Game Expansion (May 02 2025)

Since I’ve already delayed the soldier game, I’ve decided to delay it from mid-May to end of May. The original plan was 30 player cards and 20 area cards. Now the plan is 35 player cards and 25 area cards, adding 10 more cards. After more work this week, I only need 6 more cards to be content complete. Except that when trying to make more cards at this point, the ideas remaining are more pinched and are harder to keep distinct from other cards. I’m also pretty sure I’ll commit to not getting art for player cards, it’ll just be the areas.

In order to generate more cards at this point, I’ve decided to break a rule: a few cards now get to do things beyond this turn. I decided against doing any permanent abilities like in Temporum, but I decided to allow a few cards to do things until the next Camp. For example, cards can give you guaranteed control over an area, or force you to ignore all other areas. What makes these enticing is that they’re effects that can’t be done through other means, and I think it’s worth it.

Another thing I learned while working on cards is that coins are weird. Battery RAM can give you lots of coins because they’re only one part in winning. You need to spend coins and cards to play a card for crowns. This game, you just need to spend coins to advance troops. This has 2 consequences. Large amounts of +Troops is already scary because that bonus directly translates to winning the game, but since coins is all that’s needed to advance troops, that means large amounts of +Coins is also scary. But another thing is that “+4 Coins” is literally a roundabout way of saying “+1 Troop” due to Road. This means that I can’t really do large amounts of +Coins, as they could just be +Troops. I can still do large amounts of +Coins if it’s through a formula (“+2 Coin per area you control”) as it can fluctuate between +2 and +4, but if a reward is always +4 Coins, it may as well be +1 Troop.

Looking back at the games I made in the past year, almost all of them involved math. It’s a great tool and I learned a lot, but also I’d like to take a break from it. Math isn’t at all necessary for making a fun game. But also I want to try making more games that don’t need much balancing, such as All Shapes and Sizes and Relentless Waves (they needed some balancing, but far less). But a game without a need for balancing has to be something where you can’t really complain about something being too strong or weak. All Shapes and Sizes is the example here, it makes no sense to say that one of the shapes is too strong or anything.

But while that game is still in the distant future, I still want to go back to Relentless Waves. I wonder if I can spice it up with some extra cheats and challenges, things that I can’t do with enemies. I could also make official levels with predetermined enemies instead of having only random ones, which could act as a tutorial. It sounds fun as a project for the future.