I recently got into gamedev after wanting to for a long time by participating in a few local gamejams.
I've also wanted to make a game for artfight for along time as well. I know that i could make either a platformer, point and click, visual novel or dressup game, but all of those seem kinda generic and would also require to have multiple sprites and/or animations which I may not have the time for in July.
So i eventually decided to make a card game. I can set up and program the game before July and then during Artfight I would only need to draw a single illustration and bam - i have a card to immediately put in my ready game.
I also didn't come up with this idea out of thin air, i had a few inspirations:
One of the biggest inspirations for this whole game idea, but mainly graphics, was Celestialmaze (@cmzw_ on twitter). I am absolutely amazed by what people can do in blender (and other shaders in different programms/engines) so I thought i should try making something similar myself. While searching for shaders, references and other things I also found tons of super amazing art by other people which also inspired different small things for this project.
As for gameplay, I will admit that i have almost no experience with playing any card games, both in real life and on a device (digitally in a game). I was also never into collecting pokemon cards or other collectible cards. My only experience is from trying a few free games here on itch.io and the Genshin TCG gamemode. So if my game has similarities to the Genshin TCG gamemode it's because that's the only card game I've put actual hours in.
Currently I have not programmed any logic yet for this game, but since this is a mainly art-focused game and I will treat gameplay as secondary (which you shouldn't do in gamedev generally). I am starting with the visual style, specifically the card design.
In this version the main thing i have done is set up a shader for the card background (originally prototyped in Blender and then rewritten for godot) and also made the node tree for the card object/scene. The current project has all 8 cards each in a unique color to test how the background looks for each color.
After thinking of potential gameplay ideas I decided make the cards not have any unique attributes because there will always be some sort of META if i implement this and some cards/characters just wouldn't be viable to play.
The only attribute a card/character has is its hue (or color)
Rough gameplay idea:
- You make up a deck of 6 character cards and 12 modifiers. You choose 3 active cards at the beginning of the game. Your cards have 10 HP. When all your cards go to 0 HP you lose.
- You make moves that cost a color resource. Each turn you get 6 color resources.
- You can attach 2 modifiers to a card. It costs 1 resource of the same color as your card.
- You can switch out an active card for a different card. It costs 2 color resources (1 - active card color, 1 - color of the card you're switching to)
- The color resources you get are random colors, unless you have activated a color harmony, then it will only give you the colors of the harmony you have activated.
So what are modifiers?
They are basically moves that a card can make. There can be a modifier that for example heals a target card for n amount of health. There can be a modifier that deals n damage to target card. Modifier that deals n damage to all enemies active cards. Modifier that makes the target cards next attack do +2 damage, etc. Modifiers can be applied to any color card and all cost 1 color resource to use or 1 color resource to switch out to a different modifier.
What are color harmonies? And what role do colors even play in this game?
The player can trigger one of 4 possible color harmonies with their active deck.
- Complementary (Example Red-Green). You only get red and green color resources. Your attacks also deal more damage the further away your target is from your color. So a red card using some sort of attack attribute would do more damage to lime, blue and even more to green - the completely opposite color.
- Split Complementary (Example Red-Lime-Blue). I will admit i have not figured this one out yet. Ive had multiple ideas which i scrapped in the end.
- Analogous (Example Pink-Red-Orange). Buff attributes last longer. For example if you use an attribute "The target does +2 damage the next time it attacks" this attribute would now become "The target does +2 damage the next two times it attacks" or maybe even just increase the buff to +3 damage.
- Monochromatic (Just Red). A flat HP increase. For example All cards have just +3 HP.
The UI of the game would incorporate different art aspects. The attributes could be modeled after watercolor squares. The color resources spawn on a color palette, etc.
To end this off - I can't guarantee that I will ever finish this. I am doing this as a hobby and I am not profiting from this project in any way.
The main reason as to why I'm prioritizing the visual aspect of this game is so that in case I give up on the idea of a finished, fully fleshed out game with different mechanics, I still have a nice card viewer where you can see your character with a sparkly background and lots of cool VFXs as a card for a hypothetical game.
Thank you for reading this post!