Good morning friends, 

I am Arjun Gambhir and I am the lead designer of this wonderful project named Card Garden. I have the absolute pleasure to be working with an amazing team of eleven students headed our most incredible producer, Alex Figueroa. For more about the team and all of their fantastic achievements so far, she has written a production blog here. My focus in this blog will be more towards the design of the game and what it is like being a designer with a remarkable group of people. 

Before I begin, there's some context to myself, the team, and the project that I believe are relevant. All members of this team are CSUC students, mostly in their final year of education. We are making this game entirely remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and still getting to know each other in the process.  As for myself, I'm a recent transfer to the program and I take a more systems driven approach to game design.  

The core idea of Card Garden begins with taking a standard tower defense game and replacing the shop with a collectible  card game interface. However if we were to stop there, then I will have failed as a game designer. It is our goal to get there by the end of Sprint 2 so that we can demonstrate a functioning core gameplay loop. In deciding the order of features for development, the core gameplay loop became our guilding principle. Any feature that can be removed from the game and the game still be functional was postponed with a note that we are developing modularly with the intention of adding those features in the near future. 

Through the process of creating our paper prototype, we spent a lot of time discussing what makes for a good levels in our game. With diverse mechanics and several systems intertwining, we realized we first had to find what makes our game unique. It's not just the combination of genres as I had originally pitched. There aren't many tower defense card games out there, but I'd like to think if there were, the feature that makes our game stand out is our emphasis on building persistence throughout levels. Card Garden features elements of base-building in the game in that each level is being treated as a Lair for the player and each Lair contains a series of encounters. Traditional tower defense games move quickly between levels and traditional card games reset the game between each session. It is our goal to have this level of permanence impact the player's decision making skills and testing both their strategical thinking and reactionary impulses throughout a Lair.

Furthermore, we are pulling an ability to express oneself strategically from card game designs and wish to allow for multiple viable strategies whose synergies are promoted through card design. In addition to the features required to achieve that, more on those in a future blog, I believe this will require an emphasis on numerical tuning and game balancing. It is a personal goal for me to reach these phases in the game design process as they are often skipped in student projects where development of core features take on a greater percentage of resources. I hope that we can achieve our goals by using modular tile systems for level design and a deep numerical system that promotes synergies and specialization in our gameplay components such as cards and minions. 

Finally, I would like to address the hardest part of being a lead and a designer for me. That aspect is doubt. There is a lot of impostor syndrome here as I came into this class applying for the programmer and producer roles. While my career goals are to become a game designer, recent learning opportunities, or failures, had me doubting my own capabilities and seeking a back up role. In other classes and projects, I have been used to wearing multiple hats in game development and thinking from every perspective except art. It has been hard to remind myself that my main role on this project is game designer. I feel guilty when I'm not programming or helping with producer duties, but at the  same time I've got excellent teammates in those roles and they need me more as a designer. I'm also worried about not learning from the mistakes of prior teams and my own prior experiences. I fear that I'm not good enough to work with such great people or that I don't deserve to be in this position. I fret that I won't be able to find the line between compromise and ambition. That I might be put in a position where I might have to compromise my own values and that I might not be able to do so for the betterment of the group. 

For anyone that needs to read this, as I know did and still do, I suppose all that I can offer you is that it is okay to feel this way. It is a part of the process. And if you are fortunate enough to be blessed with an amazing group of people for your team, cherish the moment and take solace in that they have enough faith in you to work on the game of your own design. Knowing this is the most incredible feeling in the world and I will do anything I can to preserve it. 

Next sprint, I hope to be able to break down the systems as we have designed them and to really focus in on how they help us achieve the feelings we want for our players in design. 

Arrivederci,
Arjun Gambhir
Game Designer