Hello all! I’m Nick, the designer and director of CC:S, and I’m here to walk you guys through the basic mechanics of the combat system in Card Chronicles: Sentinels.
Setting the Scene
To start, here’s a picture of the combat scene. Note that the game is still in alpha, so assets are not final.
At the very top of the battlefield is the turn tracker - a UI element that displays turn order. Many RPGs hide this information, which is something I’ve never really cared for. Showing turn order allows players to plan their turns a bit better. The number in the bottom right is the entity’s speed - the attribute that determines turn order. You can reference that when applying buffs and debuffs!
The turn tracker
Below that are the enemies and heroes, with enemies being the red ones on top and heroes being the blue ones below. Though they are represented with cards, these entities do not go in a deck or get played - they’re just on the battlefield when the battle starts, like an RPG.Â
The entities
Mousing over different parts of the card will reveal different types of information in a little slide-out exam window.
The exam window
And below that we finally have the main bulk of our UI. This is where you do most of the clicking. To explain this, I’ll go through each element and mechanic individually. Keep reading for the details!
Player UI
Weapons of War
Action Points
In the CC:S combat system, you’re given an open-ended turn in which you can choose between multiple actions and perform them in any order or amount that you want. There are no mana crystals or turn phases - just the turn. However, there is one resource that limits what you can do: action points.
You’re given three action points at the start of your turn and you spend one whenever you perform one of the actions listed below. When you run out of action points, your turn automatically ends.
Cards
The first action you can spend those action points on is probably the most obvious for a card game: you can play cards! Each card played consumes one action point, and you can only play the cards that are in your hand.
There are several card types.
First are Skills and Spells, which have a one-time effect. After being played, they go to your discard pile. Skills scale with your Physical Power attribute and are resisted by your target’s Physical Defense, whereas Spells scale with Magical Power and are resisted by Magical Defense. It’s a lot like Pokemon, for those familiar with the stat system of that series.
Second are Item cards. They function a lot like Skills and Spells, but they don’t scale with your attributes or get resisted by the enemy’s and, more importantly, they don’t get shuffled into your deck. Instead, when creating your deck, you’ll choose two item cards that go into their own special “slots.” Those two item cards will then be guaranteed to be in your opening hand at the start of each battle. They lend a little bit of consistency to your strategy, but they aren’t going to offer particularly powerful or unique effects.
Thirdly and finally there are Weapon and Armor cards. Unlike the others, these cards are equipped to your character and provide a passive effect so long as they remain equipped. All equipment cards will boost your attributes by some amount, but most will also offer some sort of unique passive effect. You can have one weapon and one armor equipped at once. Weapons and Armor are unequipped once they lose all of their durability, with weapons losing durability when you attack and armor losing durability when you are attacked. Like Item cards, there are also two special slots in your deck for a starting Weapon card and a starting Armor card. You’ll start each battle with those Weapon and Armor cards already equipped.
Drawing Cards and Loading Bullets
I mentioned earlier that there are no mana crystals in CC:S. We do, however, have two other resources: bullets and the cards themselves.Â
You need cards in your hand in order to play cards, so how do you go about getting cards from your deck to your hand? Well, the two standard ways are available: you automatically draw one card at the start of your turn, and certain cards and effects will let you draw cards. But there’s one more option - you can manually draw a card by spending an action point. If you really wanted to, you could spend your whole turn drawing extra cards! Keep in mind that you can potentially play up to three cards every single turn, so there may come a point when you need a refill and this manual draw lets you do that. You can draw cards by clicking on your deck.
Bullets are a kind of optional resource. Certain cards will have a Bullet Ability - an additional mode that can be used if you spend the required number of bullets. This ability will be more powerful than the base effect of the card, either through increasing its strength or by adding additional effects to it. Like cards, you load one bullet at the start of your turn and can load extra ones through cards and effects, or you can spend an action point to manually load one. This is done by clicking on the revolver cylinder.
Basic Attacks
Finally we’ve got Basic Attacks. A Basic Attack can be used to deal damage to a single enemy. The damage is normally very low so you should really be focusing on playing cards, but it can be used in a pinch. Also, there are various effects that will boost the damage of your Basic Attacks or add extra effects to them. In addition to dealing damage, Basic Attacks will also fill up your Attack Meter by one point. Once this meter is full (3 points), it’ll reset and you’ll draw a card! Decks that are built around Basic Attacks will make good use of the Attack Meter to keep their hand full, but even other decks can use it strategically, like using Basic Attacks to pick off almost-dead enemies and fill their Meter in the process.
Tutorial Complete
Phew! That was a lot of explaining, but it covers all of the basic mechanics of combat. There are more details and mechanics like attributes and status effects, but I hope this has given you all a good idea of how our combat works! In the future you can expect some commentary about why the systems are the way they are.Â
But that’s all the time I have for now, so until then, may you be well-armed in your journeys across the New World
Hello everyone! This post marks the debut of our development blog. We’re excited to share some behind-the-scenes info about our current game project - Card Chronicles: Sentinels - with you all in the coming months. But first, let’s take a quick look at the game.
The Gameplay
At the core of every game is the gameplay loop - it’s usually one of the first things you should figure out when you make a game. Card Chronicles: Sentinels (CC:S) blends the mechanics of a card game with that of a role-playing game, and you can see that reflected in its gameplay loop. Gameplay is mission-based, with the player picking a mission from the central menu system. Their goal depends on the mission’s type, with goals varying from exploring a certain percentage of the map to killing all of the enemies. Once the mission is complete, players will be rewarded with experience points, currency, and cards (no need to buy booster packs!). If you level up, you’re given the option to invest in various things like perks and stat increases that affect your character’s abilities. You can also take those new cards you found and use them to build new decks or improve your current ones, and you can spend currency to upgrade the cards that you own. Those cards are used in combat - we’ll talk more about that in another post. After you’re done modifying your decks, you equip one and depart on another mission!
Here’s a little preview of the combat scene.
The Setting
CC:S takes place in a land simply known as the New World. It’s a place of temperate forests, rugged mountains, and golden prairies. It bears a striking resemblance to real-world North America, and that’s because CC:S forgoes the typical European Fantasy setting in favor of one inspired by the American Western genre. This is one of a few examples where we departed from the norm in an effort to explore space not often explored in card games and RPGs.
The Story
The story of CC:S is told through text and mission design - another topic we’ll get to in the future - but here’s the gist of the plot:
You are a Sentinel: an expert tracker, hunter, and survivalist whose job is to protect the people of the New World from all manner of beast and brute (and in the New World, there’s a whole lot of those).
The Sentinels are trained specifically to handle these issues, but a new and more mysterious threat is beginning to rise - the Nebeltide. In the far west, a billowing wall of fog is slowing passing over the land. Strange and deadly creatures inhabit the fog, and its presence warps the landscape. This phenomenon, called the Nebeltide, threatens to consume the New World. As a Sentinel, it falls to you and your Sentinel colleagues to travel west and halt the Nebeltide’s advance.
It Begins
This has been just a brief overview of the project - in the future we hope to take some deeper dives on more specific topics relating to the actual development of the game. You can look forward to posts on the mechanics of our combat system, our approach to world building, and maybe even some technical programmer mumbo-jumbo. So stick around - things are just starting!
