The Making of my Dream Trading Card Game
Since 2001, I’ve been a 3D technical artist working on many film and game titles. The pandemic was quite hard on the 3D industry, and my schedule became mostly empty for about 2 years. I was getting a bit nervous to provide for my 3 kids and decided to work on another of my personal project (yet again). I wanted this time to be different, to get out of my comfort zone, do something that I always wanted to do and most importantly, to involve my kids as much as I could.
I wanted to build an online TCG game! After all, my kids love Pokemon and I enjoy MTG, why not try to do something together, but different… I drafted my basic battlefield idea and the kind of mechanics that I wanted. I used a software called NanDeck to build rough cards (doing them in OpenOffice word or Excel was way too hard). I printed a “Set” and explained the rules to my kids. We played a few games, fixed some problems and I went back to the drawing board.
After some time, it was getting a little tedious to print and cut cards to play them, so I decided to build a sandbox in Unity. I was not super familiar with Unity at that time, so everything was super crude two player game over TCP/IP. It is important to note that I was not into making anything pretty at this point… Just coding the sandbox. We had to do all the card interactions by hand. Fun fact, what my youngest liked the most was to drag cards out of the screen so I could not target them with actions…
After about a year in development, in early 2021, I decided to add some visuals, borrowing the icons of The Darkest Dungeon which had been made available online by the creators. No need to say that having just a bit of colors and images to the game made my kids react quite a bit more. I started to add more and more automation to the game, but the cards were still “dumb”. All the interactions still had to be done manually. Click dragging arrows so my friend on his remote computer would understand what I was doing while telling him what to do over Google Meet.
OK, so now that I had fun playing the game and validating that the gameplay was interesting, I needed to code all the backend of the game, making it possible to receive cards, view you collection, trade cards with friends, and eventually sell cards on a internal market. Coincidentally, I had been searching for a way to distribute “cards” as DLLs since 2013 without ever finding a solution. Back then, I was also quite interested in the crypto phenomenon. This lead to the discovery of the blockchain technology. The idea of encrypting a ledger in a way so it becomes unmodifiable, unhackable, was quite obscure in the early days, but in 2021, it all came together as I started to implement my own custom solution.
I’m not into the crypto phenomenon at all, in fact, I find that all the crypto projects are quite problematic and deceiving. My father is a professional artist and copyrights and resales are common discussion in our family. Anyways, long story short, I wanted the cards to be printed in limited sets, and to have the possibility of keeping older packs unopened, similar to secondary market of old MTG packs/cards. The best way I could find to trade/sell cards/packs without any risk of duplicating or modifying the number of total cards minted, was by using a my own custom ledger. Obviously, I didn’t want to use any existing solution for that so I coded it all from scratch, following no guidelines, just trying to make the collectibles.
OK, so fast forward a few months later, the server/game is ready. I made a full card editor and I’ve used it to create a card set of about 300+ individuals cards. Each card can be duplicated into its own unique ID, and most importantly, packs can be opened to reveal a random set of cards. Each user can have a unique collection ID that I can attach cards to. The server allows the transfer and manipulation of items between collections. Once a new card set comes out, the season is changed and I made it impossible to go back and reprint older cards or packs.
Most importantly, the game engine can evaluate card abilities and automate the game based on simple decisions for the players. I put in place game rewards and block rewards (every 10 minutes, I give away a season pack to one lucky winner). So by playing games, you can grow your collection. Easier in the beginning and harder to get as the game grow popular.
Further down the line, I decided to change the Darkest Dungeon images for icons available for free from game-icons.net. That helped getting out of using copyrighted material, but it was still not exactly the look I wanted… I wanted more, I especially wanted to have artists helping with the card art and hope to use a royalties system to pay for their hard work.
I hired an amazing friend artist to help me out with some art. It was a huge jump in the right direction, but this was all very temporary because, well, not much budget to push further… Remember; ending the pandemic, 3D industry down, no money coming in, 3 kids… I needed to have priorities…
In January 2022, everything was in place for a first release! Woot! I spent all my time coding the card logic and game server to manage all the game data, similar to Magic Arena or Heart Stone. There are bugs, but that will have to do. There was too much effort put into this to not release it. I put up the game on Steam, itch.io, on Google Play, and on my newly created website. Cheers to Unity for allowing to compile for Android, WebGL and Windows so easily. Simply amazing!
At this point, in 2022, the AI art was becoming a thing. Midjourney and similar tool were starting to be quite impressive. Well, for the moment, that will do. I can always go back and change the art as the game gains traction, so I saved some time to put into the code. Now the game as colors!
It is now December 2022 and I’ve been working on this game for 3 years. Players are coming in slowly, the server is churning out rewards, the expenses for virtual private servers are kicking in, I need more players to come and try the game! I was working on the second card set, so I gave that a final push and finally released it. That was not a simple task, putting all my code so far to the test, but everything is now working number one. All early adopters now have cards and packs or the Alpha season, which hopefully will become part of the memorabilia for this game.
In order to stay away from gambling rules and games targeted for teens/adults, there is one restriction that I wanted to implement, which was to not allow resale of game items for the current season. My reasoning is simple, as a new season set comes out, some cards will be broken and modified in the early days. I wanted to avoid game items to be sold because of my mistakes, so I deliberately blocked the selling of cards and packs of the current season. So now that the Beta season is out, the Alpha season items can be put up for sale on the internal market.
In conclusion, this has been my story up to this day about this trading card game called Reapers. I am deeply humbled by anyone who tried the game thus far and I’m looking forward to chat with you all soon to make the game better and more intriguing. I’m easily accessible and I’ve set up a Discord server to ease that process.
Come on over and lets have fun! I hope I inspire someone to develop their own games.
See you on the battlefield!
Marc
Creator of Reapers