First off, I want to say this is the first dev log for a rougelike deckbuilding game in the early stages of development. I am going to talk about Dark Souls and fighting games for a moment, but this game isn't really anything like those.
I've always been interested in the way games like Dark Souls reward players for learning an enemies patterns, or the way fighting game players study frame data to learn what is safe and what can be punished. They're both about timing, about knowing how long moves take. Can you fit in an attack while the ogre raises their club and still dodge in time? When do you have to start blocking to deflect your opponents fireball?
I was curious if you could replicate that sort of feeling in a physical game. It seemed like an interesting challenge to take a mechanic inherently based on precise timing and move it to a medium where that kind of exact measurement isn't really possible.
So I got some cardstock and markers and made some little cards
I call them cards, but I don't think you'd recognize them as such - they're all different sizes, and they look more like a timeline cut to pieces than anything else. Which of course is what they are.
The game worked, but the amount of manual tracking needed made it a little unwieldy. I packed it up and wrote it off as something to learn from.
A few months later I got the urge to do some hobby programming, which I hadn't done outside of work for a few years. While trying to think of a project I came across my old cards, and decided to try programming an automated version of the game.
The game worked a lot better, and after showing it to a few friends I was surprised by how engaged they got. It was just a single demo fight (the same one available now), and there wasn't much replayability, but the puzzle element of trying to line up your cards just right to dodge a hit or sneak an attack in between blocks seemed to interest people.
I had enjoyed creating it, and already had a bunch of ideas for more varied cards in my head. I decided to continue working on it, and to start recording my thoughts in dev logs like this one.
So that brings us to now! The game is currently in development, although at a hobbyists pace. I already have some more cards added into a dev version and a way to add them to your deck, so hopefully I'll be able to push that soon.
If you're interested and want to see what comes next, I'd love to have you follow along! You can also play the demo fight on my itch.io page here: Isochronalgames.itch.io
Otherwise, thanks for your time!
