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Brainscraps Holiday Card No. 6, and Future Plans

After taking 2020 off, the Holiday Cards are back! Without further ado, here is the sixth Brainscraps Holiday Card, Mary Sue’s Character Casino, which is fully playable via your desktop or laptop browser.

Mary Sue's Character CasinoThis is my most ambitious Holiday Card to date in terms of both game design and asset creation. The initial inspiration came through playing Luck be a Landlord, an Early Access roguelike deckbuilder I grew quite fond of this year. The few mobile gacha apps I’ve been playing around with might’ve also had something to do with this game’s theme. Once I’d settled on the basic premise, next was the game engine, which was no easy task. First I tried out Ct.js, but found it to be inadequate for what I was trying to make. Then there was Godot, which proved to be too complex for a brain as regularly wracked by insomnia as mine. The third engine I tried, GDevelop, wound up being a good middle ground, although it is not as polished as some others I’ve used in the past. It also uses the dread language JavaScript, though I won’t hold that against it (much).

All of this experimentation happened sometime in the middle of the year. That’s right. Whereas past Holiday Cards typically took between one and three months to make, start to finish, Mary Sue’s Character Casino was a half-year project. The static art assets alone took me more than a month and a half to create.

Putting all this time toward making the game meant less for other things, such as this blog. With that in mind, Mary Sue’s Character Casino will be the last Holiday Card for the foreseeable future. Starting in 2022, I’m going to make a real effort to revamp and revive this blog, with more frequent (and hopefully shorter) updates. In terms of content, I would like to post more here than just reviews and impressions, and bring back the sorts of commentary and features that used to appear here. A slight visual refresh is also being planned.

For those that have been reading all this time, thanks for sticking with me, and if you’re new here, welcome, and hope to see you again. I also hope that everyone has (or had, or is having) a safe and enjoyable holiday season!