Uphill Battle

Tools / Languages Used:

Unity, C#, Visual Studio, GitHub, Inkscape, Tabletop Sim, NanDeck, Google Sheets

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Design Process:

This game was made for the Github Game Off 2022, a month long jam spanning all of November. The theme of the jam was 'Cliché', so I decided to work off the Cliché "Fighting an Uphill battle".

At first I planned on making an RTS game where the player would move their units up a hill, fighting enemies along the way. As you progressed up the hill you would capture buildings allowing you to train new soldiers. However, after working on the prototype for a few days I wasn't quite happy with the direction it was heading in, so I decided to re-start with a new game Idea.

I had been interested in making a digital card game for some time as I personally am a huge fan of board and card games. So, keeping with the theme from the first prototype, I decided to make a game where the player battled against a large army of enemies that would get harder as they progressed. At the time I was playing Slay the Spire, a roguelike deck builder, which became a big inspiration for the project.

I got to work on a physical prototype of the game using index cards. The game started out fairly rough, and I played it again and again, tweaking cards and rules along the way. After a few days I discovered a tool called NanDeck which creates cards based on spreadsheet data. This tool allowed me to prototype much faster and I started using Tabletop Simulator to playtest with some friends.

Eventually the game was in a state I quite liked so I decided to move onto the Unity version of the game. But first, I knew this game would require a variety of art. I reached out to a friend of mine to see if they would be interested in joining me on this project. He agreed, and we got to work.

I spent a few days deciding how best to approach card and unit structure in the game. I wanted to avoid lots of repeat code, but also wanted it to be fairly simple to add abilities to each unique card. So I created a card class with all the basic card interactions, then from that I made a unit and action card subclass. Each of these would read in card data from scriptable objects, this way it was simple to tweak cards and add existing ones.

Once the basic skeleton of the game was working, I used Inkscape to make the card art. It was my first time using the software so it took a little while to get used to it, but after some experimenting I was able to come up with some good results.

I continued to tweak and polish the game in the final week of the jam. I ran a few playtests to get some final feedback on the overall game balance, and tweaked it as I needed. By the end of the jam I was able to implement most of what I wanted and It turned out to be something I'm quite proud of.