Slay the Spire: The Dragon Character Mod

This is my second time creating a mod for Slay the Spire, but is far more ambitious than the last one. The previous one was essentially a booster pack for an existing character, containing only 9 cards and 1 new mechanic. This mod is a brand new character, full of it's own brand-new mechanics and 75 draftable cards (there's even more obtainable cards via tokens). While the mod is not yet available on steam, the releases can be found here. This article is going to focus a bit more on the technical aspects, rather than design decisions. The mod isn't available on Steam as the gameplay is still in flux and it's currently full of placeholder art and icons:

This character has gone through a lot of changes and iterations, both over and under the hood. One of the core mechanics of the Dragon is her Spark and Breath cards. They can be thought of as two-sided that flip sides based on a condition. To create these cards, I used someone else's mod as a starting point. These "swappable" cards would allow me to pair cards and switch their places. However, theirs was more complex than I needed for my own purposes and I eventually created these two-in-one cards as I never needed to dynamically pair any arbitrary two cards like theirs. In a recent update, I was able to extract the Ember scaling that each Breath card has into a Breath Modifier I could attach to the cards, instead of needing to edit each card individually. This is especially helpful as I'm looking to explore the strength of the scaling for balance purposes and this will make it much easier to adjust.

One of the new mechanics I created is Hoard. While gameplaywise, it's just Exhaust with a power gain stapled to it, I ended up creating a lot of code to support it. Creating one centralized action to handle Hoarding random cards, multiple cards, the card played, and any other Hoarding situation allowed me to call the hooks I created from one place. Requiring the ability to handle all these situations led me to exploring efficient solutions to convey which scenario needs to be processed. The solution I landed on was a bitfield. While I only need 3 bits right now, it makes it extremely easy to extend the code to more scenarios in the future without bloating it with a series of overloaded constructors.

Creating the Dragon mod so far has required a large amount of trial and error. I am extremely grateful to the Slay the Spire modding community for being so friendly and helping me along this journey. I intend to continue iterating on this mod and eventually add bespoke art, rather than reusing assets already in the game.