Cards

Description

A game within a game, Cards is a WildStar themed take on the Final Fantasy 8 classic card game, Triple Triad. Play against your opponent taking turns to place cards on a 3x3 board, as you attempt to capture their cards while preventing them from capturing yours, while building your card collection of over 160 cards of various rarities and strengths. Build your collection by challenging and defeating opponents to card battles, or just get out there and lay waste to the creatures of Nexus in the hopes they drop some loot!

The main goal of creating this addon is for me to practice lua, while also - if there's demand for minigames from the players - hopefully showing Carbine this (imagine how much better WildStar could be if things like this were built into the game proper, as it would allow much greater integration with the economy, for things like rewards, trading and so forth), and give people something to do while waiting on dungeon queues or for raids.

Note that as I play exile, my knowledge of the Dominion side of things is sketchy at best, so if I've got anything wrong (this applies anywhere) or you feel the Dominion would be better represented by other NPCs, please let me know.

Features

• Collect over 160 cards, each themed after the WildStar universe.
• Battle NPC opponents on a 3x3 grid using a deck of 5 cards each.
• Collect cards by either defeating opponents, or from killing enemies within WildStar itself (or even from harvesting).
• Browse your card collection, showing what you've collected so far, and giving hints as to what still remains to be found.
• Various statistics are tracked and can be viewed.

Known Issues

• I managed to get into a situation once where the CPU player could play 3 cards before my turn, but haven't reproduced this yet. Once I can figure it out, I'll fix it.
• Some cards need improvement (specifically, defensive protocol unit, the ship I don't know the official name of - if anyone knows the name of it, please let me know - and all class cards);
• Probably many bugs remaining to be found! Hopefully bugs aren't as collectable as the cards are.

Future Development

• A lot more polish (sounds, animations, bugfixes);
• Additional rulesets (elemental, same, plus, open,  etc. as per FF8);
• Sudden death to make stalemate rematches quicker and more interesting (play again with the cards you flipped rather than your original deck);
• Possibly more cards (I have to be a bit careful here as the addon memory usage and time to build collection is already quite high, and it's hard to resist the urge to put in 1000 cards covering everything I can think of);Make battles more lively (players will offer some light banter, get annoyed or congratulate you on a game well played);
• Better AI (currently the is dumb as bricks, and simply plays the best move it can with no regard to counterplays, or leaving weak sides exposed; I want to improve this so that it can look ahead and pre-empt your plays and try to counter those too);
• Ability to view other players' collections;
• Ability to view other players' stats;
• Ability to challenge other players to a game (since I know people will ask for it eventually);
• Obfuscating the saved data to make it harder to cheat (note that it will never be possible to prevent cheating, but if I can make it trickier, it's a start);
• Improved looting (currently looting is random with quality determining drop rate. I want this to work so if you for example want a chua card, then you should find some chua to kill);
• Ability to challenge almost any (friendly) NPC in the open world. Want to try your luck versus Queen Myala? Find her, and issue your challenge (I'm still not sure if this is technically possible though);
• Games rules region-based (as in FF8), for example playing while in Algoroc may use Open, while in Galeras, the rules are Same and Plus;
• Some sort of acknowledment for completing the collection (the best idea I have currently is an alternate card back, possibly several for different percentages);
• Tasks (random mini-quests) to spread or abolish rules to different regions or gain rare cards;
• Eventually I want to turn this into a unique card game rather than simply using the features of triple triad, though this will likely be quite far in the future, if at all due to the design effort required;