Happy Thanksgiving to folks in the US, and happy just-generally-being-November for everyone else!

We've been hard at work getting this update out. It ended up being huge again! Thanks to everyone in the MythAtelier Community discord for submitting a few extra bug reports and also helping hype up our progress. Special thanks to all who are supporting us on Patreon whose help has allowed us to dedicate more time to the project for such a big update.

New in Version 1.4.6

Bug fixes

• Discard image now shows up when Discard Pile contains 0 cards
• Card Library scene has been massively optimized. No more big frame drop when you first open it
• Card Library scene no longer refreshes when you scroll down a lot
• Fixed MZ plugin command support - plugin commands should now show up properly
• Fixed crash when selecting  Buttons after being prompted to Discard/Remove cards
• Fixed bug where PartyUI_A would crash in MZ at the start of battle

New Features

Now this is the part to get excited about!

• Added coordinate parameters for Card Name and Cost Text

People have been asking for this for a while, so it was finally time. Now you can change where your Name and Cost text are placed - keeping in mind that Cost is still right-justified.

• Added two Card Passives: Start of Turn and End of Turn

Now cards can do something just by virtue of being in your hand! Using this syntax in the skill notetag:

<Card Passives>
Start of Turn: Skill 6
End of Turn: Skill 7
</Card Passives>

You can make the card that has this notetag force the Actor that has this card in Hand to execute Skill 6 at the start of their turn and execute Skill 7 at the end of their turn. The skill they execute might do damage to enemies, or it might inflict damage to the holder of the card (in which case they'd want to get rid of it as soon as possible). That skill can even have Card Actions in it!

Originally I was planning on having these be Card Actions, but I think making them trigger an entire skill makes it easier to implement and allows for a lot more flexibility.

• Extra Buttons - Utility Plugin

If the Item button and the End Turn button aren't doing it for you and you need some more buttons on the screen that do their own thing, then Extra Buttons plugin is for you! Now you can fill the screen with buttons that each execute a skill (which itself can contain Card Actions).

If you wanted, you could even make an entire game out of buttons and ignore cards entirely. I... would not recommend this. But you can do it!

• Card Selection Window - Utility Plugin

With the new Card Selection Window, you can view the cards in an Actor's Deck and Discard. These appear as a horizontal reel of Cards and show the cards in order of Skill ID so the player's can't simply peek into the Deck and plan their future draws using the order.

This opens up a few possibilities in the future, but for now this plugin mostly allows you to take a peek at your deck/discard mid-battle to help you plan your turns better. What will it be able to do in the future? I make no promises at this time, but I have plans ...

• Showing Cards on Map - Utility Plugin

You know how you can use RPG Maker's Show Picture command to make a picture appear on the screen? For Card Attack KAIJU, we were originally doing that for cards - rendering cards into image files and showing those as Pictures. But when cards change, the images need to change, and that's a big hassle if you have say ... 100+ cards.

So I cut out the middle-man, and now you can show cards directly on the screen the same way you would Show Picture. Using plugin commands you can specify an angle of rotation, move them around like the cards move in battle, and get rid of them when you don't want them anymore. It has nearly every feature that Show Picture has.

This update added 3 entirely new plugins to the suite, doubling the number of CGC plugins! I'm trying to shift away from working on the Core plugin directly and toward sequestering certain features into their own plugins. It makes managing versions/updates a little harder, but it helps organize plugin parameters, and it allows devs to just ignore the plugins whose features they don't need for their project. Like, if you don't need any extra buttons, you can just ignore that plugin entirely.

What to look forward to

The next update Version 1.5.0 will be the last major version uploaded to itch.io. There will of course be bug fixes and compatibility updates, but any further additions will be made in the form of Patreon-exclusive features or entirely new plugins that extend CGC Core. Our current goal is to release v1.5.0 in January, giving us time to take our non-denominational Winter holiday at the end of December without worrying about big deadlines. Here are some of the features for Version 1.5.0:

• Improved Touch Input

Touch Input (as in using the mouse) works differently for MV and MZ users, but both have some bugs associated with them. MZ users have let us know that the "hover to select" system doesn't play very nicely with hitboxes particularly when you're moving your mouse from the right side to the left side of the hand, while feedback on Card Attack KAIJU alerted me about a specific issue with discarding/removing cards if you hold the mouse button down while your mouse is in certain positions. It's a very niche problem but it may be in both versions and if it's present in our game, it's present in your game. We don't want you to develop a game using our plugin for a year before playtesters complain about this sort of thing out of the blue like what happened with us.

I know a bugfix isn't exactly an exciting new feature but for me to consider CGC "feature complete" this fix is a top priority.

• Zone Traversal Refactoring

I know what all these words mean individually, but what do they mean together?

So we've got Draw and Discard and Mill, which move cards from the Deck to the Hand, from the Hand to the Discard, and from the Deck to the Discard, respectively. But what if you want to move a card from the Hand to the Deck, or move a card from the Discard to the Hand, or move a card from the Discard to the Deck? I could come up with keywords for all of these cases, but that will get confusing very fast.

So what I'd like to do is turn Card Actions into sentences. Instead of "Draw 3" (which would still work, of course) you could write "Move 3 from Deck to Hand." This same format could be used to "Move 2 from Discard to Deck," something you can't currently do.

I'd also like to add the word "Random" which (in the case of discarding) would choose random cards in your hand instead of having you choose manually. I have one other idea for how to add even more flexibility, but I don't want to promise it in case it ends up either not working or being too confusing to use.

• Equipment/State "Learn Skill" cards

Right now CGC doesn't play nicely with the skills actors learn from equipment and states, and I intend to fix this in v1.5.0. I was deliberating on this for a while because I wasn't sure what the expected behavior for this should be, but the responses from people who have been asking for this feature have come in, and this is the general breakdown:

Any skills learned from equipment will be added to the deck. If you change equipment mid-battle (as some other people's plugins allow), they'll be removed from the deck, discard, and hand immediately (without activating any "remove" effects or increasing the "removed" counter). Skills from the new equipment will be added to the deck, and the deck will be shuffled.

Any skills learned from states will be added to the top of the deck, just like how the "Learn skill" command works during battle. When the player no longer has that state, all cards learned from this state will be removed just as with equipment. This does mean that cards can be removed from your hand mid-turn.

• Draw/Discard/Remove SFX plugin parameters

I tend to work with the project muted while I blast ska metal through my speakers until my downstairs neighbors complain, so sound effects have been a slight oversight. I know from experience that in game dev, especially indie dev, sound design is often not considered until late into development, so considering that the bulk of CGC's userbase are currently mid-development, it makes sense that I haven't seen this requested.

But we've already seen a few games ship using CGC and I sort of feel bad for not giving them the ability to play the sound of a card being drawn when you draw a card, because sound goes a long way to improving the feel of your game.

• Even More Card Action Triggers

Okay so Start of Turn and End of Turn triggers didn't end up being card actions so much as they ended up being skills, and these will probably be the same. Notably, we want to add Enter/Exit Zone effects, where a skill is triggered when a card enters the deck, discard, hand, etc. As opposed to Start/End of Turn triggers, these execute exactly once.

... so these are 4 big features, and 1 small feature. I'm going to have my hands full, especially since MythAtelier will also be working on [REDACTED] in the coming months.

Final Thoughts

Originally, Deck Editor was going to be something we worked on for v1.5.0, coming out alongside it. I don't think that's going to happen, and we're still debating internally the format it should come out in. It will be its own plugin for sure, but the question is whether it should be Patreon-exclusive like most everything we'll produce post-1.5.0 or if it should be for sale on its own itch page. We'll figure this out closer to the time when we really get started working on it.

On an unrelated note, our help doc is getting... long. Too long for a newcomer to read. We're figuring out how to solve the problem of a person buying this plugin and getting overwhelmed by the amount of features, but doing so takes time away from actually making more features. It's a pickle. Possible options we are considering are to turn the Help Doc into an easily searchable Documentation Wiki and/or to make a series of Tutorial Videos that walk you through all of the setup and features of the plugin. Both will require a lot of time to make, so let us know in the comments which method would be better for newcomers :)

Patron Thanks

Shout out to the following amazing folks donating $5 or more:

Kakeru
Marcus Hjerpe Östlind
Gian Cornale
For the David-Joseph of the Beaudet
DDreams Games

If you want to get access to the features that we'll be rolling out monthly, make sure you sign up for our Patreon.