New aesthetic collectible - play fields

[cg]

-When actually in-game, set up a span with a z-index below the canvas field (which will still display above the background wood image) that matches the positioning and dimensions of the inside of the red wire frame surrounding the player's creature field, permanents field, and weapon/shield field. Set up a similar span for opponent. It should default to being empty.

-Create a bunch of "play field" images that match the dimensions of the spans that were just created. These can really be anything artists want to create, though having some that are large versions of certain card arts, or element-specific things like an element's mark symbol on a field of that element's color would be a good starting point.

-Code the ability to both create reward codes that unlock a specific image and to unlock specific images in-game.

-Tie a bunch of quests (and/or achievements) to in-game game field unlocks. Have a bunch of other ones that can be given away via reward codes as prizes or whatever.

-Add a "game fields" button to the settings/logout area (or insert it as a sub-button within the settings display) that lists an account's unlocked game fields and allows them to select an active game field.

-Include the active game field when submitting arena decks or participating in PvP.

-Once we have enough game fields, start giving some of the AI decks (probably demigods first) custom game fields.

For those of you who play hearthstone, this is basically the card backs system except with play fields instead of card backs. Coding effort seems like it should be relatively minimal.


edit: also same thing except for "portraits"

[timpa]

Giving different game fields to the demigods could make the game slower due to having to load the fields. But the idea is good

[Chapuz]

Ok, it's all good. No other improvements to the idea that I can find.

[cg]

Giving different game fields to the demigods could make the game slower due to having to load the fields. But the idea is good

I mean loading a couple 250x500ish images isn't really gonna break the bandwidth bank (especially since *yours* could be loaded at the time you select it (or log in, if you've already selected and aren't changing) rather than every time you start a battle), but as I am all in favor of performance-boosting settings, all we need is a "don't load custom play fields" setting for people with narrow pipes. Possibly also a "preload all play fields" setting for people with wide pipes.

[timpa]

okay, I was thinking of something larger than 200x500

[cg]

bump while i'm requesting features. imo this is huge, though not super urgent

[cg]

Battlecry (a game of kong) has a beautiful way to make player portraits. There are "images" of 3 types (background, back image and front image) the player unlocks while playing (achievements, levels, quests) and the player can choose 3 of them to overlap to make their portrait.
Even with rough art it's fun to design a portrait mixing a background, back image and logo.

Do you like this idea?

Beyond the scope of what is initially needed, but conceivably something we could eventually move towards.

This isn't for creating your "avatar". Breaking it into pieces severely limits the scope of what's available. I'd like to see how it ends up getting used in practice before forcing it into being "avatars".

Initial stuff will be a lot more like the "gallery" option for forum portraits, since we can draw from existing card art.

edit: For clarity, it's a cool idea and something I'd like to do eventually. For right now, though, I wouldn't want to devote any artist's time to creating pieces of portraits when there's a lot of other stuff that is more urgent. Part of the point is to implement stuff that requires minimal work to implement. Right now, we can implement it and have a great deal of content pre-made in the form of existing card art. If we move right away to build-your-own-portrait, we have nothing and probably just have an unusable feature lying around for years.

[cg]

Expanded list of things we actually need for this:

1. UI support ingame for both play fields and portraits (thread posted in UI section). Functionally just a pair of spans of a specific size that we can fill with images when they are selected.

2. UI support for editor for choosing play fields and portraits (also mentioned in UI section post).

3. Backend support for owning play fields/portraits. Giving them card codes seems easiest, but whatever works is good with me. We already have precedent of using card codes to dictate which mark a deck is using, so it doesn't seem that counterintuitive.

4. Backend support for tracking selected play fields/portraits. Probably integrate them into deck codes, particularly if the cosmetics get their own card codes.

5. Codesmith support for giving out cosmetics as event rewards.

6. In-game support for giving out cosmetics as rewards for completing quests and achievements.

7. In-game support for having a low chance of obtaining cosmetics from beating specific AI targets.

[cg]

Just writing it down for later: assuming we actually do add card-specific animations, we can also have alternate-art-specific animations, so that certain special alt art prizes/collectibles for large events or difficult achievements produce much cooler animations than regular cards.