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An in-development single player roguelike card game where the main character has been whisked away into a mysterious library that stretches as far the eye can see. Within this labyrinth of books, the main character Anamesa is taken on a journey as the library guides them to revelations about themselves and their future. I work as one of the main designers on cards and gameplay mechanics.
Gameplay
Gameplay
The player embarks on a journey to discover their purpose and what mysteries the library holds. With a map, they can explore various nodes that contain either combat or events. Combat is done through a card game and your deck is built over the course of your run. Cards can attack in multiple directions and can be moved on a 4x4 board. Cards can have a number of effects and can be upgraded over the course of a run to have even more effects and grow more powerful.
Design
Design
In the first version of the game, due to time constraints, design had to be simplified. Narratively, there wasn't enough room or time to put together a cohesive story and show it to the players in a way that was engaging and rewarding. Instead, much of my time went into working with the others on the design team in trying to create a gameplay loop that was simple yet fun.
The fundamental core gameplay design we had was the chess board like playfield where players and opponents will play cards that have arrows. These arrows indicate what direction these cards can attack in. There were a lot of iterations of how the other aspects of the game would go. Some of these were: limiting where a card could move based on their arrows, making decks finite, having summoning sickness, not letting players draw in exchange for mana, and other ideas. Ultimately, we decided that giving more flexibility due to cards themselves being quite simple would be the most engaging and playtests and feedback showed that we were on the right track.
Another consideration was how to reward the player. As a roguelike game, we wanted the player to build up their deck overtime and have control over what cards to place in their deck. So, for the map, the player is allowed a full view of what encounters lay ahead so that they can plan out where they want to go. Upon winning a match, they are given gold which can be used later at a shop with limited selection and the choice of 1 out of 3 cards. The shop and giving 3 choices for the end reward are all ways to let the player have decisions they need to make while also limiting and giving variance as to what the player can get. Without this, players will tend to gravitate to what they know is strong and never use different strategies which defeats the purpose of a roguelike.
The Future
The Future
This version of the game isn't the final one. A new one is in the works and there are quite a few changes. More rooms and events to explore. A revamped combat system with new and reworked cards. In this new version, I put a lot of work into making cards and card interactions fun and rewarding. Previously, all cards were independent of one another, leading to a game that felt less like the card game it was initially pitched as and more like a simple strategy game. My goals with this new version is to lean more into the cards, creating synergies and archetypes so that cards can combo off one another and give players direction in how to build decks. In doing so, this would create playstyles which lead to narrative design and creating enemies with unique playstyles that tell the player more about them via gameplay rather than purely by story. I'll dive more into that in another post though.
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