WHAT ARE GOOD GAME ENGINES FOR MAKING A CARD GAME?

I can only really cite my experience with making Arcomage Ace on this topic.

Putting together the database of cards wasn't too bad, if I recall. Getting them to function they way they should definitely took some playtests to get right. Game actions, like drawing a card from the deck into a player's hand, then discarding it after use, required a bit of finagling. Like, I think I used the clone function to make a copy of the card that was being drawn before removing it the "deck" array, then putting the clone to the "hand" array? The action of discarding was a similar thing where I cloned a copy of a card in the "hand" array, put it into the "discard" array, then erased the object from the "hand" array.

That kind of thing a game like Triple Triad probably doesn't have to concern itself too much with. I imagine there would be the main collection database, and the player's collection database would likely just refer to that in some way, shape, or form, perhaps with an additional "count" variable to factor in the possibility of owning/playing multiple copies of a card.

That said, I have no idea how the hell to set up an AI for a card game. What I did in the aforementioned Arcomage Ace is that it chooses a card at random from it's hand, and plays that, if it can. If it can't pay the card's cost, it tries again until it fails a total of three times, or finds a card it can play, whichever comes first. After the third failure, it discards the card it most recently picked.


Aside from this, I'm aware of Triple Triad: Tournament of the Elements? Now that I think on it more, I recall trying to help pianotm with a card game meant for this game. The problem he had concerned doing a deck display using show picture, but, I don't recall the solution we came up with. ;_;

A non-rpgmaker suggestion but Godot has a lot of tutorials and templates for card game stuff (best engine for doing UI imo) https://youtu.be/rlo4rwxanZo but it will require knowledge in GDScript in order to sort out. Though honestly Godot's built in interface does half the work for you and it'll likely be more convenient in a hearthstone-like fashion, I made a card system that was only 150 lines of code give or take.

author=LockeZ
have you tried pieces of paper

or if you lack paper, Tabletop Simulator.

I recommend trying some simple card games at itch.io, which don't require an AI. My favourite is Patient Rogue. In my opinion it's an easier task to make a game like this with your resources and you might even create something more original than a card battler. There are so many ways for cards to work in a card game.
I would also second a notion to make a physical prototype first. It will look great in devlogs too.

author=kory_toombs
Unity or Unreal Engine are the only answers to this question. You will need to do coding to actually have a feasible card game like MTG or Yu-Gi-Oh! Maybe someone will make an engine for this one day.

This is just factually incorrect. Card games rely on such simple rules that you can essentially make them in any gamemaker.

Well someone did make a card game even in RM2K, it'd be even easier with an RM with scripting. Whether or not it's recomended is the real question.

I can't look at a Spirit Link without missing my Rabid Wombat deck.

To the question, how about Pygame? It has been around for awhile and is good for making generally any kind of game that isn't too high performance.

I sympathize with not wanting to use Rmxp due to its small resolution. That has always been my biggest gripe about the Rpg Makers, although they are a joy to use in many ways. If it's just a card game system you want to make then I would not use Rmxp either.

With Pygame you can have any resolution you like, and you can be cross-platform too, and it's free. (lack of cross-platform support is another gripe I had about the Rpg Makers)

I programmed MTG in Unity, and I suppose that's the way to go if you can program.