Brewing Battles
A fully independently-created card game I worked on for my Game Design class
Gameplay
You fight through waves upon waves of enemies utilizing a variety of potions. Defeated enemies turn into ingredients that are used to brew more potions.
Fighting waves refills your potion stock, reduces your health, and forces the player to think carefully about what decisions they need to make.
A lot of making this project was about making it feel like your choices truly mattered, and giving every option a good shot at being useful. In addition, because of using the enemies to create your primary attacks, making a good balance of enemies was important to keep consistent access to a lot of the good potions.
What I Learned
The damaging potion was the core of the game for my design. With three actions per turn, straight-up attacking deals 2 damage, meaning the player is always capable of dishing out a total of six damage at any given point. However, the number of turns it takes to kill an enemy changes with punches or potions.
With this potion being always important, and requiring a slime or monster ingredient, I needed to make sure that I supplied enough of either of these to always keep them in stock. Therefore, every deck of enemies contains a fairly weak slime-based foe.
The poison potion also went through an interesting development. The whole point of this potion is it’s twice as effective as a damaging potion, dealing six damage in total, but deals this slowly. There’s no way to directly avoid enemy damage, so it’s another point to consider for a powerful attack. At first, the poison potion took two turns to deal all its damage, usually letting an enemy attack twice. Considering you’d want to use these on strong enemies, it took too long to truly help out, letting the tougher foes do too much damage. By making it deal its full six damage in only one turn of poison, it became a very powerful card that needs to be used thoughtfully.
