Medium: Physical Card Game | Project Type: Personal Project | Development Time: 1 Year

Example Game State:

 About Chaos Casters

Chaos Casters is a game Daniel Olleman created over the course of a year. The game is a card based dueling game. In Chaos Casters players take turns adding cards to a stack which then resolves in the reverse order that cards were put on it. This gives the game a very reactionary nature and encourages planning several turns in advance as well as requiring the ability to predict and bluff your opponent.

Unlike all Daniel’s other projects, this game was a personal project over the course of a year. Daniel designed and iterated on all the cards and the games rules. The graphics used as illustrations can all be found on game-icons.net. Several programs were used to maintain and design the game which include: Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Nandeck. The other major contributor’s to the project would be my play testers who helped me find and address many issues.

Design Goals

The game had numerous design goals. The original and most fundamental goal for the game in its simplest form was: to make a TCG like game that at its lowest level of play felt like a fast high level game of Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh. Another goal of the game was to give player’s a high level of control over what cards went into their hand without allowing players to just search their deck for whatever card they wanted. To add to the ever growing list of goals that this game had: the game was to inhibit players from hogging turns and allow both players to play the game equally. In addition, the game was to have restricted amounts of text on the cards. This goal was to prevent players from getting stuck reading frustrating amounts of card text. Finally, I wanted the game to be played on a stack. That is I wanted the game to be played where the first card played in the round would be the last card to resolve. This would make sequencing a very important part of the game. This goal was very important to me because I thought it would facilitate the first fundamental goal of the game. Not all of these design goals were met, there were many others that existed that are not listed here because they had to be dropped at some point as well.

Reflection

I learned so much from this game and project. I think the biggest lesson though I learned was to not design for the sake of designing. Chaos Casters was built on numerous well designed systems that each in isolation was good. What I did not spend enough time on until the very end was designing the game to embody a certain experience. I had a core design goal that honestly got lost frequently in all the other less important design goals. The take away I got from this was to know the core experience that I wanted to deliver and to stay focused on that core experience.