So I'm working on a TCG engine right now, and the fundamental idea is this:
You're an Onmyoji, a Shinto Priest who wanders the land purifying cursed spirits. To this end, you combat these dark spirits with Shikigami: Spirit beasts who protect you and help defeat evil and darkness by your side.
It's a Pokemon-Alike TCG with a heavy basis on Eastern Mythology and Japanese Folklore. It's got an Any-Card-as-Resource system where every Shikigami/Monster you have has an "Essense" value at the bottom. By placing a monster under another monster upside-down, that top monster is able to pay for attacks. This is meant to be a mixture of Pokemon's Base Set Era and the Diamond and Pearl Era, where there's a mixture of Big Basics (There's no evolution in this game), and Attack/Option Boosting cards.
Now, my main problems here are:
- What should I call the Units?
- I currently want to name my creatures "Shikigami", like the spirits that real Onmyoji summon in order to cleanse local shrines. However, I'm unsure if players will be okay using the name or whether they just want them to be called "Spirits" or "Monsters".
- How should I implement the Color System?
- I have a five-element system already lined up. Based on the concept of Wu Xing, the elements are: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal.
- In Chinese Medicine, these primary elements make a harmonious cycle where every element interacts with another element.
- For example, Water feeds Wood, defeats Fire, is defeated by Earth, and is eaten by Metal. However, I don't know how to implement this into my game.
- On one hand, I could make it so the stronger attackers need energy from the element that feeds them (like a Fire Attacker needing Wood Energy to attack), but I'm not sure if I want to implement a hard Weakness/Resistance system into this game like pokemon.
- Pokemon is able to handle this because they always had more than five elements in the game, and that some pokemon have different weaknesses than cards of the same type (Some Water Pokemon are weak to grass, while others are weak to lightning).
- If I implement this system poorly, this could mean that every deck is hard-countered by another, and that matchups could be too one-sided to be fun.
These issues that I bring up lead me to the title of this post: How deep should my Aesthetics be? Or in other words: Should the aesthetics of the game overpower Gameplay? I can't tell if these are real problems, or if I'm overthinking things.