LibriumArcana.Games

I was sitting on the computer last night when I got a sudden urge to play Triple Triad, the card minigame from Final Fantasy 8. So I cracked open my text editor and hammered out the code to make a clone of it. This clone is already almost done, but a program on its own is no fun - I need some cards.

Problem is I'm a shitty ass artist myself, so anything I make would suck. Thus, here I am asking for contributions.

A LibArc card set might just be fun anyway!



How to make the cards?

There are two parts, the art file and a text stats entry.

The art file should be a png, 120x145 pixels in size. It should have a transparent background, so the program can layer it on top of a color to show card ownership in the game.


Realistically, you don't need to be exact with a submission; I can always resize it and add a transparent background myself.


You should not put the card's numbers or elemental icon on the picture. The program adds that during the game.

To make note of what the numbers and name of the card should be, write the following text:
[filename] is the name of the picture file without the extension. It should be all lower case and only letters and numbers - no spaces or symbols.

name is the full name of the card that is displayed in game.

ranks list the numbers on the card. The order is top, bottom, left, right. You must specify all four, and it can be 1-9 or A. There are no technical restrictions on what these can be (a, a, a, a is accepted by the program), but don't wank - that's no fun.

rarity is actually ignored by the game (as it is right now), but you can fill in the field for later. The options are 'common', 'rare', and 'unique'.

elemental is the element of the card, used in game to give it a +1 or -1 modifier. Options are "none", "fire", "lightning", "wind", "poison", "ice", "water", "earth", or "holy". (As of this writing, elemental is not yet implemented in the program, but it will be later. The elemental icon will be added to the card by the program, so you shouldn't put it in your art file.)


An example:
Here is one of the pictures I made using a pattern brush in the gimp:


The filename is lightning.png.

The stats entry is: In the game, it looks like this:



You can see ones owned by each player in the two top corners. Thanks to the source lightning.png image having a transparent background, the ownership color is easily visible.

Also notice how the program added the numbers for me and how they were on the opposite side of the card on the left player's hand - that is why the picture shouldn't have the numbers drawn on it ahead of time.


(Also, I'm using the gameboard from FF8 that I grabbed off a screenshot. For copyright reasons, I'll have to replace that image too before releasing the program. I'll take contributions for that too if anyone is willing. That image should be 512x512 pixels, and the upper left corner of where the game pieces go should be at (80, 40) if (0, 0) is defined as the upper left corner of the image. From there, each rectangle of the 3x3 grid should be 120x145 so a card will fit in.)

I should be finished with the program by Monday at the latest and will release it then. In the mean time, let's have some fun in making some cards.

Those of you who follow other boards to which I post will know I've made this same post everywhere - I want to ask everyone I know to participate.

But libarc gets a special add on message: the Triple Triad implementation here is actually part of the M3 project - my console RPG engine and (eventual) toolkit. I've been silent on it recently, because progress has been buuuuutttttt sloooooooooooow, but in the last week, I've been able to devote some time to it, and creating this minigame was something I've been wanting to do for it anyway, so working on it last night was just win.

I have a character and job system finally finalized and I'm pretty happy with how it is turning out. I have a playable simple map and a half working battle engine going. We're definitely into the final year now, even if I am horribly slow in proceeding, like I have been. (It doesn't help that I have some 8 other things I'm slowly doing at the same time, in addition to real work and other real life annoyances.)

Something I so intend to do: go up to the final battle and press square. "So, you want to settle our differences with a card game?" hehehe that is how every game should end!

The completed game is going to be a blast, and in the mean time, this Triple Triad standalone minigame will also be a lot of fun, I'm sure.

Could you explain the game a bit please?

http://www.geocities.com/lordraidor/triad.htm
That link goes into some detail of the rules.

The basics is two players go in with five cards each. They pick at random who goes first. Then alternating turns, they place one of their cards down on an empty spot on the 3x3 game grid.

The numbers (or ranks) decide how to flip opponents cards (see the four numbers in the corner of each card in the screenshot). If your number is higher than the adjacent card's number, you flip it to your color.

The player with the most cards showing his color after all 9 slots are filled wins the game.

That is the most basic game - additional rules include special flips, combos and the elemental bonus/detriment, which I'll have to explain tomorrow, since it is very late now.

Oh I am SOOOOOOOO In.

First version available for download: http://arsdnet.net/tt-win.zip

Windows binary only at this point. If you are on Linux, just run it under Wine; it should work very well.


The cards are almost all made by a couple of the posters at the sveit.com forum, often using pictures of themselves to make strong cards. Hopefully, by tomorrow's release, we'll have several more cards (and more of the rules will work and stuff like that).



All the needed files are in there, so the game should work out of the box. Just unzip it, then go into the folder and run play.exe.

This is an alpha release, so not everything works yet. The config.txt file is currently ignored and sound is turned off.

The rules are: same, plus, open, random. You don't get to pick your cards; the computer just randomly selects them from all possible.

You play as the player on the left who always goes first. The computer is set to moderate difficulty and plays the other player.

Fancy graphics effects and such aren't done yet, but the game should still be playable.


When the game is over, the program remains open until you press the q key on your keyboard. Pressing q at any time will quit the program. If you want to play again, you have to start the program over.


The controls:

The arrow keys move you around. The s key or the space bar selects a card or places it. The x key unselects your card.




If the program crashes, tell me what you were doing at the time and I'll look into it.


The next release should come tomorrow where I'll add the stuff this one is missing and any suggestions you have. I also plan to write a tutorial teaching how to play for those who don't know or forgot.

My brother made a theme and card set based on Mobile Suit Gundam and while I can't distribute it for copyright reasons, I have to show a picture of it in action:



That looks really good.

I've created themes and cardsets for Gundam and now Cthulhu!

The Gundam theme is the one Adam shows above, with more cards added since then.

Download zipped Gundam file (around 5MB) here.

The Cthulhu theme looks like this:

Art lovingly stolen from FFG's card game, background and music from the game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. If you don't like the song, another one is included (you'll have to rename it to song.ogg) from the Children of Dune soundtrack ("Face Dancer", I believe).

Download zipped Cthulhu file (about 3. MB) here.

Put the whole unzipped folder in your "themes" folder, then move the files in the included "cardset" folder into your "cards" folder. Then, edit your config.txt to choose the theme you want.