Since 2001, I’ve been a 3D technical artist working on many film and game titles. The pandemic was quite hard on the 3D industry, and my schedule became mostly empty for about 2 years. I was getting a bit nervous to provide for my 3 kids and decided to work on another of my personal project (yet again). I wanted this time to be different, to get out of my comfort zone, do something that I always wanted to do and most importantly, to involve my kids as much as I could.

I wanted to build an online TCG game! After all, my kids love Pokemon and I enjoy MTG, why not try to do something together, but different… I drafted my basic battlefield idea and the kind of mechanics that I wanted. I used a software called NanDeck to build rough cards (doing them in OpenOffice word or Excel was way too hard). I printed a “Set” and explained the rules to my kids. We played a few games, fixed some problems and I went back to the drawing board.

After some time, it was getting a little tedious to print and cut cards to play them, so I decided to build a sandbox in Unity. I was not super familiar with Unity at that time, so everything was super crude two player game over TCP/IP. It is important to note that I was not into making anything pretty at this point… Just coding the sandbox. We had to do all the card interactions by hand. Fun fact, what my youngest liked the most was to drag cards out of the screen so I could not target them with actions…

After about a year in development, in early 2021, I decided to add some visuals, borrowing the icons of The Darkest Dungeon which had been made available online by the creators. No need to say that having just a bit of colors and images to the game made my kids react quite a bit more. I started to add more and more automation to the game, but the cards were still “dumb”. All the interactions still had to be done manually. Click dragging arrows so my friend on his remote computer would understand what I was doing while telling him what to do over Google Meet.

OK, so now that I had fun playing the game and validating that the gameplay was interesting, I needed to code all the backend of the game, making it possible to receive cards, view you collection, trade cards with friends, and eventually sell cards on a internal market. Coincidentally, I had been searching for a way to distribute “cards” as DLLs since 2013 without ever finding a solution. Back then, I was also quite involved in the Bitcoin phenomenon. This lead to the discovery and understanding of NFTs in a blockchain. The idea was quite obscure in the early days, but in 2021, it all came together into a private blockchain solution.

I’m not into the mainstream NFT solution at all, in fact, I find that “opensea” to be quite problematic and deceiving. My father is a professional artist and image copyrights and resales are common discussion around the table. Anyways, long story short, I wanted the cards to be printed in limited sets, and to have the possibility of keeping older packs unopened, similar to secondary market of old MTG packs/cards. The best way I could find to trade/sell cards/packs without any risk of duplicating or modifying the number of total cards minted, was by using a blockchain. Obviously, I didn’t want to use any existing solution for that so I needed to code this myself.

OK, so fast forward a few months later, the private blockchain is ready. I specify “private blockchain” here because at this point, Bitcoin was raising a lot of questions regarding how it could stay relevant without eating up all the electricity of the world and destroying the environment. At the same time, the NFT markets were polluted with copyright infringements, rug pulls and other major ethical issues for me.

Basically, my custom blockchain has a token used for value exchange, and it contains “card set chains” from where all the cards are minted. It also have “pack set chains” where the packs are minted from. Similar to Bitcoin, the block rewards (a season pack) are distributed to the “workers”, which simply are game winners. So every block, the players are rewarded with cards and packs. Once a new card set comes out, the chains are created in the blockchain and it becomes impossible to go back and generate cards or packs of the older set.

Further down the line, I decided to change the Darkest Dungeon images for icons available for free from game-icons.net. That helped getting out of using copyrighted material, but it was still not exactly the look I wanted… I wanted more, I especially wanted to have artists helping with the card art and use the NFT royalties capability to pay out royalties to them.

I hired an amazing friend artist to help me out with some art. It was a huge jump in the right direction, but this was all very temporary because, well, not much budget to push further… Remember; ending the pandemic, 3D industry down, no money coming in, 3 kids… I needed to have priorities…

In January 2022, everything was in place for a first release! Woot! I spent all my time coding the card logic and game server to manage all the game data, similar to Magic Arena or Heart Stone. There are bugs, but that will have to do. There was too much effort put into this to not release it. I put up the game on itch.io, on Google Play, and on my newly created website. Cheers to Unity for allowing to compile for Android, WebGL and Windows so easily. Simply amazing!

At this point, in 2022, the AI art was becoming a thing. Midjourney and similar tool were starting to be quite impressive. Well, for the moment, that will do. I used Wombo to create card art. Remember that I can go back and change the art/royalties as the game will gain traction, so that was a big plus. Now the game as colors!

It is now December 2022 and I’ve been working on this game for 3 years. Players are coming in slowly, blockchain is churning, the expenses for virtual private servers are kicking in, I need more players to come and try the game! I was working on the second card set, so I gave that a final push and finally released it. That was not a simple task, putting all my code so far to the test, but everything is now working number one. All early adopters now have cards and packs or the Alpha season, which hopefully will become part of the memorabilia for this game.

In order to stay away from gambling rules and games targeted for teens/adults, there is one restriction that I wanted to implement, which was to not allow resale of game items for the current season. My reasoning is simple, as a new season set comes out, some cards will be broken and modified in the early days. I wanted to avoid game items to be sold because of my mistakes, so I deliberately blocked in the blockchain the selling of cards and packs of the current season. So now that the Beta season is out, the Alpha season items can be put up for sale on the internal market.

In conclusion, this has been my story up to this day about this trading card game called Reapers. I am deeply humbled by anyone who tried the game thus far and I’m looking forward to chat with you all soon to make the game better and more intriguing. I’m easily accessible and I’ve set up a Discord server to ease that process.

Come on over and lets have fun! I hope I inspire someone to develop their own games. See you on the battlefield!

Marc Creator of Reapers