Red Dust: Done

Tee on 2022/09/12 03:13 of Tee

The core idea of Red Dust is a card/strategy game where each round represents an expedition, and your cards represent the supplies that let you move around the map each day. Each card also has a special effect, most of which can only be activated once in special locations (ruins). Your goal is to get rid of all the worms in the area with special cards.

I personally find strategy games difficult to get right in Pyweek. This is in part because there is a lot of implementation work, but also because I have a hard time tightening and fine-tuning them in a short amount of time. This week I spent most of my time on the interface and framework, and I'm happy with how the game looks and feels (given my limited artistic skill), but I just couldn't get the gameplay to work the way I wanted to. The mistake on my end was that given the time pressure I thought I'd just keep grinding through the implementation and try to figure out the gameplay in the end, and I got something playable a few hours before submitting but I didn't know how to actually make it fun within the time frame.

I think there is potential for a good resource-balancing card game based on this concept even if I wasn't able to get there. In retrospect, there are several design issues and a major one is that the game doesn't really have imminent threats or anything that makes you keep moving, and it's very easy to play safe. I did have a boss-type sandworm that would occupy multiple tiles and you had to kill it as your end goal, but I didn't have time to finish that (the code is still there, commented out).

That said, although I wish I had spent more time on the design phase at the very beginning, implementing this game was still an interesting experience. I hope you can get a feel of what I was aiming for and enjoy it.