Time for some thoughts. Check them out below the cut.
Making The Game
When I first saw the theme The Tower, I thought of the Tarot instantly, but I’m crazy like that. It’s not just Tower, it’s The Tower. An archetypal image of doom if I’ve ever heard of one. So, the game design was pretty straightforward to me. I took my love of games like Magic: The Gathering and turn-based strategy and combined them into one overbearing strategic puddle. When the theme discussed was evolution, I was considering an evolving space-shooter, something like a combination of Gradius and Warning Forever. I kind of wish I had kept thinking along those lines.
The programming was really simple, but time consuming; there are 38 unique card effects. Some of them are still bugged (Knight of Cups), however, I got most of them debugged in time.
Lessons Learned
In general, I think I bit off just a little more than I could chew. I love this game idea, and I am going to continue with it. But I had to make major sacrifices to get it done in 48h. The idea is simply too big for a compo like this. The interface sucks. A lot of status effects aren’t displayed at all, or are displayed with different names when they wear off. Combat is not at all balanced (defending is unbalanced, which makes the entire suit of shields sort-of suck).
Most of this was a concious trade-off. Once I was locked into doing a game with the Tarot, I had to implement ALL the cards. A lot of time was taken just coming up with unique effects for each card. After that and the implementation, I had to make a lot of sacrifices in usability, display and general game mechanics.
Some of the things are fairly easily fixed. The player phases (Move and Attack) could be combined into one phase; when you move into an enemy, that could trigger an attack. Since you have the option to end your turn at anytime, it would be essentially the same thing as we have now. The reason the enemy phase is split up into two parts is so that you can play cards like “The Moon”, which reduces all damage to 0, after an enemy moves next to you.
But I think in general the reliance on phases is a bad holdover from physical card games. This should be transparent to the player. I think in the future the enemies will move and attack one at a time, but there will be an “end turn” option which will yield to all events until your next turn.
The ultimate example is that there’s an enemy in the game which is never fightable! You see it in the first and last levels. I simply did not have enough time to balance the game to the point that I would have wanted to put it in. The original idea was to make TWENTY levels, so that by the time you were fighting this thing, you had raised your stats to the point where it was beatable.
The Future
I’m happy with the game and how it turned out. I think it’s still a good idea. Despite the trade-offs I had to make, it’s fun and when you beat the harder levels, even if it’s just by luck, you feel good. But I think if I could do this LD again, I would make something else. I’m definitely going to continue with this game; I’ve been working on moving things to OpenGL so that I can do some cool animations with card flipping and playing, and so on. I just wish I had started with something that didn’t lock me into a tedious task of coding 77 cards.
I hope you had fun playing it and you will leave me ideas for future versions of the game.
