Draft Time Strategy

Project for Game Studio I class, Fall 2016.

Players take turns (in a snake-drafting fashion) drafting cards from the center pool. Each card gives the player some amount of the primary resources in the game - attack, defense, economy, and tech, with a cost based on the resources given. Players can also choose to trash a card for 10 gold rather than buying it - perhaps they can't afford it, or they want to save their gold for future purchases, or they just want to deny the card from their opponent and don't want it themselves. After the 6 cards are depleted, a round of combat occurs. Each player measures their attack power (augmented by 20% for each unit of tech they have) against their opponent's defense power, and is able to destroy a number of their opponent's resources equal to the difference. Players receive back half the cost of a resource when one of theirs is destroyed. After all damage is dealt out, players generate 10 gold for each unit of economy they have, and then a new set of 6 cards is generated. The game ends when a player has no units remaining.

Design Thoughts:

This game is an exploration of card drafting mechanics in a digital medium alongside a minimalist abstraction of RTS mechanics. The digital medium allows cards to be procedurally generated on the fly, taking into account the current game state.

The cards are procedurally generated based on the amount of gold the players have collectively - this ensures that the cards are always things that players want to buy. The amount of resources on the cards and their cost will scale up as the players accumulate more purchasing power. This addresses a frequent issue in card games, where players are often given cards at a stage in the game where they aren't useful - either expensive cards early on when they can't play them, or cheap cards later in the game where they have low impact.