Malcolm McDonough
Overview
My Responsibilities
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Defining the vision of the game, designing core game mechanics around that vision, and providing clear, concise documentation of that vision;
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Creating, documenting, and balancing card, enemy, and boss designs;
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Regularly updating design documentation to ensure effective, consistent communication of ideas across the team;
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Implementing cards;
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Collaborating with artists, sound designers, and composers to produce cohesive visuals and audio;
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Testing new prototypes to preserve the cohesion and consistency throughout the game.
Cardificer is a roguelike deck-builder/dungeon-crawler with real-time combat and an original card-combining mechanic called Chording. The game is designed to encourage players to experiment with the game’s systems and devise their own strategies for taking on the dungeon. Our goal with this game was to make players feel like a wizard crafting their own unique spells. We achieved this by building systems that allowed players to combine cards like building blocks to create new spells, encouraging experimentation and enabling players to develop creative strategies using the cards in their deck.
I served as the project’s primary designer, focusing on gameplay and systems design. My responsibilities centered on designing Cardificer's core gameplay systems like player movement, deck-building, and card-playing systems, the game's cards, and the game's central card fusion mechanic, Chording. I also provided support on programming tasks related to implementation, particularly through maintaining up-to-date documentation of the game’s design on the project’s wiki. Cardificer was developed by a team of roughly 15 active developers and I have been involved in the project since its conception.​
Design
In Cardificer, players maintain a deck of cards, each of which correspond to different attacks or “spells”. The player keeps four of these cards in their hand at any time and can select and fire them to cast the spell on the card. Players navigate through a procedurally-generated dungeon made up of pre-constructed rooms, fighting enemies, gathering cards, and defeating bosses to reach the end of the game. Combat is done in real-time rather than a turn-based format typical to a card game, so players must be able to quickly decide their moves.
Cardificer also has a unique mechanic called Chording. Chording lets players select up to two cards at once from their hand and play both simultaneously as a “chorded” spell, the first card being the spells base and the second applying a unique modifier that can drastically alter a spell’s nature. These can be effects like causing a spell to apply a burning status effect, letting it move through walls, or causing it to spawn bombs when it hits an enemy.
Mana Bullet + Fireball (adds burning status)
Mana Bullet + Spectral Arrow (pass through walls)
Mana Bullet + Bomb (spawn bomb)
Design Highlight – Cards
Cards are the main way in which the player interacts with the game and are what every other aspect of Cardificer, from enemies to bosses to dungeon generation, is built around. The Card system is central to Cardificer’s design because it is the main way players are able to express their creativity, which is the primary focus of the game’s design. I was responsible for designing the card system and everything in Cardificer that directly interacts with it. I also created all 55 cards in the game as well as their chord effects.
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I imagine the cards are like LEGOs. When you’re playing with LEGOs, it’s a lot more fun to get a bin full of all different kinds of bricks rather than a bin full of a bunch of the same brick in different colors. So, to make sure I was giving players the best set of LEGOs to play with, I wanted to make sure the cards were all distinct from each other in some major way. By giving players a wide range of different spells, the difference between different chords becomes much wider, making it a lot more interesting to experiment with chording different cards together. Additionally, having cards be distinct means that a much wider range of strategies can emerge from them, making the game extremely replayable. Experienced players will be able to develop a sense for which cards would fit best into their deck, just like an experienced LEGO builder knows what bricks they need for a build, while newer players will be able to experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t through trial and error.
Cards are organized into 12 elements which all share some behavioral trend or theme. For example, cards of the Cold element all are themed around ice and snow and each apply the freeze status effect, while cards of the Steel element are all themed around weapons like swords or shields and mostly are short ranged attacks with strong offensive or defensive capabilities. Elements originally existed to help solve the blank page problem, but turned out to be a useful source of information for players when they saw a card for the first time, as the element of a card wound up being a helpful indicator of the aspects of cards that don't come out of just reading a name and short description.
Card Demo Reel
This video contains a demonstration of each card and it's chord effect.
Design Highlight – Chording
With Chording, I wanted to make chorded spells feel powerful and satisfying without chording uniformly increasing the power of every card. After all, if players had no incentive to chord cards together, they wouldn't bother doing it, and that means they won't be experiencing the sense creativity the game is designed to evoke. For the most part, chord effects are useful, but when used with certain cards they can be either useless or directly harmful to the player or the spell itself. Other chord effects are more situational and won’t be useful unless used in the right circumstances. This all works together to help chording spells make players feel like they're experimenting much in the same way a scientist might in a lab. I’ve included some examples below to help illustrate this.
Bolt of Light + Bomb – Bomb's chord effect creates a bomb each time a projectile is destroyed. This makes it more powerful with spells that have several projectiles.
Slash + Explosion – Explosion's chord effect makes attacks explode when they hit something. Since Slash is short range, this causes the player to get caught in the resulting explosion.
Slash + Spectral Arrow – Spectral Arrow's chord effect lets projectiles move through walls. Slash is a melee attack, though, so it doesn't really need to move through walls to hit enemies.
Judgement + Polymorph – Polymorph's chord effect turns things into rats, but will double any rats it tries to polymorph. With a spell like Judgement that has lots of projectiles, things can quickly get out of hand.
Poison Blade + Plague Cloud (left) / Slash + Plague Cloud (right): Plague Cloud will increase the number of stacks of poison on an attack based on how many stacks it starts with. Since Poison Blade starts with poison on it, the effect is much stronger on Poison Blade than on Slash.
Design Highlight – Bosses
Cardificer’s bosses are each designed to pose a challenge to the player at the end of each floor that sets the bar for the difficulty of the floor that comes after. I designed all of the bosses on paper before handing them off to one of the team’s programmers to implement and collaborated with that programmer to ensure the nuances of their designs made it into their in-game forms.
There are four bosses in Cardificer, one for each floor, with the first three being inspired by cards from TCGs the team and I have played before, and the final boss being the titular Cardificer. Each one is oriented towards a bullet hell-style boss fight, with attacks having clear telegraphs and set or clear attack patterns that are dodgeable once a player has learned them. Bosses also provide clear opportunities for players to attack without lowering the intensity of the fight.