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Show HN: Hearthstone-like card game builder for humans

44 points by KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cpeterso 10y ago
Looks interesting but it took me a minute to realize that you don't actually need to register to see the site's content. For some reason, the page ignores keyboard navigation (page down/up, arrow keys down/up, space bar) in Firefox (only) so, on my laptop, the page looks like it has no content except the register button. Also, the page uses a background image blur that is supported by Firefox and Chrome, but not IE or Edge.
- KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
  Thanks for letting me know. Will fix.
forbiddenlake 10y ago
Is there a guide somewhere? I haven't played Hearthstone.
- riffraff 10y ago
  it's a basic trading card game/collectible cards game, think magic, yu-gi-oh etc. Hearthstone is a simple version of it, with a lot of RNG thrown in for "casual gaming", and using the fact that it runs on computers only. I don't think the OP is specifically HS-like, just TCG/CCG.
  - demircancelebi 10y ago
    AFAIK, hearthstone works on iphones.
    - detaro 10y ago
      Which is a kind of computer, and thus can do all the things that are hard to do with physical cards.
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    There are non-rng mechanics that preclude physical cards too, like abilities modifying the stats on cards in your deck and hand.
    - riffraff 10y ago
      yes, sorry I wasn't clear that was what I meant.
  - Bombthecat 10y ago
    No trading in hearthstone. So, no tcg. Just cg.
cyberferret 10y ago
CloudFlare is reporting '521 - Site down?!?'. Possibly the HN 'hug of death'?
- user5994461 10y ago
  Definitely one more victim of its popularity. "Error 525 - SSL handshake failed" One day we should do some stats about site going down on HN. That would make a nice narrative for why engineering matters and running a site on your own home server ain't real business.
  - roblabla 10y ago
    Not everything needs to be real business... Solid infrastructure has an associated cost in both time and money that not everybody is willing to pay, especially for side-projects.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      Not everything is costly. For instance a wordpress.com is free and takes unlimited traffic but your own wordpress instance costs money and has limited traffic.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        You think wordpress.com has unlimited traffic? I doubt it would survive the front page of hacker news.
        jermaustin1 10y ago
        As a person who has front paged multiple times on HN, I can tell you my blog is self hosted WordPress on a $10/mo digital ocean droplet, and it has fared very well every single time, including almost 100k views in a single day. I'm pretty sure if my $10 stock instance can handle the traffic, WordPress.com can definitely.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jccooper 10y ago
So is there a Hearthstone-like card game builder for aliens? Robots? Replicants?
AdamSC1 10y ago
As someone who is currently building a card system in Unity I greatly appreciate the work that must have went into this project! While I realize it is pretty early in the project, since your audience is hobbyists and indie devs, a few questions spring to mind that I think are important but I couldn't find answers for yet: 1) What rights do creators have over their project vs the dulst team? (And if you decided not to continue support for the project do you have a policy to allow creators access to the code base to keep their games alive?) 2) It looks like you plan to monetize through the coin system which it seems can be earned in game but probably also have a purchase function. What kind of split are you thinking of for creators? 3) Will there be some sort of support for PVE style battles so that players don't need to wait in match-making? What I like: 1) It's great that you thought of a number of pre-defined special abilities/functions. Most card game templates are just raw battle by number. 2) It's clear you are trying to provide a ton of flexibility to the game creators not only in terms of their game, but the website, tooltip work etc. 3) It's really clever to allow users to suggest cards and then allow game creators to reward them for that. The community aspect of this will go a long way for some games. 4) You've added in help docs, wikis and forums for every games sub-site which will be very useful for making a more polished experience for end users. General Feedback: 1) The game chat bar is rather garish and at least on Chrome pops-up over the content. Even though it is see-through it makes me think something is broken. 2) The grey on grey on white theme of the admin panel makes it feel very cluttered and hard to discern where different options are. You may want to break that out with more spacing, coloration on the titles and a darker text font. 3) The current "Gameplay" tab for admins is pretty overwhelming with options. It seems like something that could either be split out into further menus, or at least have drop down toggles for each section. 4) You've done a great job at explaining most of the fields and allowing me to add in tool-tip explanations for players, however, there are still a few fields that are unclear. For example, on "Gameplay" secondary property I can add in my own tag such as 'Potato' but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to define what that property is or what it would do. There also isn't a list to reference for existing properties. 5) The "Quests" tab doesn't load in the admin panel. Not sure if that is just unfinished or if it is a bug. 6) When you hit the button to create a card (noted in Chrome) sometimes the creation screen flashes and the card is created before you can enter details. 7) The UI to click on cards to edit them is not intuitive given the pop-up. I kept hovering over the card and trying to click into the pop-up version of it to edit cards. 8) Also when the create/edit card overlay is up I can navigate to other pages by clicking them on the background but it doesn't result in the overlay being removed. 8) It seems once again I can add properties to a card, but even in the Wiki there isn't a list of what elements I can add. Even if I add in "Potato" and set it to "2" this won't have any game impact. 9) The rarity mechanic is kind of odd. You've got it on a 100 point scale which makes me think it is percentile, but even if a card doesn't appear 99% of the time that may not end up being that rare? 10) It's also unclear from the wiki and help docs when a card 'drops' and rarity is used. The wiki mentions manually designing packs and says that they may break the rarity mechanic and make cards too common. In the packs menu you can only assign a cost, level, graphic and name to the packs, and in the card editing list you can't seem to assign cards to a pack so I assume that rarity is what is used here? There doesn't seem to be a way to define what rarity appears in what decks etc. 11) I like the board editor concept, but it is confusing as hell to open up and to move elements around. Even though you can create new elements, there doesn't seem to be a way to bind any code to them, so why not open this up as CSS for people to edit the layout of pre-defined elements instead?
darkstar999 10y ago
So this really only builds a game exactly like Hearthstone? I was hoping it was more of a generic game builder.
- KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
  It is a generic game builder. Hearthstone is the first template that's available, but you are able to modify the rules to make any games you'd like. Check out the "rules" tab on the card list.

44 points by KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Looks interesting but it took me a minute to realize that you don't actually need to register to see the site's content. For some reason, the page ignores keyboard navigation (page down/up, arrow keys down/up, space bar) in Firefox (only) so, on my laptop, the page looks like it has no content except the register button. Also, the page uses a background image blur that is supported by Firefox and Chrome, but not IE or Edge.

KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
Thanks for letting me know. Will fix.

forbiddenlake 10y ago

Is there a guide somewhere? I haven't played Hearthstone.

riffraff 10y ago
it's a basic trading card game/collectible cards game, think magic, yu-gi-oh etc. Hearthstone is a simple version of it, with a lot of RNG thrown in for "casual gaming", and using the fact that it runs on computers only. I don't think the OP is specifically HS-like, just TCG/CCG.
- demircancelebi 10y ago
  AFAIK, hearthstone works on iphones.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Which is a kind of computer, and thus can do all the things that are hard to do with physical cards.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  There are non-rng mechanics that preclude physical cards too, like abilities modifying the stats on cards in your deck and hand.
  - riffraff 10y ago
    yes, sorry I wasn't clear that was what I meant.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  No trading in hearthstone. So, no tcg. Just cg.

cyberferret 10y ago

CloudFlare is reporting '521 - Site down?!?'. Possibly the HN 'hug of death'?

user5994461 10y ago
Definitely one more victim of its popularity. "Error 525 - SSL handshake failed" One day we should do some stats about site going down on HN. That would make a nice narrative for why engineering matters and running a site on your own home server ain't real business.
- roblabla 10y ago
  Not everything needs to be real business... Solid infrastructure has an associated cost in both time and money that not everybody is willing to pay, especially for side-projects.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Not everything is costly. For instance a wordpress.com is free and takes unlimited traffic but your own wordpress instance costs money and has limited traffic.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      You think wordpress.com has unlimited traffic? I doubt it would survive the front page of hacker news.
      - jermaustin1 10y ago
        As a person who has front paged multiple times on HN, I can tell you my blog is self hosted WordPress on a $10/mo digital ocean droplet, and it has fared very well every single time, including almost 100k views in a single day. I'm pretty sure if my $10 stock instance can handle the traffic, WordPress.com can definitely.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jccooper 10y ago

So is there a Hearthstone-like card game builder for aliens? Robots? Replicants?

AdamSC1 10y ago

As someone who is currently building a card system in Unity I greatly appreciate the work that must have went into this project! While I realize it is pretty early in the project, since your audience is hobbyists and indie devs, a few questions spring to mind that I think are important but I couldn't find answers for yet: 1) What rights do creators have over their project vs the dulst team? (And if you decided not to continue support for the project do you have a policy to allow creators access to the code base to keep their games alive?) 2) It looks like you plan to monetize through the coin system which it seems can be earned in game but probably also have a purchase function. What kind of split are you thinking of for creators? 3) Will there be some sort of support for PVE style battles so that players don't need to wait in match-making? What I like: 1) It's great that you thought of a number of pre-defined special abilities/functions. Most card game templates are just raw battle by number. 2) It's clear you are trying to provide a ton of flexibility to the game creators not only in terms of their game, but the website, tooltip work etc. 3) It's really clever to allow users to suggest cards and then allow game creators to reward them for that. The community aspect of this will go a long way for some games. 4) You've added in help docs, wikis and forums for every games sub-site which will be very useful for making a more polished experience for end users. General Feedback: 1) The game chat bar is rather garish and at least on Chrome pops-up over the content. Even though it is see-through it makes me think something is broken. 2) The grey on grey on white theme of the admin panel makes it feel very cluttered and hard to discern where different options are. You may want to break that out with more spacing, coloration on the titles and a darker text font. 3) The current "Gameplay" tab for admins is pretty overwhelming with options. It seems like something that could either be split out into further menus, or at least have drop down toggles for each section. 4) You've done a great job at explaining most of the fields and allowing me to add in tool-tip explanations for players, however, there are still a few fields that are unclear. For example, on "Gameplay" secondary property I can add in my own tag such as 'Potato' but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to define what that property is or what it would do. There also isn't a list to reference for existing properties. 5) The "Quests" tab doesn't load in the admin panel. Not sure if that is just unfinished or if it is a bug. 6) When you hit the button to create a card (noted in Chrome) sometimes the creation screen flashes and the card is created before you can enter details. 7) The UI to click on cards to edit them is not intuitive given the pop-up. I kept hovering over the card and trying to click into the pop-up version of it to edit cards. 8) Also when the create/edit card overlay is up I can navigate to other pages by clicking them on the background but it doesn't result in the overlay being removed. 8) It seems once again I can add properties to a card, but even in the Wiki there isn't a list of what elements I can add. Even if I add in "Potato" and set it to "2" this won't have any game impact. 9) The rarity mechanic is kind of odd. You've got it on a 100 point scale which makes me think it is percentile, but even if a card doesn't appear 99% of the time that may not end up being that rare? 10) It's also unclear from the wiki and help docs when a card 'drops' and rarity is used. The wiki mentions manually designing packs and says that they may break the rarity mechanic and make cards too common. In the packs menu you can only assign a cost, level, graphic and name to the packs, and in the card editing list you can't seem to assign cards to a pack so I assume that rarity is what is used here? There doesn't seem to be a way to define what rarity appears in what decks etc. 11) I like the board editor concept, but it is confusing as hell to open up and to move elements around. Even though you can create new elements, there doesn't seem to be a way to bind any code to them, so why not open this up as CSS for people to edit the layout of pre-defined elements instead?

darkstar999 10y ago

So this really only builds a game exactly like Hearthstone? I was hoping it was more of a generic game builder.

KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
It is a generic game builder. Hearthstone is the first template that's available, but you are able to modify the rules to make any games you'd like. Check out the "rules" tab on the card list.