The Weaver: Dev Diary #2 — Vault of the Void News

Pet Cards

[p align="start"]The main power of Weaver relies on cute Pets, and they can be summoned by playing a Pet card. Pet is a new card type (similar to Ability, Attack and Buff), but different in a handful of ways:

A Pet card has an Attack Power (AP) value stored on the card, and the value persists in a fight,
Playing a Pet card will transform (Weave) the card into a Pet on the board. The card will not shuffle into Discard until the pet is un-summoned (Unravel).
Pets will have various actions, and normally each Pet can perform one action every turn, including the turn they are summoned. Performing an action does not count as "playing" a card.
There are a total of 5 Pet slots. Playing a Pet card when slots are full will Unravel the Pet in the desired slot first, and then Weave the Pet.

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[p align="start"]Think of Pet cards as limited buffs that provide values over turn where you get full control of! One of the many difficulties of implementing pet cards is displaying the transform smoothly. An early approach to create a separate game object for pet on board to distinguish their differences with a pet card, however that soon proved to be buggy with so many minor things we kept in a card.

[p align="start"]In the end, a Pet on the board is now a special form of card object, just with their display tweaked. All card attributes, like expel, rebound, or even random energy under the Dolus passive effect, are kept safe when displaying as a pet on board and will resolve correctly when the pet is unravelled.

[p align="start"]Another key point of pet cards is that they stay on board and do not shuffle into your Discard pile (or other places) until it is unravelled. When describing the pets, "Rebound" can bring up many questions -- Does it return to hand immediately after being played? Does it stay on the board, and return to hand when unravelled? If the pet is unravelled next turn, does it still return to the hand? If a pet card that cannot rebound is played this turn, can it rebound when unravelled next turn?

[p align="start"]We try to answer these questions by clarifying the mechanics in the card texts. All pet descriptions will present "Rebound/Expel/Loop when Unravelled". In addition, we also made a "cheatsheet" that you can reference in the game about all pet behaviours. The texts on queen stones, unfortunately, cannot be changed without making other classes unreadable, so keep in mind that all "Rebound/Expel/Loop" all mean to take place when the pet is unravelled. Hopefully you can find more broken combos!

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PlayOps and Mods

[p align="start"]One of the most popular requests is mod support. During our 2.0 rewrite, we put foundations of mod support by introducing the PlayOps system (you can find our old dev diary here).

[p align="start"]In short, cards and artifacts effects are written as sequences of operations, and whenever the effects are triggered, these operations are read and executed in the game. We have been using this system to update the game since 2.0, and that greatly simplifies how we ship balance patches -- most of the changes just modify numbers in the cards and artifacts definitions and don't need to go deep into the code.

[p align="start"]With the upcoming update, we have taken a step further: all cards, artifacts, spells and such are now stored as JSON files that you can read at anytime! Of course, you can even edit the files, but we have file integrity in place that deviations from official files will be detected and your game will be marked as "modded", so no cheating in daily draft by bringing a Rigged nuke card to kill everything on turn 1 :)

[p align="start"]We have future plans to fully implement mods on top of those files, with full support of loading image assets and Steam Workshop integration.

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[p align="start"]-Bugphobia (Shu)

This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Vault of the Void on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.