Cardyceps | Rico Game Portfolio

When designing the game I already knew I needed some variety in terms of playstyle and card design.

Firstly I came up with a Pokemon-esque type wheel. This forces the player to think about what card they should play outside of the highest damage.
Taking advantage of the real-time nature of the game and making a large majority of cards deal damage-over-time. This minimises downtime where nothing may be happening on-screen.
Understanding that Time=Damage in a real-time card game makes it important that players know that they can combo cards together, despite that not being immediately obvious. cards that give you no immediate effect now but will help you deal more damage later on reward players who are patient and experiment.

Coming up with a base set of cards to create the core of the game is paramount to game balance and creates a base level which designers can build.

The base cards include:

3 damage-over-time cards(falling under the type-wheel)
2 buff/debuff cards
2 heal cards(one instant and the other over-time)
1 shield card to block incoming damage
1 instant physical damage card
1 unique type of card

All these cards have multiple tiers of upgrades up to +6. upgrade points are given out at the end of fights allowing players to allot their upgrades for the next battle.

This is the spreadsheet used for visualising the upgrade tree.

This upgrade tree had a two-fold effect on the development of the game, not only did it help with coming up with the costs of cards and how they all link together within the upgrade system but also aided with helping the Card artist to come up with design ideas and discuss with me about what we wanted the card designs to look like.

Design challenges

One of the main design challenges I faced when creating the cards was the number of words within the card's description. This was a unique challenge as usually these types of games are played as turn-based so the player would have as much time as they'd need to come up with what cards they'd like to play. In this instance, I was designing a real-time card game which led to many issues occurring during play testing. One of the main complaints is that players felt overwhelmed with the amount of text along with the enemy attacking them too, it was too much mental load.

Revising the way card effects were worded was a must. So I spent a good couple of weeks cutting out everything that wasn't necessary, but it still wasn't enough, players still said they felt overwhelmed. A new approach was needed for the cards so I decided that instead of text I should use images instead, which would mean I could still convey the same information but in a much more concise manner. I introduced these changes in another playtest and it seemed to have worked, players were far less likely to feel overwhelmed while playing.

Using graphics instead of words was far more intuitive to understand for players in the heat of the moment as opposed to having to read and understand terms that they may not be familiar with in a TCG.

The other primary design challenge was the balance of the cards themselves. At first, I made all the cards deal differing amounts of damage across differing amounts of time but it was obvious from the start that this was very boring and unengaging for players in a playtest. This caused me to bring in a type wheel into the game with 3 primary types: Fire, Poison and Bleed. Each type played off of the other in a rock, paper, scissors type dynamic which instantly caused players to put more decision-making in moment-to-moment gameplay, along with this I also added some buffing and debuffing cards. These 2 new types of cards reward players who are able to manage their energy resources to combo cards together and cause more damage to the enemy in the long term while potentially missing out short term. Adding all these changes together really fleshed out the deck and made playing certain cards feel strategic and impactful, improving the overall gameplay according to playtesters of the time.