Vortex

Vortex is a dark, procedural take on Hearthstone.

Yet another prototype for my long term project, Bestiarium. I originally started to develop it for #procjam 2018, but couldn't finish during that week. Since the theme of  #procjam 2019 is Heritage, I used the dark arts of code necromancy to polish and wrap it up.

Special thanks to my good friend @thia9uera for the help with the UI, all the artists who made their neat 3d PBR assets available via Sketchfab, the godfather of all indie soundtracks, Incompetech, and especially to my Hearthstone-addicted wife for not only putting up with me doing yet another game jam, but also testing and helping me improve the AI opponent.

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INSTRUCTIONS:

TL;DR: Play the Hearthstone tutorial (it's a free game and way better than this one).

Longer version:

If you've never played Hearthstone, it might be a bit cryptic.

Basically: select a deck style (one of the paintings), discard the cards you don't want until you finish collecting 30 cards for your deck. 

When you start the game: 

1. You're on the bottom of the screen, your opponent on the top
2. There are Minion cards and Spell cards (the round ones). Cards cost mana to be cast. Minions can be cast on the board and have an attack (indicated by the sword and shield) and health point (indicated by heart) values.
3. Your mana is on the right side of your portrait. You get 1 point per turn, indicated by the small spheres. Your mana replenishes at every turn.
4. You can click and drag Cards towards the board to cast them. They will use the mana indicated by the top left corner. After you run out of mana, click "End Turn" on the right side of the screen.
5. Your minions can only attack on the turn after they're cast. Minions that are ready to attack are indicated by a glow around them. To attack, click on the minion and drag towards the target. Minions marked as "Protector" (indicated by having a shield around them) need to be attacked before you can attack anything else. Minions can only attack once per turn.
6. To win, you must make the opponent's HP reach 0. To attack the opponent, target the portrait in the middle of the board, opposite to you.

Hopefully this and the UX helps!

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CC art by:

• al0sral0
• FlukierJupiter
• Jamie McFarlane
• Ole Gunnar Isager
• Font: Yeseva One
• "Ghost Processional" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
• License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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v0.3 (16/11/2019):

• Balancing improvements
• Improvements in AI
• Squashed some bugs, promoted some to features

v0.2 (15/11/2019):

• Slight tweaks in balancing
• New card naming engine