It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Lost Trying to Design Cards
Probably the most fun and exciting part of designing a customizable card game is the first round of card design. You have a rough rule set, and the skies are blue—carve out your design space, go wild, and crank off a hundred or so awesome cards. Every inkling you have can go on paper to be tested, and every path leads to more paths.
But eventually, practicality tiptoes back into the scene, and with it, doubts and uncomfortable realizations. It's OK, this roller coaster is part of the creative process (at least in my experience). I recently hit this obstacle with XYbrid Arena design: the rules were tight-ish, and I had 88 play cards to design for our initial playtesting. It wasn't the 88 designs that were challenging; it was the gut feeling around design #74 that I was off the rails. I was making a bunch of cool little objects, but I had no framework, guidelines, examples, or touchstones to confirm what I was doing made sense.
It's important in many card games for strategies and factions to have a specific feel—what is the idea, or flavor, a card (or class of cards) is trying to capture? Does playing that card reflect this intent through its effects on the game? Is this territory distinct from what other cards or strategies can do? Defining this can be a watershed moment in a game's design. The classic example is Magic: The Gathering's five colors expressed through the "color pie". The definition of what each color can and cannot do, refined over three decades by some of the world's best game designers, has resulted in a conceptual scheme for MTG that satisfies the needs of designers, players, artists, marketers—pretty much everybody with a stake in the game.
In XYbrid, the distinction between sciences is where these play identities emerge. It's critically important, for example, that playing a chemistry card feels different from playing a biology card, and (!) that there are parallel mechanical differences as well. While I had some loose ideas about the strengths and virtues of each science, I didn't have a tool to use in the design process. So I set out to create an atlas—a document that sets "feel" territory for each science and connects those feelings with flavor and mechanics.
Here's what it looks like:
I'm sure this document will grow and change over time, but the help it provides at even early stages of design is invaluable. I was able to sort all my rough designs and reassign misfits to a science where it made sense. It showed gaps I was able to fill. It forced me to think about card design in a disciplined way, and thus the first set of 88 plays finally makes sense.
And, as the Xybrid story world is built, this document can be a reference point for writers and artists who need to create narrative experiences consistent with the game itself.