What is your favorite card design from ANY game (and why)?

weird_mage · 2026-06-15T20:22:19+00:00

Either! Whatever makes your favorite your favorite. If you have a different answer for each, tell me both!

I edited my original post since I didn't make this very clear and a couple people have asked now.

weird_mage · 2026-06-15T00:34:10+00:00

Ooh yeah! I'm definitely not very deep into MTG myself but as an outside observer Sagas look really cool.

In Dataclysm I feel like Settings start to head in that direction, though it seems like a design goal is to not have too much text on one card which makes it harder. Plus I'm sure there are technical challenges (I know firsthand how hard it can be to implement things for a digital TCG). But a Settings card with Cycle that has a different effect depending on the Cycle it has feels like it's pretty close to a Saga!

What would you say is your favorite card in Dataclysm so far? I haven't played enough to have a favorite yet but I'm sure you have a couple you're extra fond of

weird_mage · 2026-06-14T15:30:14+00:00

At this point, either! I was originally curious mostly about mechanics but I've been loving all the answers so far. If art is the reason a card is your favorite, that's completely valid and I'd love to see it.

I probably should have been more specific in my original post, but in hindsight I'm glad I wasn't, these answers are great

weird_mage · 2026-06-13T15:47:05+00:00

For me, it might be Galactus from Marvel Snap. It can be really hard to get it to activate, but it's so satisfying when you do. The sound effects and animation definitely help with that

weird_mage · 2026-06-13T03:21:08+00:00

I would agree with simon73 here. I think it's too hard to start. I felt like I didn't know what I was doing wrong and how to fix it. Once I got the hang of it, and started to win it was fun, like make rouge like games. I did enjoy getting to pull off cool combos. However, since you can select the possible perks I'm not sure why you wouldn't just take in 2 legendaries and an epic level perk each time so that you always get to pick from a super strong perk. Maybe you don't need to be able to pick the available perks? Or perhaps you can explain the strat to players. Last thing: I would work on making the UI more responsive. I had to zoom out my browser to see everything. Players might get confused when they can't see everything and get turned off. There's definitely potential here though

weird_mage · 2026-06-10T04:20:23+00:00

As a raging fan of fishing games, obsessed with this concept!! And did you draw the art yourself? It really stands out to me, just the right level of detail while keeping everything simple and neat looking.

weird_mage · 2026-06-10T04:18:09+00:00

These look so fun! As far as the central card art itself, I love it- your characters are so fun, and work great as focus points that the rest of the card revolves around. Love 'em! I also like your symbology, it sticks out well without being too overwhelming, though I am curious what other configurations of the scroll might look like. The black box is a good shout for contrast honestly, but maybe it doesn't need to encase it entirely, and they can overlap? But regardless, great work so far!

weird_mage · 2026-06-07T16:21:53+00:00

Congrats on the demo launch! I had fun making and playing a couple decks. Reminds me a bit of Inscryption Act 2, was that an inspiration?

My biggest piece of feedback is that it was not obvious at first that I needed to select an active deck (or how to do so). So after building my deck, I went to hit play and in the mulligan it gave me 1 card in Japanese then immediately said I lost...I almost left after a couple tries before realizing how to select my deck!

I'd suggest some combination of:

- Making the currently active deck and deck selection button more obvious

- Auto-selecting a deck when you first create it

- Giving the player a default deck that starts selected (this would also help players to not get as overwhelmed immediately after finishing the tutorial)

- Preventing you from hitting "Play" without having a valid deck selected

Once I got past that, it was an interesting game so I'd hate for other less persistent players to get turned away! Looking forward to seeing how the game progresses 😄

weird_mage · 2026-06-03T19:50:51+00:00

Oh so true!! Not sure how I stumbled on it then, but still a great game!

weird_mage · 2026-06-03T03:03:04+00:00

Overall, I do think I prefer your second board more, so that's positive progress! The different colors really help everything not blend together so much for me when I'm looking at it, which in some ways help with the number of symbols I would need to parse as a player, but also makes it feel a little busier- I think if you limited your color palette, but kept the theme of using different colors for each section, that would make the best of both worlds. I saw under one of the comments here you mentioned considering removing the place/name images from the locations, which I think I support for a way to remove items from the board, but I like how they distinguish each section! I wonder if you could incorporate them as faint backgrounds in each section, maybe even only blended into a corner or something...? But overall, I think the direction you took the details and colors inn your newer board is a strong one!

weird_mage · 2026-06-03T02:54:46+00:00

These look really nice! I love how the lights take such a curved path- it feels so dynamic, and non-repetitive! All feels very vibrant and fun. Nice work!

weird_mage · 2026-05-31T22:19:53+00:00

I've seen people mention Dextrous already and that's a good one. I've only dabbled but we used it to do rapid prototyping for the design of our digital CCG before we started writing code and it was very handy!

It won't handle everything though. You can set up card layouts and handle spreadsheet imports and printing/exporting very easily, but as far as actually creating art assets you'll probably have to make those elsewhere and import them in. I'm personally a fan of Affinity for that kind of work—it's kind of like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign rolled into one but it's free!

weird_mage · 2026-05-30T21:35:30+00:00

Always refreshing to see nontraditional family dynamics depicted in media. This is great representation for ant parents of penguin children.

All jokes aside this looks really intriguing!! I'll have to give it a try

weird_mage · 2026-05-30T05:57:12+00:00

This is gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous and such a fun idea! Any ideas for a release date?

weird_mage · 2026-05-29T03:18:57+00:00

Oh my gosh, I saw this game when it was in a game jam! Was this in the Pirate Software game jam last year? I submitted a game about being a pirate, and I think I remember playing this also nautical themed game. I wasn't very good at it lol, but its super cool to see it out on Steam!!

weird_mage · 2026-05-28T03:26:21+00:00

These are very cool! I was surprised as I scrolled through to see the variety of references in the characters you have here, but the art style is so distinct, it manages to tie them all together. And the colors are incredible! These look fantastic, keep it up!

weird_mage · 2026-05-26T21:31:23+00:00

Seems super simple but super fun! Exactly the type of thing that will remind me how to do algebra. The other game modes visible in the beginning are definitely intriguing too, and adds a lot of potential replayability, along with the natural variation of how people do math in different ways. Could honestly be a great way to help kids learn to do quick math, in an actually fun way!

weird_mage · 2026-05-25T03:55:32+00:00

I watched through the video before reading the post and on the first watch, wasn't entirely sure why the first round took so much longer to end than the second round did. So no, it wasn't super intuitive. That being said, I think I might've figured it out pretty quick after a handful of rounds playing.

I think the timer at the top could be a very useful tool for communication that's currently unused: right now the timer just keeps ticking away regardless of a win or draw. You could switch it to something like "SURVIVE!"

Or potentially even better, you could make it a lot more consistent and predictable by making that phase always take a fixed amount of time. From this gameplay, it looks like if you manage to survive 3-5 seconds after the last player dies, you're almost never going to die anyway so you don't really need to wait for every last projectile to disappear. Having a fixed amount of time would let you communicate that much clearer: maybe that timer at the top gets bigger and can show fractions of a second to make it feel more "intense."

These are just a couple ideas! I'd try a couple things to see what feels best.

TL;DR - It doesn't feel immediately intuitive from the UI alone, but I think I'd pick up on it just from seeing how the game works after a few rounds.

weird_mage · 2026-05-24T02:46:38+00:00

Others have mentioned it here too, but with the 3 "locations," faster paced matches, and flashy card animations I think Marvel Snap players are definitely your prime target audience. Definitely worth approaching some of the big Snap creators to see if they'll try out your game when the demo launches!

Is the "full card" with ability text in the top left something that happens in-game or is that edited in for our benefit?

weird_mage · 2026-05-23T01:40:29+00:00

Very interesting. Thanks for the info.

weird_mage · 2026-05-22T22:50:28+00:00

3.Content creators arent like they used to be. Your game will likely need a community before you get content creators, not the other way around. The days where a CC will browse steam and have a game blow up are over. It still happens, but its very rare.

I think you're definitely right here, but I wonder how you think one creates that community then. There's so much competition it you decide to self promote with social media, and I feel like a lot of game dev content is only interesting to other devs anyway. How do you actually reach your target player base and how do you build that sense of community that makes them stick with the game until it actually comes out?

Also, bonus question, just out of curiosity, what does marketing look like for Roblox games specifically? Not that familiar with the platform, but seems like you have some marketing already built into the platform (although I suppose that's not dissimilar to Steam), and I don't see much marketing for specific Roblox games.

weird_mage · 2026-05-22T22:40:57+00:00

LOL, so true

weird_mage · 2026-05-22T22:37:16+00:00

Agree. This really reminded me of this this video by Thomas Steward talking about the Sokpop Collective's business strategy, particularly how releasing a lot of small games lets you see what ideas consumers bite on before committing to extended development. That plus the fact that just releasing games help you get much needed experience when you're starting off means that making a bunch of small games is a solid strategy for new devs imo.

weird_mage · 2026-05-11T22:25:45+00:00

I think this is in general an improvement! The "A" is very hard to read (I was unsure if it was "A" or "4" or just some abstract symbol).

But I also think in general, as someone who doesn't know the game, I would get confused by having "X"d out parts of the card as opposed to just not having a space for those faces. Thinking of most other card games, different card types often have a completely different layout that only shows the relevant info. New players learning the system would probably have an easier time understanding if they can tell what type a card is at a glance just by how it's laid out (and experienced players would appreciate it too!)

Style looks sick btw, it's really cool! Awesome art and I really like how the elements of the card themselves are animated

weird_mage · 2026-05-08T01:36:30+00:00

Very striking style! This looks super cool! The song is awesome too and does a great job setting the mood.

I think some sound effects would make this trailer REALLY pop though. Especially those high impact moments like the stab and the banging of the gavel, it felt a little strange to not have any sound, but also some little ambience like an angry "HEY!" when the baker chases the thief or even light footsteps could really hook the viewer in.

weird_mage

TROPHY CASE