Let’s get Started - Lightmare Design Blog, Entry 0
Introductions are in order
Welcome to the first of a series of design articles from Lightmare Studios, creators of the award TCG game Infinity Wars.
Before I get onto the topics of today’s article first let me introduce myself and another of my fellow team members. In due time you will get to hear about everyone else here at Lightmare too, don’t you worry.
My name is Reuben Covington.
My job title is Player Experience Designer & Programmer. First and foremost I’m a passionate lover of the card game genre, having helped on the digital card games Faeria and Collective, I’m a prominent member of Magic:The Gathering custom card community, I ran a podcast called Remaking Magic, and have been prototyping my own custom cards, expansions and card games for years.
I’m a huge fan of elegance in design and making a game achieve a perfect balance of accessibility to newcomers, but with a depth that keeps more invested players excited.
Outside of games I love skiing, fine dining, and cinema history.
Reuben Covington
Bonus points if you know the game characters on my shirt
Jason Thomas
Next up let me introduce my colleague Jason Thomas.
Jason is our Community Manager. Jason’s professional history is embedded in Marketing, Content creation, and having been a long time volunteer within the Australian esports community., He has recently moved in to his current community based role when we discovered his passion, positivity and optimism for that area. Jason has a lot of strange skills, such as sleight of hand, and rapping ( good luck getting that one out of him though ). His most recent miscellaneous accomplishment includes making top cut at the Dragonball Super TCG Regionals right here in Melbourne.
Dedicated fans still chatting away on the Infinity Wars discord channel might recognize Jason. We can now confirm that he is not a hoax and is employed at Lightmare Studio. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him a lot more in the weeks and months to come.
Grand Expectations
So what is this article series going to be about in the future?
I plan on drilling down into some of the design decisions we make here, sharing insights and stories about everything from splashy core gameplay mechanics, content creation, to systems you may not initially consider, such as user interface.
I also will be going into detail about more general design practices and ideas that underpin card game’s more generally.
Hopefully, not only can I communicate the team’s design decisions, but you can come away from future articles knowing something new.
So whilst I’m not ready to talk about any design tales this week, there is some exciting news on the horizon.
Infinite Questions
So for those following the Infinity Wars TCG facebook page things have been pretty quiet until recently when this was posted.
I’m very excited to announce some more details about Lightmare Studio’s new game: Infinity Heroes.
Infinity Heroes is a spiritual successor to Infinity Wars, it's a new style of simultaneous turn based card game set in the same world (or is it worlds?) as its predecessor. While its not quite time yet to reveal details about the gameplay, many fan favourite mechanics are making a return, as well as characters such as Aberion and Lucca
All of this is likely to just spark more questions than it answers, but I promise a floodgate of information will be opened soon.
For now on I look forward to starting to chat with everyone about this upcoming game.
If you want to get in touch I always try to be generous with my time. You can contact me on any of the platforms below:
Twitter: @ReubenCovington
Discord: Reuben#4049
Email: reubencovington@gmail.com
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