TCG by Equinox
for 9 months between October 2021 and June 2022
Team: 20 – including 5 game designers
Tools: Google Suite | Excel | InDesign
Skills: Gameplay design | Card design | Lore design
The starting point of Altered was to provide unique cards, generated via an algorithm that can be found in boosters. I joined the team when the project began and we didn't know how the game was going to be played at the time. So it was with this constraint in mind that we developed the game's core gameplay, taking into account other parameters such as the need to offer a game with a non-violent gameplay conveying the company's humanist values, or to be clearly distinguishable from Magic, the leader in the field to which many games tend to resemble.
Base card
Rare version
One of the unique versions
To bring unique cards to life, the key notion is to have enough possible variations so that the algorithm can generate a number of cards large enough to never run out of possibilities. For this reason, the cards have five numerical values that can be altered, in addition to an effect that can be broken down into several lines and attributes. In this way, variations increase exponentially for each modifiable parameter.
As for non-violence, I conducted a benchmark on two-player opposition games, which were perceived positively and didn't seem to emphasize a sense of confrontation. What this study helped me to understand was that we needed a neutral material that could be used to measure players' progression. By shifting the win condition to an object that doesn't belong to any player, we no longer play to beat the opponent, but to complete the shared objective. In the final game, this objective is represented by expeditions that players must lead by playing cards on them.
It wasn't easy to find solutions to all these constraints. I sometimes observed inconsistencies between different elements, such as being accessible and at the same time proposing something unique and with a lot of numerical values on the cards. But often the solution lies in acting methodically, deconstructing one's certainties to find a new way of doing things, prioritizing the areas that seem most important. It's this aspect of the project that I'm most proud of today, the way the game has evolved from its constraints to become something quite unique in the TCG sphere.
Card design
Once the core gameplay is defined, the next step in the production of a card game is to produce the said cards. I spent some time on this at the end of my time at Equinox, making a few decks for the different factions to test their respective mechanics. I also made cards throughout my work, in particular basic cards to test core gameplay elements. Unfortunately, I can't show the cards I designed: they're internal documents.
To make cards, we used Excel with a workflow allowing us to extract the cards in .csv format and convert the data into cards with InDesign. I helped improve this process by making adjustments to our spreadsheet to save time exporting and ensure a good final rendering within InDesign.
I've learned a lot about card design, thanks in particular to online resources and content such as the articles by Mark Rosewater, Magic's lead designer, who documents his work on their site and gives many useful tips.
Some cards from the game
Another more secondary task I've been given is to take part in the development of the game's lore. Specifically, I researched and prepared documents for the lore designer, to give him some basic material to work from. The main documents I produced were classifications of themes by faction and research on popular tropes around famous and beloved characters in pop culture.
But my work on lore doesn't really stop there. In the design of a card game, the medium used is cards. For this reason, gameplay design and card design must necessarily go hand in hand with the game's lore.
Let's take Kitsune for example. This card represents a young girl lost in the forest. To express this idea, we take into account the core gameplay and during card design we assign 0 to her in the first leaf statistic, which corresponds to the forest biome. I didn't make this card myself, but I hope this example shows how my work on the lore went alongside what I did on the other elements mentioned above.
