CARDWORK Prototype #1...

... was playtested yesterday evening. As expected, there were many balance issues, and other things to be changed. The most important insight of the playtest was, however, that the game's concept actually works and is fun! Which is great news, as it means we can continue with our concept as is.

The playtest was very brief and simple. Only two players (our artist Reinhard Gruber and me), six simple fights and a small selection of only five unique cards. I kept it compact intentionally as to not distract from what we really wanted to test: the game's main mechanic, the cutting of cards.  It took us around two hours of playing, receiving feedback and chatting to get through the six fights.

The biggest insights were...

... how strong "splash damage" cards are. Needs balancing before next playtest.

... that enemies directly need to interact with the main mechanic of cutting cards. The slime and frog enemy in the first playtest did, and it encouraged the player to snip & glue cards in ways that would otherwise be inefficient. I'll have to make sure many enemies do interact with it, but not all - we will need to have some basic enemies as well.

... Drawing cards is not as powerful as expected at first. However, the more cards you have in your hand, the more options you have as to how you can combine the cards, which leads to a sort of analysis paralysis. So, we will need to limit the amount of access to card draw, not as a form of balancing, but as to not overwhelm our player. The goal is for the player to have roughly 3 - 4 cards in their hand at once.

Playtest #1 parameters:

Starting deck: 10 cards, 2 copies of 5 different cards.

 > Seemed fine, but we will experiment with different starting decks in later tests.

Starting health: 25

 > Surprisingly balanced. Thought it would be too high.

Starting hand card amount: 4

 >Drawing just one card makes you have five in hand, which leads to the earlier mentioned problem of feeling overwhelmed. In the next test the starting hand size will be limited to three.