Posted January 03, 2025 by Robin Johansson
This update focuses on improving the readability of the card GUI. Few new features are added. With these changes it's now much easier to understand cards, and there are less graphical bugs like text extending outside of the cards boundaries. This has needed to be done for quite some time, the initial descriptions were very unreadable, and often relied on me using my game engines editor to properly see things. This improvement should make it easier for other people to use the program, and make it faster for me to develop the project further.
When making the new card GUI I've looked at cards from ALOT of different card games for ideas: Terraforming mars, Ark Nova, Dominion, Ascension and Magic the gathering. I will probably change it more in the future, but right now it's good enough.
I've added some AI generated art, provided by magicstudio.com, for most of the images. As long as the game is a sort of prototype I think this is okay. Since it enables easy generation of art with little effort. Right now speed and being lightweight is more important than details and polish. If the project reaches a more mature state I will make sure to either make the art myself, or outsource it.
Example of how the card GUI looked before:
Example of how the card GUI looks now:
I was previously considering adding animations and transitions in this release as well. The purpose of those animations would partly be to increase understandability, something which this GUI update already does sufficiently. Because of that I've decided that the animations can wait until later. They will be important at some time, but are not crucial now.
Recently I've also been playing with the idea of a "Story progression" release. This project was originally inspired by "The lost expedition", which is a board/card game with a jungle exploration theme. I think I could create a system where the game progresses through a couple of "stages", where victory is achieved at the end of the last stage. Similar to how defeat/victory is handled in a game like Arkham Horror the card game. But this potential system is far in the future.