KingClashers Beta 4.0

KingClashers Beta 4.0

I'm happy to announce a major release of the KingClashers trading card game! This features a major overhaul of the game's aesthetics by introducing a wide variety of attack and ability animations, creating a more engaging play experience.

What's new

The Beta 3.2-3.6 releases focused a lot on aesthetic improvements, such as clarity of card presentation.  These have concluded with Beta 4.0, which finalizes aesthetics and introduces more polished artwork and replacement of old static attack and ability indication symbols with elaborate animations (see credits).

In addition to aesthetic changes, I also implemented two mechanics changes:
a) Each deck is allowed to have only one queen from now on. I deliberated a lot on this change, since it limits deckbuilding strategies a little, but decided that the excitement of having one of the powerful queens more than makes up for the role. It also fixes some balancing aspects, as it allows stapling powerful effects on queens and not having to worry that these will be spammed throughout the game.
b) There are now abilities that allow cards to produce more cards in hand. This sounds fairly easy in principle, but it was a pain to implement in a way that allowed the AI to maintain consistent card identifiers as it switched between different board state predictions. Barracks have now switched to producing 2x Minion using this new mechanic (instead of healing, which is already handled by other similar cards) and new cards were added that I could previously could not fit: Magmarock, which is 1/3 for 3 delay and creates a Fireball spell when it survives combat, and Yeti, which is a 1/2 for 2 delay creates a Deep Freeze spell if it survives combat. Experimentally, I also implemented a card called Queen of Revenge, who creates 3 different cards to play for the next turn (these only last till the next turn).

Remaining TODO items

A little more work remains until the game could be considered fully polished and be moved to its first full version:

• Improving music and sound effect quality (I'm not sure how far I can go with this, since it needs considerable time investment efforts to get right)
• Creating a settings screen to access from inside the game.
• Fixing card display details, such as some names being covered by delay period annotations
• Making booster pack opening more engaging, potentially reworking the in-game economy (reminder that this is NOT a monetized game and that in-game currency can only be obtained by playing the game). Points to look out for is how to manage redundant cards when opening boosters (e.g. more copies than a deck could ever hope to accommodate), how to incentivize opening booster packs instead of directly opting to get the needed cards (e.g. is the reduced cost attractive enough? should cards be split between more sets to reduce variance?) and finding an attractive game-win-to-booster ratio (currently a game win vs a random AI opponent)
• Adding game modes, such as playing with random decks.
• Potentially put an ELO-like rating system of deck power level.
• Better organizing the tutorial and adding a puzzle mode.
• Fixing automated ability text production (the last beta released saw a grouping of ability text to make cards easier to read, but unfortunately this made some wording by the automated description generation engine confusing)
• Exploring which kinds of starting decks to include. Perhaps introducing a community deck sharing system in the process, where you can send decks for others to play with but which can not be edited).