Cards and Magic

A deck builder for GMTK game jam 2020.

Game jam theme

Out of control

Game idea / Story

You're a young prince who was rather impatient and didn't learn proper wizardry, so you can either cast a specific spell on a random target, or a random spell on a specific target.

Behind the scenes

I have 4-5 genres that I love, and I always consider making a game in those for a game jam. Of course, there needs to be some twist, specific to the game jam.

In this case I came up with this idea for a card game, where you're not fully in control of the cards you play and how you play them. This means that damaging spells can hit you, or healing spells can hit the opponents. This allows me to play with the chances and give the player various options of controlling them. 

• The player can change how likely they are to be targeted when playing a spell

• The player can change how likely each spell is to be cast when selecting a target

• There are also spells that effect those chances

Then, this also allows for making cards that have different effects based on whether you play the card or it gets automatically triggered when selecting a target.

Various cool ideas that give the player stuff to think about as they play!

My role

As a solo game jam thing I mostly did everything myself, but here are the interesting parts.

Programming: I made a system for card effects, so that I can easily create many cards with it, by just implementing the different effects and attaching them to cards as I want. A card can have multiple effects, can have different effects based on who it affects, or different effects based on how it's cast. An effect can have various parameters specific to the effect.

Game design: I added about 10 cards to the game. I could obviously copy cards and mechanics from other games, but I mostly wanted to focus on things that would be specific to this game, playing around the chances and the different ways to cast spells.

This time I got all the assets from some packs that I had.