Big Redesign Progress

In my last blog post, I discussed a number of improvements to Rogue Deck Builder's core design.

To recap, I decided to make the game a little more like Minecraft/Factorio in the way resources are acquired. You chop things down and then gain resources from it. To get cards, you now expand your deck towards a neighboring house with a deck. 

Their deck has powerups sitting on it. To get the cards, you build your deck up to their deck, claim it, and add the cards to your inventory.

Earlier, the game was only about expanding the deck. Now it's more about tearing down the neighborhood to expand the deck, sort of like in Katamari Damacy. 

Other changes discussed incldue:

- No more "malding" system. I ditched it in favor of a more standard health bar. Enemies attack you, and you get hit. You lose HP and then eventually die when overwheled. Simple enough.

- I overhauled almost all of the game's deckbuilding user interface in favor of something more direct. Now you hover over things you can build, a UI shows up, and it tells you the cost of building the thing.

So far, I'm pretty happy with my progress, but the game is far from playable. I just wanted to provide this update for some folks who wanted to know how things are progressing.

I still haven't figured out a good solution for how the player can explore the entire neighborhood. I don't know what happens when the angry neighbors kick you off of your own deck. 

Maybe you can build stairs to walk off the deck, but I don't know what this means for the gameplay, so that's the main problem I need to solve before I put out another playable build.

I suppose it's okay if the player becomes confined to the deck, but a number of people have said they don't want that constraint. They want to explore the neighborhood more freely. 

I agree with this sentiment because it makes the game more like Vampire Survivors in some important ways.

So that's my main task for the next few weeks. If I can solve that game design problem, the game will be much better for it.