Pyramidion is a roguelike deckbuilding game that focuses on using time, rather than mana, as its main resource.
I was the sole artist and co-designer of the game, creating all of the art assets, UI elements, animations and all other visual elements. The game design has been a dual effort between my partner and I, with continuous discussion and iteration on a daily basis. Aside from art, I also designed many of the cards, the enemy behaviors, and balanced/tuned the card values and enemy actions.
Latest Release (GitHub)
Website (NYU Game Center)
The unique addition of time to the conventional structure of card-oriented combat creates a gameplay experience that is a uniquely complex blend of the improvisational chaos of deckbuilders and the deliberate, chess-like calculation of turn-based strategy games.
Over the course of development, we definitely faced a lot of challenges in realizing our initial conception of what Pyramidion would be. Though the digital format offered many advantages, it also put a lot more responsibility on us as designers to create a user interface that was easily readable, but also sufficiently conveyed the nuances of the timeline-oriented combat system.
Through countless cycles of play-testing and iteration, we can confidently say we’ve arrived at a point where the UI speaks for itself without need for an overbearing onboarding process, which was one of our greatest design struggles throughout development.
As designers and players that have been deeply passionate about the elegant yet cerebral systems belying the card game genre, we hope that Pyramidion makes for a distinct entry into the rapidly evolving landscape of the genre.