- Play cards with higher power into the center with the aim to lock your opponent out
- Singleplayer
- Created in January 2023
- Available on itch.io as a Web build
- Developed solo
- Singleplayer
- Created in January 2023
- Available on itch.io as a Web build
- Developed solo
This project was me putting my prototyping skills to the test. I wanted to develop a simple cardgame that I could use for a singleplayer RPG, however this was my first time making a cardgame of any kind. So I decided I would first implement this in Pico-8 and then take the experience from there into Unity.
Pico-8 doesn't have classes or distinct objects so I had to approximate an object-oriented approach: Each card is a table that holds it's position, power and ID. This same ID is used in several functions to determine if the card is playable or what should happen when the card is played.
This was much easier to implement later on in Unity but by first implementing it in Pico-8 I was able to find what functions each card needed and what limitations I needed to address. For example, in the Pico-8 version only the top card of the stack can prevent a card being played, but the Unity version queries every card on the table for playability.
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The concept
This project was as previously mentioned a prototype for a singleplayer RPG; the concept was to make something that captures the nostalgia of the collectable cardgames of my childhood. A story about nostalgia and how children exist in their own microcosm framed through a flashback of a child visiting their parents years later and finding their old card collection.
Ideally the main gameplay for a game like this should be simple, it's a literal children's game after all, but it needed to support the addition of cards over time through expansions. It should also be quick, if the player was going to battle many times then each individual battle should be quick. Finally the game needed a simple theme that could help card comprehension: It's a lot easier to remember what cards do, if what they do is flavorful for what they are (like the Smith turning another card into a Knight).
New tools
This was also my first time using AI-tools: The images used for the Unity version of the cards are generated using dall-e 2. I wanted to go for a medieval manuscript illustration look as I could find images in this style in the public domain. Getting dall-e to generate similar looking images in this style was trickier than expected: Often simply giving it the name of the subject (ie.: "Knight") wasn't enough and instead I would have to give it a description of the subject instead (ie.:"Knight in plate armor carrying a sword and shield"). The prompt also had to include some hints about color as the resulting images were otherwise wildly different in tone and feel which made them seem disjointed.
I did play around with putting foreign concepts into this style; I was wondering if dall-e could create convincing looking illustrations of things that wouldn't exist in this style. My first attempt at this was asking for "robot" versions of the cards, ie.: "a medieval manuscript illustration of a robot beggar", however these came out very unfinished and too obviously AI generated.
