Heya! So I was a game design major at Indiana University for a few years and we talked a lot about board and card game designs - we even had a fun assignment once where we were told to improve Uno. Point is, while I am certainly no expert, I’ve put a decent amount of thought into the matter, as well as into general game design.
Choosing Your Audience
Let’s start off by agreeing any game can be fun to somebody, but that certain concepts require more effort to get the player engaged, and certain game might only be engaging to a small percent of people. So when considering making a card game you need to determine who you’re targeting, because that will determine how you implement.
Targeting Card Game Lovers
If you’re targeting people who already love card games, go for the full immersion. Have avatars sitting around, have a first-person view of the cards with your character’s hands holding them. Maybe even monetize character looks or food they can eat while playing, or maybe even changing the skin on the back of the card for other players. Be warned though that this audience isn’t probably too big - you don’t see many kids sitting around playing cards all day, especially not kids playing Roblox.
As a bonus this could be especially relevant during Covid-19 times, with many families being stuck apart and wanting to have a game night again. This could be a way to provide that on a free platform like Roblox.
Targeting Mainstream Audiences
If you want to make a successful game (lots of visits and robux), you’ll need to make a game for the average Roblox user. This user is likely a kid in the 8-12 range. Here are some considerations about them:
- They aren’t heavy readers, preferring games with more visuals
- They probably haven’t played too many card games recently
These factors lead me to believe your best bet would be abstracting the concept. Figuring out what makes the game fun, and then losing the card aspect and replacing it with a mechanic that fits a videogame better.
How Does One Abstract a Card / Board Game Into a Videogame?
A classic example of concept abstraction is the process of converting the fun open-fantasy gameplay that drives games like Dungeons & Dragons, and trying to make it into a playable videogame. Developers have been attempting this for years, and in doing so they’ve began to recognize strengths in videogames as a visual interaction media. This is shown through trends in D&D inspired games such as:
- Replacing the avatar descriptions with an actual rendered avatar
- Visualizing attacks with attack animations rather than a spoken description
- Creating a fully interactable 2D/3D map with the avatars moving through it
- Including tools to randomize certain character aspects instead of rolling dice a bunch at the beginning.
Now this obviously also comes with limitations, by baking in visuals and moves it often severely limits the free-form nature of D&D games, but this is all done for the sake of making the game faster, as well as visually expressing it rather than relying on player imagination. As videogames like Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars KOTOR, Divinity: Original Sin, and Pillars of Eternity have done very well, you could say that this loss doesn’t tarnish the experience for the average player.
But that’s D&D to a videogame, how would one take the game you mentioned and abstract it?
Determining Core Loop
So what are the core actions that define a game? Minecraft is a great example because two of the three core actions are in the name - mining and crafting. The third one is of course fighting/survival.
So what are the core actions of the card game? Based on reading I’d say your very high level core loop boils down to:
- Get funding based on random chance
- Select furniture to maximize points
So this core loop isn’t too complicated, which can be fine for short term gameplay - think of Rock - Paper - Scissors. That’s a game based around a single combat mechanic and has proved compelling for generations. However as you may note, few play rock-paper-scissors all day, because it lacks good progression in the gameplay. Players lose motivation fairly quickly as the experience is quite repetitive - this is a risk you face to a smaller extent. So what makes a game compelling?
Why Do Players Play Your Card Game?
I present to you, the most important tool when planning a game:
This is the
Quantic Foundry game motivation model, and I highly recommend exploring their other work. They focus on player psychology and have come away with some excellent workable findings.
So there are two major clusters of what motivates a player to play, this is what players find fun about all games. Typically you’ll see players move between sections, but when creating a game you should try to target at most one or two colors (though try to avoid combining yellow and red, due to the lack of a good bridge you risk splitting your audience’s motivation, something I did in my game Super Hero Life II and has cost me a great deal of effort, but here is not the place to talk too much about that as this post is already long enough haha). Once you’ve found your target zone, you can begin building mechanics around their interests. Also if you want to hit all 3 colors, you’ll need to make a sandbox game - but those are difficult to get right and aren’t always super popular, so I’d advise not aiming for that for this project.
Since you have an existing game already, we can use that to determine what motivates existing players, which we can then take and implement at the core of your game. At a glance, due to the lack of much strategy (the more chance/luck/randomness there is, the less strategy - hence why Chess is considered high strategy with 0 chance, while Uno is almost completely chance driven and is considered low strategy) your game seems to be heavily in the Red section, comparable to a game like Uno.
I think you can do better though, in my experience combining colors leads to more mainstream appeal, as well as often providing more replayability for the game. I think you should aim for a red - blue mix for this game, and that means replacing the randomness of the first mechanic with something that requires strategy, ideally player specific strategy, as well as adding a third mechanic to play off of the other two.
My Pitch for the Game
You may stop reading here if you like, as there are numerous if not infinite ways to upgrade the mechanics to provide a superior experience. But based on what I’ve read, here is what I propose.
Replacing Randomness with Strategy
Tp get that blue audience in, the first thing would be to replace the lucky based funding mechanic with some sort of bidding, say you’re bidding for coupons or something, an advantage specific to certain circumstances (like gives you 70% of a furniture of X type, but increases the price of furniture Y by 10%). Sid Meier, a master blue zone game designer, is famously quoted as saying “A game is a series of interesting choices.” and in terms of strategy heavy games he is quite compelling. So make your game’s decisions interesting, never give an advantage without a potential cost. Let every situation be a win-win or a lose-lose situation, forcing the player to think before they act.
In terms of visualizing it, try to stay away from using a card analog. Try to keep the text light, have these advantages be visualized in some way with a 3D object. Have players raise their hands/signs to bid on items as the price steadily increases. Have an NPC auctioneer describe the item before the bid. These are more fitting of a videogame and are more engaging than a bunch of text on a card.
Making the most of a 3D world
For the second mechanic, where you must find a piece of furniture, consider making the entire thing a 3D almost stealth driven experience. Where you must go through a store and grab the best items, returning them to your truck. This would also be a great way to add some PvP, as players can possibly attack people moving furniture to the truck, either stealing the item for themselves or simply sending it back, putting the other player at a disadvantage. This would play directly into the motivation of red zone players who like dominating their opponent. This would also be good for the blue zone players as they will have to find the most strategic root back to their truck (maybe take smaller aisles to avoid detection, rather than one of the longer ones, even though the journey might be a bit longer).
Adding a final mechanic
I feel the simple purchasing of the furniture is an odd place to stop, and a score based victory is a bit hard for younger players to follow. I think you actually want to replace that with a solid win state, such as delivering all your furniture to houses before a timer runs out. This is a good final mechanic because it adds a layer to your previous mechanic.
If the player can only reach so many houses in so much time, they might prioritize higher-earning furniture designated for nearer houses. Since everyone is prioritizing that furniture though it will become a battleground, meaning a safer player might go for the medium tier stuff. On top of that if you include things like single-round truck upgrades, riskier routes (driving along a cliff, having to stop at a train crossing, etc), you can put strategy on the actual delivery. Overall this could be a compelling final mechanic.
The game could repeat this 2-3 rounds, or just run through it once and the winner would be whoever delivered the most money’s worth of furniture. You could add a leaderboard of game-wide winners, maybe even get a semi-competitive scene going.
Conclusion
Games at this stage are quite malleable and quite flexible, hopefully my post has given you some ideas and guidance on how to best design yours. No matter how confident you are in your plan though, graybox the idea first and test it as soon as possible. Don’t focus on aesthetic stuff until you’ve proved the game is fun. Players will enjoy an ugly unpolished game that’s fun, if a game isn’t fun players will not return to it. As this game is fairly small in scope I bet you could graybox it in a week or two.
Best of luck!
