I’m not so good writing but I’ll appreciate any help I can get.
I’m currently working on a Unity TCG, it works much like hearthstone, and its my first C# project (i’m very familiar with C but not with OOP at all) and im looking for anyone either experienced on making a TCG or C# for technical questions mostly, im currently working on what should be the Card Class and on the Board, so far all I could test was if the deck was shuffling correctly via a command application but i’m not sure of how should I test all the back-end without first making a front end. anyways, if you have any experience with unity projects like mine please share so and thanks for your time!
As far as testing goes, try a minimal text-only front end. You’ve probably seen an RPG that has the combat represented as text in a chat stream, for debugging purposes? You can do something like numbering all the cards in a deck too. So your log can print things like:
Computer is flipping a coin… Player A goes first!
Player A draws card 1: Flaming Sword
Player A draws card 2: Wolfasaur
Player A draws card 3: Doomcloud of Doom
etc to get their starting hand. And do that for both players. Then ask each player if they want to mulligan, if your game does that - presumably both players are a version of your AI, because the AI is probably the part that requires the most testing, and you want to be able to set it to play a dozen games so you can glance over the written summary to see if anything insane happened.
1 Like
^ That’s great advice. You can get this kind of front end running very quickly. It also forces you to decouple your front end code from your back end code, which is a good engineering practice.
If you keep it in place even after you implement your real front end, it’ll make debugging much easier – both your internal debugging and ironing out bugs reported by playtesters – since you’ll have a text log to review. And, as sunandshadow mentioned, you can run automated trials to test AI and deck balances.
We often mention paper prototypes in this forum section. Andy Makes has made a nice, free TCG Proxy Generator that you can use to make paper cards. You can take these to conventions and other meetups to test your ideas and get feedback.