The Art of Card Shark Dev blog and a new lowest SALE price!

When making this game, we honestly weren't sure if anyone would want to play it. We knew that the gameplay would not be for everyone. It's a game about cards, but not a card game. Deck manipulation puzzles are bound by real-life and not traditional game mechanics. It encourages you to think and memorize but under significant time pressure.

Despite that, we made a game full of artistry that we are very proud of. If you want to support indie games that take ambitious risks like this, it would mean a lot to us if you bought or gifted Card Shark.

Thank you to everyone who has already taken that plunge and experienced what our team has worked so hard on. Whether it was a game for you or not, we really appreciate your support!

And to celebrate this new lowest sale price, our lead artist, animator and cheat, Nicolai Troshinsky, has written this detailed developer blog. It shows how much work went into just one small aspect of the game.



If you played Card Shark it might surprise you that out of all the different mini-games, the “Card In Hat” was by far the most difficult one to develop. We spent more time working on this interaction than on any other technique in the game. Minor spoilers ahead!



Throughout the game, this technique appears just once and the interaction lasts only a few seconds. It seems absurd that such a short one-off moment took us so much work.

The idea came from this brilliant demonstration by legendary magician Ricky Jay. We immediately thought we had to have something like this in the game. So it was storyboarded and written from very early on in the project, becoming a necessary part of the story.



The basic idea was simple but making a card fly in 3D inside a hand-drawn 2D game was a big challenge. I naively thought we could have the card in actual 3D and simulate the physics but that was quickly discarded as too complicated.



I decided to solve the problem myself, in animation. Here's me trying it out to see how the card should behave. Not only the motion of the card would be a challenge but also it´s interaction with the chair.



We originally tried to implement a more complex aiming system for which I built this trail that didn’t make it to the final version. There are several animations accounting for hitting the chair, falling in the hat and rules to deal with draw order based on angle and strength of the shot. It got complicated fast!



It took me a lot of tests until I ended up figuring out a way to animate each axis on a separate bone and combine them in order to achieve the pseudo 3D motion. With a single animation I was able to scale and rotate the entire trajectory from a single bone.



We originally tried to implement a more complex aiming system for which I built this trail that didn’t make it to the final version. There are several animations accounting for hitting the chair, falling in the hat and rules to deal with draw order based on angle and strength of the shot. It got complicated fast!



That was just the visual side! The interaction design was another big problem, it played terribly for the longest time. We tried so many things and they were all either incomprehensible, trivially easy or insanely difficult. A ton of work was discarded.

I think it was only finished around the very end of development. Looking back, was it worth it? What did you think of this part of the game?

Nicolai Troshinsky - Artist, Animator, Cheat