At the beginning of 2018 we began to think about how we could bring our young fantasy world Silberheim to life in the form of a game. We quickly agreed that it should be a game that can interact with Silberheim on an ongoing basis. In other words, a game that not only depicts the characters and places from the first book, but that grows with the world and even adds to it in terms of content if necessary. Furthermore, it was important to us that this game (in the best case) is also physically playable, to offer sustainable values and real ownership - instead of just ephemeral licenses on digital assets. The last and most important criterion was that our game should also be complex, challenging and engaging. It should be aimed at players who still want to earn their achievements and love challenges. But then there was one criterion that we were not free to decide on: our resources. We started with only two programmers, we didn't have a lot of money and we didn't have an unlimited amount of time besides our daily obligations. Nevertheless, we had planned to complete a digital prototype of the game on our own, so that we could use it to test and optimize the actual game. Our choice finally fell on the creation of a trading card game.

Well-known trading card games include Magic The Gathering (MTG), Pokémon TCG, and Hearthstone, which exists only online. Many of us had already come into contact with these games, be it as children with Pokémon and MTG or later as gamers with Hearthstone. So the game principles of collectible card games were by no means foreign to us. Nevertheless, we naturally began to thoroughly examine the aforementioned games (and others). It was important for us not to develop the umpteenth copy of MTG or Hearthstone, but to break new ground and learn from the problems of our competitors. A very close connection to our history is a source of new approaches. The chance to develop a trading card game directly for physical and digital use is another.

In the course of our research, we found a lot of problems that we would like to avoid in our game. We would like to present a small selection of these problems and our approaches to solving them here, to give you an idea of what we have put emphasis on.

Too few parameters

Collectible card games thrive on change. With each new edition, more cards come on the market that players buy and add to their collection to build new and better decks. To keep the game experience exciting and varied, new game mechanics or new card parameters are developed from time to time. However, there are always problems with old cards. These were not originally intended for the new mechanics and often fit poorly or not at all into them.

We want to avoid this problem as long as possible by starting as complex as possible. The principle here is "rather have than need". However, this should in no way stand in the way of an easy game entry. Therefore we equip the first cards with numerous parameters (e.g. colors), but do not use them actively in the first editions and formats. If it becomes necessary later, however, we can switch on new mechanics on the basis of these parameters, which will then work automatically with all cards.

Worthless playing cards

It's always a nuisance to have a maximum of 1 or 2 usable cards in each booster pack and the rest of the cards are just stored somewhere catching dust. In our opinion you should be happy about every card in a booster. Of course, the current game meta and the rarity of a card means that some cards are always more desirable than others. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the supposedly less valuable cards are completely worthless or have no purpose.

This is where the aforementioned link to our fantasy story comes into play. We want to offer at least one game format that offers varied entertainment based on our lore. You can think of it as similar to an MMORPG, where you join a race or side and fight for them. Based on current events in our fantasy world, you need different cards in turn to complete certain events or tasks. Even supposedly weak cards suddenly become an important factor that justifies collecting them. This, by the way, is one of the reasons for the "Evolving" in the name of our game. Apart from that, there are many other things planned to make collecting and trading all our cards worthwhile.

Resource generation

In all trading card games you need resources (e.g. mana) to be able to play cards. These resources are often generated by extra cards that you have to draw and play (for free). In other games these resources are independent from cards and grow automatically over the rounds up to a certain maximum value. Decoupling resources from cards completely didn't seem to be a feasible way for us, though, because we want to have the resource factor for additional complexity in deckbuilding as well. However, it also doesn't promise much complexity if you simply have to include a certain amount of these resource cards in your deck to have a good chance of drawing the resources you need. We have therefore tried to find a good middle ground.

Our resource for playing cards is called battle morale. This battle morale is generated at the beginning of each turn and must be used up by the end of the turn. Unused battle morale expires and is not transferred to the next turn. In our game, each player has a fortress, which is a starting building that also carries the player's life points. If the fortress is broken, you have lost the game. The forts differ, however, both in their secondary abilities and in the amount of base combat morale they give. So, depending on my choice of stronghold, I get between 1 and 3 combat morale without having to have already played any more resource cards. Additionally, I can get up to two extra combat morale if I don't draw a card, or one extra combat morale if I draw only one card. In fact, in our game, you can draw one, two, or no cards. In this way, I can generate a basic income of combat morale relatively flexibly just by choosing my strongholds and through my behavior when drawing cards. On top of that, there are various building expansions that you can play and that generate additional combat morale every turn. This allows you to gradually expand your resource generation. However, these building expansions rarely exclusively give extra combat morale, but also enrich the player with specific buffs, actions or mechanics. Therefore, even the resource generation cards have multiple uses in our deck, which means that you can directly factor in these possibilities when building your deck, instead of just filling up 30% of your deck with "mana cards".