Retheme Work (Mar 07 2025)
- Thomas Tang
- Mar 7
- 3 min read
The game concept of 2 robots gaining weapons and fighting each other. It sounds great, except that applying it to this game has been harder than expected. Naming the weapons is hard without them all sounding super similar, and I got nothing for the environments. Plus finding art would be hard too. Instead I gave up and went for something more basic: the players are 2 fortresses fighting each other with troops. Art should be somewhat easier as they can be from Randomly Generated RPG.
Renaming all (25) cards for this has been annoying too though. For the environments I decided that they’ll be auras of some kind, which sort of makes sense why there can only be one aura per row. I haven’t gathered any art yet though. It’s fairly annoying that everything will need art though. For the Randomly Generated RPG update, most of the changes were in the abilities, which don’t need new art (I had to get a couple new pieces of art for some renamed enemies, but it was like 3 at most). This game though, every card needs art.
Last week I got a new idea for a game and shelved it for the future. I made the same mistake and came up with another new game idea. It’s another 2-player game where you place buildings on a shared map. Each turn, you add a building of your color, then you play a card that gives you points depending on where the buildings are, such as “+$1 per building in a column.” After both players empty their hand, the game ends. If expanded upon the buildings can do different things when placed/run. The only downside is that it can’t really be simultaneous, as what if both players place a building in the same spot? Anyways it sounds like a nice concept for a game.
I’ve also worked out a new way to draw cards. This would be used in a game like Battery RAM, where there’s only 1 deck of cards that players draw from. Instead of directly drawing cards from that deck, each player has their own mini deck of 12 or so cards. In between turns, any cards you discarded get sent to the master discard pile, and if your mini deck has less than 12 cards, you add cards from the master deck to the bottom of your mini deck. If the master deck doesn’t have enough cards for all players, it reshuffles the master discard pile first. This is way better at handling cases where multiple players need to draw cards at the same time.
Other miscellaneous stuff. Since the start of the year I’ve majorly disconnected from social media and the news. It’s just endless negativity and complaining. Most of it is just an echo chamber and I don’t feel any need to see any of it. It’s great, I recommend it. Really the only things I read now are Donald X.’s private playtesting discord, and Blogatog.
I also managed to remember a weird dream, but only a little bit of it. I was in a flower field on top of a mountain, but then suddenly the sky turned orange and the whole flower field got set on fire. I had to escape by jumping off with a parachute (I have no idea where it came from).
Finally, here are some new songs I’ve been listening to recently.
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