Hobbies sometimes take the backseat as life happens. I have other hobbies such as board gaming and woodworking, that fight for my time and motivation. And well, exciting things like a relationship with @Techslut. Still, throughout the last couple of years, I have made multiple attempts at starting this project. This time, I’m hoping this development blog, along with some comments, will keep me motivated to make at least some progress every week.

Aww, It’s a game!

In 2015 I made Dungeon Surge as my first prototype of a deck building video game for Ludum Dare 35. It allowed the player to play cards as combat elements, fighting an opponent on a line with locations. The game wasn’t very polished and had very limited and basic content, but it showed that the idea can work. I got some great feedback for playtesters and even some people played it on stream while I watched, which was an amazing experience. You can try it yourself if you like.

Yeah, I know. Not very pretty, I'm not good at art.

It is well known that hobby projects have a tendency to die off. I tried many times to make very complex games, but they all were too big, and needed a huge time investment to show viability. The first step though, regardless of the design, was to make roguelike core functionality for unity. I found a very good article on how a roguelike game loop might look, and went to work. Since I based it almost entirely on someone else’s article, I decided to make my code open source so anyone could benefit, like I benefitted from that article. Linky.

Are we there yet?

After that, my hobby took a bit of a backseat in my brain, and only now have I really gotten back to it. The reason I have gotten back to it, is that I have finally found a unique way to use deck building concepts in a video game. The basic premise is that you have a single card active, and that card changes into one of the other cards available in the deck when certain criteria are met.

This finally felt like an interesting enough core mechanic to start working on, unlike adding deck building to a roguelike, which results in a simply more complex roguelike. With the added advantage of having a simple minimal viable product. And so the first thing I did, was write some notes for the core design. This core design took about two hours of thinking and writing.
I considered just posting my evernote here, but it’s not very readable, and some of it I already covered in the above paragraph, so here is a summary of the game as I might describe it to a player.

Game rules draft v0.1

As a player you always have one card active that may have a static effect, an activated effect, or both. A card also has a cost, which is the core way in which cards change into one another, for example: Change this card into a 3 cost card. This would replace your current card with a random 3 cost card from your deck.

If no card in your deck meets the criteria, it will morph into a basic card that is always available. Example basic card idea:
Hunger
Soul collector - Each time you kill an enemy, add one soul to this card.
Morph trigger - 3 Souls.
Morph rule - Morph into any card with cost equal to or lower than the number of souls.

Notice how I made keywords for the abilities, this allows the player to easily learn aggregates of abilities, and reduces clutter on the cards. Morph trigger is a condition under which the card morphs immediately. A player can choose to morph the card early, when there are only 2 souls, and get a 2 or lower cost card, based on the morph rule.

The game world will be a grid of connected rooms, and a room can be occupied by several entities. Enemies travel towards the player each turn, unless they are in the room with the player then they attack instead.

Actions always available to players, regardless of cards:
Attack enemy in your room - deal one damage.
Move - To an adjacent room, drawing attacks of opportunity from all enemies in the room.
Buy card - Spend the cost of the card gain it. (Resource still undefined)

Enemies in the player’s room are known, and the player can know it’s name, etc. Rooms that the player is not in, have a red circle of varying size indicating the threat level of all monsters in the room.

Randomly generated map that grows as the game progresses.

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed reading. Join me next time as I tackle outlining the minimum viable product.