Tabletop Simulator and a Number Wizard

So, today at work, I had an excellent discussion with a coworker Shenoa about the whole act of freeing myself from any projects and just exploring all the little ideas and projects that have intrigued me...


One such item was this idea I've been kicking around in my head for a deckbuilding card game (similar to Ascension or Dominion or Mystic Vale or Nightfall or one of many others in this genre). The premise though would actually be closer to a PC game that has really taken way too much of my free time, Slay the Spire!

Essentially, the gameplay loop of Slay the Spire is as such:

1. Start a new game
2. Select a hero (Warrior, Rogue, or Robot)
3. Each hero has a starting deck of 10 relatively crappy cards
4. Battle your way up the "spire" by fighting enemies using the cards in your deck.
1. When you kill an enemy, the game shows you three cards, of which you can add one to your deck
2. Sometimes, instead of fighting an enemy, you'll instead get an event, or visit a shop, or get to rest. 
1. Events are randomized. There are dozens of them, and they each do something different such as giving you money, letting add and/or remove cards from your deck, dealing damage to you, etc
2. Shops allow you to turn gold you get from killing enemies into new cards for your deck, or relics which give you massive passive bonuses
3. Resting lets you either rest and recover a portion of your hp (you don't inherently heal after combat), or if you don't need to rest, you can upgrade one of your cards to be a better version of it.
3.  At the end of the floor, you fight a boss. After you kill the boss, you get to choose from one of three boss relics that will give you a massive passive bonus just for this run.
4. If you can beat all three bosses on the three floors, you "win" and you get a score for your run.
5. There's an optional "mega boss," but I don't need to go into that here.

The reason it is so fun is each and every run is entirely different. The enemies you face, the cards the game offers to you, the relics you get from the bosses or shops or events that massively change how things work... it's possible to have some INSANE synergies and combos, and it's also possible to just build a shit deck and die to a boss on the first or second level.

Anyways, I adore this game and can't recommend it enough if you've ever played a deck building game or enjoy rogue-likes.

So my concept for designing a deck builder game was to take the core theming of Monster Hunter (get a group together to fight an ultra-powerful monster, then use the materials from that monster to make better gear) and implement a tiered progression system similar to that of Slay the Spire. You'd fight 3 monsters back to back, each harder than the rest. In between each fight, you'd make adjustments to your deck based on the treasure you get from each monster, and hope your party was strong enough to take out the third and hardest monster.

I've got a lot of the core prototyping in my head but never sat down to start really building out the details, but now that's a thing I can look into! Shenoa had mentioned Tabletop Simulator, which is a steam app that lets you create some custom assets in a physics engine and then play it with your friends online. This sparked a real desire to possibly start looking into mocking up some cards and rules and then giving a high-level prototype for a spin. No action on that, but it's at least a great starting place.

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Aside from that, after work I came home and got a couple of losing runs in on Hearthstone (trying to win Chapter 2 of the Dalaran Heist on Heroic difficulty with Shaman and it's just fucking TOUGH), I jumped back into my Unity courses.

Tonight I got through 1.5 hours of lessons and built an actually functioning game called Number Wizard. This was all pretty easy, as it's just covering basic methods and variables and just simple "if" statements, but it's a good refresher. Also, I'm finding that SO much of what I learned using GML with Game Maker Studio is carrying over, and stuff that didn't make sense when I was first starting to learn C# just clicks now. This is gratifying stuff, and it's like, my heart is pounding from excitement and joy just playing around in unity and making it do the math.

Basically, Number wizard is a simple little program that asks you to pick a number between 1 and 2000 and then it will continue guessing until it guesses the number you picked. It uses some very simple logic to narrow down the guesses based on whether your number is higher or lower than the previous guess. It's not really a "game" in its current state, as it's a mathematical inevitability that it will get to your number (after about 8 or so guesses?) but it's still awesome to write the code and have it do a thing again.

No screenshot from unity as this is all just printing to the console (debugger and not the actual game window) but as soon as I start testing some stuff that shows something, I'll include an image.

Thank you, as always, for reading!