Week 10 - Making of a card game.

“After developing a basic framework for magic that seemed fairly robust, we had to decide which of the huge selection of cards to include, and with what relative frequencies’ (Garfield 543).

Our game design follows a similar path that Garfield covers in the chapter. We are making a game focusing on spells and ingredients. Balancing out the ingredient cards with the cards that can be used to attack or block is our main focus. Figuring out how frequent cards for our game should be is something that only became more apparent to us with some more playtesting. Last week was our development phase for our idea, but this week will be when we find out more about what changes should be made to our game.

“First of all, you can’t have any bad cards–people wouldn’t play with them” (Garfield 541).

Deciding the quantity of cards at play is just one step, in order to get there you have to first have cards you want to have playable in the game. Our brainstorming phase was mostly just us coming up with more cards to make gameplay more interesting and competitive without making it too confusing. Our main method of doing this was to have a card that caused an action, but also have another card that another player could play to counter that action. This would add more incentive for a player to hold onto certain cards instead of discarding them while also increasing the variety of cards we have at play.

“So we figured players would make house rules to cover those decks…’ (Garfield 554).

Rule-making not only covers what the cards do, but how you can use them. Rules can go a long way in making a game amazing or absolutely terrible to play. In our design phase we have been thinking of as many ways to make the cards balanced and fair to use. We wanted to add the ability to play multiple attack cards, but realized that this had to be pushed down to just two at a time. If there is any combination that we have just simply never come across I would hope that players can adapt to the situation, but it is important that we get it right earlier on. Overall, we chose a type of game that can get pretty complicated and time will only tell if we can get it solidified in time for it to be final. I have pretty good hope that we can simplify it to be easy to understand by most.