What I learnt from Cards and Tankards: Humble beginnings

Hey y'all, its me. 

So as some might know, I have lost my job at Divergent Realities. Its harsh and a bit sad, frankly. This was one of the proudest things of my life, having worked on a game that shipped. At the ripe old age of 25 this might not seem like much but hey, I also dont have much else going on either. On the bright side, now that I am jobless, I am also without a muzzle to talk about my experience working in that kind of environment. So I thought it would be a nice bookend to do so. 

First up, how'd I get the job? I had a VR headset for one and joined the main PCVR discord for two. Some guy that Emrys had hired to do a survey on the interest of a card game in VR. Im sure I will talk more about Emrys later but he is a very business-first kinda guy and did the sensible thing of surveying interest before doing a big project. He himself had little experience with card games and simply found it to be an unexplored market/niche. I answered the survey and talked a bit more about the project and my experience with card games. By that point I in my last year of college, I had rebuilt my PC and gotten a headset to do something during covid. I had played the pokemon and MTG card game for about 4 years and had made my own custom set which you can find here. Outside of that, it was about all the experience I had with doing a big design project. It was also around where I finished my first published board game: The Machiavelli. With these middling credentials I was hired on the team at first for free to design the game's mechanics and the first set. Later a contract and payment would be signed because Emrys is a professional and dosent deal in shady. 

The original idea for the game was to be themed around dungeoneering in general. Dungeon Dynamite was my favorite animation series on YouTube and wasn't cancelled yet and it inspired me to make a game around the concept of dungeons in fantasy. This is where I did the first error of many that I hope to learn from:

1. The original idea was too small for the game's scope

I had only worked on small projects and didn't really think big enough with the idea. "The Dungeon Wars" is a cool concept but very quickly by the end of the base set, the original idea wasn't present much. The four factions were meant to show how different people interact with dungeons: The ones who run it (dungeon master), the ones who work in it (Monster's rights association), the ones who explore it (plundering guild) and the ones who oversee it (the dungeon fund). Another big inspiration was the Donjon de Naheulbeuk, a french audio-drama comedy which satirized fantasy TTRPGs. But even that series eventually stopped being about dungeoneering and expanded to a greater story involving the rest of the world, which should have been my clue that it would happen here as well eventually. This lead to the second primeval problem I didn't address: 

2. The tone was not consistent between factions

Dungeon masters were dark and broody, filled with dark experiments and geneva-convention-breaking spells, the MRA was a comedic group of hapless monsters in over their heads ala goblins from warhammer combined with communist undertones, the plundering guild were "adventurers" who abused recruits to enrich the people on top and the dungeon fund were an overseeing group that didn't directly interact and controlled from the shadows. While the inspiration was comedic and there were attempts to have humor in some places, the tone changed from faction to faction and from card to card which made things feel discordant. Eventually when Avid was hired as he played a lot more than me, changes were made to make the factions have similar tones. The MRA became a more serious group of monsters and the dungeon fund became the augur order with a focus more on prescience and predicting events. It strayed a lot from the original idea and removed the focus from dungeons by quite a bit but it did fit a lot better and made the augur order much more interesting as before I didnt have much idea with them which led to the third problem I will discuss today 

3. The Augur Order/Dungeon Fund 

The entire faction of the DF was a complete fail on my end, as far as I am concerned. Mechanically, they were a combination of MTG's white and blue colors. A focus on control, taxing and life gain. This is however a style of gameplay that i havent interacted with much myself and my lack of expertise of this playstyle showed. I had run out of ideas and build-arounds before even the first set and in part this was because the faction mechanic was uninspired. Contracts was a type of permanent similar to secrets in hearthstone with the wrinkle that they could also have an ongoing effect when uncovered as long as the contract wasnt broken. A flavorful idea for certain but a permanent unique to the faction wasnt unique enough when all the others fundamentally changed gameplan. At this point Avid had started doing design as well and simply changed the mechanic without much input from me to the discarding cards to gain an effect and draw a card. This was an insanely powerful effect that has been nerfed recently as of writing this article. It did do what it needed to do in changing how you played but its a far cry from what I would have done. But i came up with nothing better so I cant complain that much, frankly. 

I will keep writing these until have gone through most everything I wanted to say about the project. I probably have 2 or 3 blog posts worth of things to say, we will see. Thanks a lot for reading this. It hurts a bit to rethink through this but its important to do a post-mortem in any creative venture like this in order to realise what worked, what didnt and improve your future work. Its the basis of improvement, in my opinion. 

Have a good evening folks, thanks for reading and I hope you leave a comment, I really appreciate it.