Board Thread:Suggestions and Ideas/@comment-24454571-20141012213528/@comment-76.105.145.190-20141112233212

I've had some time for my ideas to settle now, so I return here, bearing the fruit of improved ideas and new ideas, or clarified ideas. First, I should go over some refresher on what I've plotted out thus far...

A Digital Card game; what this generally implies is ease of playing. If a card has a complex effect, like choosing a random target, then a computer is more easily capable of handling this sort of request than say dice or coins, or eenie-meenie-miny-moe. It also makes tracking complex statistics more easy -- rather than managing sheets of paper for characters Health, etc, the computer can easily manage all of these things.

On to the game itself -- Races & Monsters. So far I've created many different 'types' of cards. Before getting to those, though, the Limits of the Game itself. Each players deck is comprised of X cards -- to achieve Victory, your opponent must run out of Prize cards; a number of cards set aside before every game starts. Whenever one of your 'Characters' dies, you draw a Prize. In this fashion, Losing grants you a bit of Tempo, which makes 'comebacks' theoretically more plausible, or simply 'keeps one in the action of the game'. Because of these conditions, we have to include a couple of rules to ensure that there is at least one Victor/Loser (although it seems entirely plausible that Draws will occur). First, if you don't have a Character on the board at the beginning of play, when it becomes your turn, then you Draw a Prize -- simple enough, no stalling the game by failing to provide an objective. Second, if you no longer have any cards left to draw from your deck, then you Draw a Prize. If, for whatever reason, the game can reach no conclusion -- because both sides are healing to full health every turn, or something -- then there's a way for the game to end. The latter condition, in itself, requires quite a bit of knowledge on how the game actually plays out to understand the full implications of -- healing, for example, could become a massive detriment to the quality of the game at its highest level; as in, it shouldn't ordinarily be a viable strategy to simply never lose any characters, because then the game comes down to who plays, which, whoever that is, loses.

My initial idea for 'drawing cards' is that there's a 'Rotation' of cards -- your Starting Hand, followed by One Card that is drawn at the beginning of every turn. If your 'Rotation-Slide' becomes too full, then the first cards entered begin to 'slip off the face of the queue' and 'burn to death'. I haven't given too much thought to any alternatives, though -- I imagine there are some pretty creative methods for dealing with card draw.

As for card types, I only have the vague-est sense of how I'll handle them all, but so far the two main categories of 'Character' cards are Races, and Monsters. Races have lots of unique attributes, such as being able to Equip Items, while Monsters are vastly different in the sense that they 'choose to act Randomly', as in, you have no control over how a Monster chooses to act, only over what Monsters you want to include in your deck. Some Monsters may be innately very offensive, while others may be most suited to being defensive. Generally, due to the inherent nature of Monsters, I imagine they are stronger than Races. Both types of characters though, have access to Experience Cards, which are capable of granting characters Levels to increase their function & strength.

Things like Experience cards, though, bring up some questions for me -- if there are various amounts of Experience, then there must be some kind of 'Resource' system in place, so that having a card that says 'Grant 5 Experience' is fundamentally different or preferable to a card that says 'Grant 15 Experience', or else why not simply call the card 'Level Up'. Another option is that Experience cards represent a Random amount of Experience, making them somewhat of a Risk to play. On top of these questions, though, there is the question of 'how much Experience does it take to level up?', or if opting to go with a Level Up card instead of an Experience card, "what kinds of strengths should a character be capable of achieving upong leveling up?"

Other kinds of cards that I'm considering are Equipment Cards & Class Cards. Equipment can be attached to a character, I'm initially thinking, for the cost of Gold -- an innate attribute of either Races, or, perhaps Classes. A Thief, for example, ideally possesses more starting Gold than other classes, or even has the capability of Stealing other characters Gold. Class Cards, I imagine are easy to attach to a character. Initially I had considered choosing a Race & Class at the same time during Deck Creation, but, like many of these ideas, I'm not 100% sure which direction I'm heading with, but, I can cover some of my intentions moving forward.

In the ideal situation, the player will have many options to pick when designing a deck -- one doesn't need to 'strike a balance' between cards, so much, under this ideal circumstance, where instead, they're able to opt for heavy Experience or heavy Equipment kinds of decks. Some things inherently won't be possible unless I think of a solution; Classes for example -- is there a reason to having many of them? Perhaps Classes stack, as in multi-classing is a possibility, but I'm not totally confident with that yet, as ideally everything would appear to be very simple & readable, which isn't really the case with a character who is a Monk Shaman Druid Mage Paladin Warrior, who might possess too many Unique Abilities to fit within their options menu.

There's also the issue of, "how are characters played?" as in, if they don't cost anything, then the idea is that you can just slap them all down at the start without many reprecussions -- also, what are the unique traits of characters, specifically races, that would make one a seemingly better play than another at any given point in the game? In the past I've considered using 'cards from your hand' as resources for playing characters. For example, you can play an Angel and that would require you to put one card from your hand back onto the top of your deck, or you could play a big Monster, that would require you to pick three cards to randomly shuffle three back into your deck. There are lots of options to go this way, but the key element is ensuring that the game provides players with a healthy 'hand economy'.

There are lots of issues, big and small, that I'll have to address eventually -- for now, it appears that I haven't made a whole lot of progress in terms of solidifying the elements of the game, but I may have a better idea of the kinds of problems involved with going forward in terms of game design.

Some of the things that I'd really like to focus on, which begin to involve the technical aspects of creating a game like this, are creating readily apparent graphical cues for things, such as having a 'rotating slide of cards' as your hand -- rather than having those precedures happen instantaneously at the beginning of your turn, for example, which can leave players thinking, "wait, what happened? my cards changed," compared to having an animation which shows your cards sliding, then a new card appearing, and if necessary, a card 'burning'.

Again, how I use the screen space is going to be elemental to how this game is perceived and played. There needs to be space for many, many things -- from having a Hand, to a Deck where you can see how many cards you have remaining, to even having a Graveyard, perhaps, as well as a Board where characters exist, as well as Menus to navigate so that the characters can act, and also some way for cards and components of the game to be displayed in great detail. Any individual character themselves will have various components attributed to them, such as Attack, Health, and then any other things that I think will work out, like Gold or Mana or Elemental/Poison/Buff-Nerf Status.