The idea for The Vortex first came to me a couple of months ago, just before graduation.
My initial thought was that I wanted to create a collectible card game with the gimmick of being very difficult to understand. Each card would only have flavor text, which would be a puzzle hiding the statistics and other rules behind the card, and even the basic rules themselves would be hidden behind what appeared to be a history of the universe the game takes place in.
I also wanted the rules to be weird; they would be unlike any other card game out there.
You would have to play for keeps, because the mechanics allowed you to take an opponent's cards and use them as your own in one sitting, and since separating them would be a chore, it could only mean that only hardcore players -- players that had to be smart enough to figure out the rules in the first place, and players that believed themselves skilled enough not to lose too many cards, and players humble enough to accept the loss of cards -- would play.
It would be a novelty more than anything else. People wouldn't play as much as they would simply buy booster packs and try to figure out the rules. The barrier of entry would be high, but its mysteriousness would entice people anyway.
This idea was scrapped, first as a collectable card game, then the hidden rules.
A friend of mine and avid non-digital game player advised me that such an idea would only work as a one-shot game -- a single, self-contained game like any other traditional board game or card game, rather than a collectible card game -- because the novelty of hidden rules could not last long enough for people to want to buy more cards to a game they don't know how to play.
So I whittled down the idea to a one-shot game, which turned out to be alright by me because there are far fewer cards to manage! This also meant that there was no such thing as "playing for keeps" because whoever owned the game would just put the cards away when they were done.
After that, I started coming up with a variety of interesting mechanics that mixed and matched games like Magic: The Gathering and A Game of Thrones. As I made them, the proud game developer in me thought "Why come up with such great mechanics when no one will ever figure out how to play?" So I scrapped the hidden rules part.
Remnants of the hidden nature still remain, but I have at least typed up a straightforward set of rules and the cards say exactly what they should.
I have still kept the aspect of the game where one player's cards end up in another player's hand, and I color-coded each player's cards so you feel the sting of knowing your own card is being used against you.
The very objective of the game became, in essence, "Take as many of your opponents' cards as possible." When the game ends, players count up the number of cards that they have that are not their own color, and the player with the most wins.
As the mechanics developed, I realized this could not be a battle-themed game, like Magic, otherwise cards would "die" instead of being shifted around. It could have more the language of chess, where pieces are "captured", but even then, narratively-speaking, why would a card fight for a foe?
Then it struck me to make the game have a religious theme, where you are trying to "convert" as many of your opponents' cards to your religion as you can.
I had already decided to have the game's art and feel have a macabre, quasi-sci-fi feel to it like an even darker Cosmic Encounter. Putting a sectarian spin on it would make it all the more morbid, complete with murder, crusades, conversions, rogations, resurrections, torture, and the like.
Instead of battling, the major event every turn would be a Crusade, which brings an uncivilized, medieval flare to an otherwise space-themed game. This isn't going to be Star Trek!
It took a couple of weeks to generate all of the different types of cards (four different types in all), the basic mechanics, and the additional rules for the cards. Some off-the-cuff balancing occurred as I figured out a rough draft of the card layouts and the names of each card (193 unique cards with names!), and after two months, the first draft of the cards have been printed, cut, and sleeved. I will be playtesting the game in the coming days.
As development continues, I may get more specific in the specifics of the game, especially when it comes to discovering mechanics that do or don't work. But for now, as a development log, this looks more into the process of creation than the game itself.
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