Introduction
After finishing college and taking a break, I decided to follow my passion and start making games.
During that same time, I had been playing the card game Scoundrel with an old deck of cards and trying to beat it. That’s when I thought to myself, “I wish there was an easier way to shuffle this deck, distribute cards, and keep track of health!”
It then took two days for Mr. Links to remember that he could use Scoundrel as the base for the game he wanted to make :/
And that’s how I decided to transform the card game Scoundrel into a video game!
How I Decided to Make the Game
Prior to this project, my friend Robin had been talking a lot about Godot, so naturally I wanted to try it out. When I mentioned this project to her, she also said that Godot’s documentation was really good and that I should check it out.
I took that as a challenge and decided to add a rule to this project:
- No looking up YouTube tutorials — rely exclusively on Godot’s documentation, Reddit threads, and forums for this project.
(I would “break” the spirit of this rule on the first day of the project.)
The Process of Making the Game
Godot’s documentation has a 2D game tutorial that I used to learn the basics of the engine. Since Godot has a workflow similar to Unity, with nodes and scripts acting like components, I was able to build a basic skeleton of the game pretty quickly.
This included the core mechanics of the game:
- A deck of cards that places cards in 4 designated positions
- The ability to draw 3 more cards from the top of the deck after 3 cards have been used
- The ability to reshuffle the current 4 cards back into the deck
- The player defeats monster cards and loses HP
- The player can equip armor cards to reduce damage taken
- The player can heal using potion cards
- The player loses when the HP bar reaches 0
- The player wins after defeating all monster cards
Where I Stopped
I am not an art person!!
As I tried going for a pixel art aesthetic, I was once again reminded of my Achilles’ heel: art (of any kind). I currently struggle to create basic drawings and animate them properly.
While facing this brick wall, I decided to make this beta release of the game using free art assets from artists on itch.io:
- Clockwork Raven on itch.io for the Armor and Potion icons
- Arex_V on itch.io for the Tileset and Monsters
- Androx on itch.io for the HP Bars
- TimberwolfGames on itsch.io for the cards
This decision was also made so I could get feedback on the game from friends, family, and anyone interested, while giving myself time to improve as an artist and better understand Godot’s animation nodes.
Final Thoughts and Future Work
Even though it’s a simple game, I am absolutely loving this journey, and I’m confident that I can build something fun for people to enjoy.
As for the future of the project, I am currently bug hunting and fixing issues, while also working on animations and creating my own art. In the future, I also want to export the game to more platforms, such as macOS and Web, to make it available to as many people as possible.
At the moment, the main feedback I’m looking for is:
- Bug reports
- General gameplay feedback
- Suggestions for artistic direction and game feel
For example, a friend suggested adding a fade-to-black transition after losing a run, which I thought was a really cool idea.
If you want to help with the project, feel free to download the game and provide any kind of feedback:
https://github.com/Linkseyes/Scoundrel2d/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta
This is the end of my first blog post. I hope you didn’t find it too boring, and I’ll see you next time :P