Hi! I'm Melon, and this is my first solo jam, and first time making a game of this kind.

My goal this jam is to make a simple collectible/trading card game and focus on the balance of it. There will be no collecting or trading, that's just the style. Ideally, I will be releasing an online playable package for OCTGN(with lots of manual cop-outs and written rules to follow, sorry, don't know the first thing about coding!), printable PDF/image files, and if I have enough time, or after the jam, possibly a Tabletop Simulator mod.

This jam's theme is change eggs, so I must note to add some Eggs to cards/card art, Egg card back, Egg objectives and/or an Egg card(probably my favourite idea). I also briefly considered naming the game after Eggs in some fashion.

On a more serious note... I have had the idea for this game for quite some time, at least in terms of some lore and visual designs. The central idea is "lots of dragons are there", but there is a little more nuance... 

• There's 7 distinct flavours of dragon, with different powers associated with them.  These range from ouchie super hot fire to raising the dead (potentially, it might be overpowered, hehe).

• With enough numbers, your  'lesser dragons' can band together to change into more powerful units.

...and there will be more mechanics, but these are the ones I'm not willing to give up For The Sake Of Balance! I'll see what I can come up with.

Today's progress: I was busy wrestling my testing tool of choice for the first few hours of the jam, (which started at 5pm my time) but now that's out of the way... I can sleep! First order of business tomorrow will be designing a card and play area template, then perhaps some basic stat design. I expect to spend about 3-4 days setting up with placeholders before I'm ready for testing, but I don't have a solid schedule in mind. I expect to make somewhere in the vicinity of 26-30 distinct cards, but would love to make more if I have time!

(Log Part 2.)

Time for some Lore™! there's  7 "factions"  which will primarily be differentiated by colour and something of a classical "elemental type". 

1. Fire dragons: Feisty, attack-oriented, and somewhat speedy. May have special abilities that involve group(AoE) damage. Weak areas: defenses & utility.
2. Wind dragons: The speediest! Since they're the best fliers, they can out-manoeuver any other unit. Overall the most well-rounded stat wise.
3. Earth dragons: Defensive powerhouses, and with a little bit of utility. Weaknesses: Middling to weak attack,  very slow.
4. Nature dragons: Strong attack, some utility, and decent movement. Weaknesses: Very frail.
5. Water dragons: Defensive but in a slightly different way; their total health will be lower than an Earthen dragon, but they have healing abilities to compensate. 
6. Cosmic dragons: The nerd dragons. Very strong utility, decent movement, but weak in attack and defense.
7. Metal dragons: Mostly defense-oriented, but quite rare, and utility wise something of a generalist card that any deck can use. This will make more sense when more card abilities exist.

You might think, "Melon, why does paying their utility bill help them in combat"! Well. I'm using it as a bit of a shorthand for any special card effects. They can be very particular and each individual effect will need to be balanced carefully. Current effects vary from freezing enemies in place to reduced card costs, and a few other things I mentioned in previous posts... (:

For the starting set of cards, I've created a dragons of each type which can then be "evolved" into a powered-up version at a 3-to-1 ratio. There are also mana cards, and the egg card(yes) which can be used as a substitute in card evolution. I'm not totally sure if the 3-to-1 ratio will be better than 2-to-1, so I'll see how it feels in testing.
If the egg card is too powerful I might make... 6 egg cards. (Type specific! Except Metal, because they are special.) 

While I just finished(took long enough) coming up with stats and abilities I'm happy with for the first 16 cards, I just realised I have to write an instructional pamphlet for my beta testers very soon, so they have some idea of what's going on! I'm going to work on that ASAP... (next devlog!)

(Log Part 3.)

Last night, I finished my first few rounds of testing! The game pacing was a bit too fast with the HP values I chose, so I'm going to increase them across the board. That way there's more chances to engage the change.

Finally, I rolled the 3-to-1 summon ratio to 2-to-1. That was, uh, mostly expected.

1. Assemble a deck of any cards you like, up to 60 cards.
2. Flip a coin/roll dice/etc. to determine the starting player. Starting player can summon, but cannot move or attack on their first turn.
3. The goal is to get to the opposing player's end of the board and attack them directly! They have 20 HP. (In OCTGN:  for now, I use a discarded mana card or something to keep  track of HP, and count up from 0.)
4. Draw 7 cards at the start of the game. Draw 2 cards at the start of every turn.
5. You can summon up to 2 units each turn. Maximum 7 on the board.
6. Once you have moved and attacked with any or all units of your choice, your turn is over.
7. Unless an ability explicitly states otherwise, you cannot move past the line of an enemy unit. You must be on the same or an adjacent area to attack the enemy. 
8. If you are on your opponent's starting area and no enemies are in the same area, you can attack the enemy directly.
9. Tier 2 summons cost both their mana cost(2) and 2 matching tier-1 units.

With revised numbers & card effects to add, I'm going to be replacing these ten-second card doodles and placeholder names, and continue working on card art until I can accost one of my friends to playtest! So since I haven't posted any images in a while, enjoy the old card drawings before I trash 'em.

[I would like to note the Red and Yellow description simply reads "A cool guy" in the placeholder iteration.]

Wah ! I haven't been able to focus on my game for a couple of days. That puts me way way behind... but I still have the better part of a week, so I'm hoping to recover!

A few days ago I polished off the card template with some free stock images & general pickiness. Today, I've been trying to finish off sketches of all the cards. I like some of them a lot more than others. Here's the first half, and then I can go back to designing more card effects. I've been alerted the appearance of the card is really what's going to sway people to using a certain kind of deck, so it must be pretty important! :P

[You may notice some weird symbols to the right of the card name. That's something that's changed slightly since the first template showing - an elemental "symbol" to match the type above the name. Once the tier 2 cards are complete, you should be able to spot one in a description, with hopefully a few more to come...]

The second half of the images!

Can't believe the game jam is almost over! I'll be trying to round everything off so it's uploadable and playable for the remainder of the time, as well as refining some play instructions. Unfortunately I didn't even really get into the 2nd round of cards design - that's fine though, since it helped me lift off a concept I'd been thinking about over the past few months. 

Next log will probably be the last one, thanks for tuning in.

Submitted the project, after a couple hours adding some more card names & parameters, as well as writing instructions and double checking the installation process for new players. Probably all changes I make will be re-wording or adding to the instructions, rather than changing core gameplay.

https://melon-pope.itch.io/dragonsnap-ccg

Advice to my future self(and any readers!):
- It's best not to include anything that needs multiplayer testing on a schedule. I got to test with other players about twice throughout the whole process

- Don't develop new hyperfixation on the jam start day 

- Social involvement is really helpful! The jam Discord is a great resource.

Yeeeeah I didn't get much done. But I'm looking forward to playing the other jam games in a couple of days! Woohoo!  And I hope my followers at least like the drawings (X. Next time I jam, I might sign on as artist/part of a team instead. (I wasn't expecting them to be in such demand!)