Author's note: I'm going through some old projects I have lying around, and I felt like writing about one of them. This one is about how I made an auto-battler. Accidentally.
I was going to try and port the entire post over into cohost for convenience - I didn't want to force people to visit my portfolio site - but the process was taking forever. Reformatting from wordpress is inconvenient at the moment, and I'm very tired : ) So for now, at least, this is the opening section of the article.
You can read the full thing if you want to here.
Thanks!
Ah, 2020. The year I graduated college – and a year where, famously, absolutely nothing went wrong whatsoever.
Earlier this week, I finally pulled the trigger on my new site, and cast my overpriced, crunch-born, collegiate portfolio back into the abyss – where it belongs. But, in preparing for the job search, I realized there might be some files on the old site whose originals were lost with my college email – so I downloaded everything, just in case.
Apparently, senior-year Andrew was way too busy to name the files properly. Understandable, but I hate it.
There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s nostalgic for me, but not really worthy of a proper page on my new portfolio. I was originally going to compile some of them into a blog post – a kind of tour of my college game design experience – but I got a bit caught up about one project in particular: Ultimatum.
Part 1: Local College Student Plays Too Many Card Games.
A collection of card designs.
Ultimatum was a head-to-head, strategic draft card game that I worked on for my senior-year Advanced Seminar in Game Design. At the time, I was in the depths of my tabletop gaming phase – Magic: the Gathering, Betrayal at House on the Hill, D&D, etc. – and I had a lot of ideas kicking around in my head. So, when I had to choose a systems project, I chose a genre that I was already immersed in on a daily basis. Or so I thought.
A visual design document for ultimatum, showing the game’s basic play. Players would take turns passing around cards, and placing them on the board. At the end of each round, all of their cards would be revealed, and take effect.
At the time, I had been playing a handful of games that explored the idea of base-building with cards. Most notably were:
- 7 Wonders, where each card was a building used to build out a city
- Smash Up!, which was all about putting unit cards on bases
- Magic, which really isn’t about base building –
but I definitely tried with the number of land enchantments I was running
For a while, I had wanted to try my hand at a game that focused on preparation – something that blurred the lines between standard card game turn mechanics, and the sort of gradual, wave-by-wave buildup you get with a tower defense game. All these ideas came together in my head as a “base-defense” card game – where players would lay down base cards, load them with units, and – at the end of each round – flip them over to see whose board would be strongest.
Boom.
Now, if you’re any sort of game developer reading this right now, you might be thinking something like: “Hey. Did he just say he’s going to develop an entire draft card game as a side project? In his senior year of college? In one semester?”
To that, I would say “No! Of course not! This is just a prototype! I have to make it in Unity, too!”
Hah.
But in all seriousness: I knew going into it that this was far too large of a project for one semester. But this was a seminar class – it was more about learning than making a public-facing product. And that was my plan: fling myself headlong into card game design, and then into a digital adaptation, and then just… see what I can learn from the experience.
This is, unfortunately, the part where the cohost preview ends. Not because I want to but because I'm literally falling asleep at my keyboard.
You can check out the full post here.
Thanks for reading this far!
PS: If anyone knows how to export stuff from Wordpress to cohost easily please let me know, this is killing me