Tag: Fragment Forge

A call for playtesting and design feedback on Fragment Forge

Db0

With the milestone of 100 fully-scripted cards in Fragment Forge, I believe it’s time to switch the focus from prototyping, to playtesting. To this end, I’ve released v0.15 which contains all the latest cards, + 6 personas, over 3 different affiliations.

If you want to help, please download a client, or try it direct from the browser (executable application is way faster though). The application will also open a debug window when it runs. This is normal and you will be useful for any bug-reports.

You can use the single (for now) starting deck, or make your own.

At this point I’m particularly interested in the following:

  • Design Feedback: is the game fun? Is the deck-building interesting? What could be improved?
  • Balance: overpowered cards, broken combos etc
  • Fluff suggestions: Think a card’s name doesn’t fit? Lemme know! I am still looking for better names for the “Zippers” and “Champions” affiliations. Hit me with your best ideas.
  • And last but not least: Bug Reports

Feel free to post your feedback here at the issue tracker, or leave a comment on this post.

A tutorial will be forthcoming soon. Until then, please read the single player rules.

The game GUI is obviously rough around the edges, and the card layout leaves a lot to be desired, but I wanted something playable more than I wanted something pretty. Especially since the design might change in case the rules are adjusted.

It’s been a long road to this point, starting from scratch. Game design + Programming + Playtesting + Story design/Worldbuilding by myself is hard!

At this point I think there’s an interesting core in the game, but I’m not convinced it’s interesting enough to play solo repeatedly. I would be really happy to get some ideas on how to make the solo play more engaging.

A game about the demoscene

Db0

Working on a card game framework (CGF) can be tricky. There are tons of edge-cases in card interactions to handle, and a lot of the time one does not even think what functionality the framework they will need until some game requires it.

This is why working with OCTGN was so frustrating a lot of the time. A ton of things that would be quite useful to have for a card game were not supported and that led to endless discussions, arguments and borderline begging at the main developer (who was not a game designer) who very rarely saw the need for those features.

In order to avoid this situation, I decided once the card game framework was stable enough, that I would be working on my own game in parallel. Therefore the development needs of that game would feed the development of the framework itself.

To this end, I created Fragment Forge. It has already helped improve the CGF considerably, leading to massive additions such as the deckbuilder and a ton of additions to the ScriptingEngine.

I would describe the game itself kinda like a solitaire Android:Netrunner, but way simpler, since there’s no human opponent and “mind-games” involved. Rather it’s a pure race against the clock and the interesting aspects come from the deckbuilding and seeing how high in difficulty levels your deck can reach. Take a look at the gameplay video linked in the project page.

While it started as a way to improve the CGF, I’m honestly quite pleased with how it’s shaping up. It’s not the most amazing thing, but it’s tricky enough to tickle your brain a bit and the fragment shader card art looks dope AF. As development progresses, I’m hoping that I’m going to get more ideas to trick up the game and make the gameplay choices more interesting.

I’m also totally open to ideas, so let me know if you come up with any cool new additions, or otherwise let me know what you think in general.