Sigaldry is (or hopefully, will be) an online digital card game with tactical, grid-based, turn-based combat where you (the player) design and build the cards that go into your decks.
Currently we are a very small team of two. We may add more resources in the future as needed, but I personally prefer smaller, more nimble teams that can move quickly and without a lot of bureaucracy.
These are my goals for Sigaldry:
- Build a game that the target audience loves
- Allow creative players to develop advantages that are not easily replicable by others
- Community-driven meta game
- Minimal need for user-generated content moderation to help keep costs (and required revenue) down
- Develop an economic model that is biased towards players while funding live operations and content development (read: free-to-play with no pay-to-win)
Designing Your Own Cards
There are many inspirations behind this game. The primary inspiration behind how card design works was chemistry. I wanted card creation to function similarly to how chemistry works. In the lab, a chemist can combine different elements with a variety of mixing variables (temperature, technique, time, sequence, etc) and produce an enormous variety of results. The physical properties of the resulting compound can be observed without revealing how it was produced. While this is a drastic over-simplification of chemistry (and belies my knowledge of the subject), the general concept applies to the card creation mechanics in Sigaldry.
Card design is done in such a way that opponents you play against cannot easily figure out how you built the cards you used against them. They will be able to see what your cards do without quickly (or easily) knowing how you accomplished the design. This allows players with exceptional card design skills to develop advantages over other players with cards that are more efficient, or better fit within their deck design.
Card Authorship
When a card with a unique combination of function and cost is designed for the first time, the designing player will be able to assign a name and image to the card and will be recognized as the original designer of that card for any other players who end up encountering that card in the future. Other players may figure out how to replicate the function and cost, but they will not receive design credit and can only craft the card for use in their own decks.
At some point we would like to add leaderboards for a variety of performance metrics, including many around card design. Players will be able to see the most popular cards based on recent gameplay metrics. Some of the obvious metrics are:
- Frequency of deck inclusion
- Frequency of victorious deck inclusion
- Winning % (when card is in a deck)
- Losing % (when card is in a deck)
Combat
The combat, or “gameplay”, portion of the game will consist of 2 players competing to destroy the avatar (or champion, or leader – the verbiage isn’t fully baked in yet) of their opponent. Avatars are also cards that must be built, but which start in play on opposite sides of the battlefield. Once the game starts, avatars are like any other unit you can put into play, except that if one dies, the game is over.
Combat is turn-based with timers limiting the amount of time you have to execute your strategies. Playing the game will earn you raw materials that you can use to design and build more cards.
More To Come
In the future I will share more about how the game works and hope to include some of our early (and extremely crude) screenshots of our prototypes in progress.