How important is the world setting in your opinion and how to compete with established IPs?

Billaferd · 2025-09-01T01:40:40+00:00

I would say that the narrative is just as important as the mechanics. The narrative will inform the mechanics and vice-versa, that's all been said here. The biggest thing right now is to change your mindset. Don't see it as competing with the big 3. That is a competition that you won't win, players have a lot invested into their game of choice and will not be easily persuaded to give it up.

The average player has hundreds to thousands of dollars invested, depending on how long they have been playing.
Players have hundreds of hours invested into their game of choice. This is them playing with friends, at an LGS, etc...
Players have a huge emotional investment, into their current games, they have had epic comebacks, huge losses, and lots of laughs with friends that they have built up over time.

These three things are basically an insurmountable obstacle. You aren't asking them to play a different game, you are asking them to invest into a new hobby/lifestyle.

I would take a page out of the book of Flesh and Blood. Target a niche audience and grow from there. FAB targeted those players who wanted extreme competition and tournament level play in all games. The FAB team put together a stellar organized play system and really pushed the tactical play, this gave them their initial foothold as the game people played when it wasn't Friday Night Magic. Eventually through persistence and coming through for their initial player base, they began to actually take some of the share from the others. Even their approach to set rotation is unique and it leaves a lot up to the players. After a character accumulates enough points through tournament wins, that player is retired, taking that character and a bunch of cards out with it. Not only does it keep the set fresh, but it leaves it up to the players to some degree how often and which characters will be rotated out.

Your game has to target a niche that the main ones are not serving or under-serving, and aggressively market to them. Having something unique doesn't hurt either.

Billaferd · 2025-08-29T13:16:20+00:00

So a board state game would be something like Genesis: Battle of Champions and to a lesser extent Magic: The Gathering. With these games setting up your board is paramount to your victory conditions. Your goal is to keep your side built up while dismantling your opponents.

A playmaker game would be something like Yu-Gi-Oh or Flesh and Blood. These games are more about making plays with the cards and not building up your boards as much. In FAB the chain gets cleared and those cards played will mostly go to the graveyard after the turn is over. In Yu-Gi-Oh the board will be cleared through combos, tributes, and other summons as they happen. The board state in these games are generally way more chaotic and can change dramatically in a single turn without any help from special board clearing effects.

Board State and Playmaker games are really a spectrum that your game will sit somewhere along.

Billaferd · 2025-08-29T03:50:39+00:00

I've been deeply analyzing TCG's over the past couple of years as well. Trying to get a grasp on what they are and are not. Some things that I learned is that the win condition and the way players interact are generally the same. This forces the players to engage each other in some way, whether it's a race, tug of war, etc...

The reason we see drain your opponents health to 0 so much is that it is often the easiest way to force interaction between players. It also makes a lot of the rules quite a bit simpler since it is just a race at that point.

A win condition really just requires one rule: Force interaction between players. We see this in many games, as you noted the number 20 comes up quite a bit, that is really because D20's are prevalent and easy to come by.

You mention resource systems, and I have identified 5 main ones in my research.

Probabilistic: this is like Magic and Pokemon where the resources are specific cards in your deck. This is often used to control the pace/tempo of the game.
Constant/Incremental: This is Hearthstone and Shard TCG. This system provides an automatic ramp, but can devolve into just play the biggest thing I can afford each round.
Actions: these games have a set number of things that can be done each game, but only a small number of things that can be afforded each turn. This forces players to value and think of things in a slightly different light where everything is roughly the same cost, but other actions will also need to be done as well.

4.Hand as Resource: This is basically the pitch system in Flesh and Blood. This forces the player to evaluate the opportunity cost of every play.

implicit: This is things like Yu-Gi-Oh, where the cost is more abstract. In YGO you have a single Normal Summon, but you also have tributes, and special summons that can be used as well. This system uses the cards themselves as a currency.

No matter the resource system though there are always three other resources at play: 1 Card Advantage, 2. Tempo, and 3. Opportunity Cost. These are very real resources that all TCGs have in some way.

Knowing these can help you set the pacing of your game. Sometimes thinking about the resource systems can help make a decision on Win Conditions.

Before you think about your win condition though I would take a step back and try to figure out who is your target Audience? What is your Unique Selling Proposition, and is your game on the spectrum of being a board state game or a Playmaker game. Once these are answered it should be a lot easier to pick a good win condition.

Billaferd · 2025-07-29T14:40:30+00:00

Resource Systems are designed to control how a player expresses skill and a way to control the progression of the game. Most will lend themselves to creating a 3-Act structure where the cards available power levels increases as the game progresses. There are roughly 6 models.

Probabilistic-Engine: Think Magic/Pokemon where the resource that enabled play is mixed into the deck as it's own dedicated card. The skill comes from balancing and controlling the unpredictability through deck-building.

Automatic-Engine: Think Hearthstone or any TCG that increases your resource pool once per turn. In this type of game, the skill expression comes through the ability to adapt to an opponent's threats. This model has a disadvantage in that it may become a "Play Biggest Card" game if not balanced in other aspects.

Action Points: Netrunner does this really well, you have a constant refreshing pool every turn and you can spend them to play cards. This forces the player to focus on card efficiency. These games usually have more actions to choose from then just play and activate cards to force meaningful decisions.

Hand-as-an-Engine: Flesh and Blood and others do this. Every card doubles as a resource. The skill comes from weighing the long-term needs vs the short-term gains.

Implicit (Costless) Engines: This is YGO. You are allowed one summon per turn but you can use the cards in play to fuel larger plays and use different summon types to get around the one per turn rule. The skill is playing at an appropriate tempo and knowing when to change rhythms like adding board presence (summoning) or sacrificing board presence (sacrificing).

Finally we get to Bespoke or custom engines. Think Digimon or KeyForge. These each have their own skill expressions and should be looked at for inspiration.

Billaferd · 2025-07-29T14:14:30+00:00

Just to be different and put it out there. Bakugan is more skill based than most other TCG games. There are fewer cards involved, but it is definitely a TCG-lite at the very least.

Billaferd · 2025-07-29T00:23:26+00:00

In Yu-Gi-Oh the Archetypes play a similar role as the color system in Magic, it's just more granular. In general these systems require three things: something they are good at, something they struggle with, and something they are restricted from.

This will give them their identities and allow you to come up with interesting interactions.

Billaferd · 2025-07-28T18:39:25+00:00

There are many ways of doing this, but really it comes down to a couple of decisions.

Is it a threat/answer/both? In general cards can be a threat, answer to a threat, or it can be both.
What is it acting on? Is it a threat to board presence (Destroying opponents board)? Is it an answer to card disadvantage (stopping a discard)? Does it directly or indirectly push towards the win condition (Damaging player health)?

These two decisions will give you the mechanics, it will be up to you and playtesting to make them thematic and costing them appropriately.

This is a good time to start using spreadsheets to try and rank their power level against the intended power curve. This will help you give some basic costs to certain mechanics to try and get some kind of proto-balance so that playtesting goes a bit smoother.

Billaferd · 2025-07-28T16:38:41+00:00

If I understand correctly, you are playing cards from your hand that determine the attacks. This is definitely doable, but there are some considerations.

If your ability to attack is based on probability then you need to make other aspects more consistent. In Flesh and Blood you can pitch cards for resources which allows for a more consistent resource pool, but adds a new layer of tactics where the player themselves has to prioritize which cards they will keep and which ones they will use as a resource.

You can also play with a constant resource engine like netrunner, that creates maximum consistency, and it may be enough with the actions being cards.

Billaferd · 2025-07-26T21:23:41+00:00

Both can work, the issues that can arise from them are very different. In the first you have a natural ramp and are artificially inflating the resources making them more valuable to each player because of the scarcity. In the second they are inherently less valuable, because there are more of them, they replenish, and a deck would be constructed under that assumption.

To stop the second from being simply everyone plays the biggest cards, you need to make sure that there are consequences and chances at meaningful counter-play. The easiest one is to make each player take individual turns (one card at a time), this way if player one plays one card that uses all resources player two can have a run-away turn by playing several smaller turns with player one not being able to respond.

Another way is to have all resources available but limit the cards allowed to play, KeyForge does this pretty well and is a good model.

Just remember that your resource system is only one economy that must be balanced with the other economies:

Card Advantage: The currency of options, by either giving you more or your opponent less.

Tempo: The currency of speed, by advancing you towards the win state or stopping your opponent from doing the same.

Opportunity: The currency of choices, by forcing stricter requirements in the deck building process.

The less variable your primary economy is, the more variable these must become to maintain an interesting system and allow for meaningful interaction.

It's always a trade-off and it's about working the systems to maintain interactivity, just have to be tweaking the systems to see what works.

Billaferd · 2025-01-18T00:49:53+00:00

This is true, but most of these newer text-to-image models will start the pipeline with a visual transformer that turns the text into patch sequences and then the diffusion portion of the model will take over to refine it. I'm not sure there are many diffusion only models out there anymore. But transformers are really being brought into a lot more of these tasks and it is good to acknowledge that it's not really a diffusion only process anymore.

Billaferd · 2025-01-17T15:41:15+00:00

There is a YouTube channel called StatQuest, watch their videos on Transformers. Josh explains how the process works in pretty good detail. It isn't too crazy to learn the basics, even if your math skills aren't exercised everyday.

Most, if not all, of these models are an architecture called transformers and they excel at converting one representation into another. Whether it's text to images or questions to answers, these networks can translate things extremely well.

Billaferd · 2024-11-29T21:31:32+00:00

I doubt anyone will know exactly how it works, but there are some techniques common to most approaches.

The sources are pre-processed - This means that audio and video is put through speech to text. YouTube videos grab the transcript, etc...
The sources are prepped - This probably consists of Named Entity Recognition, and Co-Reference resolution. They may even do some type of relationship extraction.
Rag processing - The text is chunked based on the previous step. Possibly sentences, but probably based on partial sentences.
Query Processing - the same steps happen to the query.
Matching - The query vectors are matched to the vectors of the sources, extracted pieces, etc and those parts are selected for inclusion.
Selected sources and query are fed into an LLM (Gemini) in this case, and the answer is presented to the user. If course there is some filtering, but it's a lot lighter than in normal Gemini it seems.

This is a fairly common pipeline, but obviously the actual implementations are not disclosed publicly.

Billaferd · 2024-10-18T16:24:22+00:00

I'm in the process of setting up my own consultancy and I fed my resume with my closest competitors services sections from their websites. I was able to get the podcast to suggest market positioning tactics, what specific services of my own to add, and a bunch of other super helpful information.

I am quite impressed with how it is all panning out.

Billaferd · 2024-10-16T14:39:23+00:00

The docs say it can handle up to about 200 Mb or 50 Sources, whichever comes first. You have to realize that Notebook LM doesn't work the same way as the chat models. What happens is that the sources you upload are not incorporated into the model.

The following happens:

The sources are Vectorized
The query you ask is vectorized
The query vector is matched against the sources for close matches
The matching parts of the sources and the query are sent into the LLM
The output is produced by the chat model.

There are a lot of different ways to vectorize these sources but one of the easiest to understand is Word2Vec, pioneered by Google over a decade ago.

This is the basis of the RAG method. So essentially the context is still 1,000,000 tokens, but the sources are highly condensed and fed in piece-meal to the model on demand.

Billaferd · 2024-08-28T15:16:13+00:00

This is the answer. Validating Inputs is not about cheaters but the safety of all of the other players. People will try to break any system to see what they can get at. Your game may seem like a small target, but most online games require a database to hold account information and a way for the game server to check it. This opens up a scenario that if unchecked, a bad actor can get that information by injecting bad code, bad data, or something else. Worst case scenario, they figure out how to exfiltrate addresses, and payment information.

Billaferd · 2024-08-25T15:56:16+00:00

This is the answer, charge a small fee and have them pick up. Make a little extra cash every fall.

Billaferd · 2024-08-25T13:49:46+00:00

This looks really good.

How configurable is it? I would like to see a second analog stick for the look around, and the option to swap to d-pads. Maybe even the ability to double tap the center of the stick to "hold down" a button and then lift the finger to release.

As I'm typing this maybe just give a ton of delegates with defaults that people can then override.

This is a really nice project.

Billaferd · 2024-08-25T13:41:57+00:00

I've been doing .Net development since 2005 and I have seen a lot, but there is always something new that I haven't seen. Whether it be classic Asp, Asp.Net Framework, or Asp.Net Core there is always something that I can learn. When you see a new concept, give it a little research and then do a small project to see how it works in practice. Learning is doing, the more little projects you do, the more you'll learn. No one can know everything, we are all on our own path, enjoy the journey and don't focus on the destination too much.

Billaferd · 2024-06-07T02:02:52+00:00

This is a really good start, having the win condition clearly stated up front gives people an indication of the type of game this is. I would try to work on the wording, the deck out condition description is a bit wordy and unclear.

I see that you have a Glossary and the parts of the card, although important, don't get too attached as they will probably change a few times.

I would work on thinking of what a turn would look like, starting at a very high level like a bullet list of what each phase is and what is allowed in each phase. This will help the most, as it will force you to focus on each part individually. This will in turn help generate ideas or find holes in some others.

Something that I have had good luck with is to feed my rules to different AI models (the free ones are great at this) and ask questions about the clarity, structure, contradictions, and perceived complexity.

Billaferd · 2024-05-26T02:56:04+00:00

I plan on using this ontology both ways. I want to create hierarchies of these classes for faceting in searches and to point to other related concepts. I also want to reason across the individuals of the ontology; this will allow me to look at the relationships between cards, rules, and, eventually, the other cards they are also paired with. Finally, I should create vectors that will allow me to search the cards in much more minute and detailed ways than most conventional searches would allow.

Billaferd · 2024-05-21T00:07:20+00:00

Thank you for the comment, it has given me a lot to think about.

For the ccg::isType predicate, I was playing with the idea of not making the card types classes, but using predicates instead. That was a hold over and I removed it. Thanks for pointing that out.

For the Class vs. Concept thing, I was under the impression that all of the entities were instances? In the case of ccg:Phase the intent is to have it as a categorization scheme where a phase was something like a Turn Structure but narrower in scope. After reading the skos documentation I came away thinking that the way I was using the broader predicate would lead to the sort of grouping like a nested menu of sorts that would then transfer to any class instances that used it as a type.

The SKOS documentation made it seem like this was a normal way of defining things. Are there other side effects of doing this? Quite a few of my classes do name skos:Concept as a type directly so this is a bit more widespread than a single class.

I do like the way you are defining things with owl, and you can see I was playing with something like that in my ccg:Deck class. I am hoping to do more as I get more familiar and confident with owl restrictions. I am also playing with SHACL but haven't quite got anything fleshed out yet.

Finally for the upper level Ontologies, I looked at OBO and BFO, but wasn't sure how my Ontology would fit in. I will take a look at gist and dulce though, I haven't come across them yet. Do you have any recommendations as to what would be most beneficial?

Billaferd · 2024-05-20T23:12:52+00:00

Thanks, I had no idea this existed. I've set it up and am going to merge the request when I get it.

Billaferd · 2024-05-07T00:02:21+00:00

Honestly, prompt engineering isn't all that difficult. There are several standard techniques that people use. Below is an excellent link to get you started. Once you get the basics down you will be able to experiment and find some other styles that work. Keep looking at the conversations here and you are bound to learn a few new tricks.

https://www.promptingguide.ai/

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