Skip to content

Specific Designs

Jump to bottom
Ezra Weller edited this page Dec 30, 2018 · 1 revision

Game Design

Fighting Game Feel

  • Health represented by a deck, put cards from that deck into your hand when you take damage

    • Players lose when they are forced to draw from their health deck but can't

  • Simultaneous turn taking

    • Players choose stacks of cards as combos they are committing to
    • those stacks are "evaluated" like a game of War

  • Players may build decks with as many "normals" as they want

    • Normals, each optionally crouching, standing, jumping:
      • Block, Throw
      • light, med, strong punch
      • light, med, strong kick

  • Players may put a limited number of any given "special"

  • Moves have optional positioning

    • "Normals" can all be performed either standing still, approaching, retreating, jumping or crouching
    • "Specials" each specify what positioning options they have if any

  • Moves have "frame curves", a frame is a single simultaneous turn

    • Startup frames are how long they must be revealed before they take effect
    • Active frames is how many frames the effect of the move lasts
    • Recovery frames is how long the player must wait until their next action

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmO7K_n6n5o&index=5&list=PLj34EySs1IeZLdaLTIoMvkoMkxUk2l74A

    • Hit stun
      • We'll need rules for hit stun, how much recovery time is induced by being hit
      • Lower if the receiving character is blocking
        • a move is "safe on block" if the block stun is longer than the recovery time
        • heavier moves should be less safe on block
    • The recovery time of an attack will usually (always?) be longer than the hit stun it produces (without some other synergy?)
    • Canceling allows the next move to occur at the end of the active frames rather than the end of the recovery frames
      • every move has a weight on a scale, does it's weight in damage on hit
      • heavier moves can cancel lighter ones
      • the whole cancel chain must be committed to at once
    • Combo breakers and extenders?
    • Super meter?
    • Mechanics from TCGs?
      • Permenants
      • Hand disruption
      • Healing
      • Deck manipulation
      • Direct damage
      • Card draw
      • Resource escalation (do we need it?)
        • "Crowd support/excitement" could be the narrative excuse for resource escalation
          • Crowd support could increase your damage, reduce the damage you take, reduce startup or recovery frames leading to easier combos,

Game Narrative Notes

Exploring the "humble beginnings —> epic endings" narrative. One of the satisfying parts of strategy games is the crescendo into some kind of epic ending that can happen sometimes. Most games achieve this with some kind of game economy that grows for each player over time, eventually letting them do big exciting things at the end of the game.

Is there a way to get this narrative without a growing economy mechanic?

  • built-in timer mechanics (sagas from mtg, options only available after a certain amount of time)
  • stakes that go up over time (like the last two players at a poker table who now have all the chips)

What are the different kinds of economy mechanic?

  • Spend a resource for more future resources (spend cards like lands, spend cards and resources like mana ramp)
  • automatic growth (Hearthstone)
  • accomplish side goals to increase resources (explore a new place, build a new city, make a new ally)

"Survive the harsh world" game

Concept:

Create the possibility for the epic crescendo narrative by having players earn greater resources over time through their actions (rather than getting those resources for free or just by spending other resources). Those greater resources allow them to do bigger and more exciting things.

You each have a deck, but there's also one combined deck of resources (the world?). Race to get more cards out of the shared deck. you "attack" the shared deck to get cards from it—but some of those cards are your opponent's cards! You "die" if you can't get enough (or the right) "world" cards, so you can win by out lasting your opponent, by directly attacking them, or by stopping them from being able to get world cards. World cards do two things: give you resources to play your own cards (which in turn can get you more world cards), and stave off starvation/freezing to death, etc. The world deck can contain all sort of environmental hazards you might run into on an alien planet: deserts, ice storms, oasi, gold veins, but also predators, zombie plagues, who knows!! decks could be built around putting lots of negative cards in the world deck — negative cards your deck is much better at dealing with, etc.

Rules Description:

Each player builds two decks — a settler deck and a world deck.

Settler deck is built using "settler" cards: people, creatures, actions, buildings, spells, etc. These cards require specific types of resources or circumstances (X total food production, X temperature, X precipitation, X metal ore, X pixie dust, etc.) to play and use, and their functions are to draw you cards from the world deck or to affect the board in some way (increase/decrease hazards, boost other cards, attack the opponent, protect you from the environment, etc.)

World deck is built using "world" cards: things found in the world, like places, weather, creatures, diseases, disasters, etc. These cards are free to play (perhaps some you're required to play if you draw them?) and generally have two functions: to grant resources/circumstances for playing settler cards, and to change the environmental hazards in some way (environment does more/less damage, other hazards like sacrifice a unit, units get a debuff, etc.)

At the start of the game, players shuffle their world decks together to make a single, mixed world deck. Then each player draws 5 cards from their settler deck and 5 from the world deck. Players start with 6 health.

Players trade taking turns. At the start of a turn, a player draws 1(2?) settler card(s?) from their deck.

On a turn, players may play any number of world cards they have in their hand and any number of settler cards that they have the resources to play.

  • (an example resource might be food — if you've played a world card that gives 1 food, you can have a settler card that requires 1 food/turn, but that uses up all your food until that settler card leaves play)

Settler cards that stick on the board ("units") can generally be "activated" once per turn.

At the end of the turn, the world attacks the player for a base line of 1 damage (this can be modified by their world cards) — players can take this damage themselves or "block" it with one of their units with health (some units have their own health score).

The last player with more than 0 health wins.

"Steal all the gold" game

Concept:

Create the possibility for exciting narrative by building timing into the game: players can only do certain things if they wait for the right time, but in return for that waiting, they get bigger, more epic effects.

each player starts with 10 gold. you win by having more gold at the end or by taking all theirs at any point. the game is split into a finite number of rounds — the game ends when neither player has any more cards to draw. Some cards can't be played until later rounds. Players can play any number of cards each round, and at the start of each round they draw until they have 10 cards. Players can also discard or keep any cards they haven't played at the end of a round — this is to allow players who focus their decks on specific combos or powerful "late round" cards to assemble the combo or prepare for a powerful late game in exchange for not being able to play as many cards early.

Because this game doesn't have resource restrictions to limit deck building (i.e. enhance variety), many cards should be given deck-building incentives or restrictions (card is more powerful if you're holding all late round cards, or your deck has all cards with quality X, etc.).

Also, since cards are such a key resource to this game, card drawing effects should maybe be somewhat rare.

Question: should permanents persist through rounds? Maybe this is a mechanic some permanents have (and they could even have saga-like time bomb effects that go off in 2 rounds!)

Another cool thing about this game: the "gold" pieces can be actual antes. They could be bitcoins. They could be cards you have to ante up. They could be anything you can stick the ownership of on a blockchain. (of course, you can do this "gambling" in any game, but this one really makes it feel like part of the game).

Rules Description:

Each player builds a deck of 60 cards and starts with 10 gold. All cards have the end goal of stealing the opponent's gold.

Notes about cards in the gold-stealing game:

  • card draw effects are rare
  • many cards have deck-building restrictions or incentives (card does something extra or can only be played if you build your deck a certain way)
  • cards often have "round restrictions": they can only be played in round X or later
  • some cards stick around for a whole round once played (i.e. units/creatures/minions/whatever) and can be used once / turn in addition to your card for the turn

At the start of each round, each player draws cards from their deck until they have 10 cards in hand.

In each round, players take turns playing one card at a time (though some cards skip the opp.'s turn, letting you play 2 in a row). The round ends if 1) one player gets all the gold (they win the game), or 2) both players run out of cards in hand or choose not to play any more cards (if player 1 passes, then if player 2 passes, the round ends).

Players keep or discard any left over cards in their hand at the end of a round into the next round (if they keep, they will draw fewer cards the next round).

If at the end of a round, neither player has any cards left in their deck, the game ends and whoever has the most gold wins.

Clone this wiki locally