We've had threads for various interviews, so why not this one? http://www.armchairgeneral.com/interview-with-card-hunter-dev-blue-manchu.htm So, yay, interview. I liked the reminder that computer-based rules are less forgiving than in-person rules, and also that "emergent gameplay" can come about differently too. I'm trying to imagine what sort of bugs could come from the program as I understand it. Mostly things like targeting edge cases ("I cast Glowing Goo Pool diagonally through the solid wall!") and odd overlap in card abilities ("Did my damage boost card just add damage to my movement card?"). Oh, and "I didn't know you could walk around with negative HP."
Ya i find with most card games ported to video games, bugs usually occur when card effects start to overlap each other. I play the Yu-gi-oh card games on my psp (the actual cards are too expensive, no one i know plays them, and there are way too many cards to collect now) and with the older versions of the game, certain traps or spell effects would have unintended actions when responding to cards of constant or competing effects. Though it was only natural cause thats a card game with over 4,000 cards now, with a program written for each one it gets a little complicated at that point. I'm sure Card Hunter wont have that many cards at launch and if there are problem with card effects they will be squashed before beta or during. Edit: Interesting read btw, though we did know most of this info already, its nice that Jon is getting more exposure.
The thing that "jumped out" at me as new was... Definitely sounds to me like "classes" are actually more like characters that have a particular collection of inherent traits/card suites. Neat.
I think Jon mentioned that before somewhere on the site here (everything is merging together in my brain), but with the way card games work i wouldnt suppose anything related to adventuring to be cookie cutter. I'm excited to see the game in action and i'll probably be the first one recording games and posting on youtube. Speaking of recording, will i have to deal with an NDA during beta?
I wasn't really talking so much about bugs as about unexpected interactions between the cards. These aren't always bad - in fact they can often be fun if they seem weird at first and then you figure out why they happened. The way the rules work internally is that each card is made up of modular components. The effects of these components are applied in a strict order. Some of the unexpectedness of the behaviour can come from the exact ordering of the application of those rules. It's not relevant 99% of the time, but it can sometimes make a difference.
To date, the defining difference between classes appears to be what items they are eligible to equip, e.g. Dev Diary #5 showed us several "Arcane Items, for Wizards of course." I'm looking forward to learning more about the inherent functions of each class. Also, we have a promise in the Heal card preview that not every Priest character necessarily carries healing cards. That seems like a pretty radical departure from the standard RPG definition of a "Priestly" character, where healing is assumed to be a basic function that other characters perform poorly or not at all.
A not insignificant amount of the bugs in Pox Nora are precisely of ordering of effects. If you do not already have it, you should nail down exactly the types of effects there are and the order in which they will process to minimize having to add in triggers in between other triggers... For example, in Pox Nora, there are effects that deal damage at the end of turn. End of turn is actually kind of ambiguous, does it deal damage after or before effects that end at the end of turn? In Pox Nora's case, such "simultaneous events" are often handled by deploy order, unfortunately.
We use a command queue to process the effects, so we don't get a lot of bugs, in the sense of code crashes. Do you mean logic bugs or crash bugs?
There are a large selection of mods out there that take Total War off in those directions. The Westeros and Lord of the Rings mods are both solid fun. Great interview, by the way.
Logic bugs. Basically sometimes we didn't know what a particular interaction would do, and making it do what we wanted it to, from a design perspective, would take some doing. The primary problem was conflicting effects processing at the same time, like the example I gave above.
As for what I did on PoxNora, I joined pretty late, so all the framework was there already. So I was mostly concepting and designing new cards (runes as we call them) and abilities. Was heavily involved in the QA process, as I liked doing that stuff (it's like a puzzle!) and with a game with the level of complexity that PoxNora has, it is often that the designers know what's intended and not more than a QA person would. Most of my designs tended toward combo/synergistic pieces that weren't always powerful on their own; in general, players either loved my stuff or found them annoying to play against, and sometimes... both!
