In the last devlog I wrote about exploring potential SRDs to support the game. I found that a bit too restricting for the event and "map" type portion of things that I've been thinking about, so I've decided to concept out a few things. I may still revisit an SRD for the other aspects of a game, however.

Starting simple and getting familiar

The first thing I wanted to do, was refamiliarize myself with a deck of cards! During my time back home I got one of my sisters to teach my a few cards game and play with me for a while. I bought some new card decks and messed around with them for a while. I also made several diagrams for myself like the following images to represent a deck of cards visually. I wanted to get really familiar with how many cards were in a deck, how quickly you could go through those cards in a standard card game, how standard card games generally broke up ratios of cards per player, turn, or round, and so on.

Building out a standard format

I want to build out a system where cards can act like traversing time like a literal timeline or like a map. If this is the case, I think some cards will represent places or events you may know will happen, while the others are random events in between. Therefore, some can be face up, and the rest are face down. This also gives us a nice, basic, system to start building out. All of the following images follow the format from this legend.

The path or timeline

One of the main things I'm exploring is a timeline type concept. The path format of laying out cards represents this idea. The player would flip a card, resolve whatever happens, and continue on. The cards that start already flipped are rewards, goals, or incentives of some sort. If they players reach a branching path, they may choose which direction to go.

The wheel

The other type of format is the wheel, which could be a metaphor to represent many different things. It could be more literal and represent a fortress, with smaller towers around it. Or, it could be more abstract, each being a smaller challenge of any kind leading to a bigger challenge. The flipped cards in this format are the challenges, and the idea here is that you'd have to take down at least two of the outer challenges before taking on the middle one. The player chooses an "approach" where they lay their hand of four cards and follow them in sequence, but from then on they are following everything in sequence.