Card Theif Chest Time Continually Increasing

Reactive guards, chests and early card art

We been quiet for the last few weeks due to a small jam and other distractions but today we want to show you some new stuff we've been working on!

Reactive Guards
As you might have seen guards (all enemies that that can see the player in general) are the main danger of loosing a game in Card Thief. Once the player runs out of stealth he is vulnerable to being caught if a guard will see the thief while standing in the light. Each guard has a facing direction that defines which cards are visible to a guard and which side of the guard card itself is strong or weak against the thief. While approaching a guard from his backside is always a good idea, approaching him from the front is always a bad one. Especially when guards are illuminated they alarm other guards when they are played from the front side.

When a guard card is dealt they always start with their facing direction to the player, which makes it harder to get a path that is approaching from the back side. Each guard has a turning behavior that will trigger if the guard recognizes that an illuminated card left or right of his facing direction was played. This way you can actively influence a guard's facing direction an distract him to face away from you.

While this was possible before the change already it still was quite hard to align guards so you could easily sneak past them. Especially for guards that are facing up and occupying a slot on the bottom row, there was no way to ever distract them to the bottom for example. We've now added an additional mechanic that we call the follow behavior. Guards that are alerted or distracted by an adjacent card will try to move into that card's spot after it is removed. Here's how it works in action:

Guards that followed the player will also stay in this spot, stoping cards above them from dropping down. This way the game board changes more often and using advanced tactics to lure guards into disadvantages is really fun. This mechanic was originally intended only for wolfs but turned out to be a great mechanic for all „seeing" enemies.

Chests
We talked about chests before but here's a small summary: Chest are the main objective of each game and should be stolen to successfully complete a heist. This time different to Card Crawl the player has an active objective that needs to be accomplished to actually win a game. Only getting through the deck is not enough. In the previous version of the game chests worked like this: Once a certain amount of gold is stolen from treasure cards and guards the chests is dealt. Once picked up the chest occupies an inventory slot and can be carried out of the castle. While this worked on a basic level, there were several issues.
1. Thematically it does not make any sense why a chest spawn would relate to the amount of gold stolen.
2. After the chest has spawned the gold collected becomes meaningless and does not influence any further outcome of the game.
3. There is no way for the player to increase the value of a chest.
4. In addition to 3. there's also no incentive for the player to play more risky by picking up the chest later or earlier.

For the new chest mechanic we came up with the following idea:
What if the chest would become more valuable the longer it would stay on the game field?

This way we can remove the whole gold/chest relation and use gold as a separate scoring mechanism. We also give the player a super simple way to increase the chest's value by increasing it's number automatically after each turn. This also means that after each turn the chest becomes harder to pick up because the value is also the stealth needed to actually pick it up. We now spawn the chest after 50% of the deck is played, which thematically makes more sense and gives a feeling of finding the chest after some time. The player then can continue her game until the exit is found. She can actively decide when to pick up the chest or to leave it one more turn to squeeze out the extra value. In addition to that there's another incentive to play further even after the exit card has spawned to increase the chests value even a bit more.
This change was another really good design change that made the game way more interesting.

Early card art
In addition to the described design changes Mexer also was busy creating the first drafts for the upcoming card art. Here are a few excepts from what he is working on right now.

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Source: https://cardthiefgame.tumblr.com/post/141728908044/reactive-guards-chests-and-early-card-art