Create Your Own Adventure: How We Developed a 1–4 Player Co-Op Role-Playing Collectible Card Game with AI-Assisted Graphics
For decades, my childhood friend and I have been gaming together, playing titles like Quest for Glory, Space Quest, Hero Quest, Dark Tower, Dungeons and Dragons, Doom, The Realm, Magic the Gathering, Ultima, Warcraft, and more. Recently, we decided to take our gaming to the next level and create a game that both of us, as well as our children, could enjoy together. We’ve been creating rules and card images with photoshop, midjourney, and stable diffusion to make this game a reality, and we can’t wait to finally play it together!
To begin creating the game, we took inspiration from our favorite titles and identified common themes such as heroes, villains, dark fantasy, spells, role playing actions, and evil creatures. Additionally, we included features like quests, resource management, leveling up opportunities, and shopping. We started out with a few cards and tested them among ourselves and our kiddos. As the game progressed, we added more cards to make it a multi-session experience with five levels of difficulty.
We decided early on that everyone should have the ability to use magic, so each hero is a druid with spells who can also specialize through the purchase of skills. Our inspiration for this idea was drawn from our own interest in magic users, and darker fantasy themes such as druids, fairies, and vampires from Irish folklore. We also incorporated Gold as a resource and shopping as a mechanic into the game.
Our game features a typical party structure of a tank, healer, magic user, and rogue with unique mechanics for each hero. For example, the healer has more group healing capabilities than the other characters. However, all characters have the ability to heal.
We started by placing content into the initial level in a spreadsheet. This level took around 30–45 minutes to play through. We then built upon that by creating the remaining four levels, raising the difficulty as the player advances, much like a video game.
After creating low resolution art for testing, we generated high resolution art for the cards using Photoshop and Stable Diffusion. This enabled us to imagine, refine, and produce artwork for the hundreds of playing cards in a few weeks instead of months.
The cards were then proofed, saved in the database, and sent to the printer. We got back our first copy to play with and do a final proof.
After playing all the way through we found that no changes were needed, so the final version is up and available to order here!
If you play the game leave your feedback in the article comments.
