Pop Culture Ikon

Creating a Lusternia trading card game has been one of my dreams almost since I came up as a wee little ephemeral and learned how to program mobs and quests. I’ve been sitting on the idea for a year or so now and finally decided that I had some free time to see if I could go anywhere with it. Feeling confident that I was on my way to programming something awesomely cool, I talked my idea over with Morgfyre who pointed out all the things I wouldn’t be able to without hard-coding. He gave me a few more ideas and with the thought that I was onto something, I took my proposal for this new card game to Estarra. Initially, Estarra didn’t think that there would be much demand for another card game and it would quickly fall to the wayside. However, we hashed it out a little bit more, spiced up the original proposal up with some fresh ideas and cut out some of the more confusing and complex things I had originally thought of.

In fact, the idea transformed from just a card game into a full-blown skillset. That’s right, we designed a whole skillset around collecting cards, battling with them, and gaining buffs from them. Once we tweaked our skillset idea, revamped it a few times, and hashed out all the details of the buffs, we promptly deleted it all. Estarra’s thought that maybe there was no need for people to invest more lessons into a new skillset when we could just add this to an already existing skill to make it more convenient and accessible for everyone, even newbies. This is something we all agreed with (Estarra is pretty brilliant about these things) and so we streamlined the system (again) and decided to put it in the Dramatics skill set and tie it in with stages.

Now that the design was confirmed, we moved into the coding phase. I spent a couple of weeks anxiously waiting for Iosai to do all the hard work, and although it seemed like it took an eternity, everything was coded and we were ready to begin making our cards (which as you might have guessed, we decided to call ikons). I had initially planned to make all of the ikons myself, thinking that it would be a small task and wouldn’t take too long. However, Shikari was really excited about the project so Estarra made this into a group project for all the gods. I was really only expecting Shikari to want to make ikons, but so many of us jumped at the chance that we had to create new sets of ikons just to have enough to go around!

To make a long story slightly shorter, what started out as a small, fun little project blossomed into over 1,000 ikons. The admin have been testing them out for weeks and we’ve really enjoyed them, so I hope that you all do too! I’d love to hear about your favorite ikons so far or what new sets of ikons you’re hoping for in the future… and once you get your gestalts set up, make sure you challenge your favorite divine to a game of Psychodrama!