#2: Terracards: This Game's Primary Inspiration

As I have previously mentioned, the main inspiration for this game is TerraCards. It is a deckbuilding-farming-roguelike available on steam among other places. I don't intend to just clone or reskin Terracards. There are definitive changes I plan to make.

Here is a basic outline of Terracards gameplay:

• Start with one island and a small set of cards
• Cards are fully consumed on use, placing a crop or animal or building etc.
• Crop yield is sold at the end of your turn for currency.
• Most units multiply their yield if certain conditions are met
• The goal is to keep making enough currency to outpace the growing tax amount that triggers every x days.
• Units you place can feed into one another to make 'better' yields such as fulfilling the recipe for a chocolate bar.
• Units demand but also produce a mixture of water, electricity, which is an additional element of the game that needs managing.
• New cards are aquired periodically at a store in exchange for currency
• You can buy new islands at any time for an increasing cost

There is also a wacky nature to the units, featuring electric sheep and fuel-peanut-cows.

What do I like about Terracards?
Terracards is very easy to get into. Everything you initially place makes sense. Wheat needs water, produces wheat. Wheat in a mill produces flour. Cow eats wheat, produces milk. Milk in a pasterizer creates pasturized milk. Even when the units enter fiction, they are mostly intuitive: Water tree provides / helps with water. Giant carrot produces a bunch of carrots. Fuel-peanuts turn into fuel instead of peanut butter. The pattern of aquiring cards and placing units is obvious and sees immeidate benefit in the money you gain.

The strategy is fun to figure out. Managing the resources is an engaging challenge. If you run out of water or money the game ends. If you run out of electricity or fuel, units that depend on them will stop functioning which drastically harms your output. Placing units in ways to minimise their cost is an important part of the game's strategy. Trying new builds out and prioritising different cards provides replayability.

It's addictive. It has that 'just one more turn' feeling where you don't want to put it down because in one turn you get to buy some new cards. Oh but now I just need to resolve 3 more turns to place them all. Oh but now  I get to buy some cards again, and oh this part of my strategy is about to come online. Oh I lost, ah but now I have a new idea of how to build in the future let's start again. When my friend first showed it to me at a party I was instantly distracted from the other going-ons and had to be pulled away. Even when the game gets boring - as I will touch on in a sec, it is still very hard to stop playing.

What would I change?
I want to preface this section with the note that the game is great and I thoroughly enjoy it. My points below are not in critisicm of the game. e.g. Terracards only lightly uses deckbuilding elements and there is nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly valid choice which works well.

Buuut that IS my first point of change. In Terracards after you work through the initial bunch of cards you start with, you mostly place cards as soon as you buy them. Sometimes the store offers you 8 cards in one package so it takes a couple of turns to get through them but then they are gone and they don't come back. So for most of the game you are really just buying units to place - not buying 'cards'. You hardly have to deal with having a 'deck'. I am hoping to lean more into the style of Slay The Spire's deck management, where it really matters what is in your deck.
I plan to achieve this by having cards not dissapear on use - they will enter your discard and shuffle back into your draw. This means that a card you no longer need starts to block up your hand. To balance this I will need methods of removing cards - which in Slay the spire is the most valuable thing you can do at a store. My initial idea is just that you can burn one card per turn, but all of this will need extensive playtesting and balancing.

My second point of change is that Terracards starts to blur after turn 300, This is a generalisation. But I have found that if your build is working, it reaches a point around turn 300 where you will already easily outpace the oncoming taxes and everything you place kind of loses meaning. New units are still needed to enmable growth, but they don't feel impactful and the fuel water costs are easily covered by the existing set-up. I started to feel like I was continuing to play just for the sake of it - and for grinding achievements. Having a succesful build doesn't ruin future plays, as there are different builds to try and achievements to encourage that - such as using only one family of crop. This is a harder one to fix, but I am going to look at:

• Limiting the field of play - to reduce late game bloat. This introduces the problem of managing how the game reaches and end point or the player can free up used space - because otherwise after the space is filled there are not more player actions to take.
• Having the tax be more brutal / the game shorter. If achieving 500 turns in my game is the same as achieving 1000 in Terracards, in theory my game became less of a drag before hitting that milestone
• Having an 'win' condition - this is related to the above point. If the game can end, then bloat ad infinetum stops being an issue. Plenty of rogue-likes have ends (Slay the Spire) and they use new game + for their replayability. Plenty also have ends that you can ignore in favour of looping (Risk of Rain), and some don't have ends (Terracards). I'm not 100% sure if I will have an end and what that will be. I originally thought of there being additional resources that you manafacture into ship parts to build a shuttle that takes you to the 'next area' (Rim World) but that would start to turn this into a factory game over a farming game. I could simply say that once you have reached turn x you have 'won' but you can continue to play, knowing itis not the intended experience. (Bloons Tower Defense).

I'm sure there are more points of difference than 3 but the last one I'll mention is the method / clarity of item processing. In Terracards crop yields are automatically sucked into a nearby structure (within that structure's range), and then the output of that structure will be similarly sucked into the next structure. 
Cocao beans > Melter > Crusher > Centrifuge > etc.
You can click on each structure to block certain inputs from being sucked into it, allowing you control over what goes where. This system is easy to use - other than placing down the structure no other actions need to be taken. However late-game it can become a confusing mess of trying to figure out why your recipe isn't being fulfilled - and it's becaues a somewhere along the path an item is being diverted to the wrong place. The animation of where yields are being processed is fast and hard to track to identify the problem in the chain.
I want to replace the 'block x input from this structure' method with a toggleable overlay that shows arrows directing you through the chain of processing, and allowing you to move the arrows around. This is probably going to be a pain to code but I hope the increase in clarity will be worth it.

That wraps up this discussion on my inspiration. Other than Terracards, I am influenced by additional games like Slay the Spire as mentioned above. I'm really hoping to create a new and original product here, but I am scared of feature creep so I may need to keep reigning things in and bring them back to being closer to the base of Terracards if I want to actually release this thing at one point.

Thanks for reading!