Last week was Fuck This Jam 2014. The idea is to quickly make a game in a genre that you hate. Initially I wasn’t planning to create anything myself, but on Saturday an idea popped into my mind. On Sunday I decided to run with it and join the jam.
What to Hate?
I picked collectible card games as my genre. I have played quite a bit of Magic: The Gathering way back. It was actually quite enjoyable to play casually, but extremely frustrating to get into on a more serious level. It’s inherently unfair because the good stuff is rare and expensive. The sets are seeded with junk and even some of the rare cards are trash on purpose. And then there’s power inflation and deflation. I liked the idea but hated the economics.
Nowadays collectible card games exist in digital form as well. But it’s basically just the same thing in a different package. What would happen if we would reduce the concept to its bare minimum, then build a digital game from that?
Game Concepts
Here are the concepts that I extracted.
Players compete with each other.
They all play by the same rules.
They start with 20 life points and are defeated when they lose all of them.
They use cards to take away their opponent’s life points.
Some cards are better than others.
Better cards are more rare.
Player’s cards change over time as they claim those of defeated players.
But how is the game actually played? I could use my knowledge of how collectible card games are played, with decks, card types, turns, and so on. Or I could toss all that baggage and approach it fresh with the mindset of a video-game player that’s never heard of these games before. Let’s do that!
Brainstorming
How many players are there? Unspecified. Let’s say a bunch are fighting in an area, free-for-all. How do they fight? With cards. Too vague. Let’s say you fight with weapons, so cards represent weaponry. What kind of weaponry? Guns and stuff, because that’s cool.
So an arena with guns blazing. That sounds quite dynamic! So let’s make it a real-time action game, definitely not turn-based. 2D or 3D? It should definitely look 3D, but let’s keep the action on a flat plane.
What about the cards? They’re power-ups. Defeated players drop one and you get a random weapon when you pick it up. Who gets it? Whoever gets there first! And everyone starts with a random card too.
How many weapons? Simply one per arm, so two. Default common weapons go pew-pew, awesome rare weapons go zoom, burn, kaboom! Oh and picked up cards replace whatever you’re holding, so it could be a downgrade. Why pick up cards then? Because you only get points by doing so! Try to get as much points as possible before you die.
What happens when you die? Play again! These should be quick games. So the game restarts each time? Why not make it go on forever, and you can jump in whenever you want? Then you can spectate too!
At this point I stopped as I probably had more than enough to work with.
Constraints
There was a fixed short-term deadline, and I could only dedicate limited time to working on this game. About 30 hours at most, spread over a few days. So I had to impose some strict limitations. Besides keeping things realistic, limitations also spark my creativity.
Use Unity version 4.5.0. It just got out.
Only target web, ignore other platforms.
Use cubes for everything.
Add sound and music, but only use free stuff from the Asset Store.
No optimization and performance work, unless it really doesn’t run.
Gameplay first. Gameplay second. Everything else third.
If it’s not fun to work on, stop.
Results
I’d like to present you Super Card Swipers, my entry for Fuck This Jam 2014. Give it a shot! And be prepared to get shot a lot too. You’re playing by the exact same rules as the AI. It’s so fair you’ll probably say it’s unfair.
I did end up spending about 30 hours to create this game, and I had a blast every minute of it! I enjoy playing it too! If other people like it too, that would be a nice bonus. I’m definitely going to partipate in more jams in the future!
0 comments