DaB Gameplay

Following up my previous post, I wanted to give readers the general concept behind the gameplay for DaB. Here is an excerpt from the design document.

The main gameplay is playing a match. This is a 1v1 game of cards. Each player has 4 character cards, collectively known as a party, and a deck of other card types; Aer, Ability, and Item cards. An Aer card is played on a character (this is known as channeling), which enables the character to perform certain abilities. Such as the Aer of Health would give a character the ability to cast healing magic. Item cards are agnostic and consequently can be performed by any character at any time, but are generally weaker than their ability card counterparts. The objective of the game is to KO the opposing player's party.

DaB will follow the "always connected" methodology and require the player to always be connected to the online service that will be provided. Think of this online service as a mini battle.net. Through this service the player can match up on the ladder, with friends or take it solo in either practice (PvE) or story mode.

• The story mode would consist of dialog scenes (2D backgrounds with character portraits). No actual character movement, everything is menu driven.
• The online mode is where the major focus lies. With a matchmaking system in place the player is put in a match against another player with similar experience for competitive play. Players will be ranked but there are also unranked matches for playing with friends.

Hope you found this interesting. I will continue to provide more information about this project as development goes on.

The beginnings

It all began nearly 10 years ago. I was all so eager to begin making video games. With the trusty RPG Maker 2k (rm2k) program at my side I felt like I could take on the world! and I could... I just had to set up the scene...

Before too long I decided I was going to make an epic RPG. I planned to pull all of the stops with my game. The game was going to have an original mythology with at least a decent amount of history. To go along with the game's story, I designed several original gameplay systems (which I still think would be fun to play). Somewhere along the way I decided that I needed a card game inside my game. I figured why not, FF8 and FF9 were doing it. Also, subconsciously, I had to make sure I overwhelmed myself with as much work as possible - guaranteeing my game's demise.

I never completely fleshed out the card game concept, but I had a pretty rough idea of how it was going to work. Basically the player would have some sort of creature card they would have out in play. Then the player could use a card that would represent one of the Gods from the game's mythology. When played, this God card would modify the abilities of the creature. This is all I can really remember from it. I probably came up with more but in my old age I have a hard time remembering the days of my youth.

In May 2008 I decided I was going to develop a game. After some long and hard debating (that's what she said), I decided to revive my card game - at least what I could remember of it. In about a month and a half I came up with a good game design and even a very basic website. Things were going great and then came the avalanche of distractions; my wedding, FFXI and final year of college. FFXI was definitely the biggest one of them all. FFXI is to time as a Vampire is to blood. Needless to say, this project was put on the back burner.

Earlier this year I resumed game development, but on another game, Puni Puni Kingdom. After working on the game design for a few months we decided we needed a project that was more scalable. Puni Puni Kingdom required more overhead than we wanted for our first game. We wanted something we could get a basic build out before too long and build on top of it. That's when DaB(the card game) came back into the picture. Consequently we immediately switched projects and began working on DaB. This was all just a little over a month ago.

Stay tuned for followups!

*saved game*