This week we're continuing what we started last week - the ability to QA this set. Due to the current Covid-19 pandemic, it is difficult to go and QA with people in real life. However, I have figured out a way around that so that I can test with friends remotely!
The application below is Cockatrice - a free application available on GitHub often used for Magic: the Gathering gameplay. What's important about this application is that it allows people to add custom cards to it through XML files and some basic scripting. Through this, I was able to add most of the cards I currently have developed into Cockatrice so that I can test out a bunch of the cards along with test if the individual archetypes are supported enough to make a deck!
Of course, this file is currently local to my computer. However, by simply just sharing the XML file below to my friends, they can add the cards onto Cockatrice and I can test it with them!
Furthermore, I added some extra organization to the cards by marking their Region as their "Color" and their different Card Types. This allows me to filter out all cards from all of Magic's history and instead just look at my individual cards and even look for exactly what I'm looking for.
Now, of course, the functionality of LoR isn't there. Mana needs to be manually added each turn and kept track of, Level Ups need to be kept track of by the players, actions don't happen automatically... There's a lot not in here, however I've been working on easing some of those difficulties.
I've put tokens of different skills and Champion Level Ups into the sideboard so they can easily be grabbed out of the sideboard when needed. All relevant tokens to the deck will be put into the sideboard to try to make it as easy as possible. This is just a temporary solution, however, to get this going early.
My plan going forward is to make the Champions double-faced so that the player can easily flip between them. I also want to make all relevant tokens to individual cards accessible by right-clicking the card in-game, which is possible through Cockatrice already. Right now, what I've added is the basic functionality and I just need to do a bit more research and mess around with the script a bit more to get more of the better functionality in. But, going forward, this allows me to deck build and test!
On reflection, however, I will say I definitely underestimated this. Not only did I have to go through to grab all the cards off my website due to my computer getting wiped, then convert them and put them on Imgur (though that was more meticulous than time-intensive), but I also realized I don't need to just do that for my cards.... I need to do that for all existing cards I look to put into decks. I'll only be adding the cards to be put into decks, which means just designing some decks prior to adding them all into Cockatrice.
Still, even now I can test with smaller deck sizes just to see how interactions are. Soon enough, I'll be fully able to do some QA!