Cards of Zern is a game I worked on for six months in Spring 2020. While I had some help from Audrey Walsh and Jackson Cohen with the title menu and game music respectively, everything else was done by me. The game is played by running around an arena as enemies chase you. In order to defend yourself you have to play down cards that you draw from a deck. Each card does something different, forcing you to adapt depending on the tools you have at hand!
- I created a thorough GDD detailing everything.
- Programmed all the mechanics.
- Aggressively play tested the game, continually revising the mechanics every day.
- Spent nearly all of the project’s lifespan working alone on it.
This game was born from my love of Yu-Gi-Oh, Hearthstone, and Lost Kingdom II. I wanted to make my own card game with a focus on real time combat. While sitting on a couch one day I captured the core idea for my game in a notebook and after finishing my work on GMU Skywaves I got started with this project.
I was working alone on it for all but the very last days of the project. As such I didn’t have the benefit of having artists and sound designers to work worth. While I originally envisioned a game with a lush beautiful world and story, time constraints forced me to double down on the mechanics and just try to make a game that feels as fun to play as possible.
The production schedule was somewhat fluid, almost all of the changes I made to the game were born from notes made during play testing. One of the easiest ways in which I found new work to do on it was that I would kick off and end each day with a quick play of the game. As a lifelong gamer I never had trouble identifying elements that didn’t feel right or that could stand to improve and so I just kept playing the game while making continual changes to it using my strong background in programming and game design. The core of the game was fairly simple so being able to layer on new mechanics and ideas was a fairly easy process.
While the game plays very well it did teach me the importance of updating the documentation for the game as I worked on it. In previous projects I would often get to focus solely on the design aspect and as such I always had time to keep up documents and make sure the vision for the game was very clear. Because Cards of Zern was the first solo project I had gotten to work on since 2017, I was caught off guard by how difficult it was to keep up with documentation while also working to debug and modify the game every day. I eventually had to take a week off from play testing the game just to get my documents in order, but this taught me that documentation is a lot easier if you do it every day as opposed to whenever you have free time (which you will never get unless you deliberately set aside that time). I think the other big mistake I made was deciding to put art and sound design on the backburner until I got the game mechanics ‘done.’ I should have been working on those things during my first couple of weeks on the project, but I got so engrossed in refining the gameplay that I never got around it.
I think the ultimate lesson to be learned from this project is that nothing should ever get put off: you want to do a little bit of everything as you work so that you don’t wind up with a half baked final product. That aside, I am proud of my work on this project and how refined the gameplay shaped up to be compared to the initial prototypes I made. I definitely need to finish this game at some point!
Darren Walsh 