basic card mechanics!
so what the hell is this thing?
you've seen the pitch, right?
somehow, this thing has to connect a number of unrelated card games and individually work with all of them.
now to get legal out of the way, i'm going to make reference to some card games that happen to work with void god on this page, but they are not the sole target of void god's interoperability and are just being used as examples.
that taken care of, lemme break it down from a high level before i get into all the particulars.
the idea for the design of void god's cards is for them to be explicit about everything they do; nothing is assumed. mechanics that void god shares with other games are explicitly declared instead of implied.
by doing this, said other games are de-abstracted and their contents become easily analogizable to the explicit features of void god.
once analogized, they are naturally interoperable.
once this system of explicit expression is understood, identifying the properties of a compatible card in a globally-functioning way becomes simple!
it does bear the upfront of familiarizing oneself with a number of symbols and positions, but the game will ship with both rules and a cheat sheet.
tl;dr: modularity is the name of the game, just like with lensed night sky. sell your shot type and mess with the cost and conditions of every card.
of course, this is purely from a technical perspective. from a balancing perspective, void god has a number of unique rules which make things run together smoothly.
i'll mostly be getting into those another day.
for now, i'll go over the details of what each of these things mean.
this card is a "soul", one of the five card types in void god.
souls are cards you tend to make a lot of, which fight for you and tend to be defeated without too much trouble. they are creature-like or monster-like. damage they take is healed naturally at the start of turns, which distinguishes them from "bastions", a type of card which does not naturally heal.
1. the attack stat of the card. used for calculating damage on attacking actions.
2. the health of the card. cards die and are discarded at zero or less health.
3. the cost that must be paid when the card is played. typically, but not always, these are "torque" costs. "torque" is a resource you start the game with little of, but gain more as time goes on, as a basic description. costs like these are familiar to most who have played card games before.
there are a number of different "shades" of torque, as well as a generic shade which can be paid for by itself or any other shade of torque. this card costs two of the generic shade.
all of the shades in void god correlate to an equivalent concept in at least one other card game, with the exception of one.
in addition to torque costs, there are also non-torque costs including sacrifices, exhaustion, arbitrary costs, and a few others.
4. this icon indicates where the card is played, with multiple icons appearing if there are multiple available choices. this card, along with the majority of other souls, may only be played to the homeland.
void god has seven areas, "domains", in which cards may reside at any given time. not to worry, this includes the deck, hand, and discard.
cards with transient effects that only occur when they're played have the playing domain of discard. keeps it simple.
the stack is not a domain. the stack is the stack. or the "chain", or whatever you'd like to call it. i'm a programmer, so it's the stack to me!
5. this icon indicates when the card may be played, its play-timing. this card's play-timing is standard.
there are only four timings at the moment, with one being exceptionally rare.
standard timing may be used during one's own turn, while no other actions are ongoing.
grouped timing may be used only once during one's own turn, but at that moment, one may use as many grouped-timing things as they desire. usually, this takes the form of a "combat phase" sort of thing, as most attacking actions are grouped.
blink timing may be used at any time during the game, including to interrupt ongoing actions. it's quick, it's instant!
compile timing must be used at the time of deck-assembly. this is the rare one, as you might imagine!
6. this is our first example of a card's active ability! this active ability is "swing", which is a type of attack.
just like cards themselves, active abilities have costs, domains, and timings.
swing has the cost of "exhaust", which, when paid, prevents the soul from paying any more exhaust costs until the start of your next turn. and big surprise, you'll be turning them 90 degrees clockwise to represent this.
it's got the domain of "war", which is typically where souls are when they are able to take actions.
and finally, as alluded to before, it has the timing of grouped, so any other grouped actions that you want to take have to happen at the same time.
when used, it'll send some damage to the other side of the board in a very hmm Magical way. however, this is not the only type of attack in the game!
different shades of souls tend to have different active and passive abilities; at the moment, "swing" is only commonly seen in two of them.
7. a second active ability, this one is "defend", which is a type of block. defend will redirect certain types of attacks, including swing, to the user, and reduce the damage taken by one.
it also has the cost of exhaust, as well as the domain of war. as well, it has the additional domain of homeland. defend can be used in either!
because defend must be used in response to an ongoing action, it has blink timing.
just like with attacks, there are multiple blocks, and which one a soul is likely to use changes between shade.
some of the different attacks and blocks are analagous to ones found in other card games, and some are entirely original!
8. a codified passive ability. this one is "prepared", or maybe "hardy", i've been going back and forth on it.
passive abilities are all represented by icons and appear in the bottom-left of a card's art.
many other card games have "keyword abilities", and while we certainly have keywords, i felt that we could make things a bit more interesting if our codified passives were outside the usual card text.
also, i think inscryption really hit it on the mark with those things. also also, we support inscryption, if you'd like to proxy some beasts or bots!
anyway, each shade correlates to some passives; right now it's two-per with a few that are shade-ambivalent.
"prepared", or whatever, reduces damage taken by one during its owner's turn.
combined with their defend active ability, you can see that this fella has the capability of withstanding two damage without dying, despite only having one hp! what da heck! and for only two bucks (torque)!
of course, in addition to codified passives, arbitrary passives (card text) are present on a large number of souls, just not this guy.
9. idiot.
10. lore text! yippee! i quite like the font we've got here, pilfered straight from the len'en english translation (license permits!), and it is compact enough to get us a lot of space for functional and non-functional text. course, it's subject to change, but i've looked at other fonts for a while and couldn't find anything i thought fit as well.
11. and finally, the card type. soul.
there are no plans for subtypes. i think shades do well enough for that.
oh yeah, the shade the card is would be in the top left. it's WIP half because the card is actually WIP but half because i haven't finished the design meant to go up there.
the other card types are "armament", "miracle", "bastion", and "decree". we're pretty confident that just about every card from compatible card games fits into one of these five.
previews of those will come: later!
right now, each card type has one implicit mechanic. i'm still debating whether or not they should be made explicit because just one is pretty simple and you could consider their card type name a keyword for that mechanic.
souls are capable of moving to war from homeland at the end of their owner's turn.
anyway, that's it for now!