Is my game having a flawed pattern?
I have been working on this game for 3 years now, but I'm worried of the core design being actually flawed in several ways.
It's a solo adventure CCG with some unique mechanisms, adding depth, but maybe not so well adjusted.
Here is how the game is played:
- Several campaigns with a linear path (sequence of enemies to beat)
- New cards are received through play, and permanently added to collection
Each enemy encounter plays like this:
- you pick a deck, including 3 heroes and 20 starting cards + 20 archived cards
- resources: you start with 2 crystals (hearthstone-like, used to play items). Your heroes each have 3 skills, that can be magical (water, fire, air, earth) or neutral (explore, combat).
- a hero can play an action card by spending the related skills. Items spend crystals from the team pool.
- each heroes adds a custom quest in your deck, and you can handpick some more if needed.
- Quests are the way to gain more crystals, allowing to unlock more costly cards from the archives. To advance a quest and get the reward, the player must either spend some combination of skills indicated by the card, or hit the quest with an attack. Quests have 2-3 steps each giving rewards immediatly.
- Each turn, discard your hand and draw 5 new cards
A typical game is: land your quests -> play cards/hit monster to advance them -> unlock item -> equip item on hero so they get more skill -> unlock more powerful spells from archives -> win
The trailer illustrates the flow: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4644230/Triad_Elemental_Saga/
I'm worried about:
- many cards to play each turn: might need to chose between advancing quest (ramp) vs optimizing the direct output of your cards (aggro).
- it's pretty complex overall: 3 heroes to manage, each having it's pool of skills that can be used to play cards + crystals shared by the team + items. No minions though.
- there is a good sense of progress each game, but since state is not kept between games, there is no real sense of RPG (like in some roguelites)
- the deckbuilding is hard: need to have a nice item curve, understand what quests to use for the gameplan. Changing a card from the deck also affects the capacity to complete quests, since they depend on its cost.
In short, I feel like there is a lot of cross-dependencies, which I thought was cool initially, but now I'm afraid it's too complex.
I feel like I tried pretty hard to reduce the complexity of this design while not killing the core essence, and I'm wondering if this kind of pattern is flawed.
Note: playtesters that were experimented with TCG did like the game. Newbies to TCG found it overwhelming in majority.