Sorry about not getting around to doing this yesterday, but there was an emergency. You see I had to go hang out with some friends and then get drunk and see Rush, which was bad-ass, but not exactly conducive to making cards or rules about how to play with them.

Anyways, I've got some good news and some bad news.

The Good

- I started out not knowing anything about how CCGs work, and with the help of Rockvillan, Brecksher, Dynamic Sheep and Google, I was able to get a much clearer picture of what needed to be done to make this a real game, and it doesn't seem all that insurmountable.

- Long story short: I'm looking at using a slightly modified version of the rules that Brecksher cooked up. My reasoning for going with these rules? They are simple enough that anyone could jump in and learn to play in a few minutes, require the least amount of modification to the current cards, allow for two people to play using only one deck and they fit the whole Destructoid theme quite well. Comment cards would be used as interrupts/instants (basically one-shot abilities that you can use anytime provided you have enough "hours" to play them) and blog cards would have global effects that you can only use on your turn.

- Right now it's possible to make a "pilot" version of the game by modifying only a few select cards to get the kinks worked out and create a small, but playable, game. More cards could be modified once this step is done and could be continue to be added until doomsday.

The Bad

- I have no idea how to balance the cards. I could add in numbers and modify abilities like so (note: only one ability modified):



(The "2" next to the ability is the number of hours it would cost, and on other cards that number might be different from the number of ability icons, just to keep modification time down. I'm also looking for a good way to highlight the ability effects in the description so that you can quickly and easily see it without reading the whole thing)

At the end of the day, I'm just putting in random numbers. I don't know if there's any other way to make an educated guess other than by testing the cards, which would take a bit of a time investment. Time that I just don't have.

- Not really "bad" per-say, but I was thinking that I'd give each card just one ability for play and keep the other one just for laughs for now to keep things simpler/more manageable. More abilities could be put in later.

- Blog cards and comment cards would be needed. These can be fairly generic to make them easier to write if need be, but they would still need making.

- Again, a numbers thing: how many character cards, blog cards and comment cards per deck would be more or less a random decision. I guess we could just go with the official Magic rules or whatever, but because it's a totally different game it's essentially an arbitrary decision. Also, the number of cards, not to mention which cards, for use in creating a pilot version of the game would be up for debate.

- I'm leaving on June 12th, but might not have access to a computer after June 8th, and my internet access until August 21st is going to be sketchy at best. Maybe I'll have great access 24/7, maybe I won't have any. That's Zambia baby!

Decisions

I'm just going to keep making cards the way I have been until I leave, since I probably won't be able to see this project through until after PAX. As for the rest of the summer: it would be great if a few people wouldn't mind trying to come up with that pilot version. I'll provide all of the .psd files that I've got (I'll also be posting a .rar file with .jpeg versions for everyone before I leave) thus far as well as .psd files for generic comment and blog cards. All that would need to be done is making up numbers and testing the cards to see if the game works. It could be as few as 6 cards or as many as 20 that get tested, but the idea would be to lay the groundwork, which shouldn't be too labor intensive at all. It's just something that would need some people who don't mind tweaking the text of a few cards and then testing them a bunch of times until the cards are reasonably balanced.

Remember: this ain't a retail card game or anything. Anyone that works on this doesn't need to make it a huge time sucking monster, just a little bit of work every once in a while would be great.

Oh, and because I seem to get at least one or two people asking about this in the comments each time: I'm going to Zambia to teach an anatomy and physiology course and a technology course to Nurses at the University of Zambia as well as doing some public healthcare education stuff (public talks about malaria prevention and whatnot).

Thanks in advance everyone!

Random quote... EXECUTE!

“The rule which forbids ending a sentence with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

~Winston Churchill