New Free Game: Spellstones
by Sam Avallone
Based on the classic card game Cuttle, Spellstones repackages the action in a high-fantasy theme while making it easier than ever to play. Below you’ll find my thoughts on the game, as well as a link to download and play it yourself!
Several weeks ago, we experimented with a new type of YouTube stream focused on highlighting the PLAAY approach to game design. Dubbed the “Game Garage,” the idea was to create a casual “peek behind the curtains” environment that gives viewers an extended, up-close look at how we make games. Spellstones is the first project to come out of the Game Garage segment, and serves as a proof-of-concept for what’s to come in the future. Click the button bellow to go to the official Spellstones page where you can read more about the game and download it for yourself!
So, what exactly is Spellstones? At its core, Spellstones is a re-theme of the game classic card game Cuttle, which dates back to the 70s and is often credited as being the first example of a “battle” card game. Played with nothing more than a standard deck of playing cards, Cuttle’s mechanics share many similarities with modern-day TCGs such as Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Yugi-Oh, etc. Though playing a complex and text-heavy game with only a standard deck of playing cards does have its novelty and charm, it’s also what I think is Cuttle’s main downfall. This is where Spellstones comes in.
The biggest upgrade that Spellstones makes to it’s predecessor is simply putting the text onto the cards. No more cross-referencing a rules sheet; everything you need to know about a card is presented clearly on the card itself. Beyond that (and beyond the artwork, which we’ll also touch on shortly), there have been several other tweaks and changes made to morph Spellstones into slightly more than just a Cuttle clone. For starters, there is an extra 13th card in the mix (the Colossus), and another that has been completely changed from its original text (the Conjurer). Several other cards have been updated and balanced, mainly with the focus of putting more emphasis on board-building with Champions. If you’re familiar with Cuttle, you should be able to spot the changes right away, and hopefully find yourself enjoying a fresh gameplay experience.
Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: all that cool artwork! If you can believe it, every card image has been largely AI-generated. I did some minor cleanup work by hand, but for the most part the AI results got me exactly what I wanted in a cohesive art style. I’m blown away with how far AI has come, and excited to see just how good it will get in the future. I know there’s a lot of discussion going on right now around the ethics behind AI, especially as it impacts creative fields, and I want to be very careful about taking that into consideration while working with this new technology. However, I do feel like AI is the future, and will eventually be considered a standard-practice tool in every creative’s belt. Even today as I write this blog post, Adobe has just announced that their AI model is now available for commercial use—change is definitely coming. Until we get there, though, I think that for-fun projects like these are the perfect use case for AI technology, and I’m excited to continue exploring it in this way. If you’re interested in what the card creation process looked like, you can watch the Game Garage VOD and see it all from start to finish.
On the topic of the Game Garage, you can expect to see more of this content coming very soon! I had wanted to keep a consistent schedule with it from the outset, but production of Tennis has derailed any plans of going live the past few weeks. Once I’ve got some more design time on my hands though I plan on making this a weekly (or maybe even more?) stream. Also under consideration is whether to keep the Game Garage streams on our YouTube channel, or if it would make sense to migrate to Twitch so we don’t flood the YouTube channel with Game Garage content. Either way, we’ll keep you posted as plans develop.
Thanks for reading though to the end here! I hope you enjoy playing Spellstones as much as I do, and I’ll see you real soon back in the Garage!
-Sam