Hello everyone. Thanks for reading our devlog.
Today we would like to share more details on the game mechanic design and also share about what we think about our current design.

Introduction to the Game Mechanics

1) Control of Core Game Loop - Daily Scheduling System

At the beginning of each day, players can decide their own schedule for the day at home. After deciding on the schedule, the game will be executed one by one according to the contents of the schedule. There are three main schedule items: events, card battles, and restaurants. 

When the day ends, players will get a certain amount of apocalypse progress. If the apocalypse progress reaches 100%, players can choose the ending at home and challenge the final level.

2) Story Event

Players will experience an event every day, where players can select various options to obtain different attribute enhancements and apocalypse ending points.

3) Card Battle

Each battle consists of rounds of "debates". The player's goal is to use the knowledge cards in their hands to reduce the HP of the enemies in front of them to zero, and then they can win.

At the beginning of each round, the player will draw 5 knowledge cards from the draw library into their hands. Players can use cards they have collected each round, to attack "topics on the field", which is named as the contest-points. When players attack these contest-points, the enemy status will be affected accordingly. 

If the damage caused by the player to a single contest-point is greater than the enemy, the player will occupy the contest-point and gain additional effects of the contest-point, and vice versa.

When the damage applied to the contest-point is greater than a certain value, the contest-point will increase its level, and strengthen the contest-point effect.

4) Restaurant

Players can make deck adjustments or supplies in the restaurant.

* Please note that the development is in progress and the design is subject to changes.

Words from the Creators on the Game Design

We designed the scheduling system because we hope that players can use strategy to select the daily routine and then gain bonus afterwards. Selecting an appropriate route may help them to win the game more easily.

As for the story event, we are still struggling on how to present the content. We want to create a layout that enables the game to maintain the immersive feeling (just like the card battle) as much as possible.

About the card battle, we have created a paper prototype and found that this design has greater potential in creating a new experience. We believe that we may need a certain amount of time to test the game balance both internally and externally to ensure a good gaming experience. Especially for the design of the contest-point layout, some found that it is not intuitive enough. We are planning to do more testing on that to see if improvement is needed.

One Final Word

We are now testing our internal beta game to prepare for the releasing of the demo. We still have lots of work to do on game balancing and visual effects, but we are sure that we can release a public demo in the coming months!

If you are interested in our game, please support us by wishlisting our game on steam or/and follow us on social media!

Links:

• Official Website: https://rankbdev.github.io/codea/ 
• Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2051290/Codename_Apocalypse/
• Discord: hhttps://discord.gg/yqZXhKf9AH
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/Kf3zY_IIUpE 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RankB_Dev 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codename_apocalypse/ 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Codename-Apocalypse/100075844770182/  

* If you would like to ask questions to learn more about Codename: Apocalypse or our team, please feel free to leave comments below!