I've gone through a bit of a paradigm shift as I've actually thought about what I want to do. The TCG I've been working on, Soulcross, is going to be put on the shelf for a bit. Long story short, I want that game to be as good as I can make it, but I need experience for that.

I feel like I need to get a good partner with the same level of passion for this project. I'm not good at keeping on task by myself. 😔

I'm very willing to utilize mechanics and concepts from other tcgs that I feel fit the core themes of my game, but one thing I don't want to do is use the basic 5 MTG colors, but as I sit here struggling to make one of my colors coherent, using them is sounding so good. 😔

A while back, I joined a homemade tcg discord server to talk with others and get a bit of advice, but I'm not the most social in public places (hence my rare posting here), so I was AFK there a bit. I noticed recently that it's no longer in my server list. They must have kicked me.

Miraculously, in a half-asleep state, I came up with a name for the game that I'm vibing with: Soulcross TCG.

So I knew this would be a slow process since I have zero game development experience, but man, I feel like working on this solo is dragging it out a lot. I altered my design philosophy for the beginning in a way that'll hopefully be faster to create ideas, but I don't think it'll be that noticeable.

It is definitely much easier to come up with the core concept of a deck's mechanics and what the "boss" monster does than to come up with all the supporting effects of everything else in the deck.

I finished the first prototype deck and I'm now starting on the second before starting to test them against each other. Both decks will be somewhat mid range styles, so we'll be able to see how good the game feels with actual card effects.

I think the hardest part of making the initial decks is making things just the right power level. I don't want everything to start too high powered, but I don't want to start with DM era Yugioh power level.

I was finally able to playtest with my design partner, and while we were still using the mainly vanilla cards, having someone who manages resources differently than me a well as utilizing an updated version of the combat rules made the vanillas feel much better, before we make real deck designs.

I've made my core rules and put together half sized decks of mainly effectless cards to test the basic rules, but I realized that doesn't actually work. I intend to be a little more liberal with resources like Yugioh, Buddyfight, etc compared to MTG, so vanilla cards isn't a proper representation.

My intention is for my TCG to be a type of spiritual successor to Future Card Buddyfight. I genuinely loved that game and want to play it, but none of my friends are really interested in getting into a dead game for valid reasons. So Buddyfight will be a major influence alongside things like Yugioh.

I'm currently working on creating my own homemade TCG. I've got a few reasons why I'm doing this.
1) I've got an idea for a "card game anime" story that I don't want to be a yugioh AU
2) I've got a specific TCG itch I want scratched
3) I really like TCGs and think it could be fun

Well, trying to work with people on my projects is basically just talking to a void privately, so why not, I'll try talking to a void publicly. We'll see what happens.