Nay Saga Devlog 6: New Gameplay, Card Layout Updates, and Digital Game

I’ve been doing a lot more bringing things together with how I want this game to play out. I’m trying out new game styles, working on the layout of the cards, and the overall flow of it all.

So to start things off, I came up with yet ANOTHER new gameplay style. So I tested it out and it was pretty fun! So I’m up to 5 potential ways to play this game. It’s cool that it’s turning into something that can be played multiple ways, so I’m excited to see which ones people enjoy the most when I play with real people.

 For this new gameplay style, there’s one card in the middle that’s the active card and everyone plays a card face down from their hand. Whoever has the most matches wins the round and gets to play the next active card. It’s pretty simple but can have some strategies because of who plays next.

Then I came back to thinking about the digital version of the game. I drew some of these sketches earlier, but started to think about how the screen would look with all of the cards laid out and how it could play digitally.

I came up with a few quick sketches for the dialogue portions of the digital game and also what the intermission menu would look like where you can access your menu between Eventure chapters.

Then I was thinking about how a lot of these variations to the games have strengths and weaknesses for the types come into play. Originally I was going to have a mini-card that has this information, but then I started to think that it might be helpful to have that information directly on the card too. So I sketched some ideas for trying to figure out where I could put strengths and weaknesses on the cards without making it too crowded. I’m not sure if these will distract too much from the other details, so I still need to do some tests in Photoshop to see how I could fit this in effectively.

I mocked up a quick type card to get some layout ideas. I’m not intending this to be final, as I still need to work on the colors a lot more, but I wanted something rough that I could reference for the types.

Then I tested adding the type to the card and I think it turned out well and isn’t too distracting. I tried out using + and - symbols and arrows to indicate strengths and weaknesses. I asked my friends for feedback and they helped me decide that I’m leaning towards the + and - symbols. I also played around with different coloring, but I think overall I liked them using the type color. I tried a few different variations with white or type colors but overall the + and - are so small that it just works better with them matching colors.

I brought back an old style of maybe cutting the type out of the top part, trying to figure out if that’s what I want them to look like. I used some feedback I got last time to try and make the top part match the bottom a little better.

Then I started thinking about the logo for the game. I want this to be centered around how it’s Mr Dude’s project that he’s making for Izumi (as that’s where the original idea came from). So I was first thinking about making the logo echo the “Nay-A-Day” style of a scribbled background and handwritten logo. Then I started to incorporate elements of Mr Dude into it so like the shape of his hat and sunglasses, his hammer, or even putting his face or silhouette in there somehow (to kind of get inspiration from older Final Fantasy logos or Romancing Saga). I think I like some of the bottom concepts more, but I’m still thinking through these!

Then I had a breakthrough moment! I’ve been making so many different ways to play that I finally found a way to connect them all. It can be one massive game that you play 1 of each phase and it’s all leading up to 1 final collaborative game. So the cards you win in each round end up being your massive hand in the final round. I tied each round to a different character related to time travel to represent each of the games. So then after planning all of that out, I played it all together! It took about 3 hours for me to play 5/6 of the games in a row. I’m not sure if that’s accurate or longer/less time than it would take, but I’ll find out when I try with real people I suppose.

The final mode ended up being pretty challenging when I played it with 3 “players” (on my own). Because you have to stack 6 characters on 3 piles (18 cards in total), the last pile was challenging to get. It could be because I’ve made the majority of the cards M or S Nays, so they have more in common, while the others have a much lower chance. I might end up changing some of the numbers so you don’t lose if you have to discard 6 in a smaller player game, but instead something like 10 might be easier to win.

I continued to iterate and make some variations on the new games I came up with. For the final one, I added some more type advantage actions and I think it really added a lot more to the game. I’m still playing around with the difficulty level and collaboration aspects of it so I’ll need to do some more testing to fully figure all of that out.

I then realized that I needed to focus back on the priorities for this project. I created a Notion calendar of tasks months ago but haven’t really been referencing it or prioritizing tasks. So I sat down and updated the calendar and added priority systems. I felt so much better and more organized after spending some time doing that! Now I know what I should focus on to get things done for this project (outside of playtesting) so I can focus more!

So one of the first big tasks I’ve been working towards after organizing what needs to be done is finding the best drawing I’ve done of every character. Because I have about 500-1,000 characters that I’m planning to make cards of, this ended up being a long process. I’m almost at the 400 character mark, but there are still a lot more left to go through. I’m saving out a high res PNG with no transparency of the character so I can then just save those into my final layout to match the final size when I have that ready. Right now it’s just a matter of finding the best drawings, saving them out, and then making notes of characters that I plan to redraw or draw for the first time if I want to include them in the game.

So now that I’m planning things out more and knowing what’s left, my main struggle is just having the time to do it. My life has gotten so busy lately that it’s really hard to find the time to work on my own projects anymore. I’ve been struggling with balancing my social life with my personal projects and often prioritizing socializing over projects lately. I really want to get back to having a healthy balance before the two, but it’s just something I need to work on in the future!

Nay Saga Devlog 5: Additional Cards & Tabletop Simulator

I took about 1-2 months break from working on this project while my personal life was busy. But now I’m getting back into it!

When I got back to it, I started by adding 64 new character cards in the sheet so I could try and balance things a little more and have more variety, especially for playing with a bigger group. I found some placeholder art and threw them into images within a few hours. There are a few characters I definitely need to draw new ones of or at least clean up old drawings that I found before I’m comfortable using them in the final version though.

I decided that I wanted to try them out in Tabletop Simulator to even more quickly prototype and test without having to print them. So I made a quick card back so I could at least import it in for this step. This is super rough and very placeholder right now, so I’m not intending to use it at all in the final version. I still need to brainstorm and sketch some ideas for what it’ll look like.

Then I exported all of my cards as a large png to be used in Tabletop Simulator! I discovered though, when I was importing it in, that you can’t actually have a deck of more than 69 cards in Tabletop Simulator. I did some tests with a smaller deck of like 10 cards for work previously, but I didn’t realize this limitation until now. So I realized I need to cut down and make multiple decks to even test this aspect.

After looking in the documentation for nanDECK, I figured out I could just type more lines in the DISPLAY command to specify how many cards are in each row/column and then specify the start and end cards. So I just had to run 2 different commands to save out 2 image files to use for the decks.

Then I imported my two decks into Tabletop Simulator! It was pretty easy once I had the correct sizing figured out. So I started to draw the cards and lay them out for testing.

Then I decided to prototype and playtest a game in there. It was a little more manual than using physical cards, but was a pretty quick way to test it out, especially with adding new cards and not needing to print them out. I used some default marbles for tracking the order cards were played in and then checkers pieces to track the points. I think I prefer the methods I was using when playtesting physically by using colored tiles with numbers on them and the numbered tokens for points (temporarily borrowing from other games), but it was good to test with these to figure out what I prefer most.

Then I printed the new cards out so I could use them for testing! The printer was out of ink though, so it took a couple of weeks before I could do this. But I now have a lot of cards and a lot more variety (with 108 total)!

Now that I’m back into working on my projects more, I hope to have more updates and test with real people at some point soon. I have some other game types floating around in my head that I might try out too, but I also have been thinking more about the digital version of the game. So there’s still a lot that I want to look at when I get fully back into this, but the great news is that adding new characters is fairly easy to do with all of the systems set up!