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One of the things I mentioned in my recap post for the last Ludum Dare was that I’d like to build a free/open source tool to automate the annoying task of generating poker card images. This is a very niche tool (I’m not sure it would be useful outside of a game jam, where you’re working on a very limited timeframe) and it’s debatable whether it even fits the spirit of the competition.

I pitched it to Mike first and even he was unsure, suggesting I do this post and put it to the community.

The “make it all yourself” rules are pretty complicated (put in place both to encourage people to get their hands dirty as well as prevent people from grabbing premade art off the net that might be illegal or blow hastily-made art out of the water). Poker cards are weird in that (1) they’ve been around forever (like a chess board) but (2) they’re a pain in the ass to lay out and export.

Pros

• would save anyone interested in building a poker-style game several hours in the LD format.
• if someone wanted to make a card-based game, they could theoretically use this tool and no other art programs (though hopefully they’d skin the suits at least)
• does allow for full skinning (see “dragon cards” in screenshots below)
• others?

Cons

• only 4 layout choices, so cards might look very similar across games
  (counter: how many games would even use it?)
  (counter: playing card “look” has been mostly static for a couple hundred years)
• others?

Open Questions

• would anyone but me use this tool?
• does it fit the spirit of the competition? (for jam it wouldn’t matter)
• others?

Here’s a rough walkthrough on how to use it and what comes out the back end:

1) Choose a Layout, adjust the size of your export images. The box on the right tells you what images you need to provide (and what size).

2) Choose a font from your system fonts.

3) Select images for each of your 4 suits.

4) Choose face cards (select either a single J/Q/K, one each for red and black, or a unique image for every face/suit combo)

5) Export, choose a folder, and you will now have 52 images!

6) For now, I use TexturePacker. If there is sufficient demand, it would be trivial to have the AIR tool export a texture atlas instead of individual images.

Even though I just finished a tool for making poker cards, my wife Diana wanted to participate in this Ludum Dare and learn how to use Unity. Last night we brainstormed ideas.

Rejected ideas:

• you’re a cave dweller lady who can only survive in the sun for a few moments. you have to run out and snatch men and take them back underground to your cave harem
• there are monsters under your bed and you have to trick them into coming out
• you’re a washing machine and you steal socks

What we’re going with:

You’re the Loch Ness monster, but not the dinosaur one that everyone thinks you are. Something more tentacle-y. Your goal is to avoid detection by sonar boats and submarines, sneak a tentacle up to the surface, and snatch tourists.

Thinking we’ll do it puzzle-game style, where each level has a set number of tourists to grab and a set number of patrolling enemies.

This morning so far I’ve gotten her set up on github and Unity and we’re about to start working on the tentacle prototype.

Tools:

• Unity
• Photoshop for me, Krita for Diana
• (maybe Flash, thinking we won’t need animation, though)
• Glyph Designer
• Texture Packer

Spent the morning/early afternoon writing some enemy classes with Diana. While she’s been cranking on art variations, I got started on the tentacle prototype. The idea is to have the tentacle track the mouse path fairly closely and retract as you move it down. Still a lot of work to get the tentacle feeling right, but it almost feels game-like at this point.

Gameplay systems are mostly in place. Starting to wire up UIs.

TODOs:

1. need a victory state/screen (we’re thinking we’ll pan back down to the monster)
2. need to implement circle/triangle collision instead of circle/rect (the sonar view frustums)
3. need to implement paging on our level complete screen and make a bunch more levels
4. need to fart around with sound effects and music

Had a really simple idea last night and decided to get cracking on it ~4 PM (with ~5 hours left). I’ve got it up and working well enough to test the idea, so I think I’m going to submit after all.

Called in some cavalry to help my wife watch the kiddies, which means I get to (mostly) jam!

Tech:

1. Flash
2. Flash Builder

That’s probably it!

My first idea was to do some sort of Earthworm Jim / Metroidvania — a beefy guy with a big ass bat with a salt lick wrapped around it and a rock-salt shotgun battling hordes of banana slug alien invaders.

Salt LIck Beatdown

I think that would end up being too much art, though, so I started thinking about simpler mechanics. Currently leaning towards some sort of simple card game. Sort of a rummy/trick-tacking jousting game where you combine a “mount” (some innocuous vehicle) with a “knight” (some sort of animal) with a “weapon” (something ridiculous for the animal to hold).

Instead of being argument-based like Superfight or Cards Against Humanity, I’d rather it be rules or dice-based (maybe paper-rock-scissors like Yomi). So given a specific matchup, one outcome should be more likely.

Some ideas for “mounts”

Some “jousters”

The main challenge with the digital version of this game seems to be cramming all that information into itty bitty little UI screens. There’s not a whole lot of gameplay yet — just the ability to deal cards out of the deck, trade in for new cards, draw cards, and construct a Jouster. I’m not even checking yet that the cards dragged onto the new jouster are valid plays… So lots to do tomorrow!

• Create some sort of state management (your turn vs not your turn)
• Jouster validation (make sure it’s a good combination)
• Finish laying out all the cards so the art fits nicely.
• Create the “transform” animation where 3 cards merge into a single jouster.
• Create the “battle” animation where 2 jousters fight each other.
• Create tertiary/powerup cards: draw X, +X attack.
• Finish up the card art and start prettying up the UI.

We also ran a 30-minute play session with the physical cards and came up with a ton of great ideas. Starting hand was upped from 3 to 4. Hand limit upped from 5 to 7. I had the idea to add the Draw 2 and Draw 3 powerups as well as the single-use attack boosters to help topple someone who’s King of the Hill.

We also now have a way to do scoring. Our first try was to get a point at the end of every player’s turn if your Jouster was still king of the hill… but we found that some combinations actually stuck for quite awhile if the draws were going poorly. To address that we (1) added the draw cards which help get you to valid combinations more quickly and (2) changed the scoring so that you get one VP for every ROUND instead of every turn. If your bot is still king of the hill when it comes back to your turn, +1 VP. Woohoo!

Derpy Baby Derp Derp