StudioKlondike

[Background Blog] Nekojishi: Lin & Partners - Argument Cards

Added 2024-04-04 12:59:01 +0000 UTC

Hey Patrons,

Compymono here, this month I wanted to share some of the design work we’ve been working on for Lin & Partners!

For some background, in the game there are real-time card battles called Debates. In these Debates, players use Argument Cards to deal damage to their opponent. While overall this is still a work in progress, there’s some cool design work we’ve been working on for it.

Argument Cards

Argument Cards the attacks the player uses during battle. The designs for these have been through a few iterations during development and the various Debate prototypes.

The current iteration and some of the drafts from my design files can be seen below. The primary goal was condensing the information as much as possible while reducing how much the player needs to think to understand that information. (i.e. managing the player’s cognitive load)

For a quick rundown, an Argument Card contains the following information:

Trick power
Effect power
Charge time
Element

While there’s a lot more I could talk about regarding the Debate system, today I'll focus on the card elements.

Elements

In early designs each card had a unique graphic and effect, but that got too complex in practice. The current design has six elements, each with their own type of effect.

義 : Justice (Attack) | Red
廉 : Integrity (Defence) | Blue
德 : Virtue (Healing) | Yellow
恥 : Fervour (Status / DOT) | Green
禮 : Order (Buff/Debuff) | Purple
道 : Spirit (Time Effect) | Special

After deciding upon the elements, I worked with Totemmo to design the element icons.

Each icon went through a few revisions as we needed to ensure they’d remain legible on the corner of the cards at 720p (Handheld Switch screen resolution)

The plum blossom design for Virtue went through lots of tweaking for this reason!

Above are the finished card layouts for each element! While it’s inevitable that tweaks will be made from here on out, I’m happy with how the card designs panned out!