What I learnt from Cards and Tankards: The First Patrons Of The Tavern

Heya y'all, its me again. 

So in the last blog post I talked about the earliest parts of designing Cards and Tankards, the core of design stages, if you will. Now we go to the more practical parts. At this point the concepts for each faction as well as the gameplay loop was in point. We both agreed on the more social aspects of the game with the tavern concept since the start and to this day I believe this to be the best thing about Cards and Tankards by far so I wont mention it much and focus on the digital cardboard and the table its played on. 

With the mechanic of each faction have a completely unique rule that changes gameplay, we didn't really have the manpower to start with each faction having a few cards and expanding over time, we needed to do a faction at a time and as such I chose Dungeon Masters for a few reason. For one I thought they were the core of the dungeon theme as well as offering the most variety in playstyles thanks to the different Dungeon Masters. This lead to an odd error I do not believe I saw before 

4. The Dungeon Master faction did too much

I dont mean that DM was an unbalanced faction in terms of power (tough it was at some points, of course) but mostly that it did too much in a game where having the cards of two factions is easy and a given. Because for almost a year it was the only faction you could play, it needed to have a bit of everything so that the game was playable and fun. DMs had removal, burn, big creatures, token spam, life gain, life loss and a few other misc. things. This was not exactly intentional and perhaps more subconscious but due to the early access nature of the game, it ended up being that DM was a bit too strong once other factions arrived mainly because having them as a primary or secondary faction left you with few weaknesses. Card games are built on colors/factions/classes having strengths and weaknesses that makes each one different and worth playing and adding diversity to games and this had been eroded. 
This isn't a problem unique to this game, black in Magic: The Gathering as well as blue and sometimes green have this issue where they often cannibalize other mechanics endemic to other colors with the justification that you have to lose life or some such to explain why it isn't a color break and I realised much too late that I had made the same error. Part of this issue in the first place also comes from another issue from the dev cycle of the game: 

5. The game lacked enough core mechanics to create card variety 

This one might seem odd to some. Many games create endless variety with just spells or creatures... or do they? My original plan was to have  a relatively simple gameplay loop elevated with faction-specific mechanics that could add depths and then increase that with new mechanics in each new set, a common and functional formula. However what happened as time went on is that adding radical new mechanics often clashed in ways the engine was not prepared for ahead of time and a relatively simple new idea could possibly take months of programming that we could not spare between all the other tasks Emrys juggled as well as the seasonal content and everything else. This wasn't an issue for some such as the MRA and DM who's unique mechanics could and have fueled entire games before but with some other factions it felt like a majority of what could be done with the current faction identity was already mined through halfway during the second set. 

A lot of things was planned like different types of permanents and card abilities that had to be delayed indefinitely due to engine and ressource reasons. Now, those reasons were entirely legitimate and part of the issue of live service game development which I was and still am a novice in I believe. All these things should have planned and ready to implement since the start and included in the design documents. If only one card with  these mechanic was in the base set, future implementation would have been much easier, faster and more set in stone. There is value in surprising the players with mechanics that have the possibility of changing how they even see the game however, a TCG's core set should at least hint at a lot of future mechanics and give a solid vertical slice of the game running on all cylinders, which I think we under delivered in that regard.

This is it for today. The next articles should focus  more on the positives and the victories of my work on  the project which is just as important in a post mortem. 

P.S. Sorry for the double spacing, my keyboard is having issues again...