Hello everyone! This is my first Dev Log and, in fact, my first game (well, sorta). I’m a little hesitant to post this right now because I just hit the “playable” milestone and the game is very rough, but I think it will be good to get this out here. It doesn’t help to see all the dev logs here with such awesome art though; I am more programmer than artist, haha.
Let’s get right into the game!
Check out this video for a quick overview of how it works:
The showdown!This game (created with XNA) is a simple, quick card game. Each player chooses a class. Each class has a base attack and defense stat, as well as a deck of cards associated with it. Cards in the decks represent actions, such as attacking (increasing the attack stat), defending (increasing the defense stat), or using an item. 5 cards are drawn and placed face-up so both players can see all 10 cards. Each player plays one of their 5 cards per turn, which are executed simultaneously for both players. Defense directly negates attack 1:1 and whatever is left over is dealt as damage. For example, damage dealt to the opponent is calculated using the following formula:
(player base attack + player attack bonus) – (opponent base defense + opponent defense bonus)
The opponent’s defense negated most of my damage, but I still got some damage in!And the damage to the player is calculated using the opponent’s attack and player’s defense.
The cards that were used are put in the respective player’s discard pile. Then each player draws another card from the deck and places it face-up. If there are no more cards to draw from, the discard pile is shuffled and used as the deck.
A good play on my part!
After a long, hard-fought battle, I am Victorious!When one player runs out of health, the other wins!
As it stands right now:
- There are just attack and defend cards in the game
- There isn't really any AI for the opponent; it just picks a card randomly
- The game is just single-player against a computer-controlled opponent
To-Do:
- Item cards: can have a variety of effects, such as healing, or poisoning opponents. Item cards can only be used once per game; they are not reshuffled when the player runs out of cards
- Special cards: special abilities that are often tied to a specific class. For example: a Knight might have Shield Bash, which provides both attack and defense bonuses
- Passive cards: “status effects”, such as poison or healing over multiple turns
- Create classes
- I want to get some art into the game to make it look more interesting!
- Add some polish to the game (animations, fading in/out, and so on). I don’t have much experience with polishing games so if you know of any good articles or tutorials on the subject, please let me know!
Some far-off things I’d like to do:
- Allow players to create custom game modes by changing a variety of rules, such as max health and number of visible cards. Think something similar to Super Smash Bros. They can then save the mode to a file and share it with others, similar to how you share Halo game modes.
- Possibly add multiplayer support over the internet (I don’t think local multiplayer would work well)
This game is very much inspired by one of Squidi’s Three Hundred Mechanics (
http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=134). If you haven’t checked out his site, I definitely recommend it. It’s all sorts of inspiration!
Feedback is welcome, both positive and negative. It might sting but I’ll have to learn to be able to “burn my babies”, as one of my professors put it!
A little more about me and this project:
As I said, this is kind of my first game. I consider it to be my first game. I’ve technically completed a game before but it was very crude, a Visual Basic form game I made for a high school programming class. I’ve also started multiple other projects and worked on them for varying amounts of time before stopping work on them (for now at least). Most recently I started working on a roguelike, thinking it was technically simple enough and had a small enough scope for me just starting out. Alas, it seems like I made the Big Mistake most often made by beginning game devs of trying to take on a game that has too large of a scope, even though I was trying to be conscious of that. This game seems more reasonable in scope for me. Hopefully posting here will also motivate me to keep working on it; I get distracted a lot by actually playing games, haha. This is starting to seem more like a blog post, so I’ll wrap this right up.
Welp, thank you for taking the time to check out my game! If you have any comments or questions feel free to leave them!
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