Queer Cards: Dice and Demis
Published on March 05, 2025
Hello!
A while ago, right after participating in GGJ, I also participated in the Big Mode Game jam, hosted by Video game Dunkie. This time, the team wanted to make a more art heavy game. We discussed making a TCG style game, and since our artist Jasper Falk feels more inclined towards making rendered artworks for video games, I thought the role would suit him well. I also wanted to make a card game base for my code archive. I want to make an extremely generic code archive; something akin to an engine within an engine, for Unity. This time, I worked on improving the turn based code I made for Purgatory of Greed earlier (and which I intend to backport, to make sure the archive is complete).
Gameplay-wise I tried to take inspiration from the Genshin TCG as well as other card games such as Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire. I also had intentions to draw some ideas from Everdell. In the end, the game came out quite bare bones. Using Zenject and DOTween did speed up the process quite a lot, and it did turn out very visually appealing, in my opinion. I 3D modelled the table that one plays on as well as the dice, and I drew the borders and backsides of the cards. Jasper made a lot of the artwork on the cards, and we also had my fellow Comic artist Nikola Kubasova draw some.
As for the story and the theme, we ended up making the different elements of the cards inspired by the stripes of the original pride flag by Gilbert Baker. The meaning of these translated into game mechanics is kind of vague, but it did lead to a lot of brainstorming. In the end, we couldn’t implement most of it. That’s just one of those things about game jams. The scope is always difficult to predict, especially with only one programmer.
Since we couldn’t put in the story, I’ll brief it here: The main character was supposed to be some sort of gay knight who was fighting his way up to the king in defense of his rights to marry his boyfriend. Quite a basic story, but it suits a basic game. I’ve recently set Jasper on making character designs, so maybe I can get around to making this game presentable as well.
Here’s da linky: Da Linky
Gameplay-wise I tried to take inspiration from the Genshin TCG as well as other card games such as Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire. I also had intentions to draw some ideas from Everdell. In the end, the game came out quite bare bones. Using Zenject and DOTween did speed up the process quite a lot, and it did turn out very visually appealing, in my opinion. I 3D modelled the table that one plays on as well as the dice, and I drew the borders and backsides of the cards. Jasper made a lot of the artwork on the cards, and we also had my fellow Comic artist Nikola Kubasova draw some.
As for the story and the theme, we ended up making the different elements of the cards inspired by the stripes of the original pride flag by Gilbert Baker. The meaning of these translated into game mechanics is kind of vague, but it did lead to a lot of brainstorming. In the end, we couldn’t implement most of it. That’s just one of those things about game jams. The scope is always difficult to predict, especially with only one programmer.
Since we couldn’t put in the story, I’ll brief it here: The main character was supposed to be some sort of gay knight who was fighting his way up to the king in defense of his rights to marry his boyfriend. Quite a basic story, but it suits a basic game. I’ve recently set Jasper on making character designs, so maybe I can get around to making this game presentable as well.
Here’s da linky: Da Linky