Some of you might be wondering how Galacard was made. Well, despite it’s incredibly short development time, the process still contains a great amount of fun curiosities and details. 

1. Mockups and Prototypes

Galacard was born as an adaptation of a real life French-suited card game that no one has been able to tell me the name of to this day. I would eventually start to add some of my own rules into the mix, but the first thing I did was make a visual mockup of the game with PICO-8.

The first mockup for what would eventually become Galacard.

Then I made a playable P8 prototype of the game, just like I had done with Anctrayl. The first iteration was text-based, but graphics based on the initial mockup were added soon after. Interestingly enough, the later versions showed every player’s win count and goal, which are not present in the final game.

Yup, this is how the first ever prototype for Galacard looked like.

The final version of the playable prototype in action.

2. Porting to Game Boy

After that, I quickly ported the prototype to GBDK, removing the win count and goal from the computer players to save some space. At this point in development, every card was still randomly generated.

I had the idea to make the game take place in outer space, but I needed to figure out how to make P1 distinct from the CPU players without having to render text that explicitly said “you” next to one of the portraits. Because of this, I decided to make only the main player a human and draw the rest as identical aliens, which gave the game its initial name: Aliencards. To make the design process easier, I roughly sketched the character designs onto graph paper and analogically converted them to pixel art with the help of the grid.

Not long after I started to port the game, it was pretty much complete, and its name was changed from Aliencards to Galacard. I polished the look of the main gameplay screen and added new assets such as character art – once again with the help of graph paper – and music. Due to the complexity of the game, I also created the Galacard Strategy Guide, which would turn out to be very helpful to first time players. I also worked with a couple of testers who provided a lot of feedback.

The tune that can be heard during gameplay was actually recycled from a canceled game I was making at one point – which was based on Kakurasu, a math-oriented game with similarities to Picross – with very few changes, and I thought it would be fun to turn its melody into a motif that would be present on every other track (even the jingles!).

Here's "PixPlus" (A.K.A. "P+"), the Kakurasu project I was working on back in February.

3. The Final Version

Believe it or not, the game was initially released with randomly generated cards. After a couple of days though, I realized how unbalanced the game was. To fix that, I created an array or “bag” of available cards that would be sorted them between the players. That way, no cards would be repeated, just like in many real card games. This turned out really buggy, but I quickly fixed it with a bunch of updates. So, that’s how the current version of Galacard came to be. Have fun with it!