Over the past week we’ve continued to experiment with the idea of building a deckbuilding/card system into Rads & Relics. This is still under significant development, but today we’re going to share some of the things that have come up over the past week.

The first thing that’s been on our mind is the interface for interacting with cards. Our big inspirations here are Slay the Spire, and more recently, Balatro. In both of these games it feels really good to hold and play cards. We’ve put together an initial prototype that supports drag-and-drop interactions and basic animations to recreate this feeling. It’s a promising start, but it’s going to take a number of iterations and polish to have something that feels truly great.

Secondly, we have a problem that’s more specific to our project. We still want the core game to be a 2D tactics game. Most actions in the game require both selecting who’s performing them (the character) and where they’re targeting (the grid space or enemy). This introduces several additional steps to play each card, especially if there are multiple targets. Right now, we’re just forcing you to play the card and then choose targets, but it feels fragmented. We’re still exploring ways to make this smoother while preserving player control.

Finally, we’re thinking about game balance. In our initial prototypes, we have cards that let you move and cards that let you attack. This works well when you draw a good mix, but it can be frustrating if you draw only attack cards with no enemies in range. We’re testing a few ideas to remedy this, from smoothing out hands with guaranteed draws, to offering a way to trade in cards for basic actions like a simple move or weak attack.

A lot of these questions are still unanswered, but we’re going to keep working on it and think this could be an exciting turn for our game.

State of the Game

  • Progress this week
    • Initial card prototype
    • Character design for knight
  • Coming up
    • Finalize characters for Make-a-character March
    • Full working prototype of card mechanics