2024, card game/visual novel
Itch.io
This was a group project for my third-year game development class. It’s an interesting genre mix-up: card game meets visual novel. The idea is that you’re acting out a play through your cards. Your co-star gives you dialogue, and you’ll be prompted to respond through cards. For each prompt, one third of the total cards in the deck would be correct answers. (The cards are internally put into groups, and their text changes depending on the current prompt.)
The player will often know what the right answer to a prompt is, either through context clues or familiarity with the play it’s parodying. So, it becomes a game of making sure you have the right card on hand, and if not, using other cards to find it. “Dialogue” cards are the cards you have to play in response. “Scene” cards help you obtain other cards (including dialogue cards). “Prop” cards are playable items that trigger a bonus later in the play if they’re relevant to a future prompt.
I, along with my colleague, designed everything that makes this system tick — the distribution of cards in the deck, the currency system tied to card use, the effects of scene cards, and lots of testing and balancing to ensure the average game went smoothly and that no cards felt over- or under-powered. As with any card game, randomness plays a factor, but by the end of the project I think we were able to wrangle it down sufficiently.
We even got to show off our game at Ontario’s own Level Up student game showcase, which was a great experience.
