We're proud to finally release our third major expansion to Card Game Combat: Card Summons v1.0.0!

Feature List

• The Field Zone

The Field is a special Zone with unique properties. It has a unique appearance, and all Cards that move to it will be arranged in a grid. Both Actors and Enemies have a Field! Enemies can use a skill that will "move" a card to the Field, which will create the card and then move it.

A Card that moves to the Field can have Field Skills, or it can summon a Creature which has Field Skills. The Field also has unique Start/End of Turn Forced Actions.

• Field Skills

A Card can have skills attached to it that it can use on the Field. So when you play a Card to the Field, you can then select it from the field and use a skill it has.

Say for instance you want the player to start each turn with 0 MP, and play "Land" cards that you can activate to gain 1 MP per card each turn. You can specify how many times a Field Skill can be used per turn so that these Land cards can be activated once per turn to give the player MP.

Cards can also have as many Field Skills as you want. But Creatures can have them too! Speaking of which...

• Creatures

You can't have a summons plugin without summons. Creatures are special Battlers which are added to the Field. Creatures can belong to either the player or the opponent, but they inherit behavior from Enemies. Just like a Card is made from the Skills database, a Creature is made from the Enemies database!

When Creatures have Field Skills, they execute them using their own stats, including using their own MP.

We also have a special way of showing off Creature stats, since which stats need to be displayed depends on the project, and sometimes depends on individual creatures. Stat Displays show on the Creature and on its Card, and the number showing off the current value can change colors based on certain conditions - for example, it can turn yellow if it's lower than its initial value, and blue if it's higher!

[collage of the same Creature under 3 conditions - one with 2 attack, one with a debuff to have 1 attack, and one with a buff to have 3 attack. In each case its text color should be different]

Cards that summon Creatures will turn into Creatures themselves when they move to the Field, and when the Creature dies they turn back into Cards and move to the discard.

Creatures also have...

• Creature Passives

Right now we have two passives for Creatures:

First Turn Attack: true/false

This determines whether a Creature can use any Field Skills or attack using their Action Patterns on the same turn they're summoned. It overrides a plugin parameter that sets a default value for all Creatures, so you can give one Creature "Haste" while every other one has to wait a turn.

Ignore Action Patterns for Player

Action Patterns are the built-in RPG Maker way of determining how an Enemy chooses their actions on their turn, and since Creatures inherit behavior from Enemies, they use them too - that's how you can get the Enemy Troop's Creatures to use skills - but you may want to give the Enemy and the Player the same Creatures, and only want the Enemy's Creatures to auto-attack during their turn. This passive disables Action Patterns on the player's turn so that the player can stick to Field Skills.

• Start/End of Turn Forced Actions

Just like how base CGC gives Cards access to Card Passives which force actions at the start or end of a turn if the Card is in the hand, Card Summons gives access to ones that trigger if the Card is on the Field.

<Card Passives>
Start of Turn Field: Skill x
End of Turn Field: Skill x
</Card Passives>

Maybe you want that whole "Land" thing to be automatic - you can set it up so that each Card has a Start of Turn Field passive which triggers a skill that gives the player 1 MP.

• New Card Actions

Select X from Ally/Opponent Field
Select X Type typeName from Ally/Opponent Field

This is a new Selection type action which allows you to select Cards on either your field or your opponent's. You can filter by type to do things like ensure you're only selecting Creatures, or "Skeleton" type Creatures, or only Field Cards.

Use Skill X on Selected

This allows you to execute a specified skill on all Creatures that were selected using the above Select action.

You can already target Creatures for skill execution, but using Select X followed by Use Skill X allows a lot more flexibility in how you target them and what other effects you want to add.

Use SKill X on This

This allows you to execute a specified skill on the Creature that this card summons, as soon as it's summoned. This lets you do things like give a summoned Creature a state right away.

Battle Log: message

This pushes a message to the Battle Log. 

• Summons Scope

By default, all skills can target both Battlers and Creatures, and you can modify this with the following notetags:

<Card Summons Scope>
Battler
</Card Summons Scope>

or

<Card Summons Scope>
Creature
</Card Summons Scope>

In addition, scope can be made to include Battlers or individual Creatures when certain conditions are met, like so:

<Card Summons Scope>
if [expression]
Creature
</Card Summons Scope>    

These if expressions are similar to the If Action in the Core Engine. They evaluate a code expression.

However, in this condition the user has access to the variable "target", which represents any given Creature or Battler, and can be used to evaluate if that specific target is valid for the scope.

For example:

<Card Summons Scope>
Battler
if target.hp >= target.mhp
Creature
</Card Summons Scope>    

In the above example, a skill could target the opponent Battler, and any Creature whose HP is greater than or equal to their Max HP - any Creature who hasn't taken damage.

Creatures that cannot be targeted will be greyed out during selection.

• Stats Display

Creatures are made up of Enemies, and as such have all of the stat parameters that enemies have. In most games, the relevant stats need to be made visible.

Using the Stats to Display param, you can specify which stats will appear on the Creature, their coordinates relative to the center of the Enemy Sprite, and whether they display on a Card with a <Field creature ID> notetag.

You can also specify if the stat will show on all creatures. If you set the Show on All Creatures? to false, the stat will not appear on any Creature or Card by default.

You can override default display behavior by using the following notetags:

<Show Stat X>
<Hide Stat X>

Replace 'X' with the stat/param associated with the Stat Display.

• Debug Mode

Card Summons has a Debug feature which may be useful for lining up parameters.

If the user hits F11 in battle during a playtest, some debug visuals will appear that show each side's field grid based on the user's parameters, as well as the “center” of Cards and Creatures.

[screenshot of the game in Debug mode with the Tile Width/Height parameters and offset parameters a little off, and then a screenshot with it fixed]

This can help the user set their parameters to match up with the images they're using to represent the field. 

You can take a look at even more detailed documentation on the Plugin Wiki page for this.

Future Plans

Waoh... that was a lot. But are we done? Never! There are always more features to add! 

• Improved Card AI

Right now you are having to use the Action Patterns table to dictate the actions of both Summoners and Creatures in a Card Summons battle. This method has a lot of limits especially when it comes to being more strategic about when and why to play Cards. You can currently use another plugin like YEP Battle AI Core to achieve this, but it really isn't optimized for card games nor is it able to easily access the data required to formulate decisions. 

So, we want to write a support plugin that gives a greater degree of control over the intelligence of Actors and Enemies in Card Battles. You should be able to specify the logic you want a Creature or Summoner to follow in the Notetag space of their Enemy Page. This should help out Card Summons users greatly but also may have the side benefit of helping regular CGC users by automating the actions taken by allied party members with their Decks or even creating a Card Autobattler type game.

• Targeting Arc UI
  

Visual arcs drawn between Creatures targeted by a skill before confirmation similar to those seen in Magic Arena. If a skill has multiple targets then multiple arcs will be generated emitting from the source to the targets. Arcs will also be in different color (configurable by the user) to denote the nature of the action that will take place.

• Tactical Field Grid
  

While the field can currently host Creatures, we are not especially tracking its particular position on the grid and making use of that information. We also do not currently have Card Actions that would move a Creature to another spot on the Field. The Tactical Field Grid update would allow  a Creature's position on the Field to be trackable and manipulable by Card Actions.

We will also look into combining the Party and Troop fields and having Creatures be able to move and attack at range once we have the basic Tactical Field Grid in place but don't hold your breath it might be a while yet before we are able to offer this feature.

• More Creature Passives

We're looking at two major ones right now: 

Priority Target, which would disable any single-target skills from targeting Creatures that don't have the Priority Target passive while a Priority Target is on the field, much like Taunt from Hearthstone.

Persistent, which would make it so any changes to a Creature, such as buffs, states, MP spent, and skills limited per battle, would persist after the Creature is sent to the discard and summoned again within the same battle. HP would reset though so that it doesn't die immediately again.

• New Select Action for Creatures

Right now you can bodge it yourself, but we'd like syntax to make it easier - like, "Select X Ally Creatures with [condition]" which evaluates which Creatures on the field meet those conditions. Like a Card Action version of the Card Summons Scope condition.

Final Thoughts

This expansion has been in development for a while, and we're excited to have it finally out! With this expansion, the possibilities for CGC have opened up massively. We're very close to being able to just make TCGs. All that's missing is giving enemies their own decks... but I'd hate to accidentally say too much about our future plans for CGC.

The potential for Card Summons is huge, but that also means the potential for breaking it is huge. We're going to keep a close eye on bug reports for the next 1-2 months, so expect some patches here and there.

Special Thanks to our Wonderful Patrons from helping to make this happen:

If you run into any issues with Card Summons, don't hesitate to let us know either via Comments on the Store Page or via our email (myth.atelier@gmail.com). As it is the first version of a new plugin, there are bound to be things we didn't anticipate. We look forward to buildiing on this plugin from here and  seeing where you all are able to take it :)

Cheers,

MythAtelier Team