Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

It's been another week with fantastic progress. With the deck builder out of the way, I put all my efforts into adding all the cards available in Snapshot 2.0. I also managed to implement every single card effect. Obviously, all of this will require serious testing, and due to the sheer size and the number of card combinations in the game right now, I'm unlikely to be able to test everything. Expect issues with game balance and the occasional bug, though I will make every attempt to prevent both. Especially the crash bugs.

Over the coming weeks, I will preview some of the upcoming new cards and mechanics. I don't want to spoil the entire update, so expect just a small selection with plenty of juicy surprises to be discovered on your own. 

The first preview is attached to this update and shows three cards I feel need to be shown together. These are new level 1 Engines that offer a tiny one-time bonus in addition to the things that the level 1 cards you are used to. So, why did I add these cards, specifically? Why not just update the common-rarity level 1 Engines instead of adding a bunch of uncommon cards that do basically the same thing? And won't these additions just mean people will leave the common Engines behind? Well, not quite. There are several reasons:

• I want the common cards you start with to be as simple as possible. As you get to grips with the basic game mechanics, I want your first choices to be simple and straightforward. Introducing one-time effects like these would be potentially confusing immediately, so I want to ease players into things instead. Thus, these cards are uncommon and won't show up in your collection until you've played, at the very minimum, one match.
• The deck builder can be a daunting concept at first, and these new cards are a way to ease you into it. When you first find these specific cards, you'll quickly realize that they are basically just improved versions of cards you already possess, which should encourage you to head into the deck builder to replace the old cards with the new ones. These cards are straightforward upgrades that make the choice of which cards to add and which to remove simple, giving you a taste of deck building without requiring you to fully understand it yet. With some luck, that should whet your appetite and get you started on making more extensive changes to your deck, or even, once you really start to grow your card collection, make your own deck from scratch.
• The beginner deck contains 3 each of the level 1 Engines. It spreads itself equally among the three categories of Confidence, Trust, and Skill. As you face more specialized scenarios, however, you might also want to specialize your own deck. And once you do that, you will likely need more than 3 copies of these cards. By having both the improved uncommon versions and the basic common ones, you now have 6 level 1 cards of each type to pick from, giving you more flexibility. 
• As you discover these uncommon variants of the basic cards, you will begin to see the essential concept for each of the three categories. While each category has more to offer than these basic effects, they still set the tone. Gaining Heat is indeed the forte of Confidence. Drawing cards is one of the central aspects of Trust. And damaging Challenge cards is the job of Skill cards. These new level 1 Engines illustrate these ideas and give you a quick boost toward these goals. 

A theme of this update will be to make the three card categories feel distinct, each changing the game's feel in a unique way and rewarding specialization. These three new cards merely hint at these new options. I can't wait to see what you do to make your decks your own.

Anyway, now that the game is fully playable with deck building and new cards, we must be really close to the release of version 2.0, right? Uhm, not really. Here is a quick summary of what is missing, and I'm probably forgetting something as well:

• Playtesting.
• Art for the new cards.
• New Challenge cards.
• The ability to pick a scenario, a deck, and a difficulty level, as well as the graphical user interface (and potentially music) to make this all feel slick.
• Earning new card booster packs and the whole visual spectacle surrounding this.
• A new model with her own background pictures and theme music.

Still, we have come a long way toward this version's eventual release. Just the fact that I can play full games with nothing but new cards in decks I have built using the deck builder is an accomplishment and the most significant part of this update. The rest is, by comparison, window dressing.

Until next time!