This past week, I’ve been working by my lonesome on a digital trading card game.
This game has a modern twist where players are the ones who actually create the cards.
i.e., the game provides a list of possible things that a single card can have, and the player provides the card effects, artwork, etc., which calculates to some amount of in-game currency in order to craft it.
The other twist here is that players are rewarded in-game currency for voting on which cards require certain changes, which cards need to be moved into another game mode, and even which cards should be banned from the game entirely.
All of these majority votes will then be reviewed by a “card moderator” who is either a staff member or a high-ranking, active player, collectively deciding on the outcome of the card(s) in question.
Of course, this is all very much still in the “theory/design” phase, but I’ve already begun production in some areas of the project.
If anyone has any good ideas to contribute to this project, or perhaps you might even wish to join, please feel free to contact me or reply to this post.
If all goes well, I eventually intend on making this a royalty-based paid project. But first, I need some more ground rules for a proper design.
Thanks!
Idea for making it, without making your own TCG basically.
There is room for a software that people can upload their own decks to without having to purchase online digital cards for, for testing decks or casual play with existing, popular games, such as … If it’s done well even though you probably can’t make money off it for that purpose, you could most likely sell or license the engine to a TCG company looking for an online card game.
Well just because I won’t be providing all of the artwork, doesn’t mean I’m not making the game.
I’ve already done some of the artwork myself, at least for use as temporary prototypes.
And I’ve written a good amount of boilerplate code in C++, and made some minor engine source tweaks to better support this kind of project.
I’m just trying not to write too much code before having a more solid foundation of design.
From past experience in other team-based projects, I find that doing so only leads to redesign and rewriting of code.
As far as legalities are involved…
I imagine that some sort of protection would need to be enforced in order to legally make this profitable.
Like when uploading your artwork, it would obviously have to be tasteful/appropriate, and perhaps display a legal disclaimer to the effect of “By hitting the submit button, I agree that I am the sole copyright holder for this artwork”.
And of course, I could also provide an easy option for 3rd party companies to request a certain image or card be taken down, possibly even refunding some in-game currency to the player who authored that card so that they can try again.
Or maybe the player could even choose between a small starter set of images, and in-game artists could add their artwork to this pool of images, allowing other players to buy that image with either real money or in-game currency, which would in turn reward the artist?
I believe there’s plenty of ways to make this work.