Getting a shuffling deck set up took me a bit longer than expected (one more reason to do something as simple as a card game!), and my old man energy is flagging for the night. I also did a sort of logo/card back which turned out kinda fun:

I also roughed out a design to get cracking on in the morning… probably a bit too ambitious even for tech I know well, so we’ll see how far I make it.

The basic structure is a dungeon-less arena combat solitaire game (Gladiators?). Maybe more like Infinity Blade without the generations? You start as a lowly peon with a wooden sword and shield. You fight other peons by playing solitaire. Different poker hands map to different defensive and offensive maneuvers, which are affected by your base stats (armor & damage). The fancier your maneuvers, the faster you level up those two independent stats. Instead of having a single XP level, you have an attack level and defense level… these levels control how much damage/health you have as well as what kind of armor/weapons you can buy/equip.

Defeat an enemy (while hopefully doing fancy maneuvers to level up) to earn coins, which you spend on better gear. Repeat until you die.

I have five screens mapped out, but there’s quite a bit of UI in there — progress bars, a few FX for combat, the actual gameplay screen… but the scariest screen by far will be the store screen (if I make it that far). On top of that will be coming up with the content for the store screen (say, 20-50 levels multiplied by 2-3 interesting pieces of gear at each level… yikes!).