Board Thread:Program Announcements/@comment-24454571-20140928231811

So, PTC 3 has been announced to provide Networking features, and the way that I've perceived this as that it will allow people to play games they made together over wi-fi! That seems amazing, and so, despite my incredibly limited knowledge and experience, I'm planning on working on what I consider to be a practical and engaging project; a digital card game!

Some of you may know that I boast very highly of my game-design abilities, and so before PTC is release, I will be working on the features of the game themselves, as well as thinking about how I'll implement them. Hopefully, I'll be able to realize this project in such a way that I'll be able to apply the touch-screen (shouldn't be too hard), but it would be pretty darn neat if there were come graphical options too, such as being able to 'tilt' or 'flip' a card -- I plan on using variables though, so I may not find this feasible or even necessary.

What am I thinking so far? Well, I've been playing quite a bit of Hearthstone, and I like the general idea there, so I'll be borrowing some of the elements -- I will be definitely borrowing the Attack/Health concept (where lost Health lingers, unlike in MTG), but there are some things about that which I'd like to change -- for example, I find the stats to be pretty linear; while interesting, I think that by essentially doubling the numbers will make 'trading' more interesting -- instead of 3/2, 4/5, 7/5, etc, I'd like to look at numbers that are more like 6/4, 8/10, 14/10, -- 8/12, 9/18 more like it (less Attack, more Health) -- the curve looks really good early on, and trades seem essential and dyanmic, up until numbers start reaching ~10 and higher, where there is a whole lot more room for dynamic trades. In addition to a 'Health' stat, I also think that an 'Elemental' stat would be interesting, which would essentially function as both a Boon to the strength of a Characters attack, as well as a Resistance against Elemental -- having an Elemental stat of 6 for example would mean that you would deal 6 bonus damage to enemies, but that would be reduced by their Elemental stat, so against 3, the attack would only produce 3 extra, and hey, you know, why not -- if you're attacking 6 against 9, why not have your attack heal the enemy for 3? I really like that.

The next concept I'd like to go over is that of Resources -- I'm unsure of exactly how I want to handle resources, particularly 'cards' themselves (which I would like to see being 'shuffled & drawn randomly' as in most card games), but I'm really interested in the idea of having cards that might be like, "Grant 15 Experience to a Character", which would enable you to 'Level up' your characters - but maybe it would be simpler just to state, "Grant +X/Y" to a character. Mm, and that's all about that for now... but-- in regards to another 'alteration' from the Hearthstone concept that I'd like to see, is that, rather than say having a character with 'Taunt' (you can't attack past that minion until you destroy or silence it), I'd like to have a feature like, 'Block', which is an Action rather than an Attribute, meaning that if you want to 'Block' attacks, that you would have to spend your action for the turn not attacking.

I'm pretty sure I'd like to add Equipment as cards to buff your characters -- which all makes it seem quite a bit like an RPG, and that's the general theme that I've been working off of to expand the idea of a card game. So, suffice it to say, I'm actually rather fond of the idea of giving characters Experience curves. Whatever the case may be, I think that it's necessary for everything to be extremely transparent and accessible on the interface.

Another thing I might do is 'Roll for Initiative' -- instead of taking turns linearly, while providing some benefit to the player acting second, I think I'd rather leave 'who goes first every round' up to chance. Some things that I need to think about are like, what is the primary objective (probably will be to destroy a Crystal, though that crystal may grant you powers, like Points to spend based on its remaining HP, for example), How are Spells handled (I've given thought to the idea of 'teaching your characters a spell' or 'giving them a spellbook')?

The general information that I'm considering including with a card are its most Essential Stats, which as I've conjured so far would include Element, Attack, Health, and possibly Cost. Then there would be the Image Art (Think very confined old school Sprites -- confined as in unlike FF6) and then the Card Text, which states specific rules relating to a character.

Originally I am not conceiving of any mode in which cards are acquired, outside of potential game modes such as 'drafts' / 'draft modes', so, perhaps, one of the Game Loops will be titled that of Library -- some mode to form cards into playable decks. Hm, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking in the way that you'll have to be connected to other players, even if not necessary, may be for the best when the players experiences are linked -- seeing this as a 2-player game -- so that both players are accessing the Library at the same time. It simply adds a sense of coherency to the experience, so that you can be sure if you're-say playing with strangers, that you can expect to play some time in the near future.

Maybe like, a 3 minute timer to find all of the cards you want to include and place cards into the slots of let's say 3 decks to play with. Then after both players are ready, or the timer runs out, Game Mode commences which declares the Game Type, like Best of Three, although I imagine that scaling up for whatever reason. People wanting to I guess.

Anyway, if you couldn't tell, this is totally my blog now. Just a place to organize some thoughts I'm having on the project. I like to think that I reserve this OP for pretty much everything that I have/want to say. Thematic ideas for the project: seperating things into Races, Monsters ~ whatever, maybe that's all that needs to suffice. Gods would sound really fine among those denominations. For races I'd say there could be a lot of Sub-Races, like Angels, Demons, Humans, Elves, Sprites. Monsters would include a bunch of stuff, like Elementals or various feral beasts -- perhaps some rules change the way that monsters operate. Like, maybe they're very powerful, but totally random in the way they act.

I've considered using a Game Board and having Sprites move around the screen to fight. Like, as a top screen, it could be Sprites moving around, and the bottom screen being sore of like 'Your Hand'. It could pretty much just be a Tactics RPG that's designed to be a competitive game, but I very much do enjoy the simplicity of a Card Game. The idea of like, Bumping Cards together to make them attack though isn't that compelling, nor is by simply reading the rules off of the card itself. I think that placement is quite an important aspect of the design of a game to be played with cards, which is where the stem of my lack of trust remains in terms of analyzing the design from the perspective of the dimensions of the DS. 