Graphic & Game Design

There have been a lot of new developments in the past week.

First, I built a super basic GUI library for GameMaker. GameMaker does not currently have a built in way to create GUI in the editor, so everything has to be made in code. This is very annoying. Thankfully, a GUI editor is on the engine's roadmap, but that could take a year before it reaches stable release, and I simply can't wait that long. So I just have to do it myself. This is actually the second time I've tried to write this GUI library—the first time, I ran into some design problems and had to put a pin in it. This time, I restarted with scratch with the same fundamental principles, but a slightly different approach to implementation. The result seems pretty practical so far, or at least as practical as you can get with *just code.* I will probably make the GitHub repro public after I've used it more in this project.

Second, I've begun to work on some graphic design for the game—starting first with cards themselves. I'm not a graphic designer or an artist (the card art is placeholder taken from Marvel Snap) so I'm trying to keep things very simple. Generally when I want to make something look good, I'll just take a simple shape, clone it, offset it, and darken it for some contrast. It's not super great design, but it looks clean and is *a style* so it'll probably be what I go with for now. The image attached is showing a card being rendered in-game with my GUI library. Needs a bit more work, but it's a good start.

Last, and most importantly, I made a really big change to the game's design. I've done away with the card tier system entirely. I haven't fully committed to this decision yet, but it's probably 90% certain. The mechanic was interesting, but it only really worked in the context of a PVP card game where you queue with pre-made decks. I'm currently trying to reduce risks in the game's design, and this was the biggest source risk remaining. The game feels much less original now, but it's for the best. It should still feel very fresh, it'll be more vulnerable to comparison. 

One thing I haven't changed, however, is cards costing higher amounts of mana/energy. My compromise is: you start with 3 mana and gain +2 max mana whenever you reshuffle your draw pile. Currently this feels pretty good, but there's almost certainly issues with it. I definitely want to keep some amount of resource growth during battles, so it's just a matter of finding the right design. If the current idea isn't right, I'll just come up with something else.