Curse of the Cards early access alpha notes

Curse of the Cards is now moving from idea to something close enough to put in players' hands.

The game is a card-based roguelike dungeon crawler planned for early access on iOS, Android, and Steam. The first public description is simple: swipe to move, use scrolls to control monsters, climb the staircase to reach the next floor, and find the exit on the final floor.

The twist is that monsters are not only threats. Spells can turn them into weapons, forcing them to kill each other, although some monsters resist being spellbound. That one mechanic opens up a lot of the design space: enemies, weapons, movement, and risk all start to overlap.

There is also a lot of production work happening around the game. The build already has 25 fully animated monsters. I am waiting on store review so the alpha can start, and the review process feels much slower than it used to.

This week I wrote a small automation script to upload builds to the Google Play alpha track and Apple TestFlight. That kind of tooling is not glamorous, but it changes how quickly you can test. When uploading a build is easy, it becomes much easier to send frequent updates to early players.

The map system is also taking shape. I figured out how to draw dashed squiggly lines in code, which means I no longer have to manually design every map path. Those paths can become procedurally generated instead. The implementation uses Cocos Creator's Graphics API, which is close enough to the HTML Canvas drawing model to make line, curve, and dash work manageable.

I hoped to launch the alpha earlier, but the usual game-development reality arrived: the work never really ends. The reassuring part is that the unknowns are shrinking. More of the remaining work is execution rather than invention.