Release and Reflection

After three weeks running of Unity-based game projects, I needed a bit of a break. I also knew that this week wasn't going to be especially conducive to long sessions at the keyboard, so something I could prototype in a notebook / on the go was an added bonus. I imagine I'll keep up a cadence like this throughout the summer.

Fundamentally, this is a Slay the Spire-like. You get the enemy's intent, you generate attack and block, then you execute your moves. There is a little bit of comboing off through the face cards, but honestly those have more to do with Magic: the Gathering's cantrips than any particular card from StS.

The thing I'm most proud of here is the elegance of the dynamic deckbuilding you do. Taking damage starts off as a critical existence threat and trends towards something you are trying to manage in order to thin down your deck. Because of the twin loss conditions, you also need to be working on the court's face cards, even if those cards never pose a direct risk to your faction at the end of the turn. All very satisfying. I'm also quite proud of the artwork (more of that soon!).

The biggest growth area here is the sheer density of nouns I've introduced. Some number of these are necessary: "faction" and "dismiss" most of all. They make the narrative layer of the game actually happen. The others might just be jargon. They're additive, but might provide more of a barrier to new players than I would necessarily like.

I'm not 100% sure the game is actually learnable from the documentation. Obviously I understand it, but I wrote it. I've playtested fairly extensively on my end (at least as much as one can in a week) but I didn't get a chance to get anyone else's hands on it. This is an obvious hole in this approach.

All told, this means this is probably more of a 0.1 than a 1.0, but the game is technically feature complete. I look forward to playtesting this more with some folks soon.