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[Jesse Ko]

If you haven't done so already, follow and wishlist Luckless Seven on Steam! :]


Over 1,000 portraits! Many characters have different expressions and the story will change based on the choices you make.


Ekosi is the card battle system in Luckless Seven. Ekosi is the next evolution of Pazaak.


Explore the enchanting island of Arithia!







Game History
Hello, my name is Jesse and I've been working on Luckless Seven since December 2013. This is our journey to creating our first game. Please let me know if you have any questions. We first started out with pixel art and then transitioned to 3D later. The game is built in Unity3D engine and we started in version 4.2 but now we are well into Unity 5.

Luckless Seven is a card game and an RPG. We are giving the game a real story and fleshed out characters. You play as Mark and he will make many dialogue decisions and can complete optional quests that will change how the story progresses and how his party members view him. We drew a lot of inspiration from Kotor's Pazaak and Mass Effect's dialogue system/party system.

Game Description
Luckless Seven is the story of Mark Vesco’s journey from a listless existence to competitive glory. Blending a fast-paced card battle system with conversations and stories that respond to your choices, we offer one of the first card games with a story exciting enough to match it.

Websites
www.LucklessSeven.com - Recently updated!
@LucklessSeven
STEAM PAGE and STEAM DEMO
Devlog - DeckpointStudio
Indie DB Page and Demo

Devlogs:

2014 - Website Only
March 8, 2014 - New Cards!
March 16, 2014 - New Animations
March 16, 2014 - Pazaak and Luckless Seven
March 18, 2014 - Physical Cards Are In!
March 19, 2014 - Demo Up On Indiedb
March 19, 2014 - Demo Up On Indiedb
March 29, 2014 - UI Updated
April 1, 2014 - Foil Cards
April 9, - 2014 Foil Cards
April 30, 2014 - Kickstarter Delay
May 31, 2014 - Luckless Seven Alpha 0.149 Now Up!
June 10, 2014 - New Visuals in Alpha 0.150
July 11, 2014 - Tutorials and Sound Design

2014 - Tigsource
August 23, 2014 - Alpha 0.160 Many Changes Soon
September 19, 2014 - A Big Transistion
November 8, 2014 - Shave and a Haircut!
November 19, 2014 - I Can Empathize
November 29, 2014 - We Got An App For That

2015 - Tigsource
January 17, 2015 - For Posterity
March 2, 2015 - Massive Demo Update!
April 21, 2015 - Massive Demo Update!
April 27, 2015 - Menus Galore
May 16, 2015 - The Dialogue System
June 4, 2015 - Dialogue Icons
June 6, 2015 - Library Update
June 15, 2015 - Kickstarter Launch
June 6, 2015 - Luckless Seven Greenlit!
October 17, 2015 - Casino Royale
November 20, 2015 - Ohio Game Developer Expo This Week

2016 - Tigsource
January 10, 2016 - The Next Evolution of Our Dialogue System
January 29, 2016 - Day 2 Released
April 13, 2016 - Day 3 Release
June 5, 2016 - Game Opening and Tutorial Changes
June 14, 2016 - Day 1 Done (Again)!
July 24, 2016 - The Path Ahead
October 8, 2016 - It's Happening! - STEAM PAGE UP
November 7, 2016 - GDEX Postmortem

2017 - Tigsource
January 1, 2017 - Composer Profile: Brandon Ledbetter
February 8, 2017 - Day 4 Released!
March 3, 2017 - Campfire
April 30, 2017 - Making Arithia
June 13, 2017 - Saving The Day
August 3, 2017 - City 2 Preview
MEGA DEV DIARY - October 17, 2017 - Matsuricon and GDEX! (50+ Screenshots and Gifs)
MEGA DEV DIARY - Decemeber 20, 2017 - Updates Galore! (60+ Screenshots and Gifs)

2018 - Tigsource
MEGA DEV DIARY - February 13, 2018 - Reflections on Apple Pie (60+ Screenshots and Gifs)
MEGA DEV DIARY - May 15, 2018 - A Radical New Perspective (60+ Screenshots and Gifs)



If you haven't done so already, follow and wishlist Luckless Seven on Steam !



Join us on our journey at www.lucklessseven.com as we develop Luckless Seven! Help shape the game and get access to exclusive content!



If you haven't done so already, follow and wishlist Luckless Seven on Steam ! :]

[Jesse Ko]

[reserved]

[Jesse Ko]

Original Post from August 4, 2014

Hello everyone! We’re Deckpoint Studio and our current project is the card game RPG Luckless Seven.

Features:

• Card battle system
  
• Dozens of collectible cards
  

• Long storyline with multiple narratives
  
• Social leveling system
  

• Explorable 3D world
  
• Immersive dialogue trees
  

The RPG part of the game will feature a complex dialogue system similar to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. We have the conversation system mostly figured out, but it will be a few weeks until we feel comfortable showcasing all its features.

The card game that is used as the battle system is inspired by Pazaak, a minigame from BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. For those unfamiliar with Pazaak, the game plays very similarly to blackjack, but with a few key differences. The primary difference is that players have a hand in which they can play cards to influence their score. The goal of the game is to hit a score of 20 (as opposed to 21) without going over.

Our development so far has mainly been on the battle system. After many balance and design changes, we are happy with how the card game functions and have moved on to other areas of development.

The last few weeks have been witness to the greatest changes in our game since the beginning month. While we have been planning the transition from 2D to 3D for the past few months, it wasn’t until the last few weeks that we were able to implement the changes. Although many of the designs are still in their early stages, we are very happy with how the game looks so far.



Our original design for the game was to have highly detailed pixel graphics. About midway through the project, our lead programmer discovered some lighting and shading techniques that we thought would make the game look very nice. After weeks of discussion, we made the difficult decision of ditching all our pixel assets and making the game world in 3D.



We are putting a big focus on lighting as we feel it makes the game look very realistic. We’re still learning the ropes on making the best use of lighting, but it has been an exhilarating process so far.



Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on incorporating the dialogue system into the overworld and finishing the design for the first city. If you want to play a demo of our game (overworld is not implemented yet), a download is available on our Indiedb page. You can find more information about our game on our website.

[Savick]

Okay, so I downloaded and played a bit. Here's what I think.

First of all the completely black or very dark cursor seems like a bad choice design wise, given that it can vanish in dark areas of the graphics. Come up with some variations on that and see what's more visible.

That tutorial had so much text to read that I lost interest and clicked through it, but got the gist of it. Maybe if you shortened the text load or added more informative pictures? It may be just me, but I don't think anyone wants to read a large amount of text when it comes to most games.

You have a nice presentation in general. Pretty professional looking.

[Jesse Ko]

Thanks for playing our game! We plan on adding a more natural tutorial when we implement the overworld in our demos. The current tutorial is a placeholder until we have more of the overworld developed. Hopefully we'll have the new tutorial up and running in the next few weeks.

We definitely agree that the mouse cursor is too dark. One of the reasons it's so dark is that we changed the lighting in our latest build. We probably should've just quickly put in a placeholder, but we were planning on making a new mouse cursor in the future so we decided to keep it temporarily. We'll be updating it soon.

Thank you again for the great feedback!

[tieTYT]

What's up "Sensual" Lettuce?  Following

[Jesse Ko]

Hey TieTYT! Cool to see you here.

[Jesse Ko]

We recently uploaded a new demo to our Indiedb page. This version introduces a new background to the battle screen as well as a very flashy animation effect for when the player wins 3 rounds in a row. The ne background has animated flares and clouds.



What do you think of the new sky and clouds background? Do you think it blends well with the UI? We'd appreciate if you tried out the demo and let us know how you feel.

Luckless Seven Alpha 0.159

Thanks for stopping by!

[tieTYT]

Do you have a screenshot of what the background looked like before?

[Jesse Ko]

Hey TieTYT! Yeah, I probably should've included that. Here ya go.

[tieTYT]

Hm, well I see "problems" with both.  That's that the placeholder disappears because it has no contrast with the background in some places.  In the newer pic, the lower right card is difficult to distinguish from the cloud.  But, take this all with a grain of salt.  My forte is not art.

[Jesse Ko]

Yes, we agree. We'll probably be making the UI slightly darker to combat this. Thanks a lot for your suggestion!

[Jesse Ko]

Over the last couple weeks, we've been working on our new portrait style, character animations, and dialogue system. We are nearing the final stages for all three, but we don't feel quite comfortable on showing them just yet.

We recently released Luckless Seven alpha 0.160 on Indiedb. This version has a darker UI so that many items are easier to see, such as the holo card slots and the boxes at the bottom.



Some of the visual effects are still a little hard to see on the screen, such as the "radiance" particle effect that occurs when a card is first put down on a slot. Besides looking pretty, this effect also has a gameplay element. When cards are dealt, the player can actually observe what types of cards are in their opponent's hand. Red cards have a red radiance, blue cards have a blue radiance, etc...

We plan on having power-up items that have minor effects on gameplay. One of them will keep the radiance of the opponents cards permanently active, so they'll always know what type of cards the opponent has. Unfortunately, the radiance is kind of hard to see with the sky background, so we'll still have to play around with contrast for that.

We also have a very special win effect for when the player wins 3 in-a-row. We feel pretty good with all the win/lose/tie animations now. We plan on adding some more animations for the cards in the near future. After that, most of the elements of the battle board should be complete.



We've been working on a lot of fundamental gameplay aspects over the last couple months, but we've been hesitant to showcase them since many of the designs were constantly changing, or we weren't sure whether we could implement all the features we wanted. We are fast approaching a point where all these features will be solidified. Expect to see a lot of additions to the game in the next few updates. We can't wait to reveal our new portrait style and dialogue system in the coming weeks!

[Jesse Ko]

We recently made a blog post on our site about the decision we made in transitioning our game world from 2D to 3D. When we first started posting on TIG, we were already well underway to constructing our first area in 3D. So for those of you that have read our few existing posts, some of what you see will already be familiar. This post if more of a review about what factored into our decision and the implications it's had for our game.

The full article can be read here. The highlights of the article will be posted below.



Around 6 months ago, those of us at Deckpoint had an extremely long conversation about the presentation of our game world. As early screenshots of our game reveal, our initial overworld was constructed of pixel graphics.



After extensively reading about how to create 3D worlds, our lead programmer felt confident that we could make a 3D game world with realistic lighting and reflections. For weeks, we experimented with creating the world using 3D assets. Constructing the world in 3D was definitely a more time-consuming process; we would most certainly not be able to release the game at our initially planned date. Besides that, basic functions such as player pathing, AI, and animations would be much more complex.

Another change that we would have to make would be with our character portraits. With more realistic looking graphics, the cartoony style that we had would not blend well with the rest of the game. We would have to come up with another art style for almost everything. When we eventually had a piece of the game world built in 3D, all those concerns evaporated. We realized that we might just be able to pull it off... and if we could do it, our game would look much closer to the dream game we've always envisioned.



In the next several weeks, we will have a flood of new content to show the cool things we've been working on that we haven't yet shown on our Twitter/TIG dev logs. Our dialogue system has gone through many refinements, our inventory system is close to completion, and we've finalized the art style for our character portraits. We're working on implementing these in our demo, so expect to see at least one of these features within the next few alpha builds.

[Jesse Ko]

When we changed the graphics of our overworld, we knew that we would have to change our portrait style. The manga-looking characters did not blend in well with the more realistic environment. Over the last several months, we have been solidifying a new style for the characters. Today, we're very happy to present four of the main characters with the updated art style!









Many of the primary characters will have multiple facial expressions that will change depending on the dialogue. So far, the main character has 12 emotions, but we estimate he'll have at least a dozen more by the final version.

We experimented with a number of different styles before we finally landed on where we are today.



Even before we updated the portraits, we were considering changing our art style since the cartoony looking characters looked a bit out of place on some of our more recent battle boards.

We're very happy with how the portraits look with our new dialogue system. Next week, we'll be showing some screenshots of the dialogue system in action.

[Jesse Ko]

For the story of Luckless Seven, we wanted the character to interact with his party all at once. The very first iteration of our conversation system only allowed the player to talk to one person at a time. Today, we're extremely happy to show a sneak peak at our new dialogue system.



Ideas for the current dialogue system were conceived from as far back as March. This was back when we were still using pixel graphics. Conversations between party members were very cumbersome to design under a one-on-one dialogue constraint.



We wanted to keep the portraits and still have multiple response options. Having more than 3 options made the screen look cluttered, at least with the design shown in the above screenshot. With a need for both several portraits and conversation responses to be on screen simultaneously, it became very apparent that we needed to do more than simply re-size and rearrange some boxes.

Next week, we'll go through an example of the different types of conversation categories the player can specialize in.

[Jesse Ko]

A couple weeks ago, we talked about the new dialogue system we've been working on. Today's blog post was supposed to cover more the system in greater depth, but we decided to save that post for when we have it implemented in our demo (which should be fairly soon!). Instead, we are going to talk for a bit about our menu system.



For the menu system, we decided to tie everything to the phone. We always liked games that tied in menus organically into the game. One of my favorite examples is Dead Space, where everything from your health bar to your inventory is weaved into your suit.

We were planning on using the phone extensively for the game's fictional social media elements. The player would look at the phone for messages from his friends, news updates, and codex entries. After having so many features tied into the phone, we decided to make the whole menu system viewable from the phone.

In our next post, we'll have screenshots of how the inventory and other systems look on the phone.

[Jesse Ko]

We have the latest version of our city theme on our composer's SoundCloud. Our town theme has gone through many revisions over the last several weeks. After several tweaks, we feel very happy with our latest version.

https://soundcloud.com/npc-23/the-adventure-begins

[Jesse Ko]

We've been working on releasing a massive demo showcasing primary elements of our gameplay such as the dialogue, quest, and inventory systems, but the process is taking longer than we anticipated. On the sound design side of things, we've completed several new sound effects and tracks over the last few weeks.

Our latest track is the first in a series of ambient tracks that will be used for indoor environments.

https://soundcloud.com/npc-23/a-listless-world

[Jesse Ko]

Hello everyone!

All of us at Deckpoint are hoping that your new year is starting off well.

Since our last update, we've made massive strides towards fully integrating our gameplay systems together. The inventory system now works correctly with the battle system and merchant vendors. We've made numerous dialogue scenes and refinements to our dialogue UI. Within a couple weeks, we should have a fully functioning demo with several quests that will showcase all these systems working together.



We've been holding back the release for a long time now, but we're very happy with the current state of the demo.

The ambition of our first demo introducing the overworld has steadily increased over the last few months. Originally, we wanted to just include a small environment in which the player could walk around, talk with people, and initiate battles. Then we wanted the player to have access to their inventory to customize their deck. Then we wanted to having longer conversations with lots of dialogue choices. Then we wanted to actually put a questline in. Well, with our next alpha release, you'll be able to do all of those!

One thing we are very sad to see leave is the old title screen. The art style no longer fits super well with our new one, so we've completely overhauled the design. We had a really nice title screen that showed off the 3D world, but we encountered some severe last minute errors. We hope to have the situation resolved soon, but there is a chance that we might not be able to use the original scene. If we can't, we'll definitely show some footage of the title screen in a future blog post (we actually have it working in an unreleased alpha build).

For now though, we say goodbye to our old title screen. R.I.P.



"Mark could totally push Krista off the edge" was a comment we heard surprisingly often.