card-game box

Making My Own Card Game. A Journey To Game Design

Playing a lot of games, finished and in-development, as well as covering them for a long time made me want to create my own game, one that I would enjoy with my friends and, if all goes well, it would be sold to some extent and I’d learn from that venture.

With little knowledge and my disinterest in learning programming to make a video game, but having a keen eye of noticing good and bad game designs in games, as well as a lot of play-testing over the years, my one path at the moment would be to create a table-top game.

It started out as a five-player turn-based versus game, where each player has four gems and one hero character, and one would attack another player by random selection, a dice would be thrown to determine the attackers attack-power, the same goes for the defender.

Depending on the outcome either the attacker or defender would take a hit and lose one gem, one that would be providing to the opposing player. A third player can butt-in to aid the defender (throws a dice to determine his/her attack power) and combines their powers to hopefully win the battle against the attacker. The fourth player can join the attacker, if he/she is overwhelmed, and so on.

The winner is the one with the most gems before the number of turn-battle ends (Ex: 15 battles). A player would loses and leaves the game after he/she loses all of their gems. Below is a small animation clip I created to show how the game would work.

That was the initial idea anyway, one with a lot of faults and boredom. After a few play-tests, a new modified version of the game would come to be with each play-test, making the game better overtime quickly and having my play-testers enjoy the game more.

The current version of the game, that stripped a lot of elements from past versions, is a lot closer to a card-game rather than a board-game and is now a two to three player game.

I’m not a fan of board-games, especially long ones, so reaching that card-game version is no surprise. My aim with this game is to make a card-game that’s quick, where a player can always act to some extent, instead of waiting for his/her turn. A game that I find joy in playing, as a person who doesn’t really like playing physical table-top games because of my short attention span and finding them dull with no desire to play.

My least end goal is to have one finished game under my belt, one that I’m satisfied where it would be a stepping-stone in my journey as a game designer and developer.



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