My cousin and I have always loved video-games since we were kids. Back then, our favorite games were Digimon World 2, Yugioh Forbidden Memories and the Megaman X series. We also really liked the mechanic of combining things, like the dna digivolving in digimon or the fusion mechanic in yugioh. We even made our own little card game, even though we didn’t understand the math behind it and just kepting creating new stronger cards to one up each other.

Fast forward many years into the future. I started really getting into card games, my favorite being the Yugioh TCG. Back then we didn’t have master duel or even duel links yet, so to play online I used a non-official simulator called Ygopro. The cool thing about that simulator is that the card effects were coded in Lua, my favorite programming language, so it didn’t take long until I started creating my own custom cards and coding them.

I wanted to make my custom cards balanced, so I had to study the math behind card games, concepts like card advantage and tempo. Then I finally had an idea: a card game where the main mechanic would be fusing cards, and the math of the game worked elegantly so that the trades in resources were fair and both players would always have a play for the next turn.

Having the idea, I implemented a prototype in Ygopro. I had to code every single rule of my game as if it was a Yugioh card effect. Back then my cards didn’t even have effects yet, it was just the plain rules of the game, but even like that I could see that the game was fun. Then I showed it to my cousin, and we decided to turn it into a full game.

After the prototype phase, we started implementing the game in several engines, including Love2D, Solar2D (former Corona SDK) and finally landing on Unreal, combined with a plugin to run Lua scripts (I sticked with Lua in the end). Many people played the game, and we made drastic changes to the mechanics several times, to the point that the game is unrecognizable from the prototype, but still keeping that elegant math I mentioned.

Another cool thing about the game is that we revived our Megaman influences and went for a rock/metal style music, instead of the typical calm/atmospheric style that most card games use. That choice might seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes the game feel really fast-paced and fun to play.

And now, we are finally here. The game will be released in January 8 (a week from now), so it would be great if you guys could check it out:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1397130/Primateria/

Please wishlist it if you like it, and feel free to comment any feedback here.