Release and Reflection

I expected making a digital adaptation of an existing game (especially one I had designed just days before!) would make this project easier. It turns out that there are substantial pitfalls involved in moving from something real time that can leverage Unity's built in tools for maintaining a game state versus making a turn-based game where things need to happen in a specific procedural order. This is especially true if those things are cards that need to move into a deck, but aren't going to actually just stack in real space. Or at least so it felt.

At a critical early juncture in the project I made a decision to use a single CardCollection script to keep track of every card in the game. The hand, court, and king/queen selection menu are each presenting clickable buttons, but those buttons are just populated with faces from the collection. They don't contain the card data at all. This works really well in some regards, but made it extremely complicated to add any kind of animation. I could send a card sprite from transform to transform, but timing the hand-off to the spreads without just using OnTriggerEnter or something hacky like that proved to be too large a lift for the end of my week.

That said, I learned a ton working on this. I feel much better equipped to work on turn based projects in the future, and I imagine most card games are actually less complex than this one which has 7 zones and cards that can move between most of them. I think the actual gameplay here is the most compelling of any of the games I made so far. Maybe it just scratches a particular itch for me, but I found myself playing rounds far in excess of what I absolutely needed for testing purposes.

I'm particularly proud of my drawing and layout work on the cards. Keep an eye on this space and the paper version for a printable release of those and maybe a link to a print-on-demand deck if it's not too cost-prohibitive.