Welcome to our project blog!


This started as a gimmick for us to draw illustrations, and practice our skills. But the idea kept getting more complex as the time flew by, so now we are attempting to make it a full fledged game.  We have selected a small amount of people as our audience, so we can gather limited feed back on our game as it develops. Any feed back is appreciated.

Neither of us has any experience as a project manager, so we had to research and wing it. But below are some of our attempts at managing ourselves.

Right now. To keep it simple, we have devised a way we can be happy as game designers and artists. I cannot put it in words  now. But I hope the diagram below will explain a bit of how we are working.

After we did a number of play tests with a proxy deck. I did some research in board game/card game crossover, and needless to say, we are not the only ones doing something like this. Just looking around kickstarter, I found Faeria, and Skirmish. These games have been successfuly launched and it is both depressing and inspiring. Either way, this is a game that we both wanted to play, and we hope to share it with you when it is finished. Thank you!

*note:
We currently have 4 factions we are working with. And ultimately this is a 2 - 4 player game. Right now we are concentrating on a starter set, which will serve as an introductory game of 1 vs 1 attrition game. But 3 player to 4 player interaction will get more interesting. Scroll down below this post to see all of our work so far. More updates soon.

Story/Narrative

STORY/PLOT

Act 1

The people lived in peace. They were protected behind walls of earth from the elements of the world.
With an abundance of knowledge and confidence, arrogance took over the people. With everything they had they built a tower, so great and tall it reached the limits of the heavens. Their god was angered by the attempt to reach his domain, their pride was unforgivable . He sent punishment raining down upon their world. Mighty meteorites descended from the skies and broke the great Pangaea into many pieces. The waters raged and flooded, the earth split and separated, fires raged and smoke rose, there was chaos unlike any had seen.

Act 2

As the walls of Eden broke and the people broke down as they saw everything they knew fall apart, the world watched. The four elemental gods of nature felt pity for the people and could not bear to watch their end, knowing the potential they are capable of. Earth, water, fire and air took it upon themselves to save what they could of this great civilization. They took the people unto themselves and found shelter in very distinctive terrain around the earth. Over time the people seemed to forget a lot of their past, they came to think of elementals as their gods and worshiped them accordingly. Thankful for the worship, the elements taught the separated peoples magic, a way to harness the raw power of nature they were dominion over.  After many years of co habitation the elementals fall into a slumber and leave the peoples to explore the world.

Act 3

The peoples grow restless as their gods slumber, and so they start exploring and as they explore they keep remembering, something they had long forgotten. The peoples gather knowledge from ruins scattered around the world and all come to the same realization, they lost something and the only way they would find it was to travel to their birthplace. All the seperated peoples travel to the central continent, the holy land where they had fallen from great heights and find each other not realizing they were once the same peoples, brothers and sisters of the same cloth. They fight over the land, all for different reasons. Some do it to preserve their history, others gather resources to become great and powerful and some to uncover great knowledge to regain their past glory.

-ALPHA ver. 0.3-

*note: we have changed this game three times now, and its been kinda on and off, but now its getting a lot more serious, so we have decided to use "ver" to keep track of it

GAMEPLAY

This is a strategy based game, where you build your city, build a military, and expand your territory. The main objective is to destroy the enemy's main city (deck).

Each player has a team color on their cards. This way all the cards are easily recognizable from the enemy cards.

The card can be broken down in sections. The bar with symbols are card stats and passive abilities. The text box contains triggered abilities. 

*note: there is a lot of issues with simplification. we are still working on a simple layout that will read well, and not overload the player with information.

Each symbol contains a value. The sword and shield symbol on the top are exclusive to units and buildings. The higher the number, the more powerful the card. The bottom symbol is a passive ability that is triggered at the beginning of every turn. There is a symbol card with a brief explanation of what all of these represent to keep in handy while you are playing the game. These are all the symbols so far:

RESOURCE CARDS:

Resources are not kept in your hand, They are kept behind your side of the board, and are used to build, revive, or move cards.

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UNIT CARDS/ATTACK CARDS:

These cards can move in any space but not diagonally. They can also stack on top of each other to create a stronger unit ( Only 3 cards stacked per space ). However, they all have different attack positions.

Rules on movement:

There are only two types of movements. (illustrated below). The cards come with a highlighted area
to help with the movement on the board.

Rules on attacking: 

Each UNIT card has a different style of attacking, they are highlighted on the marquee. UNIT cards replace the slot they attacked.

If both cards are the same value, then both cards die. If one card or stack is the same value as a stack, then both stacks and cards die.

However if a card is stacked with a shield, then the shield breaks first, and the unit cards survive.

If a unit card, or stack attacks your city (deck) then you discard that many cards from the top of deck.

BUILDING CARDS/DEFENSE CARDS:

These cards cannot move, and they can only be built by units. Defense cards act as shields to protect units from any damage. If there is a stack with a defense card on it, and it is over powered by the enemy, the defense card gets destroyed first, giving the units a chance to run. 

Rules on building:

Only UNITS can build defense cards. They need to be in an empty space, and they stack the building on top or below the UNIT. Once it is built, the unit may leave the building.  Abilities by buildings dont trigger until the next turn.

Only BUILDINGS can build UNIT cards. They can build as many as 2 in the same stack. ( ONLY 3 cards per stack ) 

SPELLS:

Rule bending cards that surprise an opponent, but are expensive to use.

- WORK IN PROGRESS - 

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In order to build, move or revive a card. You need to have the resources required to perform the action. Every turn, you will receive a build and a move card. You may keep as many cards as you wish to your stockpile (resource stack)

For a 2 player game start with a 25 card starter deck

Different types of boards: starter is 5x3 card board/ place city anywhere on your side of the map. The section in the middle is neutral territory, no cards can be placed there in the beginning of the game.

First turn- Start with 8 cards in hand. You may build any unit cards or defense cards around your city (deck).

Draw a resource card and move card from the resources pile.  (need to tally all resources every turn)

Second turn- Draw 1 card (you must draw a card every turn) and collect resources  (All cards that provide resources indicated on the symbols or activated abilities will trigger the second turn). Build and move your units,

When you run out of cards to draw from your city on your turn. You LOSE the game.

SPECIAL RULE- if you run out of cards during your turn but you still have revive cards left, you may build your main city (deck) on another defense card on the field. If there are none, you lose the game.

Thinking about layout for cards

Ok time for more business....

Thumbnails for a defense card and studies for an attack flying creature. I am starting to get a feel for the theme of my deck, and I am going to focus on Dinosaur like creatures, and early human civilizations...if you got ideas of what kind of sources I can look up let me know. Right now I am looking at Frank Frazetta, and John Carter for design.

Thumbnails

Studies for Dinosaur like flying creature...it has feathers and spits acid :P

Layout Roughs

I have been working out the layout design for the side of the card where the image and card information will show. I still need to digitize and clean up the designs. These are preliminary and in no way ready for production.

Rules for Game Draft

Territories- working title

This game will feature illustrations on the back and business contact information on the front. Hopefully it will be easy to learn and have minimal instructions to play. 

This is the article that I read when I was working on the mechanics for the game.

http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/174

So Ill list all the points that are mentioned in the article:

GOAL: Players must must battle over territory and ultimately conquer the citadel. Which is where the deck of cards will be located. This is a combo based game. as well as a chess sort of type game. 

RULES: 

The game requires an initial set up. Right now it is at bare bones...so in order to play you will need 25 cards. Those cards can be placed anywhere. But on the first turn you will draw and place 5 cards around your deck (citadel). *We should probably draw a diagram illustrating this* So the first turn you get to draw a card. 

There are 4 types of cards:

- Attack Cards: Can deal damage and stack in order to add attack to their current stats. They also may have special abilities. These cards can move.

- Defense Cards: Have the highest hitpoints, and are able to produce combos that will economically increase your chances of winning. These cards cannot move.

- Magic Cards: These are a one shot card that will get you out of a jam. Use once and discard.

- Catastrophe cards: These cards also have ridiculous hitpoints and may not be removed by magic cards. Usually destroys anything on the map, and blocks any path to base.

You are limited to what actions you can do per turn, unless an ability or a magic card alters the rules:

- You get one DRAW per turn. Your limit of cards in hand is 5

- You get one BUILD per turn. You may only build defense cards on attack cards. You may only build attack cards around citadel or on defense cards that allow so. *rule in question* Casting a magic card counts as a build. 

- You get one MOVE per turn. You may only move on the cards that were placed originally in the beginning of the game.  

- special rule: casting MAGIC can be done in opponents turn

- Stacking cards will add to hitpoints or attack points. Hitpoints do not deal damage. *rule in question* If cards are stacked, and attacked. The top card will be destroyed instead of the whole stack. 

- In order to win, you need to attack the citadel which causes the opponent to discard cards. If any player runs out of cards, that player loses the game. 

Right now we have pre-built decks which are composed of:

10 attack cards

10 defense cards

4 magic cards

1 catastrophe card

*Andres let me know if i missed anything. I will keep adding stuff later. I need to make a list of all the effects and abilities we came up with. Feel free to add anything you think may work.