Hey guys,

I want to make a TCG and my paper prototype is in a significant stage of development. I was wondeing If Unity3D would be a good choice as my experience in Game Development is working for a year in Unity3D. Though I want to spend some time building my own framework, I don't think I have the luxury to do that. I do have some time and money constraint as well. I thought I would start the game in Unity3D with the TCG Tool Kit.

Please let me know if this is the best option or if there is any other Engine (Exclusive for TCG) that would save my time.

Thanks,

V.Lakshminarayanan

It kind of depends how you want to approach the game in terms of visuals (pure top down 2D or a setting including 3D objects). Either way Unity3D is a fine choice in my opinion, especially if you have the most experience with that engine.

Good Luck! Let us know if you make progress

For whatever it's worth to you, Hearthstone was built with the Unity3D engine.

I'd say the new Unity 3D Beta would be a decent pick, but any current version may not.

Though Hearthstone was made using Unity, it used a custom UI solution as the currently established API parameters for handling UI are a bit of a mess...

But, like I said, Unity Beta currently has something very similar to NGUI which was/is an awesome add-on you can get from Unity store to handle this.

All of this assumes you'd be using a lot of UI (which I think you would in a TCG?).

Hey

thanks a lot everyone for giving me the input. Oh yeah I am going to try the new Unity3D beta and see the new stuff which is shipped along with it.

Hearthstone was made in Unity? Thats awesome. Right now I am still working on the paper prototyping. We are doing some changes everyday, playtesting and iterating. I have started writing basic functions for the game in Unity, but haven't gone in depth. Do you guys have any suggestions on what kind of design pattern would suit card games? (If I am not wrong Factory pattern? and singleton by default for game/sound manager?)

Thanks for the headsup!

We prototyped a Hearthstone clone in Unity for work (before we knew they used Unity). For the most part it worked out really well. Our cards were 3D objects so we could do tricks with them. But we had issues with card text because we were trying to use Unity's built in text rendering. You would certainly have to go the Blizzard route and figure out a custom system for card text.

For cards, we had a pool of 40 or so 'blank' cards that were created when the level was loaded. We had a image cache for all the card images that we just let images get loaded from disk as needed and then passed around a shared texture. Text was Unity's 3D text, it was not pretty at all (this was our biggest issue for the demo). When a card was drawn from your pile or played by the opponent we pulled a blank card from the pool and constructed it. Once a card was removed from play it went back to the pool to be used again.

Sound manager for all our games at work is a singleton. Kind of lazy on our part but that is something there is only ever going to be one of. But you can make the point that only your game 'manager' (quoted since manager seems to be a bit taboo around here) needs to know about the sound system since it would know when cards are played or when effects happen. There is no reason for your game manager to be a singleton if you properly set up your state management.