minions and casting battle spells (all battle spells must be cast before your minions can attack. attack order is always left to right). Once one player has no minions, the other player is the winner of the battle and does damage to the loser (not implemented yet).

Last thing to note is ranking up. Whenever you attempt to draw a card, but have none left in your draw pile, you rank up. Ranking up means: all discarded cards return to your draw pile and cards in your deck with the new rank are also added to your draw pile. Strengthen is a rank 2 card, so I'll only get that once I've drawn through my first draw pile.

How to Play (TLDR)

It's the draw system of Slay the Spire + the card battle system of Hearthstone Battlegrounds + the deck constructing of any CCG. The new stuff is the rank system, where cards have rank and you access to higher ranked cards every time you reshuffle your discard pile, and battle spells, which are effects that can buff your team or harm the opponent's team during a battle.

What Next

There's a lot still to do, but I'm very happy with how it's looking already. The game already feels quite good to play, even without art or sound, which is a good sign.

Outside of rote re-implementation, the big question for this project is what a person's "playthrough" will look like. I sort of want this to be a campaign game, and not a roguelike. Almost every game game out there is either a competitive multiplayer game or a singleplayer roguelike, which is sort of weird. I think there's an unfilled niche for card-based games which are just singleplayer adventures like Pokemon. Go around a world collecting new cards and challenging people. That seems fun to me.

That said, "story modes" or "campaigns" represent a lot of work — much more so than a roguelike mode, and this game will be complex enough to already be a lot of work. So I don't know... The maniac in me kind of wants to tie this into a platformer somehow. I really like the idea of exploring a big platforming world and finding new cards instead of keys or powerups. It's just that this is a mouse based game, and platformers like to be played on controllers. It's also sort of uncommon for platformer enjoyers and card game enjoyers to be the game people, I think. So that's maybe a no-go, but I'm still thinking about it. I have a platformer project gathering dust which I'd love to repurpose...