The Intricacies of CCG Design
Aug. 7th, 2005 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aMy CCG design hit a bit of a snag yesterday. Well, aside from the fact that I spent most of the day gaming, then watching The Hunting of the President.
But I did do 2 or 3 hours of work on the CCG. Friday night I'd started to see some of the cracks in the design. Nothing serious (yet; that'll come out when I play it), but the individual cards were starting to give under their own weight.
CCGs are very intricate beasts, you see, complex machines with lots of moving parts. And, those parts (the cards) need to all be cut from the same molds, else it all becomes chaos. So, last night, rather than finishing my last 23 cards I instead when back to the start and began to massage all of my 77 cards to date into the right shape.
The first problem was balance. Since players are going to make their own decks every card has to be the same value as every other card (to some definition of value). I've been watching this from the start, and I had somewhat complex rule sets for how each card type should be constructed, along with values for every power I'd used in the game.
But, it had started to get a bit crazy. So yesterday I took a step back and first I figured out what the power value should be of each effect type. (Some cards have "continuous" effects, some have "discard" effects, and some have both, and as I was to learn all of the continuous effects were at the same level of power by default and they were less powerful than all the discard effects, which were also all at the same level.) Then I spreadsheeted everything, with costs for each of those two possible values listed.
This all went well, and I now have a great chart of potential powers with exact costs, and it's all much clearer.
Afterward I had to go back and start rebalancing all of the cards. In the process I decided to also start cleaning up all the special effect text, which needed to be clear and consistent. This has been taking longer than I'd hoped, and I have lots more of that to do today.
To a certain extent I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, because this all isn't as important as making the core game work, but on the other hand it'll mean I have to do those last 23 cards just once, and it should also improve the playtest experience.
Half a dozen of one ...
I've also learned through all of this that I want some database/spreadsheet effects that don't exist without a LOT of work. I'd like to take a card, choose a special power, have it fill in all the special effect text, ask me to fill in a few entries, and also calculate the default cost of the card.
I suppose if this project goes forward post-GenCon I'll either do the spreadsheet work to make this possible or else write my own program to do so.
But I did do 2 or 3 hours of work on the CCG. Friday night I'd started to see some of the cracks in the design. Nothing serious (yet; that'll come out when I play it), but the individual cards were starting to give under their own weight.
CCGs are very intricate beasts, you see, complex machines with lots of moving parts. And, those parts (the cards) need to all be cut from the same molds, else it all becomes chaos. So, last night, rather than finishing my last 23 cards I instead when back to the start and began to massage all of my 77 cards to date into the right shape.
The first problem was balance. Since players are going to make their own decks every card has to be the same value as every other card (to some definition of value). I've been watching this from the start, and I had somewhat complex rule sets for how each card type should be constructed, along with values for every power I'd used in the game.
But, it had started to get a bit crazy. So yesterday I took a step back and first I figured out what the power value should be of each effect type. (Some cards have "continuous" effects, some have "discard" effects, and some have both, and as I was to learn all of the continuous effects were at the same level of power by default and they were less powerful than all the discard effects, which were also all at the same level.) Then I spreadsheeted everything, with costs for each of those two possible values listed.
This all went well, and I now have a great chart of potential powers with exact costs, and it's all much clearer.
Afterward I had to go back and start rebalancing all of the cards. In the process I decided to also start cleaning up all the special effect text, which needed to be clear and consistent. This has been taking longer than I'd hoped, and I have lots more of that to do today.
To a certain extent I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, because this all isn't as important as making the core game work, but on the other hand it'll mean I have to do those last 23 cards just once, and it should also improve the playtest experience.
Half a dozen of one ...
I've also learned through all of this that I want some database/spreadsheet effects that don't exist without a LOT of work. I'd like to take a card, choose a special power, have it fill in all the special effect text, ask me to fill in a few entries, and also calculate the default cost of the card.
I suppose if this project goes forward post-GenCon I'll either do the spreadsheet work to make this possible or else write my own program to do so.