Pixel Card Wars
Pixel Card Wars is a strategy cards game. You crawl the world map with the arrow keys, do encounters where you fight the AI opponent, augment your deck, and proceed to glory.
You contribute to the score when your cards attack an empty spot of the enemy. Place your cards smartly, some are better in the back line, some are better as front fighters!
Here is how to play:
- Select the team you want to play by going through one of the first mobs
- Go to an encounter by bumping a mob on the world map.
- Draw cards from your hand (bottom line) to the blue spots. Hovering over a card will show the spots you can put it to. Creatures go on empty spots. Items go on creatures. Spells can go on a single creature or on the whole board. When you're done playing cards, click End Turn to let the game resolve your attacks, play the AI, and give you focus back.
- Hovering over a skill (Long Reach, Ranged, etc.) will make its help pop up.
The mechanics are really good, but as I had no desire to spend more time on this game (hello old friend Warhammer 40k 👋), I shipped it a bit earlier than planned. For example the map background could look better and there could be more levels.
Nevertheless, it's entirely playable, so enjoy!
This game is done using Haskell's miso, if you're into that. And also it's open source so anyone Haskell-savvy can pick its development up.
Development log
- Adding the world view 🗺️Jul 26, 2022
- New team: Evil 🦹Mar 13, 2022
- New team: Zealous Knights 🛡️Jan 08, 2022
- Loot view: transitioning between levelsOct 13, 2021
- Adding mana 💧 automating balance check ⚖️Jul 27, 2021
- How gamedev proceeds (hand design)Feb 25, 2021
- New cards: spells and itemsDec 15, 2020
- Humans/Undead skirmish in welcome pageOct 06, 2020
Comments
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when i click full screen i cant see the tutorial thing, mainly due to the background turning black.
Thanks for the report, alas I don't develop this game anymore :-(
When I click the next button after completing a game and choosing a card nothing happens. is there just one level currently or is this a bug?
Yes indeed the Next button is unplugged for now. I am adding the next levels these days. Here is one:
And another one fresh from my tile fondry:
idk what this means but it isnt good
(NeutralCard (CardCommon {mana = (), text = (), textSzOffset = (), tile = ()}) (NeutralObject {neutral = InfernalHaste, teams = (), title = ()})): mana available is 0, whereas card costs 1 mana
Did you witness some bug, like you could play this card while you had no mana?
yeah, I had 0 mana and could play as many cards as I wanted, also love Dungeon Mercenary. Awesome game, both of em :D
Thanks for the nice words 🙏
I'm not surprised there are bugs, because this is still a prototype. Before the first true release I will thoroughly test all interactions. If you have further details on how you did this, please give them to me; because - at first glance - I can't reproduce it.
Bug report (2021, july, 29):
1. Card Plague cannot be used on enemy, only on my own creatures.
2. When you have too many cards in hand, cannot see what the one in the most right does.
3. i'm not sure if it was intended, but creatures with Ranged, if they are in the bottom row and the top row is free, they move to it. Melee creatures on the other hand (without Ranged) stay in the bottom row forever
Hey Ulgrash, thanks for the report, very much appreciated 🙏
1. Indeed, that's a bug I will fix
2. I dont' understand. When there are many cards, the rightmost is the only one that is entirely visible. Did you mean the leftmost card? In any case, this should be mitigated by the card under the cursor to be shown in its entirety. See example: https://imgur.com/zPku7Oz.
3. Yes this is intended, although this is not explained yet (I want to add a "Fill the frontline!" fading text when this happens). This is to make Ranged cards less strong. This forces the player to protect these creatures by putting other creatures in the frontline (top row). If you don't, the Ranged creatures will move from the backline (bottom row) to the frontline when your turn begins (avoiding them to "camp"). What do you think of this mechanic?
2. right card not showing (even if mouse over, doesn't appear):
https://gyazo.com/a8b43f40ede2fa01a6f8ce97354ca099
3. I didn't like it because i had a melee unit protecting it, but the enemy killed it and my ranged unit would "fill the frontline". When my turn arrived i couldn't place a melee unit in front, and if i placed a melee unit behind it wouldn't advance when the ranged one died.
My opinion:
I think units should only increase score if there is no enemy on the same column. So melee units should attack ranged enemies in the back row if there is no one protecting them. I think the difference between ranged and melee should be that ranged can attack from the back row but that's all.
And i don't think ranged units should advance, meanwhile melee ones definitely should. What kind of archer runs towards the swordsman and what kind of swordsman doesn't chase the archers?
2. Got it 👍 Can you tell me: the operation system you are using? as well as the browser you use (Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)?
3. I see. I had planned to add "move" cards to move units around to mitigate this, but.. hum I don't know. Either I need to make these new cards clickable (so that you can choose in which direction the affected unit will move), or I need a lot of these cards (each one moving a unit in a specific direction). None of these two options for these tentative new cards is appealing.
What you suggest avoids the need for these "move" cards which is nice. I will think about the different options and come up with a change. Thanks for the suggestion 🙏
Windows 10, Chrome.
I have another suggestion, though this one would drastically change the current game. It could also break the balance.
Cards should somehow affect other columns.
For example: "ally on the right gets +1 atk while this is alive". Similar to the current "discipline" but for as long as it's alive. Things like this would make where you place cards even more important
Thanks for the report.
Yes I have such cards in the back of my mind. It's a bit more complex to implement because it makes the stats of a card depends on other cards, which is doable, but a bit more complex than Discipline. That is why I started with Discipline. As the decks grow, the kind of card that you describe will likely be introduced 👍
Regarding 1. what do you have when you hover on the Plague card like shown below. Is the green "target" rectangle showing the enemy's part? (like on my screenshot). Or is it showing your part (the one with blue backgrounds)?
It's the same as your image. But now i can't use it on neither the enemy or myself
I pushed a new version (31cfb5f) that should fix usage of Plague. Can you confirm?
It's working. But maybe you should change the text "all creatures". Some people could think their own creatures would also suffer damage
Thanks for the report.
I'm changing the text to All enemies lose 1 HP 👍
hmmm... i have NO idea at all of how to play this game
Yeah instructions are non-existant for the moment :-)
You should select "Single Player" then choose a team and click "Start". You arrive then in the "match" view. Then you should drag and drop cards from your hand (at the bottom) onto the blue spots. Once you're done, press "End Turn" for the game to resolve attacks and make the AI play (on the red spots)
When you hover on a card of your hand, it shows you where you can play it. When you hover on a card on the board, it shows which spots it attacks.
Feel free to comment here, I have updates ready but I'm not updating the itch version at every dev iteration yet.
everything u said i had already deduced. even without a tutorial/instructions i could deduce the basic. however it didn't work.
1- i now tried again, and realized i could play creatures on the bottom blue row. the top blue row wasn't "working". it seems if the card touches a square first, u can't place on another. to place a card on the top row u need to draw the card around the bottom row to "enter from the top".
2- not every turn i get a new card.
3- i never succeded in using the cards life and health. i did try using them on creatures that had suffered damage and intact creatures
4- my cards don't show a tooltip explaining what they do, unlike an image u posted. probably because u didn't upload the latest version. but without explanation of what a card does it's difficult to play
5- i might have found a bug. i clicked on "stack" during enemy turn and the button "back" doesn't work
6- does the game save?
7- when does a match end? specific number of turns? or when soemone reaches a certain score?
8- i don't understand what "stack" does
obs: played as human
Thanks for your feedback 🙏, I'll upload a new build next week (I'm implementing items right now and it's a bit of a mess, I need some days to have a publishable build) which will fix most of your observations (the current build is 2 months old 🤦♀️)
1. bug fixed in next build
2. maybe fixed in next build? will check it out
3. yes indeed it wasn't implemented at the time of the current build. Note that you can use it on damaged creatures and intact ones.
4. yes agreed, fixed in next build. I will also add a custom widget with documentation at some points.
5. yeah interactions (clicking on buttons) are a bit brittle if you click at unexpected times. I know I need to fix that. For the moment, don't click too much when it's the opponent's turn!
6. no the game doesn't save, it's a bit tricky to do for html games. Don't click that refresh button :-)
7. a match will end when a number of turns is reached, circa 7 I envision. But this is not done yet, the game rolls on forever.
8. "stack" is the list of cards from which your hand is refilled at the beginning of your turn. When the stack is empty, it is refilled with the "discarded" heap. The "discarded" heap is filled when creatures die.
I'll let you know when the new build is up. I'm unsure if you're notified of new versions? Maybe you are if you follow the game?
Hey ulgrash, I uploaded a new build. Let me know how it goes! Items are not yet completely finished, a creature's items will get discarded when the creature dies. This is not the final behavior: ultimately creatures will keep items they received. Hope you like this WIP version! ❤️
i tried it again. well, it's better than before, that's for sure. that being said, it's still lacking.
suggestions to improve:
1- currently, u just play every card u get at every turn. why? because there is no cost to play a card and when a creature dies, it will eventually go back to your hand. As a result, all the player has to decide is where to put each card. There should be more thinking in a card game
1.1- I think it would be better if there was a "mana" system. Different cards would have different costs, and every turn your mana goes back to full. If you did this, you could either make it so your mana stays the same the entire game OR similar to Hearthstone where players start with 1 mana and every turn their mana increases by 1
1.2- cards used would never go back to the player's hand. unless they used a "ressurect card" or something like that. For this to work, you would need bigger decks
2- if you want players to save their progress/decks, you could just show them a "text/code". the players would then save this text/code in their computers, and when they want to play they just put it inside the game so it knows where they stopped
3- i might have misunderstood, but it didn't show me the description for the cards.
4- i guess you should draw the same amount of cards every turn? until your deck is over. either 1 or 2 cards per turn probably
Thanks for the report 💯 I basically agree with everything you say.
Regarding used cards, I like having them going to the "Discarded" stack and then going to the "Stack" stack (the one from which cards are drawn), as in Slay the Spire. This may not have been obvious because the decks are small for the moment.
The point of the game is to maximize your score (which you augment when your cards attack and have no opponent in the corresponding column) much like in magic the gathering. There'll be deck building in the future, I'm working on it.
Added a devlog to show what I've been up to 😎 https://hgames.itch.io/pixel-card-wars/devlog/225841/how-gamedev-proceeds-hand-d...