This blog is to detail and answer questions regarding my fan made LoL CCG.
What is Lol TCG/CCG?
LoL TCG/CCG is my attempt at creating a card game with
inspiration from the League of Legends IP. It incorporates several systems from
other card games that I have adapted to fit into my game, as well as some new
systems to ensure the experience feels different from anything else out there,
yet familiar enough to attract avid card game players. For a full run down of
the rules, cards, and a demo, see the links at the end of the post.
Why make it?
I am an avid player of
League but my first gaming love has always been card games. Perhaps I feel I am
better at these games or enjoy the strategy involved but something has always
drawn me to play card games with my friends over any other type of game. I
would be lying if I didn’t admit my interest wasn’t piqued by the leak early
this year, that Riot had at one time looked into making a League TCG. After
that I thought to myself what would I want to see in a card game based on the
League IP, and shortly began preliminary work on what would become this game.
The hope with this game was to provide players with a new way to experience
League without the constraints of a traditional MOBA.
Design goals-
Obviously when developing a game you want to make sure your
goals are clear so you have somewhere to aim for. My short list looked
something like this.
1.
Create a game that took inspiration from
League's MOBA foundations but wasn’t constrained by it.
2.
The game had to attract people who play TCG/CCG
first and foremost.
3.
The game had to be highly customizable. One of
my favorite parts of playing card games was not so much the traditional 1v1,
but the different game modes my friends and I would come up with to play, and I
wanted to support this in the core of the game.
4.
Had to have plenty of room to expand within the
League Lore and potentially outside it. While playing a game based on League
would be fun, if the same game eventually left that world for new IPs it had to
still function as the same game with minor alterations.
5.
Multi-player formats had to be fully supported
and encouraged; everyone who plays League does so in part because they enjoy
interacting with multiple people at a time. Therefore I wanted a game that supported
increasing number of people without losing its sense of balance.
The Battle Map
One of the biggest differences between my game and your
traditional card games is the existence of a map and movement. Understandably,
this can be slightly off-putting for some people. However, it became the core
of how I could hit all of my design goals and presented a new level of strategy
in approaching a card game. With the map
players could create differing scenarios for play. If they wanted to play a
card game version of King of The Hill, Capture the Flag, or straight death
match they could, as long as the cards supported this. Additionally the map
allows our imagination to take hold and the game can now belong to any universe
or IP we want by changing the art. I started with a small map that could fit on
a normal table for 1v1's but with it being a core concept it could expand to
accommodate 3v3, 10v10, or anything else you may want to try, and the idea is
the cards can all support this with minimal tinkering. Imagine a Shurima event where 10 players are
trying to take down the recently resurrected city with 10 defenders. The
limitations in the video game would make this hard to experience, but telling
this story for yourselves in my game should be notably easier.
Map System similarities to miniatures.
The first thought some people have when I tell them about the
map system is why not just play a version of miniatures. A fair point and my response would be that
while the map is core to the game the objects on the map are not the most
important. The cards in hand and the spells you play are much more important,
or so I hope, and so we get this sort of hybrid card game miniatures. Now striking a balance here is an ongoing
effort that I hope to refine in the coming months.
The Champion
The champion cards are the avatars for the player on the map.
I chose a system similar to the DBZ card game where you have 1 champion who
levels throughout the game, because this closely resembled League and could
translate well to other games. This presented a centralized point on the map
from which I could balance the summoner spells. Having a spell that kills a
minion is much harder to balance then a spell that kills a minion who is x
squares from your champion. Now not all spells had to be cast through this
avatar but for a map system it was important that some spells had a cast
point. Choosing to go with 4 levels
representing the 4 abilities was obvious, and eventually I could expand with
different orders of leveling abilities or even augmented ability versions of
champions, i.e. void corrupted Jarvan. What did end up differing from the dbz
games version was that champions in my game retained their lower levels'
abilities, something integral to League.
HP,DFS,..Etc. why choose the stats you chose?
One of the principles of a card game is the ability to
quickly determine the result of any action barring opponent interference. This
means when I do the math to determine if I can kill an enemy it must be simple
and obvious. With that said League has a wide array of stats that can both
clutter cards and make determining the outcome of a battle difficult. Which is
why I chose to go with the generic DFS stat, and flat damage values do the bulk
of the work with items diversifying AD vs AP and not built into the creatures
themselves. It’s easy to understand my ability does x + RA – (DFS + RD). So why
go with Blue and Red as opposed to AD and AP? To a player familiar with league
armor reducing physical damage and magic resist reducing magic damage is
obvious, but teaching a player that “Bloodthirster” increases attack damage,
which is reduced by armor only if the ability does physical damage, is anything
but simple and obvious. Saying Bloodthirster increases Red champion abilities
makes it easy to see the correlation of reducing that by Red Defenses. The
problem arises when you have hybrid champions like Jax or champions who build
two ways like Kayle or Nidalee. For that the plan is alternate version with
different colors for champs with clearly different builds and, eventually a
hybrid passive that can go on champions like Jax, so that they may benefit from
both RA and BA with some trade off.
Why isn’t X in the game yet?
If it’s a champion be patient. The game has to walk before it
can run. If portions of the game are poorly designed or problematic it’s easier
to fix at this stage then if, say, I had 4 cards for every champion resulting
in over 400+ cards to fix. Look at League's current fighter conundrum to see
how escalating the deployment of more content over focusing on systems can
cause problems. Now if you’re asking why a certain item isn’t in the game yet,
well it may not show up. Certain aspects of League don’t translate well. For
instance Crit and Attack speed are percentage based variables and violate the
simple math rule pretty quickly. Saying I need 100 Attack speed to get an extra
attack action is realistic except when someone has say, 30%? When should they
gain that benefit of an extra attack? That’s why I went with a unique cool down
for the time being, to give characters a benefit without the burden of
percentage math. This still leaves Crit, and honestly random variables in a
card game have always left a sour taste in my mouth. However, I am open on this
so if you believe Crit should be implement let me know why and how you would
want to see it by following the feedback links below.
Minions and my first struggle
So when it came time to decide how I would approach minions,
I had a few ideas before hitting my current system. I thought originally about
having a stack of generic minions next to each players deck and having one
minion spawn each turn. My thought was there could always be fodder soldiers in
other IPs that could replace minions and this would help keep the feel of
league alive. However, when I sat back and looked at what I had designed thus
far I noticed a very scattered field of play. With so many different zones to
keep track of, cards and a map, adding what essentially became a second deck of
minions seemed a bit much. So I asked myself what is this accomplishing and the
answer was very little. The minions presented a feel of worthlessness; they
died quick, provided nothing strategically and only served as a reminder of
“why not play the video game?” I eventually ended up incorporating minions with
a more strategic feel, having different abilities and strengths to augment the
champion and still creating a feel of battle rather than a 1v1 fight that I
liked. After testing the game a few times, a couple of my testers presented my
original idea for minions as a solution to some problems we were seeing; mainly
games taking far too long to complete. It provided me an opportunity to look
back and see if perhaps I had missed the mark. First thing I asked is, “how
this would solve the current problem of games progressing slowly?” The idea was
that by having a constant stream of minions worth RP that players could ramp up
easier and push easier thus ending the game quicker. So what would be the
drawbacks here? If the RP gains are slowing the game down, raising base RP
gains or redesigning how RP generation works would equally solve the problem,
without forcing players to keep track of more things on the field, and would
keep that extra deck away. So how about pushing faster? That was a problem that
needed to be addressed, and cheap minions could solve this potentially. I may
have even tried it if it weren’t for one more thing a friend mentioned. He made
comment on how important minion waves in the video game were and how it would
be nice to replicate in the card game. This reminded me of something, my goal
wasn’t to emulate the video game, but to draw inspiration, and if having these
waves spawn every round resembled the game too much, I could potentially
alienate non MOBA players. So for the
time being I went with a few different changes to help with pushing: smaller
maps and removing towers in 1v1’s helped in this manner and although it’s not
perfect, I feel it stayed more true to my original goal. Perhaps I may go back
to this in the future.
RP and mana systems.
The largest struggle I have had with this game design is how
to handle resources. I went back and forth with a two resource system, one for
items, minions, and monsters, and a separate one for leveling. It was abandoned
for simplicity. Now the current RP system I have lies outside the deck;
something I was adamant about. In “Magic,” mana is a part of the deck but
considering I didn’t have differing types like Magic’s 5 colors it felt silly
to have a third of the deck just be a generic card. I liked Hearthstone's
system, but didn’t feel like replicating it was the best choice. One of the
keys to the system I wanted to implement was rewarding resource back when
creatures died. This in theory would only inflate the RP very quickly in a system
where your max resource grew and refilled every turn. By allowing RP to drain
permanently, my hope was that it would make players think more carefully about
their moves, not wanting to potentially reward their opponent with a boost of
RP they can use to snowball out of control, while you had very little to work
with for a few turns. I’ll admit this hasn’t worked as well as I would like and
is the focus of my current testing. Perhaps I will redesign the system or just
tweak it.
Online Card Game Considerations
A new aspect I have been thinking over is how to handle Card Games played online. One of the big obstacles to a game online is the pausing between actions that an opponent must be given an opportunity to respond too. In my case nearly all actions would prompt the opponent to respond causing the game to be bogged down by the constant wait. This is most likely why Hearthstone does not have a deep counteraction system. For my game I have been considering a Que approach to dealing with this problem. In my mind the priority player would select all the moves he/she wishes to make under the assumption that the opponent has no response. That Que would then play out move by move for the opponent who could then respond or quickly move on to the next move until they decide to respond to something or let the whole Que through. During this time the priority player would not see what moves are successful until a response is played or the Que completes, so that they can not gain any information from the speed at which each move is passed along by the opponent. If a response is played the Que stops and the players respond in turn until the stack resolves at which time the priority player makes another Que based on the new current state of the game.
Online Card Game Considerations
A new aspect I have been thinking over is how to handle Card Games played online. One of the big obstacles to a game online is the pausing between actions that an opponent must be given an opportunity to respond too. In my case nearly all actions would prompt the opponent to respond causing the game to be bogged down by the constant wait. This is most likely why Hearthstone does not have a deep counteraction system. For my game I have been considering a Que approach to dealing with this problem. In my mind the priority player would select all the moves he/she wishes to make under the assumption that the opponent has no response. That Que would then play out move by move for the opponent who could then respond or quickly move on to the next move until they decide to respond to something or let the whole Que through. During this time the priority player would not see what moves are successful until a response is played or the Que completes, so that they can not gain any information from the speed at which each move is passed along by the opponent. If a response is played the Que stops and the players respond in turn until the stack resolves at which time the priority player makes another Que based on the new current state of the game.
Feedback and testing
I am only one man with a limited pool of testers. Feedback is
always appreciated, and if anyone reading this has some time to play a few
games and let me know how it goes, let me know what you think. What did you
like, didn’t you like? How long the game took, and was anything obviously
unbalanced, and in what way?
Thank you in advance Vitalio
Links:
Full Rules -
Demo Video -
Boards - http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/Iw2lGOFF-lol-ccgtcg
Links:
Full Rules -
Card List -
Demo Video -
Boards - http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/Iw2lGOFF-lol-ccgtcg
