Key Technical Contributions
Defining and Implementing Card "EffectSteps"
Rite of the Dealer is a roguelike deckbuilder. Naturally, the cards were a huge part of our development cycle. We decided to structure cards as a list of distinct "EffectSteps". I played a huge part in defining the necessary effects to support the card designs that we wanted to include.
I also implemented many of the effect steps that designers could use when implementing new cards! With these effect steps defined, creating new cards is as simple as creating a new ScriptableObject and configuring the correct EffectSteps.
Below is a basic "Deal 5 damage" card being defined in editor. This card only needs two effect steps! It first needs to "GetTargets" for the effect and then a "CombatEffectStep" to apply the damage to the chosen target.
UX/UI design and implementation
I was also an active member of the UX team. I helped prototype the layout and information hierarchy for many of our screens as well as implement the UI in engine.
I am individually responsible for 90+% of the UI in the game including: the main menu screen, options menu, compendiums, combat screen, cards in hand display, companion upgrade screen, and the map view. Much of the UI is still greyboxed for now as we have not yet done a UI art pass.
The vast majority of our UI was built using Unity UI Toolkit to allow us to quickly build structured UIs like the shop screen that can be seen below.
Text Replacement for Cards
An important aspect of digital card games is ensuring that cards always display enough information for players to understand the card's effect. Most cards in our game are somewhat dependent on the state of the game. For example, attack cards deal additional damage if the companion has strength, and certain cards have conditional effects.
Text replacement solves this problem by templatizing card descriptions and updating the descriptions as the game state changes. All of our cards are lists of effects that carry out the effect of the card. I implemented text replacement by creating a "calculation" workflow that could be run for any given card to output any necessary values for updating without running any parts of the effect workflows that modify game state.
Key Design Contributions
Companion, Enemy, & Card Designs
As the design team lead, I set goals and expectations for companion, enemy, and card designs. It is also my responsibility for changes being made on the design side are effectively documented and communicated with other teams. We have notion documents with all of the updated card pools, companions, and enemies.
For Rite of the Dealer, we had the difficult task of designing 15+ unique companions, each with their own set of abilities and card pools. We wanted each companion to have its own identity and fit into the larger companion ecosystem for exciting synergies.
The compendium that displays all of the cards currently in the game (there are almost 100!) can be seen below. This was another piece of UI that I implemented, and it is incredibly helpful for players to see all of the available card options!
Mechanics Evangelizing
As the project was getting spun up and we were onboarding new team members, it was my job to make sure we all had a shared vision of the gameplay loop. While the game is not 100% the same as it is presented in this early figma prototype, it has stayed remarkably close to our original vision for the game.
I worked with the mechanics team to define and iterate on our core gameplay loops. Once we had tested and agreed on our core loop, I built out this low-fidelity prototype to quickly and easily communicate the desired gameplay to the art, narrative, and UX teams.
What is GoFaceGames?
GoFaceGames is an independent studio that I cofounded with friends and peers. We all sought real game industry experience and wanted to put our game development experience to good use. We spent the first few months concepting and getting our ideas ready to share. We brought our idea to the Game Developers Conference and recruited a team of talented folk to make our first game, Rite of the Dealer, come to life. Our studio is now ~15 people and growing. We have dedicated art, narrative, mechanics, UX, and programming teams. If you are interested in our playable demo, there are mac and windows build links at the bottom of this page!
What is 'Rite of the Dealer'?
Rite of the Dealer is the first title to be produced by the GoFaceGames. Rite of the Dealer is an ethereal roguelike featuring a unique “multi-deckbuilding” system and evolvable creature companions. Below is a brief video of current gameplay!
Alpha Game Build
If you are interested in playing the current build of the game, visit our itch page: https://gofacegames.itch.io/signified! The password to access the builds is "bidoof".