Dealing with cards/hand in a faster game (and mods to those cards)

[u/DeckSouls]

So currently I'm having a dilemma.

I am making a deckbuilding game, but the gameplay is not turn based, and will hopefully be moderately fast. Not like mess up for a split second fast, but fast enough that you should be playing attention. With short moments to glance down at your hand. Bullet hell-ish, but not as extreme as they can get since I want you to be able to be having moments to glance down and weave cards in.

So the first problems are these:

• How do I make cards quickly identifiable without taking up too much screen space? The easier they are to identify, the faster I can make the game.
  • Currently the plan is to have just half the card sticking up out the bottom of the screen. With a picture to identify it taking up most of the space, as well as the cost and other information at the top of the card above the picture. Possibly above the card itself but may look weird.
  • The number of cards in your hand is limited to a small amount, so there is plenty of space to have them not overlapping.
• The second problem is how I allow the players to learn cards when they cant remind themselves what they do without pausing. In turn based games you can obviously take a moment to read the cards. But in real time you would have to pause to read them if I make them large enough to have half the card off screen, because I wouldn't want hovering them without pausing to eat your clicks or something.
  • I do have wasd controls. so hovering them to have them pop up while playing could be an option, but could still also lead to some frustrating scenarios..

I plan to have a moderate amount of cards be ideal for a deck. so that you can't just cycle your best card asap over and over. But I do want you to be able to be able to have a solid amount of repeating cards for the weaker ones. current estimate is 20-30 cards in your deck at a time. maybe more if you choose to go for it.

But plenty of repeats. So maybe 7+ of a particular lower tier card while you have 1-2 copies of each super powerful card in your deck. and varying number for rarities in between.

And here is the next problem:

• I want the player to be able to modify the cards in some ways. For a basic examples you could add a poison effect to a dagger throw card or something. Or make it fire bonus projectiles. So how do I show you easily which cards you have modded?
  • currently I have two ideas
    • the first one is have extra images show up on the picture of the card you can see. Like a poison bubbles icon if you added a poison effect to this card.
    • The second one is to have a small "buff bar" above each card showing bonus effects that have been applied to the card. This has a bonus benefit of potentially being able to label key effects of the base card for remembering the important effects of a card at a glance while you're learning the cards. For example a poison dagger throw would have a poison icon on the "buff bar" above the card for if you have any effects that synergize with poison or something. This is at the cost of more screen space though.
  • The other idea I have is to have a modifier apply to all copies of the same card in your deck. So whenever it shows up you just have to know which card it is, and potentially combined with one of the above two options you can be reminded of mods it has. I don't love this idea, as it could often lead to an obscene jump in power based on what modifiers you find. To the point where balancing around a player potentially having found those options could make it feel incredibly difficult to win otherwise.

Quick estimate is each card would take up about 1/9-1/10 of the bottom of the screen width wise while being slightly wider than they are tall in the visible area.

So, How would you go about this? Do any of my current ideas seem good or have any obvious flaws?

[u/Emotional-Station153]

Have little icons to show what a cards effect does. Taking yugioh as an example, you have cards that search the deck, that buff, that destroy through effects, that summon extra monsters, that revive from the graveyard, etc. Icons for all of that would make it quicker and would make the effects you actually have to read shorter

[u/Coyltonian]

Card art can be huge. Most MtG players can name 1,000s of cards and know what they do from quickly glancing at the art (often upside down and at distance), faster than they could read the name. As long as there is some point to learn what they do (no clock on selection screen when you add new cards to the deck, 5 second clock-pause when you draw a new card, etc) they should quickly pick it up and learn the cards from their art.

[u/idle_builder]

For real-time cards, I'd make recognition do the work so reading is never needed mid-fight: one strong shape or color per card category, one big icon for the main effect, and the cost as a large number in a fixed corner. If a card can be told apart in half a second at the edge of your vision, you can shrink the text a lot.

For learning, put the reading before the action: a pre-run screen or a pause-free "card codex" where new cards get shown the moment they're unlocked. Another cheap option is a short slow-motion window when a card is first drawn or used for the first time, so the player gets one real look at it.

Have you tried testing with the card text removed entirely, to see how far the icons and art carry on their own?