Update - This game is now complete, check it out here!

Hello! My name is Numeron and holy moly, this is my 12th 7DRL challenge!

I'm working on Kingdom Cards, a deck-building roguelike where you must rally troops to fight for your cause as you progress through the game. Each unit is a card with it's own attack, health and ability. As cards are drawn, the one at the front of your hand is used as the attacker, while the one second in will take all the damage, so hopefully that leads to some hard tactical decisions!
Here is a nearly end-of-day one screenshot:

Numeron is in the house!

Some progress for day 2: The deck/cards are now mostly functional, rather than a cosmetic UI, and it's possible to collect new units by talking to them. The story parts are all mostly done, along with the static over world. I originally intended the whole game to be in the over world, but I didn't have much in the way of interesting tiles for a different zones beyond a purple re-color of the trees and grass...

That said, I'm making heavy use of Pita's tiles, I highly recommend them!

Anyway! Adding cap to the team:

Oh no! the blight has made it all the way to the capital!

Map generation done for 2 of 3 zones! I just need to add content to the rooms of all buildings, but that can be done all at once at the end, because all 3 zones will share this functionality... I also dusted off a level generator previewer I wrote back in 2014 for Helllspace and was surprised to find it wasn't completely borked! That helped speed up work a lot, since I can actually see the whole map, and cycle generations quickly.

Every year for this challenge I take the week off work to give it 100%, and this yeah is no exception. No way I could get this much done without it.

Update forest road, with more variety and details:

The city, overtaken by blight it's all very samey, but hopefully room details will fix that:

Level previewer at work:

A very creepy final boss arena:

Today, among other things, I finished room interiors for the whole map, linked in all the required events and triggers to win/lose, made screens for each state and also a kick-ass title screen. Here is a sample of rooms for the forest road - the bar looks particularly cool IMO. Like an old timey wine cellar.

And here is that kick-ass title screen:

If you look closely you'll see all four of them are a bastardization of the space marine portraits from my previous 7DRL Hellspace. It's so good having as much artwork built up as I do now, I can mash things together really quickly out of the repository of old stuff.

Today I added the remaining friendly units, enemy spawns and began testing the feel of combat. Verdict was: way too confusing. Having your health and attack spread across two units made it really difficult to keep track of a) how dangerous it is to be hit, and b) how hard you hit back, which makes risk assessment hard. At their core, roguelikes are all about risk assessment so this won't do.

Today was a mad scramble to combine the two roles into one, so now only one card is in affect at once. You now *are* the card at the front of your hand, which means you know exactly what your abilities and health are. Since the focus is now a singular unit this also makes other odd feeling parts of the UI go away. For example, I previously always colored the attacker card blue and defender silver to try to make it easier at a glance what role each card was currently playing. In practice it was confusing because it was hard to track individual cards through your hand when they change appearance. Additionally, playing with only one role also means I can change the player's current image on the map so you don't have to keep looking down at the hand to know what your status is. Since your hand cycles every 6 turns, this is extra helpful.

Speaking of cylcing, I added bars to the right of the current card, so that you can see how long you have left before it discards. I also figured this would be a good "currency" to use in place of mana for abilities. This way a mage doesn't get 6 AOE attacks in a row, they get maybe 2 or some movement, depending on how the player approaches the situation.

I also added health potions because I discovered it's going to be impossible to balance without controlling a drop rate from enemies. Relying on the player finding new cards (which are actually friendly mobiles standing in the world, not droppables) in a pinch isn't feasable.

I only have one more day after today, so I'm panicking a bit - but I think we'll be fine...

this is such an interesting concept. Cant wait to play the finished version :)

Polish polish polish. The game is kind-of done, but I still have lots of balancing and bug-fixing and misc stuff to do. No screenshots today, the looming deadline is too stressful.