TBF #7 – Part 2: The Payoff

This is a two-part series about how cards are drawn in our game. You can go read part 1 right here.

Happy Mother's Day!

Hello everyone. I hope you spent a wonderful weekend and cherished a nice moment with your mother for Mother's Day! We always take the time to reset with our families on these occasions to come back stronger, better, and faster!

Last week, we discussed how we draw our cards in the game and the reason why we took a specific approach of using a texture atlas. In this blog post, we will discuss the payoff we got for all that work.

The Payoff

Now that all the card textures are available, we can display them very easily in different places. The first place we cared about was the deck view, which is the view of all the cards you have in your deck during a round. Before the work we did, we used to only display the front sprite of the card, and it was very hard to understand what the card would do unless you right-clicked a card to see it up close.

Since the deck view was rendered in the UI layer, it was impossible to display our cards correctly without doing a LOT of work.

As a player, you have no idea what the card would do.

Now the view is way better for players! Look at this. You can easily read what the card does and how it works at a glance.

This was just the start. We needed to make it much better. One of our goals is to make the cards feel alive, and for that to work, we have to add subtleties that most people call "game feel juice."

We added shadows, hovering effect and rounding corners. Immediately, the cards are just more fun to interact with. They seem to come to you, to levitate, to respond to your actions.

What do you think about that? To me, it feels way better.

While we were at it, we made it that the deck view slides into the window when you open and close it. All these little details just add life to the game, and we plan to add way more game juice going forward. This is just a taste of what we will ship for the commercial release!

It's time to collect the dividends as well!

One of the most important elements in a card game is the collection: a place where you can see all the cards you have, those you've unlocked, and the remaining cards not yet unlocked. This is a must-have for any decent card game. So far, we did not have such a place, and you were supposed to remember what you unlocked.

No more! The barbaric times are over!

Now we can see the whole collection of cards from the main menu. You will be able to enjoy it to the fullest!

You can see new cards you have unlocked and those that are locked. Soon, you will be able to zoom in on them to see them up super close.

This is the moment you realize how the work from last week is paying dividends. Sometimes, you need to take a step back to be able to move forward faster. At some point, the cards will also have some nice post-processing effects on them, to make them shine, break, or seem ghostly. All of this will still be easy to implement thanks to the hard work we did!

If you liked this blog post or want to talk about it, come discuss with us on Discord. We are slowly growing the community, and we would be thrilled to see you there.

As always, have a great week and see you next week!