June 2022 Wrap-up: cards, animations, maps, bosses

8 min readJul 14, 2022

In the month of June, we spent a lot of time crossing over our departments. Often our art, game, and dev departments work in their respective lanes, but things like quality control and fine tuning have become a higher priority as we’ve become more focused on shipping a playable alpha.

To make sure things are working as they should, we have animators spending more time with developers to cross-check the implementation of art, and game designers cross-checking with developers to make sure the game works. As a result, the creative juices are flowing, the company’s understanding of our product deepens, and a playable demo is the closest it’s been.

Let’s dive into what we did in June!

Game Art

One of the most rewarding things about working on Kaiju Cards is moving from ideation and concept art to final art. If you’ve been following us for a while now you must have noticed the substantial upgrades to game art over the months.

The biggest of these last month was the transition of the dungeon entry scene from concept to final art. You’ll notice much more attention to detail in textures, the platform being much larger to accommodate a party of three characters, a much more menacing dungeon character, and many other changes. We can’t wait to push this to the final animation in July!

Concept art for the dungeon entry scene used in our game trailer

Final art for dungeon entry — next up is animation!

Game UI/UX

UI and UX play a massive hand in guiding new players and easing them into gameplay to create immersion. If these elements fail to do their job, players are often confused about what to do or spend too much time engaging the surfaces of a game — when they could be immersing themselves in the world, and its stories and challenges. Naturally, as we get closer to the release of our alpha build, we’ve spent a lot more time brushing up on these elements.

WIP on our alpha demo character select screen.

The character selection and dungeon entry scene are coming along!

We opted for a format that would be familiar to a lot of gamers by combining elements seen commonly in fighting games (Super Smash Bros, Street Fighter) and in character-based deckbuilders (Hearthstone). You’ve got your catalog of characters, represented by their image in squares on the left, and their decks and stats on the right. Soon we’ll integrate equipment and deck editing systems.

Below is our victory/defeat animation and UI draft. The further you progress into dungeons, the more rewards you get. This screen is an overview of what rewards you’ve earned (which are nearly all tokens and NFTs), your run data, and your competitive standing.

Prototype of a victory screen for an entire run. Next up is the aggregation of the stats necessary and the implementation of the final design.

Battle Animation

Now that foundational battle mechanics are in the build, we’ve begun the process of fine-tuning animation triggers. In the demo video below, you can see an early demo of how these animations will sync up. Over the next several weeks we’ll make sure all animations line up correctly and begin overlaying effects, with the goal of making attacks feel as impactful as possible can while still being lightweight and snappy, no matter what platform you play on.

Rest Areas

Rest areas will be a very important part of any dungeon run. As one possibility on a branching path, a well-timed rest can mean the difference between clearing your run and getting your loot or fainting before you can make it to the end.

We’ve turned some of our favorite characters into plushies in-game that will give you different types of rest. To give you an idea of the qualities of the different plushies, one rest area lineup could be something like: +10% health to all characters, +25% health to a single character, or entering the next room with extra mana. Keep in mind these are just possibilities for now, and that rest areas will be adjusted with feedback from you during playtesting!

Also, aren’t these plushies cute?? I know I want one 😂

Card Art

We’ve also begun to lock in card art. Card art is important for two main reasons:

They add a layer of depth to the world and lore!
Because all cards will be tradeable eventually, they need to look good and communicate what the card does visually immediately upon looking at the card.

Tetsudo Formation card art; Spellbook card art

Over the next 1–2 months we’ll be creating card art for every single card, keep your eyes peeled in our Discord for previews!

More Character Animations

More animations! We’re getting so close to having all the original 23 genesis characters fully animated, which means each and all! We will continue trucking 🚚 🚚. Be sure to look at our sneak peeks in discord! We post all sorts of previews there, including early and final passes of character animations!

Map System

While we already have the flow of each act already figured out, we’ve been prototyping more unique ways of visualizing your journey on each run.

We’ve landed on a hex system, in which you’ll be able to zoom in and out and scan around to plot your course. Each room represents an encounter and on certain hexes, you will be given the option between multiple directions to the next hex. This is an important part of gameplay, as different types of rooms will appear on different paths (not yet represented in the video preview). Skillful play would involve looking many hexes ahead and making decisions based on your deck and characters, and what you might be aiming to build for the endgame.

Your party is on the left-most tile and has just begun their journey in the dungeon. Will you be able to make it to Boss Hog Jürgen and exit through the door? (Final map version will be MUCH larger)

Boss Fights

Bosses come at the end of acts and will pose very unique challenges compared to other battles. Expect unusual game mechanics and features in boss fights which may force you to rethink how you build your decks and conserve your health throughout a run. Here’s one boss that will likely be in the demo, Boss Hog Jürgen.

He may be very large.

Gen 1 Animation Tests

One of our big goals in June was to create an animation pipeline for Gen 1 characters. We want Gen 1 characters to be playable in-game immediately after they’re Summoned!

After some testing, we nailed down a way to create generative characters that would be compatible with the animations of the original 23 sprites, and be immediately playable in-game. Check out the previews below! They show two different modified Mushroom characters, an early preview of the direction Gen 1 characters are headed.

Just a rough test to see if swapping assets break animation. It doesn’t! 🥳

Mobile

Have been testing the mobile app recently, which so far is working great!

We took a lot of care early in our planning to make sure that our game scales to what we consider the next frontier for Web3 (Solana seems to think this too).

Some ways we’ve been prepping for this eventual horizon are making sure that our game engine can be adapted to mobile environments easily, being considerate of mobile gaming user behavior in our game design, and ensuring our UI/UX design will translate well to mobile (since users may be tapping on glass as opposed to a mouse and keyboard).

It’s really exciting to play our alpha prototype on mobile. Seeing months of work finally come to fruition in the palm of our hands makes us very happy.

Looking forward to how the mobile landscape develops for web3-based apps and how Solana aims to tackle it. 🥂

NFT NYC

The convention was a blast.

And we all got covid! Whoops. We’re ok now though.

Met a lot of people for the first time, and put a lot of faces to Discord and Twitter account names.

We spent our afternoons working at EmpireDao, a Solana co-working space, had a lot of meetings and talked a lot about future partnerships and developments.

The future is very bright ✨