IMI OW is an online trading card game and a long-term project hoping to bring my stories to an exiting new environment. This is an ongoing series of quick touch points to share the ideas and inspiration behind the game as it transitions from a conce...
I can't lie it's been tough making progress on a game like this when you have a job, family, and stories to write. But I have kept a weekly forward movement that is getting me close to being able to write some exciting game engine code. Here is a brief update.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Professions
This is where I started digging a hole--a hole that almost swallowed me and the project. For the game it is essential to have a good range of character cards to keep the game interesting. These cards will be arranged in profession chains: Here are the card list for the prototype game:
Level 1: Klankr (Clankin) represented by the glyph ┃
This is all fine, but the hole started to get deeper when I extended the list to what the final game might look like...around one hundred character cards later, I became worried that I would need a great UI info graphic to display the cards and their levels. Also, keeping with the fantasy world that the game is based that has a old Germanic nomenclature so that the cards each had an interesting name. The glyph idea was an extension of that so that there was a simple mark for each card that would help in the diagram and eventually the game UI and card design.
At some point with my head in some dart code that would render a chart of all of the cards at each level I realised that my hole was getting very, very deep. This is the kind of activity that drags you away from what it important in the development of a prototype; a basic working game!
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Resolution Tree
I was now out of my hole, but soon became at the risk of a new pit. But this case was slightly different, because here I am looking at a method to resolve battle damage in such a way that can be published so that players are fully aware of the order in which a modification can be applied. It is important to go fairly deep here from the start because you don't want to under-cook your game engine.
