Hello, we are looking for a programmer to help with an unfinished indie project.
The game is JRPG inspired with deck-building, and we need a dev to finish the combat system before we can move on to any other features. We are hoping to find someone who has experience with turn-based combat and a cursory knowledge of competitive card games. The combat system partially working, but the programmer who worked on it initially is no longer available, so we need someone to expand and polish what’s there.
The mechanics are inspired by those seen in Yu-Gi-Oh and Persona, so if you’re familiar with either franchise, that would help a fair bit. We used a JRPG toolkit as a starting point, so we can send you the documentation to help reverse engineer what the first dev changed. We had written up a description of the project for the previous programmer, so I’ll post a section of it here to give you an idea of the project:
“This will be a general breakdown of the systems, not everything is implemented yet, and some of it works differently currently because it’s how the template worked. As with other TCGs, you use monster and spell cards to reduce your opponent’s life to 0 in order to win. Each player is represented by a commander, which functions the same as a monster card, but if it is destroyed, you lose and has stats that determine things like starting hand size, how many cards you draw, how much mana you have, and other details along with their own effects. A notable change from Yu-Gi-Oh is that this game has a mana system, where you generate a set amount of mana each turn, and if you don’t use all your mana in a turn, it carries over to your next turn. You can place cards face down like in Yu-Gi-Oh, but since there’s a mana system, you have to pay 1 to first place it, then either pay the rest of the cards cost to flip it, or have the opponent or another card flip it by targeting it. Each side of the field has 8 slots for cards (not counting the commander) where monsters and spells can be played on. There is also 1 shared slot for ‘event’ cards, because only 1 can be played at a time.
Monsters work similarly to the ones in Yu-Gi-Oh, where they have stats, summon costs, types, and effects. Because of the mana system, summoning monsters is different, where each monster has 1 of 3 ways to summon, spend energy, tribute monsters on your side whose costs add up to the new monster’s cost, or meeting special criteria (i.e., having enough monsters of the same type, having a certain number of cards in your discard pile, etc.). Another major change is, instead of having 2 stats (ATK & DEF), they have 3 (ATK, DEF, and LIF), so they work like monsters in a JRPG, where you must drain their life with attacks, and they can block to reduce damage. Spells also use Yu-Gi-Oh as a base, where most either activate when used and go away, or sit on the field. Some also work like traps, or the secret cards from Hearthstone, where you place them face down, and they either get activated automatically, or you can trigger them yourself.
The biggest change from Yu-Gi-Oh is, instead of the ‘extra deck,’ our game has the ‘upgrade deck,’ where you have a secondary deck full of cards that act like equipment from a JRPG, which change the card’s stats and/or gives them new effects. Each upgrade card can only be equipped to a specific card.”
The material covered here is mostly the core mechanics that need to be completed first, other aspects of the combat system can be explored after these are working.
For the previous programmer, we used a milestone system for payment, and would like to use that going forward, but we are willing to use a different system if you would prefer to do so. If this project sounds appealing to you, then send us information on your availability, examples of previous projects, and rough estimates of cost.
