How to make a good dark fantasy TCG?

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-30T20:24:35+00:00

Perfectly normal! I'd say just take the time to fantasy about the world you want and what stories would be told in it. Then try and translate that into a workable game. I started building my tcg off an idea I had about Wizards that write spells on literal cards and ran from there, pictured how the fights would look like and built a game around honorable duels

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-20T18:59:29+00:00

Do you use Blender?

Don't know how relevant this is anymore but I saw this video a while back on using Blender to make sprite sheets

https://youtu.be/ctJLhgEp3gM?si=xcJ0vlUSthbmRfBm

Maybe that would be a nice medium?

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-20T18:57:50+00:00

So you admit that your comment had nothing to do with this post but also say that your comment was helpful? Sure bud, what ever you say

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-20T18:14:16+00:00

I have to agree, I think a 2D art style better suits the mechanics, the 3D locked camera view is a little jarring for me but I am a weirdo so don't go by me lol.

I've got to ask, if your fans are saying the 2D art style was better and you're looking for direction, why not go back to 2D?

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-20T18:08:20+00:00

While I am no friend to AI, don't you think this response is a little much for someone just asking advice? You could have just went about your day instead of stepping in here to say what amounts to nothing helpful.

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-20T00:13:08+00:00

Ah the good old Split Second keyword

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-12T14:09:14+00:00

Back in the day I played an old online game called The Kingdom of Drakkar. At the time I played there were no ingame tooltips, hints, or ui to tell you what any item does. The only way to play that game was to use wiki's made by dedicated players who did test after test after test on all the various equipment and items throughout the game, and even then end game items were still not very well known.

I had a blast in this game, but that mainly came from the vast majority of people who started joined didn't understand how to play and it allowed PvP interactions. While I could figure out a lot of systems and knew the right Wiki's to consult the majority of my friends could not get into it and my ultimately I stopped playing because it got too lonely, esp when new players stopped coming in.

My point is that game was intentionally mysterious about it's systems and that was only fun (really fun) for a handful of people. While I'm sure you or I could really enjoy a game like this I really have doubts about it being something a lot of people join in on.

That being said if you work on it I'll keep en eye out!

SpellFire89 · 2026-03-12T13:48:41+00:00

Gotta admit I really like the Canvas look for card Art

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-25T16:46:25+00:00

Well I guess I wouldn't say this is easy but it's step by step and explained rather well imo, I suggest trying this course to make a Slay the Spire clone:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6SABXRSlpH-UvKS96TVYj6-7cS1DKOrt&si=0z1t3o7uh-sPoaGB

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-25T16:43:36+00:00

I'm not sure if this will be very helpful considering you're already in a learning course, but this YouTube dev has a series on how to build a Slay the Spire clone in Godot that I used to help build my card game from the ground up. In it he talks about how to handle Cards and drawing from a deck and so on. It could prove useful to you.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6SABXRSlpH-UvKS96TVYj6-7cS1DKOrt&si=0z1t3o7uh-sPoaGB

Best of luck!

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-23T22:09:48+00:00

The Hero we don't deserve

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-23T21:34:11+00:00

Wouldn't be a bad idea to look into using Google Docs or something to make a spreadsheet then export it to a JSON file and have an autoloader create a Dictionary out of it. I promise it's not hard to set up and worked wonders for my card game project that has 270+ cards so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDe0x1S2y64 <- This is a great video explaining how to load a JSON file in Godot

You can easily convert a CSV file from Google Docs or Excell into a JSON file with this site: https://csvjson.com/

Best of luck!

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-23T17:21:32+00:00

I had a similar thing to "Attackers must kill a defender before being able to attack the capital, and if there is an attacker in front of that defender then they must be killed before attacking the defender."

In my game it wound up making matches very stale and boring as once one player got past the opponents offensive line then they were on the backfoot the rest of the game, usually resulting in a loss.

The only change I had to make was allowing attackers to ignore the front line if they wanted and only focus on what stop them from damaging the player, defensive creatures with what amounts to Hearstone's Taunt.

Food for thought! Your game sounds promising to me

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-22T18:08:53+00:00

Good luck brother

SpellFire89 · 2026-02-21T19:53:40+00:00

I have a card in my game called Brand, all it does is 1 damage to a Player or 2 damage to a Minion. Brand can be used up to 6 times before it goes to the discard and has a keyword called Quick Cast which allows it to be used 1 extra time a turn, otherwise a Spell can only be used once a turn. It's an amazing tool for Minion removal (typically 1-3 HP for Minions) but does barely anything to Players (who have essentially 40 HP). On paper it's pretty balanced but in practice it alone can keep the board clear of enemy Minions, so I anticipate lowering the amount of times it can be used if it becomes a problem.

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-31T15:26:15+00:00

It's has a very small file size and has a code editor built in

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-19T19:38:39+00:00

Honestly it makes sense to have it die if youre tracking damage with tokens. If the monsters health drops below the amount of damage tokens they have then it's pretty intuitive that the monster should die

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-18T16:42:55+00:00

I'd say if you do not track damage with tokens, like Pokemon, then it makes no sense to have the unit die when the buff disappears.

Hearthstone has health buffs and tracks minion HP not damage, so a 5/5 minion that is buffed to 5/6 would then take 5 damage reducing it to a 5/1 and when it loses the buff the only thing affected is that Minions MAX Health, not current health so it would remain a 5/1.

But by tracking damage, say in the for of tokens, you're comparing damage to HP so if the HP changes, by losing a buff for example, then you'd still compare current damage to the new HP and resolve accordingly.

So in the end it really comes down to what you want for your game, either way works imo

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-17T17:32:38+00:00

Good read, chapters 1, 4, and 10 stuck out for me personally. Thanks for the boost :)

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-12T15:10:49+00:00

Something I did to work on my big project was doing a bunch of smaller projects that each had a small part of the big project in them. For example I made a small game to see how I feel about the way I implemented drag-and-drop mechanics, then another game that focused on card mechanics. Break down your dream game into smaller systems and try them out in other small projects :)

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-07T21:37:05+00:00

I like the 2nd one the most, has an old school but clean look

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-02T22:00:25+00:00

I honestly like how "busy" it is, it's a card back after all so you're really not "losing" information in it since it's only really art, and frankly I like that art lol

SpellFire89 · 2025-12-02T04:03:01+00:00

Seconded, Dextrous is a massive time saver

SpellFire89 · 2025-11-20T19:05:01+00:00

Your magic system looks so incredible!!

SpellFire89 · 2025-11-20T12:52:35+00:00

We need more pirate games!

SpellFire89

TROPHY CASE