I was commissioned by game designer Thomas Stavlo to prototype a multiplayer client for his deck-building game. The setting is steampunk-meets-Game of Thrones, wherein the player has taken to the air in a crystal-powered airship to defeat his or her rivals through either total domination or by scoring reputation from broadside hits and evading or deflecting blows from pretenders to the throne.
The complex game features made for a lot of fun engineering: turn based gameplay across a network; lots of animation; cards that, when played, produce special turns that require choices; support for more than two players; an AI that makes intelligent and personality-driven decisions based on imperfect information; a rich, interactive tutorial to teach players the basics of the game; a streaming assets system for remotely balancing cards without requiring manual client updates; and a card crafting system for combining cards together on a single piece of “cardboard”.
I built this demo on experience creating Sun and Moon. Unlike Sun and Moon, the Talvos client enforces game logic / flow and does not rely on players to know the game and to play in good faith. The uploaded demos for Windows and macOS still have some bugs, but it’s quite playable.
