Game Prototype at Codeglue

Card game creation is a powerful tool for game design. Using playing cards, game designers can rapidly prototype and iteratively playtest a game’s core mechanisms to explore alternatives and improve the gameplay. However, this process is time-consuming, imprecise and hard to steer and focus. CardScript is an initiative to tackle these challenges with unified game design language and toolset.

DGA Field Lab. With a group of researchers and indie game developers, we have conducted an applied research project, a so-called Gaming Field Lab, to investigate how to create such a toolset. More information is available here: https://cardgamedesign.github.io.

Current and Future Work. We are continually looking for opportunities to continue this work, e.g., together with game developers, research partners and students.

Card Game Design Tool [2]

Acknowledgements. A special thanks goes to Karel Millenaar (FourceLabs), the originator of the card game design project, who continues to be the best possible Game Design Envoy. In addition, we thank Jori Kamp (Codeglue) and the participants of the workshops on card game design for their collaboration, input and feedback.

References

  1. Andrea van den Hooff. “Researching Hanabi with CardScript: Analysing the rules of collaborative card games”. Master’s thesis. University of Amsterdam, Dec. 2019
  2. Midas Buitink. “Card Game Toolkit: Het Verbeteren van de WorkDow in de Initiële Ontwerpfase van een Kaartspel”. Bachelor’s Thesis. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, 2020
  3. Riemer van Rozen, Anders Bouwer, and Karel Millenaar. “Towards a Unified Language for Card Game Design”. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 2023. DOI: 10.1145/3582437.3587185
  4. Maxim Petrov. “Towards an Integrated Toolkit for Card Game Design”. Bachelor’s Thesis. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, 2023