Book of River Luo

Background and theme of the game

We associate the "Bagua" synthesis with the card synthesis. Bagua is used as the player's card. In this ancient legend, a divine tortoise emerged from the Luo River during a flood in ancient China, carrying the "Book of River Luo" and offering it to Dayu. The Great Yu was successful in controlling the flood. So, we intend to set the game in this period, and players control the turtle to fight with the monsters that caused the flood.

Game Operation

The game uses a combination of roguelike and card battles. In specific scenarios, players fight by dragging cards around. Dragging a card onto a player or place takes effect. Each card has a corresponding mana cost, and the player uses mana after using the card. When the player ends their turn, click End Turn.

Game Design

We bring ancient Chinese legends to life in a game-like way

New cards are acquired after passing the levels. There is a comprehensive growth system.

The difficulty of the game is based on the mental flow model, giving the game a ladder of difficulty and increasing the player's experience of difficulty.

The aesthetic design is based on the descriptions in the source material and references traditional Chinese brush painting techniques and traditional color schemes.

Future Ideas

Bagua Card Synthesis. Because the flow of our game is relatively short, then players need to be able to operate it straight away within a short period of time at the start of the game. If the card synthesis feature was forced in, players would start to take a long time to learn to play smoothly. This is obviously not a situation we want to see, so we have removed this feature for now. In the future we have plans to continue developing the game, adding more levels and processes to the game, so we can consider gradually adding the card synthesis feature.

Bagua Card Design. We didn't end up with the eight trigrams corresponding to each card in the game, partly because the synthesis function wasn't included and partly because the attributes hadn't been introduced in the game before it was time to do so. In the original vision, both players and monsters would correspond to different five element attributes. This would allow for attribute restraint play in the game and would be able to enrich the elements of the game.

Game character animation. We created character animations, but were unable to implement them in unity. The problem was a technical one and our team members had problems importing it into Unity after playing into the animation and it was still not resolved by the time the development was finally completed.

Random events. After passing a level in the game, the corresponding event will appear for selection and the player will choose different events with different results, including rewards, penalties and enhancements, etc.

Cards corresponding to benefit reduction. We want more strategy in the game, when the enemy attacks, it will cause a corresponding benefit reduction and the player needs to anticipate in advance and use the corresponding cards to counter it.