Combat is a centerpiece of the game's 'cards and combat' foundation. As mentioned in an earlier post, Cards & Combat is a casual adventure sandbox game, and in order to make the gameplay accessible to a wide player base the combat needs to be simplified, but, in order to retain seasoned players combat also needs some degree of tactical agency. While I could go into the basics of dice rolling and perk modifiers, let's skip over it and look at: MY APPROACH TO ENCHANCING SIMPLIF

Along with Combat, Cards are the centerpiece of the gameplay. In the case of this game we researched decks from adventure games (eg. Zombies!!!), from deck builder games (eg. Pokemon) and even decks from family games (eg. Monopoly). These gave a wide variety of perspectives on game modification, enhancement and complication while keeping many of the Cards & Combat cards tied to familiar tropes. In the end I settled on a Core Game Deck that governs actions when navigating the

While aiming to keep the gameplay experience light, it felt a little too simple to have every Playable Character be assigned the same attributes (e.g. moves per turn, combat strength). Each Character in the comic has a personality and it needed to be reflected in the gameplay. And every time the game is played it felt important that players had a variety in the buffs, de-buffs and surprise features that could change their play experience when they select from the 100+ availab

With a name like 'Cards & Combat' it's pretty clear what you're in for when playing the game. The Card and Combat elements of play are the foundation on which everything is built, we'll explore these in future posts, but for now let's have a look at what I hope will elevate the project beyond being a typical adventurous brawler. There are 8 game modes in development. On launch and during open beta testing there'll only be 3 modes available (two simple modes, one standard mode

The next few posts cover portions of the game concept and how they're intended to play out. First up, let's address a few 'surprise outcomes in play' built into this 'sandbox arena'. A SANDBOX BOARD GAME??? The term sandbox typically refers to an open world in a video game that allows free roaming and a degree of creative problem solving to achieve any goals. For Cards & Combat the board is designed in a way to allow freedom of movement with limited bottlenecks in movement t

It all starts with a 'big idea'. How's this game different? What's the genre?... I'll get to that at the bottom of the post, but to start with... ...when 'anything you can imagine is possible' it's easy to go off the rails and lose focus, so every project needs some sense of self-imposed guiding limitations to provide boundaries on a project's scope while adding clarity and focus to the development process. The guiding limitations I started with are... MY RULES FOR BOARD GAME

I've always had a drive to make a game, any game - who knows why. Early 2020 corona had kicked in, my 2D Tyranobuilder game turned out to be a bust, I'd played with GameGuru to create a 3D Machinima for the web series, I had a heap of design assets for the upcoming comic series and time up my sleeve. When introduced to Tabletop Simulator... everything sort of clicked. In a couple of weeks while procrastinating on the comic I built a prototype board game... since then the proj