In this post, I will be introducing you to the enemy and item cards in Umbra and give a general rundown of the anatomy of the cards. First up are the enemy cards. All enemy cards will have two different enemies on it through having a day side enemy on the front and a night side enemy on the back, with each side giving a similar but still unique combat experience. Typically, the night sides are a bit stronger, as seen below with the Cruxfly and Wraith. The top left of the card indicates whether it's the day or night side, the text underneath the art portrait determines what the enemy type is, and then it has a text box that gives some of the mechanical keywords of that enemy. The bottom left of the card shows how many dice the enemy uses and what color those dice are, represented by colored diamonds. So, the Cruxfly for instance uses 1 Brown Die, while the Wraith will use 1 Orange Die. The bottom right of the card then shows how much health the enemy starts with, so the Cruxfly starts with 3 and the Wraith starts with 1.
Next are the item cards. These cards represent the various tools the players can equip during the game. For this, we will be going over the Handaxe item. Similarly to how the enemy type is given underneath the portrait, here the item type is given, which is "One-Handed," meaning the item can be equipped with one other "One-Handed" item. It then gives the mechanics of the weapon in the textbox below, indicating that the Handaxe has an ability that can be activated to damage enemies. Beneath that are three blank circles. These circles are upgrade slots for the weapon, which are marked in with an "X" when it is upgraded. This makes the game something that will be permanently altered as players progress through it, gradually altering the items over time and forever improving that item's usefulness and value.
[UPDATE] As of 2022, this project is going on an indefinite hiatus. I came to the decision that the project had an amount of structural issues that I wasn't sure how best to address, so I may revisit it in the future. For now though, many of the mechanics I found that worked best in this game will be featured in a similar game I'm working on called BOGATYR, which I will hopefully be able to share more about in the future.
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