Web Card Minigame: Kaalub

Kaalub is a browser card game, developed in 7 days, for the Game Jam New Year New Skills on the website Itch.Io. The development team was made up of 3 members: Giulio Icaro Sirio, our Music and Sound Designer, Matteo Riccardo Gaudino, full-stack Developer, while I collaborated as UX/UI Designer, Game Artist and Game Designer.

For the scope of this project, I cooperated as Visual Artist and UX/UI Designer.
The gameplay was inspired by the traditional, Italian solitary card game "Solitaire of the Cross".
In the original game, the player has to stack a deck of 40 cards (divided into 4 suits of 10 cards) in crescent order (from Ace to King) on the four sides of the game board. To be able to stack the cards, the player can also stack cards using the central cross-position pattern, where cards can be stacked in decrescent order. However, the completion of the solitaire in its original version was strictly bound to the random alea factor of the card order in the deck. This limitation made the game victory completely unpredictable, as did not allow the player to build a strategy.

I therefore challenged the original design with the introduction of the following features:
- Sourcery Points: bonus points, ranging from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 3, gained by stacking cards on the cross.
- Hand of the Demon: at the cost of 1 Sourcery point, the player could ask for the help of the demon Kaalub to "hold" the last picked card for later, up to 2 cards at the same time
-Summon an Ace: at the cost of 2 Sourcery points and only once per game, the player had the possibility of "summoning" one of the aces available in the drawing deck.

In order to balance the right amount of Sourcery points, costs and bonus actions, I went through 50 rounds of tests run through paper prototypes until we got to a functional gameplay, which we identified with a 65% success rate.

The different sets of cards were drawn digitally in Procreate for iPad and then elaborated in Figma to style them in their final look and cooperate with the game developer using FIgma's tools for web design:

Please feel free to play our game on the web by accessing the project's page at this link.