Toaster Story
Before A Grimoire’s Tale, there was Toaster Story, my first pass on trying to see what you get when you cross an action game with a deckbuilder. Deckbuilders are fun when you get to build up an awesome that synergizes with itself, but what if the success of your deck depended on your aim and how the enemies got hit? That question was at the core of the idea of Toaster Story. The idea first came together as a stick figure throwing cards with different effects around and being able to recall them, taking heavy inspiration from Twisted Fate and Xayah from League of Legends. After some random experimenting with an art style, I drew a cute, cartoony toaster, and from there the game really came together.
Toaster Story was developed in the span of 2 long and hard weeks for my Unity game development course during the second semester of my sophomore year. I went above and beyond the scope of what the 2 week project was supposed to be, but that was because I really want to explore the concept and get some awesome work done out of it. After the Zelda 1 Demake, I had a lot more Unity knowledge behind my back, though working with UI elements to make the draggable card system was one of the roughest parts of the project alongside manually making separate zones for every room… I also had to maintain another Kanban board throughout the process that really helped streamline development and focus me on those big tasks to knock down. After grinding real hard for those 2 weeks, I think ended up with a genuinely fun game. It fun to shoot toast at all sorts of different foodstuffs and the recall mechanic feels super satisfying too. There’s a lot of ‘builds’ to try out, and the game isn’t a cakewalk either.
Go give it a run through yourself at one the links above! Or, if you’re interested in some snapshots of the early builds, check out the postmortem linked below.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Everything except for the sound effects!