WTactics

- open source strategy ccg

Archive for category ORC

template design rationale

Jul 27

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | 1 Comment

This is a long and hopefully interesting post for anyone that want’s to get an in-depth look in what’s going on in my mind and in my layout experiments. I’ve divided it into two separate sections for your reading pleasure – one about the logo dev, and another about how one should place containers and display card costs on a template.

The logo stuff

First I’d like to present the Rebel & Merfolk logos – the only two faction symbols that are actually completed at this stage.

Most of you are already acquainted with the Elf-leaf I whooped up for the Rebels, but have probably not seen it in all it’s zoomed in glory. While seeing logos zoomed in will be extremely rare in a CCG on the cards themselves, it is still a bonus if the logo still looks good when it is enlarged. I think these ones both do, and they don’t seem to need much extra work put on them when showing them off on posters etc.

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HP tracking debunked

Jul 3

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | 10 Comments

Yesternight what has always been apparent struck me: There are really not so many ways to keep track of how many HP:s a creature has in a CCG. After having an uneasy feeling for several months now about the subject, but never really wanting to accept it, I have somehow managed to distance myself from confronting the topic. Not any more.

I’ve come to a conclusion for the rule set I’m currently working on, and I’m fairly confident it’s a global design issue that is in direct relation to how the attack system works/is resolved in a CCG. But before we look at the resolution, let’s have a quick recap of what we’re looking at here:

  • In most combat orientated CCG:s creature have a number that equals thier HP/Life.
  • If they do, that number is usually greater than 0.
  • In most good CCG:s, that number is easy to keep track of and is between 0 to 10, in contrast to 3459.
  • This is where we now continue: How should one keep track of a creature’s HP in a CCG where that variable changes often on each individual creature?

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Erode

Jun 23

Posted by snowdrop in ORC | 10 Comments

A new card that follows up on the peaceful tradition we know our beloved elves have of being more or less pacifist unless forced to take action.

Does the “destruction” of something fit the elvish profile? Like in this case, the destruction of an aggressors weapons? I’d argue it could very well do so. This is of course a matter of taste and understanding how “a real elf” would act. But, wouldn’t a real elf “destroy” anything that was evil, aggressive or threatening if it had no other choice? Or would an elf perish and rather die and see all others do the same instead of standing up for it’s rights?

It seems like a bizarre notion to have the general elves depicted as such hard core pacifists (while it also seems very likely that there would exist religions & cults where ones own death would be preferable instead of raising arms against an aggressor). From what little I know about fantasy there is plenty of room for elves to destroy whatever is bad. :P

Notice how this is still less powerful compared to “Destroy all equipment carried by target creature”, which would typically be something I’d like to have associated with the Black Legion (Undead & Co.) instead. Elves will never have the full power of destruction or the means to target such forces. Whenever they do have it it is conditional and in line with their alliance profile of being peace loving.

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take from the rich

Jun 3

Posted by snowdrop in ORC | 3 Comments

Here’s some new artwork and another card. As usual, this baby is a work copy and subject for heavy change. This is how it looks like currently, ready for playtesting. For it to be effective though it will most likely have to be released as a permanent (a card that stays in play until removed by something) at a cost of 3 or 4 instead of a free instant as it is now.

I’m also thinking about other possible and nice names for the card. While I myself like the current which sends a clear message about the function of the card I think there might be more elegant ways of doing the same. Question is, are they as straight forward? Which brings me to another one: Are elfs straight forward? Or are they mysterious and speak in riddles? I have a hard time imagining them as tall & thin Yodas, and in my imagination they are honest and direct, but without being aggressive or meaning harm, and they also have good motives for their actions. In this particular case, a hint of that can be seen in the flavor text.

I also experiment with adding some kind of flavor text at the bottom right whenever there’s room for it. Wtactics goes for simplicty for the eye and we won’t ever include the flavor as a part of the main card text, nor will it be mandatory to have flavor texts for all cards either.

The photodevelopers I ordered “test prints” from have informed me that their only machine that can deliver exact dimensions when developing the cards needs to be repaired. They estimated it would take 3 weeks, so I still haven’t been able to see if the flavor text is too small yet. I’ll get back to this as soon as I receive the prints and will then share my findings with you.

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love & the kinds of it

May 24

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | 2 Comments

Time again for a work copy of a card that will be playtested in the Original Rules Concept: Bound by Love. Personally I’m weak for civilian elements and drama even if it’s in a war centric game. I think this card has a nice touch to it, uniting mechanics and story in a natural and understandable way with beautiful artwork. It’s one of my favorites this far.

I got some reactions asking of there are homosexual elfs. In short & minus the discussion:

  1. Why wouldn’t there be?
  2. WTactics shouldn’t be heteronormative. On the contrary, it should be pluralistic and inclusive.
  3. A kiss is a kiss – it says little about the subjects sexuality.

    4. Would anyone react if it was a male an female elf making out? No? Then surely the question should be why people react on this, and not why I choose to include such art.

My ambition is to avoid making WTactics a clone of every default fantasy setting that’s already out there. That mission is impossible to a certain dagree. Some basics should remain there. An example is the basic appearance of Elves. Without following any fantasy convention the world would be very hard to understand and grasp for the players, and, it would maybe even not be a fantasy world at all in the meaning the term “fantasy” is used.

That is why many things will indeed stay stereotypical to the genre. They are defining it and they make it easy to understand the world. At the same time my belief is that WTactics should dare to push the genre in new directions, some of which touch up on real world contemporary issues, stereotypes and other problems. This would all have to be done in a balanced way of course. There is a real big difference between daring and challenging, and out right provocation & propaganda.

WTactics can create a revised and modernized fantasy setting which isn’t afraid of the controversial or unusual topics being shown and, via the game, debated among the players. Maybe it will even giving birth to thoughts, perspectives & discussions even though it’s a game made primarily for entertainment.

Let’s try to find our own way and convention of what we want to deliver instead of following the same old path blindly.

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a new tool & test prints

May 10

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | No Comments

Time came for me to check out some test prints of both the creature and event card templates. In reality it’s not really a conventional printer that will do the work. Instead, I have sent them in to a photo lab, where the “test prints” will be developed as digital photographies on high quality matte photo paper.

While playing around with the templates in Inkscape to prepare a couple of test cases for the digital photo lab I discovered that Inkscape couldn’t do a bitmap export of them in a format that the photo lab supported.

At that point I could just have used GIMP or any other editor to open and re-save the PNG-images from the Inkscape export into whatever format I wanted, but I chose a different path since that would have to be done to over 20 images, one by one (if one doesn’t know the delicate secrets of the terminal in combo with GIMP ;) )

Thus, I started my quest for a user friendly – yet powerful – open source solution for easy batch processing of image files. Thanks to durand I found out about a powerful and flexible easy to use piece of software that met all of my criteria: Phatch.

For anyone that craves after a nice GUI and powerful batch operations, this program would be it. And trust me, when developing a CCG it will likely come to good use plenty of times as having to deal with 200 – 300 cards is really something that should be handled by batch processing and nothing else.

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new card & event template

Apr 19

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | No Comments

A month has passed and I’ve been very busy with my real work, but fear not beloved cardplayers – much has happened. I donated gold and the gods of creation answered my prayers: A couple of new artwork pieces have been born and are now a part WT’s great art pool. If you feel the divine calling please consider doing the same ;)

To show a sign of life (yeah, there is a rule on the internet which says every great project which hasn’t posted anything in a month is stone cold dead, I know…) and calm your nerves I decided to show some double folded progress.

card
As seen to the right the new art looks delicious, doesn’t it? It’s a sample of how it could be used on an Event card. In this particular case, it also happens to be a card that will be playtested once I get enough cards done for the next major experiment with the orginal rules concept, one which kill the ORC and breathe life in a brand new offspring from my masterful wannabe-wose mind. :P

template
As the observant reader may have noticed there have been some development on the Event card template. We have gone from this template to the one you see to the right. In particular, the following has been changed:

Info box added at bottom: This will contain the artists name if the artist has contributed for free by donating his/her work under the GPL. In any case, it will also contain info about the cards ID number.

Each card will have a unique number which is a fast way of identifying the card without using it’s name. Next to that, followed by a dot, there is also a version number. This allows you to easily check if you have the latest and most up to date version of a card, since sometimes a card will undergo balance adjustments, spelling corrections et.c. as needed. Example: 1.3 would mean that the card ID is “1″ and it’s version is “3″, meaning that is the third time that specific card has been changed since it was officially published.

Leaf Icon: The new leaf icon in the top right corner of the card represents the Elvish Faction in the game, which would probably be called “Rebels” and be a part of an alliance (alliance is shown by the green colour of the card’s borders/containers).

Thought is that each faction will get it’s own icon which easily identifies the cards faction belonging. Sadly the factions lack official icons in BfW, but it won’t hinder us from drawing completely new ones when it’s time for the others.

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presenting two new card types…

Mar 20

Posted by snowdrop in ORC | 1 Comment

The first new card type is the instant/event/magic-type. This is not a permanent, and depending on it’s subtype, it can be played during your turn while not in combat (T), during combat (C) or on your turn or the opponents but not during combat (A).

It has a name, a cost, familiar art-work, and at the bottom it has key words. These tell us which unit that can actually cast the event card. In contrast to MTG and some other CCG:s it’s not the player that casts the event cards. They are played by the units.

The support unit is the first new card type we’re interested in playtesting. Above, it’s the Ranger. Support units must be put into play on a normal unit (i.e. the Druid). Once attached to a normal unit they will usually not leave them. Instead, they and the normal unit are combined from then on and form a legion. In essence, a legion is treated as one huge unit. No specific part of it can be targeted – if it dies all units in the legion die. (There will of course be cards that alter these things, but as default rules we’ll try out something along these lines…)

Those of you familiar with MTG can easily relate to our support units by comparing them with Enchantments. Support will have a slightly different template look in colour, and they also lack level. In some cases they will not have stats modifiers and just add abilities to the unit. In some cases they will have both stats modifiers and abilities (even negative ones ;) ).

Currently the ORC has 3 main card types: Units, support units, and events (which are further divided into 3 subtypes which regulate when they can be played). Plans are to playtest these and see how it fares…

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playtesting

Mar 19

Posted by townsend51 in ORC | No Comments

We fired up LackeyCCG and got some playtesting done this evening. The patch works well, and the game is playable.

Now the foundations are set it’s time to make it as exciting as possible. The next steps are looking at having non-character cards, and toying around with a few other win conditions.