Triple Triad

summary.

My husband @jjplusplus was playing the Final Fantasy VIII remaster when he excitedly told me about “the best minigame” he’d ever played. He rushed through the beginning (like only someone who’d played it fifty times before can) just so he could talk to the first NPC that would play the game with you.

I watched, intrigued but confused. I didn’t quite get the flow yet. Even after he’d explained how the game worked, I still didn’t have a good grasp of what strategies you could do. So I thought, what better way to learn and practice?

research.

Boardgame.io is an open-source game engine for turn-based games and something I’d been interested in trying out. It just so happened that this was the perfect engine to do a card game, so it was an easy choice to make.

At the time, React was also on my list to learn — double the learning in one project, yay!

After watching my husband play a couple of rounds and then trying it out myself, I took my notes and started prototyping.

prototyping & dev.

In boardgame.io’s documentation, they have a straightforward tutorial which I followed loosely to get things set up. They also have a very handy Debug Panel which allowed me to essentially playtest as I worked on implementing the game logic.

[ 01. Randomize values in each card ]

In FFVIII, part of the goal is acquiring new cards to use and setting up your deck. In our version, cards will be randomized instead. It adds an element of luck to the mix and forces different strategies in each playthrough.

[ 02. Check against neighboring cards ]

Points are determined by how many of your cards (either blue or red) remain on the board. The second player’s final card is also counted at the end. To flip a card, we check the ranks (the values on the card) against its neighboring card’s corresponding ranks.

[ 03. Game Board ]

For the game board, I followed the original game’s 3x3 grid and hand placements. I considered straying from the base game and adding other twists (bigger board, new rules, etc), but with the time constraints I’d set, it would take too long to properly balance and test out any new mechanics.

improvements.

In proper game jam spirit, we finished working once we hit the 48-hour mark, which cut out some of the loftier nice-to-haves we had (like networking, custom deck graphics, etc). We are definitely down to revisit this project when we have the time!