Axion Scion - A Space Opera Strategic Card Game

[alexjgriffith]

Axion Scion - A space themed strategic card game where you balance political powers to survive



The submissions for the Autumn Lisp Game Jam just closed! As usual I created my submission using fennel and love

My goal this year was have a relaxing Jam. I figured making a card game would be a cakewalk. Oh boy, I was so wrong...

As is the case with any game, I think scope creep did me in.



Axion Scion centres around playing as a space dictator balancing the power of three levels of society, the military, the oligarchy and the proletariat. The objective being to make it to the end of round 9 with your and your heir's (Scion's) heads remaining firmly attached.

Each level of society, or strata, have two stats, contentment (happiness) and power. When a powerful strata's contentment gets too low specific "intervention" cards such as coup, and revolution, get added to the deck.

You can play cards and counters to try and balance the power dynamic and keep everyone happy. Or to make sure that the unhappy strata remains too weak to come at you.

Be careful, each strata can also play cards as well, including counters, which can foil your strategies. Left unchecked things can get out of hand real quick, and when things get out of hand you lose your head.



Things I'd like to add post Jam:

• Better telegraphing. Right now its hard to know whats going on if you don't know the symbols

• Tweening animations for cards. Just as the deadline hit I got tweening working for the event ui. I'd really like to get it working for the cards rather than having them teleport to your hands

• Dynamic scaling. I built the game with my new library Anchor, with the intention of dynamically scaling to any screen size. Those intentions fell short duet to time constraints.

• More asyncronisity between strata. Right now the cards available to each strata and their approach to selecting them does not vary greatly. In the future I'd like to have each strata AI play uniquely

• Local multiplayer. The game logic has been built to allow for multiplayer (the ai uses the same interface as the player) I was not sure the best way to implement it during the jam.

[Albright]

Unfortunately it's not working for me. A brief bit of audio plays, then the blue screen of death appears. Here's the error:

Error

Thread error (Thread: 0x600002742a80)

io:12: attempt to concatenate a nil value
stack traceback:
io:12: in function 'prompt'
io:23: in function 'looper'
io:34: in main chunk


Traceback

[C]: in function 'error'
lib/game-modes.lua:94: in function <lib/game-modes.lua:93>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'

If it matters, I'm on macOS Big Sur (11.6) on a 2020 MacBook Air (M1) currently.

[alexjgriffith]

Ah yes, the dreaded threading error. This may pop up on windows as well. I'll push a fix once voting ends.

For now, there is a .love file included as a download option. If you have love on your system it should work under the web directive. This eliminates threading for better compatibility with different browsers, and macos apparently :p

Try the following

Code: Select all

cd /path/to/game
love . web

[dusoft]

It seems to be an interesting game, however I was totally lost in the symbols and the game mechanism. The intro should be more self-explaining.

[milon]

It seems to be an interesting game, however I was totally lost in the symbols and the game mechanism. The intro should be more self-explaining.

Agreed. I have absolutely no idea what's going on - which is a shame since it looks like a fun game. I died on round 2 or 3, but I have no idea why. I'll check it out again once there's a help/tutorial/whatever in place.

[alexjgriffith]

Just pushed the first big post jam patch!

1. Introduced help pop ups when you hover over things
2. You can now right click on any card to see a summary of its effects
3. Added an index of cards so you can go back and review any card if something goes wrong in a round.

https://alexjgriffith.itch.io/axion-sci ... jam-update

[trabitboy]

frankly looking attractive on my to play list