Gambit is a mobile card collection game with fast paced real-time battles. The goal was to create a mobile-first CCG that was quicker than Hearthstone but deeper than Clash Royale. With a small skunkworks team at Big Fish Games’ Oakland studio, I led Gambit from concept through a harried development cycle to an Early Access launch in Feb 2019 with earned featuring on both Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Gameplay Overview
Collecting Cards: Cards come in five different rarities and are collected by opening packs, each containing five random cards. Cards from packs have a 10% chance of being Wild Cards, which can be used to craft any card of the specified rarity. If a player collects 10 duplicates of the same card, those duplicates are traded for a wild card at the next tier of rarity e.g. 10 duplicates of the same Common card create an Uncommon Wild Card.
Building Decks: Decks are constructed by choosing two of the six factions, then selecting 10 unique cards from among those factions or the factionless neutral cards. Unit cards have a mana cost, attack, health, and sometimes a special ability, while Spell cards have a mana cost and a one-time effect.
Battling: During a battle, each player first draws a hand of four cards from their respective decks, then they play cards by spending mana that generates over time. When a card is played, it goes onto the bottom of the deck and the player draws a new card. Unit cards may be played in one of four lanes, starting a timer after which the units in that lane attack each other or attack the other player if they’re unopposed. The first player to reduce their opponent from 30 health to 0 wins the battle!
Design Highlights
Battle Design Constraints: As a mobile-first game, gameplay in Gambit had to be tolerant of up to one full second of latency while battles had a hard maximum of 4 minutes. Within these constraints, I had the goal of making battles feel more strategic than twitchy and never locking the player out of playing a card. A number of techniques were used to that end:
- Knockback timers
- Animation compression
- Global cooldown
Cycling/Transforming Cards: Clash Royale’s cycling decks are pretty novel, but I think they stopped short of exploring some of the interesting things can could be done with them.
Novel Crafting Economy: While we were inspired by the cycling deck concept from Clash Royale, I didn’t want card upgrading in Gambit. Since we also were only launching with 100 cards and we needed total collection time to take 6+ months, this introduced a problem: players were going to get a lot of low-value duplicates. So how do we keep card collecting compelling?
My answer was the duplicates-to-wild-card system described above. While it took some extra work to explain the system, players didn’t have any complaints about it, despite it taking 10,000 Commons to get a Legendary. A neat side effect is that it made every card feel like a tiny progress bar: opening a Common becomes kinda exciting again if it’s your 10th one!