v0.2.1 || Gui readability

Summary

This update focuses on improving the readability of the card GUI. Few new features are added. With these changes it's now much easier to understand cards, and there are less graphical bugs like text extending outside of the cards boundaries. This has needed to be done for quite some time, the initial descriptions were very unreadable, and often relied on me using my game engines editor to properly see things. This improvement should make it easier for other people to use the program, and make it faster for me to develop the project further.

When making the new card GUI I've looked at cards from ALOT of different card games for ideas: Terraforming mars, Ark Nova, Dominion, Ascension and Magic the gathering. I will probably change it more in the future, but right now it's good enough.

I've added some AI generated art, provided by magicstudio.com, for most of the images. As long as the game is a sort of prototype I think this is okay. Since it enables easy generation of art with little effort. Right now speed and being lightweight is more important than details and polish. If the project reaches a more mature state I will make sure to either make the art myself, or outsource it. 

New content & features

• Adds ai generated images for most cards. The aim is to have real art later, but for this prototype the ai generation used is good enough, and saves a lot of time.
• Right click zoom. When a card is right clicked it will be displayed in fullscreen, to easily be able to read cards with a lot of text.
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• Added new triggers for card destruction and discarding. This enables card that can react on these events.
• Added new trigger for when resource changes. This means that the Death card can be triggered when the life reached 0, instead of needing to check each turn.
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• Added setting for hiding log window. The log window is only needed for debugging, and most people might not look at it at all.

Before and after comparison

Example of how the card GUI looked before:

Example of how the card GUI looks now:

Future

I was previously considering adding animations and transitions in this release as well. The purpose of those animations would partly be to increase understandability, something which this GUI update already does sufficiently. Because of that I've decided that the animations can wait until later. They will be important at some time, but are not crucial now.

Instead; looking ahead I still think that a release around deck management or adding more dynamic card functionalities would be a good next step.

"Deck management" would as written in previous devlog enable more kinds of decks, and enable me to work with multiple cards decks in parallel. The user would be able to chose a deck at the start of each game run. It would also open up for a feature where I make it possible for users to define there own cards/decks through their own .json templates. But that would need to be it's own release: "User generated cards/decks".

With the "Dynamic cards & decks" I'm party thinking about mechanism where cards can create new cards. Or systems where more powerful cards can be unlocked in the market, or in the encounter system. These would change the number of cards available to the player during runtime, which could make each run more unique. Maybe make cards that can eb upgraded?

Recently I've also been playing with the idea of a "Story progression" release. This project was originally inspired by "The lost expedition", which is a board/card game with a jungle exploration theme. I think I could create a system where the game progresses through a couple of "stages", where victory is achieved at the end of the last stage. Similar to how defeat/victory is handled in a game like Arkham Horror the card game. But this potential system is far in the future.