TBF #3 - New Mechanics
The Road to the First Demo
Once again, we are so back! As always, welcome to our weekly adventure developing our first commercial game. This past week didn’t see as much progress as previous weeks, but we did manage to add some nice features and new mechanics.
Internally, we have some plans for the first demo that will be available to everyone on itch.io. We want to share them with you, but with no hard commitment. These dates are tentative and might change based on internal playtesting, feedback, and issues we might encounter along the road.
The ideal scenario for us would be to release the demo in early June on Itch. This would be the perfect time to gather feedback about the game, adjust for any issues that arise, and prepare us for the rest of production. We do have some questions left unanswered, but in our minds, nothing beats meeting reality and seeing how the game is received!
June is just around the corner, and we have two months to do a lot of work. Here is a short list of what must be done:
- Over 20+ new cards.
- An achievement list.
- UI rework (these buttons are ugly).
- Work on the environment background.
- A web build of the game.
- And plenty other stuff I probably forgot…
We will try our hardest to meet your expectations so that you have the best time playing the demo.
Now that that's out of the way, let’s jump into this week's progress.
New Mechanics
This week marked the start of implementing new mechanics into the game. One of them is all about killing cards.
Yes. Killing cards. Look at this bad boy.
Be careful with this one… It is dangerous to use.
What does it do, you might ask? Well, when you kill a card, it reveals itself and its associated pair. They are dead and will stay dead until the end of the current round. Once you start a new round, they will come back to life, ready to be killed once more!
A dead card will not act or do anything. For example, if you kill The Eyes, it will not provide the nice reveal effect it usually has.
I told you in the first TBF that it would be scary!
You do have the benefit of revealing the card, though. So, if you are in a pinch, you can just kill a card. Of course, we couldn't let you kill every card and finish the game that easily. Some cards are just petty… like The King.
Make no mistake, it will come back from the dead to hunt you.
And it’s not the only one. We have a plethora of cards that could be "bad" to kill. You will have to correctly balance your deck to make it work.
Deck builder
You might have read that last sentence and wondered if this game is a deck builder. We can answer you right away: it is a deck builder, but not in the traditional sense. We want you to be able to pick the cards you receive between each round instead of the process being deterministic or completely random. This way, you can choose for yourself and see what happens. Try out different combos and appreciate the results (or failures!) of your choices.
As you might imagine, there is no “deck thinning” in our game, because the goal is to uncover more and more cards. You also can’t grow the deck too fast, because the game becomes way harder, way quicker. We are looking to find a nice balance to make it all work.
Our decks will be themed in what should be a logical and familiar manner. We’re counting on your feedback as we share more about them to help guide us through the process.
The bug of the week
This week we had a strange interaction with our cards that happened with a brand-new card we were developing: The Canon!
As you can see, it pushes and kills a card. Normally, a card cannot be interacted with once it’s dead or paired. This means it can't be moved, switched, or killed again. The Cannon, however, moved them anyway. In one way, it’s logical: a cannon should move dead bodies with the blunt force it has. But in another way, it goes against the design of the game.
We decided that this bug is cool enough that we’d let it slide. We aren't totally sure if it’s a good idea or if it will break the game in some subtle way, but for now, it stays in. If you think that should not be the case or you have a different idea, let us know!
And with this, we are done for this week! Next week, we will discuss about the rage mechanics and how much progress we've made on those.
