Hi! I like watching basketball. It turns out sports way more fun when you aren't boxed into a particular unwanted gendered relationship to them. (Go Cavs!) I like trading card games too, but I don't play them much. TCG play cultures often feel a little too huge and impenetrable for me, or a little too financially fraught. They're a little bit like sports in that way. I'm also an analog game designer, and, well, some design ideas collided for me last week, so I guess I'm making a little wacky basketball TCG? Or at least, I'm pretending to until I can get myself to think about anything else. We'll see where this leads. Probably nowhere. Alas. Have a devlog.
To start, here are some of my goals and design principles for this project:
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Aim for quick, decisive play: A sports game should feel snappy and urgent in action. Decks should stay really small, game procedures should be relatively simple.
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Say no to arithmetic, yes to geometry. Let's avoid numerical ratings and treat cards like the pieces in tile-laying board games: I want emphasis to be on on a card's layout, where it is in the play area, and how it's oriented, not values like "HP" or "Cost" or "Power".
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Don't let reality interfere. Who's my audience? What's my final product look like? What about art? Isn't card manufacturing a nightmare to deal with? These are great questions that I will not be allowing myself to answer. I have no real intentions of completing this game, let alone selling or printing it. So why not go wild? Circular cards. Full-court play-mats. No art, and no logistical considerations.
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Think local. Okay, reality-denial aside, the ideal play culture for this (imaginary) game is probably a handful of self-contained leagues organized by small groups of friends, likely online, kind of like how fantasy sports work. I don't need a global card-list, just a way of generating them. Artificial scarcity is my least favorite thing in TCGs, but trading with your friends to build a deck is fun. This way, you get the latter, and the former exists only in the hands of the (imaginary) players themselves.
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Sports aren't fair! Is it truly sports if you can know with certainty whether or not your shot will fall while the Ball is still in your hands? I'd like to find fun ways to incorporate randomness & oracular decision-making here, and if that means sacrificing any semblance of "game balance", so be it. Hey, there's always next season.
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Honor only the Ball. Here's something you may know: in basketball, there exists a Ball. Surely then, in my game, too, there should exist a Ball. Furthermore, play should include Ball Movement. As for other elements of the real sport, like the basket? Well. We'll see. Only the Ball is sacred.
That's all for now! I have a heap of more concrete pieces coming together right now, some of which you can see in the image at the top of this post. I'll go into more detail soon. Probably.
Or, maybe, I'll move on with my life and never think about any of this ever again. It really could go either way.
Bye! :)
–– Edda Mendes
