About 6 months ago, I posted a call on this blog to find folks who would be interested in building a game in a non-hierarchical organization [fr]. This led to the assembly of a team of 7 people, and to the creation of the game Phytomancer, soon to be released. This is a post-mortem of our production period, looking back on all the mistakes we made and rejoicing about the few things we did correctly!

Bonne nouvelle : la création de mon studio de jeux vidéo en coopérative va bon train ! Après de multiples péripéties que je raconterais peut-être ici, j'ai constitué un tout petit groupe de trois personnes : James, Mathieu et moi-même. Nous avons commencé par nous échauffer en créant un petit jeu sur deux jours — Q, l'As du volant — et nous passons maintenant à l'étape supérieure. Nous allons créer un jeu, commercialisation comprise, en trois mois.

[This is part 4 of my Study of Digital Card Games series.]

Now that we have a good grasp of what the major games of the digital CCG genre are, it's time for me to do my best analyzing it. In this article I'm going to look at the common points, what defines CCGs nowadays, then the differences, where CCGs tried to innovate, and finally I'll give a shot at guessing where the next innovations can be.

[This is part 2 of my Study of Digital Card Games series.]

The first notable CCG that made it to the digital space was, guess who, Magic! There have been several software allowing to play the game on a computer, but the first to embrace online play was Magic: The Gathering Online, shortened as MTGO and released in 2002. The pitch is simple: it is exactly the same game, but playable on a computer with folks from all around the globe. It is still active today.