Hi! After seeing the positive feedback from my visual novel, kinda got that confidence to show an idea I have.
So this will be a card game where the ingredients are cards and you have to make pastries for a princess. (again, work in progress + im not really a story guy but im workin on it.)
and there are different kind of ingredients i had in mind like Basic flour which doesnt add to the final pastry, Fermented Flour where it has a chance to have a sour flavor, or like different types of sweeteners like Powdered Sugar, Rock Sugar, Maple Syrup or more.
and even more synergies like mixing molten sugar with maple syrup can make Golden Caramel or smth. AGAIN im just yappin.
What i got so far is a working card drag thing and card slots, and the deck isnt currently functioning. I picked up Godot like 2 days ago and still learning the ropes.
I’d like to know what people think of this idea? I am HEAVILY inspired by a card game that involves jokers.
5 Likes
Maybe try and add either a Delivery service in which the ingredients either got jumbled in the mail (causing you to gain random ingredients with which you have to use to cook for the princess); have the service deliver ingredients from around town in a swift manner (maybe the princess’s royal delivery service). Or you could have it where you gain ingredients in a dungeon or something in order to feed the princess. Other than that, for ingredients, try and look at dessert/fatty food recipes and see what kind of fun spin you can give them. Joker cards can be either a rare ingredient or a buffer for the quality of the ingredients (assuming that each pastry you make gives you a certain amount of points; and if the game is the one I think your talking about, maybe certain pastries can work as certain card sets. If so, you could have it so that making pastries give more points could be getting better recipes for the dishes and or upgrading your oven/other things. Jokers in this game could also be special ingredients related to certain ingredients which boosts them when in close proximity). I hope these suggestions/ideas are helpful (I read the last part halfway through the post)
My initial thoughts are that in Balatro, the jokers exist as a scaffolding to make regular poker seem explosive, but Balatro still fundamentally needs the regular poker for the jokers to play off of and provide context to them. If you want to follow that blueprint, what is the base game that the player would be fiddling with in the absence of passives? Going off your verbal sketch, it would be some sort of activity where they combine ingredients into a pastry, but this seems like it would matter a lot for the design of the passives, since, going back to the analogy, Balatro never stops being some variant of poker, it simply becomes more insane as the player fills the joker slots. What role do the passives play, then, and what are they? How extreme should alterations to play from passives be?
I do like the idea, but I do feel like those questions are important for knowing how the game will feel. Also, props for using Godot. I feel a little less alone every time I see another post about a game made in it.
i was just thinking of like synergies, im still brainstorming but im thinking: mixing 2-3 cards will make a unique synergy, like in Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories, then you plate the pastry, then i guess id add like numerical values to each ingredient? I really do like want to make something like balatro but im trying put my own spin to it.
Also I really just started on Godot and so far it’s alright, still learning but i feel like the deck part + plays and other features will be a challenge.
I can’t help but wonder if Ticket to Ride’s card system is a more workable base to riff from. You receive Recipes/Orders either at random from a deck or based on current scenario, and you have access to a deck full of Ingredients. The first (arbitrary number) of cards from the top of the deck are revealed to the players, and each turn, they may take a certain number of cards from the revealed ones or a certain amount drawn blindly from the deck.
Recipes are worth a certain amount of score when completed, and you complete Recipes by using the Ingredients listed on the Recipe. Theoretically, you can make it so Recipes merely ask for a “generic” Ingredient (i.e., your Basic Flour), but you can swap in any more specialized form of it that has interesting effects or synergies (say, Golden Flour or some such, which adds an extra +2 score to the completed Recipe for every generic Egg or Butter Ingredient the Recipe calls for, or Heirloom Flour, which would simply be a +5 to the score of the completed Recipe). I think there’s some interesting design space, here.
