Project information

  • Technology: Unity
  • Genre: Card Game
  • Year: 2021
  • ETD: 1 week v2020
  • 1 week v2021



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Dragon Crossing - about the importance of limitation (game design process)

It begins with a blank page. An infinite possibility of creation. It requires a hero. The hero should have villains to fight. And vehicles to ride. And time travel between 1800 and 2020 so it’s also a historic game where you can ride horses. And while we’re at it, let’s add jetpack capabilities and aliens that come from… and we’ve just created the perfect stew boiled at a very moderate fire cooked by a chef whose culinary abilities you can only doubt.

It’s a story I’ve been hearing way to often on beginner boards and forums. People who just dipped their toe in game development and have this “great” idea – truly the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. And it’s not just for those who just began, it’s a very general trap for experienced designers too. The game just catches on a life of its own, people throw ideas from every direction and a little speck of dust becomes an avalanche. But what if your time-travel, alternate-dimension, all-inclusive version of GTA had to be built without any of the tools available to us today? What would there still be left?

As such, I was recently enrolled in a game design course. That started at 2 AM. On another continent. Targeted at children…

The task was to create a card game. The tools – I could as well imagine were non-existent. All I could consider was a pen and some paper out of which I would have to make a game – with the true definition and characteristics of the game. Taking aside all the horses, and aliens, and time travel – or in my case, the Unity engine and a jumping square – my possibilities felt suddenly limited. This is where I learned what I now call one of the most important lessons – DESIGN WITHIN LIMITATIONS.

Fire. Water. Thunder.

Having a passion for Pokemon and being caught in one of the games at the time, I decided to start with a similar mechanic. Truly, I believe the rock-paper-scissors to be such a simple and elegant mechanic, and if used right it can also be turned into a full-blown multibillion franchise.

Rock, paper, and scissor are a bit blunt. I could have just made some pieces of paper with those words written on them (not even images!) and the game would be done. We have an early version of the game that was done under 1 minute, now let’s dress it up a bit, we still have some time. If I were to borrow from my inspirational game, I would use some elements like water, fire, grass, electric – stuff you find in nature. Let’s take a look in nature, and take 3 elements from there – elements that would dress up nicely the rock, the paper, and the scissor. Does it matter which is which? No, it’s all circular anyway, so whichever you want. However, there is something else to be learned here – about what the player knows and what he expects – but that’s another lesson for another experiment.

Dressing it up even further, I placed those elements on dragons and immediately my game turned into fantasy. Add castles – medieval fantasy. Add an imaginary board, aa objective, a strict set of rules and you have all the basic ingredients for a game to function. If three dragons sound too boring, add a rainbow dragon and a shadow dragon with special abilities. And if the game has success, create some expansion packs with more dragons and more players.

And one day it might just turn out into that time-travel, alien-probing, sword-fighting, whatever you want. But for now, you can only create a game that can be COMPLETELY explained in only 10 words. Which are they? (rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock, HEY!)

Previous version (2020)

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