Game Summary
Heart of the Cards is a first-person shooter boss rush game where the player must defeat a series of enemies using poker hands to empower their attacks.
You can also store cards in your sleeve, and interchange them with the cards in your hand to make the most powerful hands you can think of. The game obeys the heirarchy
of hand strength used in actual poker, and the player uses a standard 52 card deck. In this version of the game, there are 3 bosses, all of whom are named after card games:
Solitare, a basic "tutorial" boss who's attacks are easily understood, War, an aggressive boss who uses brute force and his army of minions to attack the player, and President,
the owner of the casino who uses a barrage of complex attacks to destroy the player.
For this game, I worked on design, programming, and sound
The poker hand action game is a concept that I had been wanting to use for a long time, and so when I pitched it for a final project idea for my Game Programming course,
I was lucky enough to find 3 other people who liked my idea! A lot of the concepts of the game, like the theming, boss names, and basic boss behavior were ideas of mine, but
as a team we fleshed them out, as well as fleshing out the mechanics of the player character themself.
For programming, I created the base functionality of the cards, hands, and deck, the rest of which was completed by another person on the project. I also was responsible for creating
some of the boss attacks on all the bosses, and making sure they behaved correctly. I created the base behavior for the barriers as well. I also implemented all of the sounds.
This game was created as our final project for Game Programming. It was created over the course of a little over a month, with our biggest restriction being the fact
that we had other classwork that we had to worry about. Honestly, our biggest problem that we encountered was that some people didn't know how to play poker, and as a result
didn't understand how to make their attacks stronger. We ended up rectifying this issue by creating the practice room, where players could mess around with the controls and
shoot at a dummy until they were comfortable and had a good enough understanding of how the game worked to play it effectively. All in all though, production of this game was
pretty smooth.
