The story so far

Finally made my Project page for the Playing card-based RPG / roguelike game I have been planning for a week or so. This DevLog is meant to help keep me on track and not wander off onto some other project

So, the story so far

I started off with a notebook in which I filled about 20 pages of scribblings and ideas. I sketched out my rough outlines for a characters system, simple combat system, character stats, how the game would play, with one prepped deck being the dungeon itself and a second pack, the GAME DECK being used for generating random numbers or events. This pack is used then shuffled constantly to keep the full 56 cards in play every time.

So what how do you use cards to generate stats and encounters, well that was easy enough to figure out, they can be used to generate a variety of random numbers. So with the cards you have 4 suits, so that gives you 1-4 random number generator, each suit has 13 cards, the 2-10, 3 face cards and an ACE so you can use that to either generate an number between 1-13, or 2-14 depending how you treat an ACE.

Add the colours of cards Usually Black or Red and you have a binary or coin toss type option as well. the odd or even cards work for this as well... but face cards must be allocated their numeric value but that is easy enough. Then you can use the entire pack. It works as a 1-54 random number generator if you include the 2 jokers. That gives you a good range of ways to generate numbers for selecting random stats, and events

The way I wanted the game to play I would need a couple of tables of encounters, creature items and treasures the player can draw a card from the deck and look up, So I began scribbling in my little notebook again and after a few days I had a basic random encounters table written up. I then set to work typing this up and as I did that I fleshed out and refined each encounter. Some are still rough and simplistic but for this stage they will do.

Some have chance-based scenarios, so you draw a card, if it is a heart event one happens, if it is a club, event two and Diamond event three and spade event four. So, I separated the encounter descriptions from the encounter results. I can get a kind of "if you do this go to page x otherwise go to page y" feel for the random encounters.

Of course being daft, at When I was planning and designing all this in my head and then on paper,  I decided there was nothing about this that said I had to just make this a video game, the rules could quite easily could be applied to a solo play pen n paper table top RPG game of some sort. And it would make it easy to pick up, no complicated or unusual 12 or 20 sided dice for someone to need to play it, weirdly not everyone has them, go figure! But a pack of cards most people are familiar with them and probably have them in a drawer somewhere.

And so, I set it upon myself to make it both at the same time. Cause hey how hard could that be right.

I bashed together a little card routine inside game maker which I made stupidly harder than it needed to be before realising I was over complicating it. I had it with individual objects for each card non reusable code. it was a mess. but eventually I got it all refined to a nice simple couple of objects and made a little shuffle system that could work as the basis for the game.

Then I set about taking my typed up encounter tables and converting them into a format to upload them into a database, I played with the formatting of the tables making sure they link up and each encounter and its outcomes were connected to each other correctly. To make sure this worked properly when needed,  I then wrote up a couple of basic webpages and scripts to access the database of 54 encounters (one for each playing card plus the two jokers).

The webpage pulls a random card from the deck and you can read and explore its results like an old "choose your own adventure" book.

Having this online will allow me to automate a lot of PDF creation parts of the project. I have a lot of code written for past web projects that generate all sorts of custom PDF documents so this will speed side of the game.

Still lots and lots to do though.

On the computer game side I will probably stick with Gamemaker studio, as I said I've started with that and created a basic playing card system for it with shuffling and allocating relevant values to drawn cards that will be needed for gameplay, I should be able to link to the online DB to get information for the encounters which will make updating the game scenario easier and central.

So that is the progress up to the creation of the itch project page. This is a hobby project, so updates will not be every day or even every week. but hopefully having these dev logs should keep me active at it.