To prevent Players from only using 'Spell' cards or 'Weapon' cards, I decided to implement something that may cause them a lot of anger, but which will further increase the competitiveness and how addictive the game is.
The game will have a Casual and Competitive mode, just like the original Runestone, but the amount of stat boosts Players will receive will be based on how high the Player's Rank is.
With the ranks being Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Master.
Players in Bronze and Silver will still receive an 'Ok' amount of stats, Players in Gold and Platinum will receive the fair amount of stats and for Players in Diamond and Master I'll use the part that Bronze and Silver players miss out on to give them a little more stats than they should receive.
Considering that the Players' Rank will look like a Gaussian Curve, the amount of Bronze and Silver Players will be only slightly higher than the amount of Diamond and Master Players, making it all fair.
I know how addictive competitive games were in my previous world, these being the games where Players spent most of their day and spent most of their money, even though they were Free To Play games, so I knew that developing this area would be lucrative.
Especially since there are no games like that in this world.
Here, players just compete for who has the most points, rather than battling each other to take the other's point, two completely different concepts.
With that decided, I turned my attention to planning the game's development.
Following the idea of the original Runestone, the game would take place in a player-only tavern. When an opponent was found, the players would be facing each other and would be able to talk and interact freely during the game.
At the end of the game, the two players would return to their own tavern where they could edit their decks, study the cards, open card packs or whatever they wanted to do.
Regarding the card packs, as the games were free, the card packs would be bought using an in-game currency that players would receive at the end of each game based on their performance, wins granting more coins and losses granting fewer coins.
One doubt I had was that if the games are free, how do the Game Creators earn money?
Simple, in order to play the games, the Players had to pay a monthly fee to the government, which then paid the Game Creators based on the time spent by the Players in the game.
The old Theo didn't pay much attention to the amount of this fee, but I know that the biggest Game Creators are multi-millionaires, so I doubt that this fee is low.
With all this decided and planned, all that remained was to develop the game.
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Fortunately, my memory was almost perfect after the merging of the two minds, so I could clearly remember all the cards in the game.
The process of making each of the cards, programming the cards' restrictions and everything they could do was easier than I had imagined.
Once I got used to doing it, I could make all 3 cards in the morning in just a few minutes, then use the remaining 23 MP to set up the smaller, more detailed parts of the game in a couple of hours, have my lunch, rest for two hours, then go back to Game Core, make the 3 cards in the afternoon, use the remaining 23 MP in the afternoon and go back to the real world to study.
My studying wasn't very complex, I'd just pick up the college books that the old Theo had given up studying and study that again.
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After repeating this routine for three days, I realized something very good!
I was ready to make my first card of the day when I started accumulating Mana at my fingertips as usual.
1 MP...
5 MP...
10 MP...
12 MP...
14 MP...
And the Mana has stopped accumulating!
[14 Mana Points Stored, do you want to model a “Special Reeroy Lenkins Card”?]
'Why did this card only cost 14 MP?!' I asked shocked.
“Yes.” I replied a little doubtfully.
Within seconds the card was shaped in front of me using my mana.
As I had studied a lot about Game Core and Game Creating, as well as observing so many advanced cards being shaped with my Mana, I was able to understand a little more about the process of shaping the card this time.
Looking at the card and seeing that it was as perfect as the others, I was a little confused, but an idea came to mind.
To test this idea I decided to make the next card.
1 MP...
5 MP...
10 MP...
12 MP...
14 MP...
And the Mana stopped accumulating again at 14 MP!
[14 Mana Points Stored, do you want to model a “Special Lava Giant Card”?]
This was an even more powerful and iconic card than Saphire Drake, but it had its cost reduced by 1 MP!
To be sure, I ran the test with another card and the result was the same, the cost had dropped to 14 MP!
'The only reason I can think of for this is that as my knowledge has improved a lot in the last 3 days, the cost System charges to cover my lack of knowledge has decreased! ' I deduced excitedly.
I wasn't even learning out of obligation, with my new level of understanding, learning had become satisfying.
Opening the book with so many new and interesting concepts that I only needed to read a few times to understand was fascinating!
I had started studying the content taught in the first year, which was simpler, so this was even easier to learn.
Who knew that relearning this kind of thing would save me MP when using the System?!
Not only had the MP cost of using the System gone down, but the cost of doing everything else in the game had also gone down.
Some things only decreased by fractions of a MP, while others decreased by just over 1 MP, which at the end of the day gave me an average saving of 9 MP compared to the previous day when I had done the same things for 9 MP more.
After another 6 days of study, the cost of using the System dropped again, reducing the cost of making the card by another 1 MP.
At this point I had made 4 more cards than I should have because of the MP savings my knowledge had generated, and with the cards costing only 13 MP over the next 6 days I was able to make 8 more cards in addition to the 4 extra I had made and the 90 cards I had originally intended to make, increasing the total amount of cards available in the game to 102 cards!
These 12 extra cards that the game received would make a big difference to Players' decks, making the game even more fun than it was originally going to be.
Being now only 7 days away from the end of the test with the game completed I decided to launch the game on the University's website and try out the game as a Player, without any Game Creator benefits just out of curiosity.
I had already tried the cards, tried the classes and even tested the False Neurological Feedback and surprisingly it worked on me too!
Ever since I discovered it I've had to control myself not to spend my Mana activating False Neurological Feedback on myself to improve my body, since I still needed that Mana, but now that the game was finished I could leave it activated all the time improving my body constantly!
The improvement it gave me was low, low to the point that if I didn't know it was active I probably wouldn't even notice the difference, but knowing it was active and analyzing the changes it was making to my body I started to see a difference!
As I was the Game Creator I didn't even have to depend on the cards, I just chose which statistic I wanted to improve and every hour my body would improve in proportion to the 1 MP it improved.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to increase how much it improved, probably because the Game Core was only Rank F, limiting my gains to those relative to a Rank F, but I wasn't dissatisfied, I could go all day without doing anything and my body would improve as if I'd worked out in a gym for a few hours.
The game was released under the name Runestone, in homage to the original game in my previous world.
The artwork for the game page on the university website was made using screenshots from the game, since I wasn't good enough at artwork and could use the System to make whatever artwork I imagined, which made the game page look much nicer than the pages for other games.
Unfortunately releasing the game with only a week to go until the test ended meant that I was one of the last games to be released, sending me straight to the bottom of the games list, but I was confident that the smell of a good wine wouldn't be hidden by a dark alley.
And I was right, as I was assembling my Deck using the starter cards the game made available, I felt an MP being spent in the game indicating that a Player had connected.
I was curious to know how this Player would react to logging in for the first time, but instead of logging in as Admin and going snooping around, I decided to just continue setting up my Deck and join the game queue, ready to be this Player's opponent when he decided he was ready to play.