So I'm about to start working on an idea I've wanted to do for a while. I've always wanted to make a game that involves deck building in some way but there are two things I don't really like so much/would be hard for me as a 1 man team...
1) With 60 card decks deck building takes a while and it a pain to do on the computer. At least for me. It also means you need a pretty large card pool just to start making interesting decks.
2) I want most of the focus to be on deck building/sideboarding so I want the actual games to play out super fast.
After a bunch of fooling around with different systems I came up with this and am about to start coding work so I wanted to get other peoples opinions on it...
The main difference between this and most other games is you don't really build a deck. You just build a hand of 5 cards and you start the game with them in hand. This means
1) no luck of the draw
2) since there are fewer cards less cards are needed to provide a variety of decks
3) deck building is pretty simple since it's only a matter of picking 5 cards, it's enough that you can hold the whole deck in your head without the help of a list
The flow of the game goes like this...
0) both players start with 0 energy, 5 atk, 100 health, and their hands of 5 cards
1) Both players add an energy to their supply
2) Player 1 plays any cards he wants from his hand
3) Player 2 plays any cards she wants from her hand
4) Both players receive damage equal to the other players attack.
5) if either player has 0 health the other player wins otherwise go back to 1
Now in order to play a card from your hand you need to have the minimum energy it asks for. You don't need to pay any energy to play the card it's just a threshold you have to reach.
cards come in 3 types, 1 time use cards (potions, bombs, etc.), cards that permanently buff something (swords, shields, etc.), cards that can be used once each turn (abilities, spells, etc). Some quick examples would be...
Name - energy - effect
(1 time effects)
Potion - 3 - heal 30 life
Super Potion - 5 - heal 40 life
Growth spurt - 1 - gain an additional energy
Bomb - 4 - damage enemy 40 life
Time Bomb - X - damage enemy 8*X
White Flag - 1 - no damage is done this turn
(equipment)
Sword - 4 - atk +10
knife - 2 - atk +3 (discard this card to do 10 damage)
mirror sword - 6 - your atk = your opponents atk
shield - 2 - oponents atk is -2
(abilities)
overtime Training - 2 - take 20 damage and gain an energy
consuming fire - 3 - remove an energy from the supply to do 10 damage
Anyway, I've come up with I think enough card types that you could build some different decks and I'm working on getting all the numbers working. My goal is to have the game play out super quick (a couple minutes) and then people can sideboard out there cards to try to counter their opponents strategy. In general it seems like this is the way it's working out...
fast decks > slow decks (the fast deck wins before the slow deck can start)
midspeed decks > fast decks (the fast deck can't win before the mid speed deck starts playing it's much stronger cards)
slow decks > midspeed decks (mid speed deck can't win before the slow deck can get out it's stronger cards)
there's also a less strong trend of...
healing > direct damage (direct damage person runs out of cards before healing player dies)
+atk > healing (the +atk hurts the healing player every turn so the healing player just ends up running out of cards and the +atk player is hurting them way more each turn)
direct damage > +atk (the direct damage player is able to kill the +atk player before their better atk skill can matter to much)
This seemed to be about as simple a system as I could come up with where I could still think of enough cards to make multiple types of interesting decks, but if something seems overly complicated to other people I'd love to hear it. Or if you just have some interesting ideas for cards
Wow that was longer then I thought
tldr: A deck building game where a deck consists of just the 5 cards in your starting hand. Players take turns increasing their energy, playing cards and then, attacking the opponents health. First Player to get the opponents health to 0 wins.
Developer
