Subway Sermons
Check out the game!
Subway Sermons is a dialogue deck builder themed around recruiting fellow subway passengers into your cult.
The game was a 2-person project with Erica Chen. Erica focused on the visual and narrative aspects of the game, while I contributed most of the programming and sound design. Other responsibilities were shared evenly between us. The project in total took roughly 2 months to make.
Main features include:
- Turn-based combat loop
- Unique card effects
- Subway map/station progression
- Enemy progression and generation
- Distinct train lines with different cards and enemy decks
Turn Order UI (Design Process)
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Prototype
An issue that we ran into fairly early, and which stayed with us until almost the very end, was how we wanted to represent the turn order of the player and enemy. When I first prototyped the combat system, I quickly threw together a placeholder interface that directly reflected how the system worked: a timer which allowed the character to act after their counter reached zero.
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Blockout
An idea that we briefly considered was something like Divinity 2's turn order display, which shows all the character portraits in order of their turns, looping as many times as the UI could reasonably fit. It would've shown the turn order a bit more clearly than what we ended up with, but the problem was that then we'd also have to explain directly how the order was calculated.
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Final
For our final version, we landed on a vertical meter (carried over from our blockout version). This design came mostly out of spatial concerns as we wanted the main focus to be on the dialogue and cards. We then added character icons as indicators, which we also used to display the “cursed” status effect. The final component, the card icon on the bottom, came from a playtest where there were a lot of questions on what the meter represented.
