I have been atempting to finish a game for years now. I never do. I always bite way too much and it ends up bittng me back and I end up quitting. To avoid this for my newest project I decided to keep it to the bare minimum I wanted. It would be a mostly 2D game made in Unity, would be using 3d for a few minor things.

The game has 3 sections, battle, encounter and travel. The player has a deck, a level which theyraises by winning encounters and money to buy things, they also have reputation with various factions that may apear in events, which he gains or loses acording to their actions.

Travel

The player has to travel across the world for their great goal.

• The map would use a node system where unlocking a location reveals the path to new locations.
• When players reach a location they trigger an ecounter from a random pool of events.
• Players can return to locations.
• Players can move any amount of locations they want provided the location is unlocked or joined to an unlocked location.
• Traveling may trigger an encounter along the location path.
• Special locations exist that advance the story forward ( 12 diferent locations, the player must visit 3 of 10 then one of the other two will open and all others will lock.)
• Defeating the special location boss will grant you a pick of 2 of their cards.

Enconter

When the player travels things happen

• A Store may give you new cards for your deck that you can purchase, thieves may want to steal your thigns, etc.
• When an encounter happens you are faced with multiple choices to resolve it, some may depend on your stats.
• Encounters have results you save someone, you kill someone, you start a fight, burn a vilage down, etc. This will cause your reputation to change and rewards to be atributed acordingly.

Battle

When the player encounters an enemy and a fight begins the battle would work as a mix of BattleCon and Slay the Spire.

• You know what your enemy will use and its initiative value.
• You have to pick 2 cards, a Style and an Action. This would give you a certain amount of Initiative, Attack and Block as well as possible effects.
• Card power has dependencies on your personal stats.
• The chosen cards get sent to a discard pile for 2 turns, unless they posess the exaust tag, which would destroy them for the rest of the fight.
• Battle ends when one of the HPs reaches 0.

In broad strokes this is what I was planning. What is your opinion? Am I biting too much with this one?

I'd say it depends on a combination of your programming skills, how much time you have, what you already have available to work with, how determined you are, and maybe a degree of your love for the project.

In some ways, an RPG can be pretty simple. Spit out a tilemap and a character sprite or two. The player walks around until he finds an enemy and then you resolve combat of some kind. Add to the character's current gold if he wins. But it's all in the details. How are you going to put together the world? How do you make sure the player does things in the order you want? How do you add a variety of tactics to combat? What if you think of something you want to add later? And then there's the learning curve for any new tools or coding techniques you might figure on using.

For me, my current (solo hobby) project is a simple RPG style story on rails. Basically, go talk to one character then the next and the next to advance a story as you move around a small pre-built world. No combat. I'm doing both coding and the sprites myself. As a hobbyist, it's probably fair to say I don't spend as much time on my project as others might. I average on 1.5 hours per coding session with 12 months having 2 sessions a week and 5 months with 5 sessions a week. I'm kinda hoping maybe I'll be done in 4 more months (5 sessions a week) but that might be optimistic. I'd love to work on other projects or switch back over to the the project I used as the base for this one and update it with the features and tools I've built since, but I'm pretty determined to see this one through first.

So... I figure it has less to do with the size of the bite you take and more about how determined you are to chew through it all.

Also, if it's the card game elements that you're most passionate about, you could just focus on that at first. Have the project initially skip everything you have for wandering around and just get straight to the card battles.

Start with just one of them, while avoiding implementing "etc", since that is not so well-defined. Battle looks most concrete at first sight.

If you have made a (digital) card game previously then I think you should be alright., although the big variable in the equation is your previous experience in developing a program.

Personally, I recommend a warm-up project before hand, such as Solitare or Top Trumps.  It gives you time to think things over and gauge what kind of game you are capable of.  Also, you will have a finished game! Hurrah!

On 9/19/2018 at 8:58 PM, kseh said:

Also, if it's the card game elements that you're most passionate about, you could just focus on that at first. Have the project initially skip everything you have for wandering around and just get straight to the card battles.

On 9/21/2018 at 3:56 PM, Alberth said:

Start with just one of them, while avoiding implementing "etc", since that is not so well-defined. Battle looks most concrete at first sight.

Thank you to both of you. I was planning on starting development with the battling aspect to begin with. I took the top down aproach to preseting the idea though, and I didn't flesh out the top levels too much so thats why they seem less concrete, I recently made some changes to all parts.

On 9/22/2018 at 9:42 AM, Anri said:

If you have made a (digital) card game previously then I think you should be alright., although the big variable in the equation is your previous experience in developing a program.

Personally, I recommend a warm-up project before hand, such as Solitare or Top Trumps.  It gives you time to think things over and gauge what kind of game you are capable of.  Also, you will have a finished game! Hurrah! 

 

I don't think making a game such as Solitare would help me much in this situation, honestly I dont even think any of the rules apply to the problem at hand but thank you for the sugestion.

One thing I didn't properly explain in the original post though is: I am confident with my technical skills, in fact the reason I am not developing this right now is that I have to put the finishing touches or my master's thesis in software engineering. My main issue refers to the Scope, what I should prioritise in this kind of project and what I should maybe scrap so I don't, as usual, lose intrest half way though I put it on the "Hiatus forever" pile of projects.

So far I belive the "focus on the battle system first" is the way to go, which leads me to belive I was on the right track.

I thank you all for your sugestions and hope I can make this happen.

Ah, if you are wrapping up a degree - especially a masters - then yes you only want to be designing a game for when you have more time.

Some advice with losing interest in your current project;  We lose interest in a project because it becomes work and less of something we actually enjoy doing.  Yet, when we ditch it and take on a new project we end up in the same situation again - its more work and worse, the abandoned project is still at the back of your mind whispering "failure".   Unless you know for a fact that you have bitten off more than you can chew...stay the course.

But anyway, finish that thesis first! 

It's not the game mechanics of Solitaire that would translate, but everything else about it. Having a deck of cards, shuffling them, dealing them out to different piles, letting the user select a card and drag it, how you deal with card face data, etc. Plus all the game framework around a simple game like a menu system, maybe support saving and loading, sound effects, etc. There's a surprising amount of work that goes into a simple game that translates over to other titles. Plus it's something you could DEFINITELY finish. So many devs hand-wave away this advice. "Pfft, those tiny games are too easy, tha'ts not going to help me." I was one of them too for the longest time.

Also, I think game jams are great investments once you know how to code. This forces you down the path of smaller ideas and helps get your framework pieces in place for future projects. It really identifies pain points and you can tell what SHOULD be easier.

- Eck

27 minutes ago, Eck said:

It's not the game mechanics of Solitaire that would translate, but everything else about it. Having a deck of cards, shuffling them, dealing them out to different piles, letting the user select a card and drag it, how you deal with card face data, etc. Plus all the game framework around a simple game like a menu system, maybe support saving and loading, sound effects, etc. There's a surprising amount of work that goes into a simple game that translates over to other titles. Plus it's something you could DEFINITELY finish. So many devs hand-wave away this advice. "Pfft, those tiny games are too easy, tha'ts not going to help me." I was one of them too for the longest time.

Also, I think game jams are great investments once you know how to code. This forces you down the path of smaller ideas and helps get your framework pieces in place for future projects. It really identifies pain points and you can tell what SHOULD be easier. 

- Eck

Thank you for the response Eck. I understand what you mean about the mechanics. But the game of solitaire would actually be more complex than what I am trying to achive.

• Cards are not shuffled. (All cards are present at the start)
• Cards only have 1 face. (Its a 2d game with no hidden information)
• The player doesnt drag the cards. (They would all be in 2 tidy lists at the bottom)
• Not to mention the checking of if I can place a card on a pile or not.

I may take up the solitaire though, just for practice.

5 hours ago, Karzan said:

Cards are not shuffled. (All cards are present at the start)

And always shown in the same order, right? (Unshuffled.)