Nine Lives to Ruin a Kingdom — Narrative Card Game

A — WORLD & CHARACTERS

Colour blocks, silhouettes, proportion tests. Sharp angular forms read as danger; flowing contours as allure.

Nüwa issues the command but never strikes. Daji is sent to bring King Zhou down and begins to waver. Zhou resists them both, and destroys himself doing it.

B — FIRST PROTOTYPE

Four hidden attributes — Love, Corruption, Divine Favour, Freedom — shift with every choice.

Built in ProtoPie, not Unity — two weeks, because “does the flow hold up” doesn’t need an engine to answer. Testers said:

They understood the concept and did not care about the story. The loop lacked appeal and reward.

Everything after this section answers those two sentences.

_{Phase I — the ProtoPie prototype that got tested. Not the current build.}

The loop is the thing the testers were describing. Both versions of it, side by side:

_{Phase I. Three steps and four numbers — everything the card does happens out of sight.}

_{Phase II. The same three beats, but the card is now played — so the loop pays you back where you can see it.}

C — THE TEN STEMS

Not five elements with a yin and yang coat of paint — the Ten Heavenly Stems arrive already doubled. Three words per card, fixed before anything was drawn:

Underneath runs the overcoming cycle — it tilts an exchange, not decides it.

D — PROCESS

Four decisions did most of the work, and none of them were about drawing.

Pipeline: boards → thumbnails → AI for initial motion → After Effects and TouchDesigner → sound. Abstract on purpose: detailed narrative art is the most expensive thing at this size.

E — GAME ASSETS

E.1 — NARRATIVE SEQUENCES

E.2 — SYMBOLS & ICONS

Fate and Artifact cards are planned. Only Element Cards are built, and they carry combat.

E.3 — UI & INTERFACE

Unity’s defaults covered the painting they were meant to frame. Rebuilt from the health bar out: dark ground, art on top, frame around.

The advantage tell, card costs and five status effects are built and still invisible.

F — WHERE IT LANDED

Phase II is a team build in Unity. Engineering is his; the card system, the art and the script are mine.

Boot → Title → Town → Battle: a hub gated on story flags, and combat carrying the ten-stem deck. The two things testers said were missing — somewhere for the story to happen, a loop that pays you back.

A prototype, not a shipped game. What it settles is that the deck works as mechanics, not only as illustration.