Looks interesting but it took me a minute to realize that you don't actually need to register to see the site's content. For some reason, the page ignores keyboard navigation (page down/up, arrow keys down/up, space bar) in Firefox (only) so, on my laptop, the page looks like it has no content except the register button.

Also, the page uses a background image blur that is supported by Firefox and Chrome, but not IE or Edge.

Thanks for letting me know. Will fix.

CloudFlare is reporting '521 - Site down?!?'. Possibly the HN 'hug of death'?

Definitely one more victim of its popularity.

"Error 525 - SSL handshake failed"

One day we should do some stats about site going down on HN. That would make a nice narrative for why engineering matters and running a site on your own home server ain't real business.

Not everything needs to be real business... Solid infrastructure has an associated cost in both time and money that not everybody is willing to pay, especially for side-projects.

Not everything is costly. For instance a wordpress.com is free and takes unlimited traffic but your own wordpress instance costs money and has limited traffic.

You think wordpress.com has unlimited traffic? I doubt it would survive the front page of hacker news.

As a person who has front paged multiple times on HN, I can tell you my blog is self hosted WordPress on a $10/mo digital ocean droplet, and it has fared very well every single time, including almost 100k views in a single day. I'm pretty sure if my $10 stock instance can handle the traffic, WordPress.com can definitely.

So this really only builds a game exactly like Hearthstone? I was hoping it was more of a generic game builder.

It is a generic game builder. Hearthstone is the first template that's available, but you are able to modify the rules to make any games you'd like. Check out the "rules" tab on the card list.

Is there a guide somewhere? I haven't played Hearthstone.

it's a basic trading card game/collectible cards game, think magic, yu-gi-oh etc. Hearthstone is a simple version of it, with a lot of RNG thrown in for "casual gaming", and using the fact that it runs on computers only.

I don't think the OP is specifically HS-like, just TCG/CCG.

There are non-rng mechanics that preclude physical cards too, like abilities modifying the stats on cards in your deck and hand.

yes, sorry I wasn't clear that was what I meant.

No trading in hearthstone.

So, no tcg. Just cg.

AFAIK, hearthstone works on iphones.

Which is a kind of computer, and thus can do all the things that are hard to do with physical cards.

As someone who is currently building a card system in Unity I greatly appreciate the work that must have went into this project!

While I realize it is pretty early in the project, since your audience is hobbyists and indie devs, a few questions spring to mind that I think are important but I couldn't find answers for yet:

1) What rights do creators have over their project vs the dulst team? (And if you decided not to continue support for the project do you have a policy to allow creators access to the code base to keep their games alive?)

2) It looks like you plan to monetize through the coin system which it seems can be earned in game but probably also have a purchase function. What kind of split are you thinking of for creators?

3) Will there be some sort of support for PVE style battles so that players don't need to wait in match-making?

What I like:

1) It's great that you thought of a number of pre-defined special abilities/functions. Most card game templates are just raw battle by number.

2) It's clear you are trying to provide a ton of flexibility to the game creators not only in terms of their game, but the website, tooltip work etc.

3) It's really clever to allow users to suggest cards and then allow game creators to reward them for that. The community aspect of this will go a long way for some games.

4) You've added in help docs, wikis and forums for every games sub-site which will be very useful for making a more polished experience for end users.

General Feedback:

1) The game chat bar is rather garish and at least on Chrome pops-up over the content. Even though it is see-through it makes me think something is broken.

2) The grey on grey on white theme of the admin panel makes it feel very cluttered and hard to discern where different options are. You may want to break that out with more spacing, coloration on the titles and a darker text font.

3) The current "Gameplay" tab for admins is pretty overwhelming with options. It seems like something that could either be split out into further menus, or at least have drop down toggles for each section.

4) You've done a great job at explaining most of the fields and allowing me to add in tool-tip explanations for players, however, there are still a few fields that are unclear. For example, on "Gameplay" secondary property I can add in my own tag such as 'Potato' but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to define what that property is or what it would do. There also isn't a list to reference for existing properties.

5) The "Quests" tab doesn't load in the admin panel. Not sure if that is just unfinished or if it is a bug.

6) When you hit the button to create a card (noted in Chrome) sometimes the creation screen flashes and the card is created before you can enter details.

7) The UI to click on cards to edit them is not intuitive given the pop-up. I kept hovering over the card and trying to click into the pop-up version of it to edit cards.

8) Also when the create/edit card overlay is up I can navigate to other pages by clicking them on the background but it doesn't result in the overlay being removed.

8) It seems once again I can add properties to a card, but even in the Wiki there isn't a list of what elements I can add. Even if I add in "Potato" and set it to "2" this won't have any game impact.

9) The rarity mechanic is kind of odd. You've got it on a 100 point scale which makes me think it is percentile, but even if a card doesn't appear 99% of the time that may not end up being that rare?

10) It's also unclear from the wiki and help docs when a card 'drops' and rarity is used. The wiki mentions manually designing packs and says that they may break the rarity mechanic and make cards too common. In the packs menu you can only assign a cost, level, graphic and name to the packs, and in the card editing list you can't seem to assign cards to a pack so I assume that rarity is what is used here? There doesn't seem to be a way to define what rarity appears in what decks etc.

11) I like the board editor concept, but it is confusing as hell to open up and to move elements around. Even though you can create new elements, there doesn't seem to be a way to bind any code to them, so why not open this up as CSS for people to edit the layout of pre-defined elements instead?

Thanks, tremendous feedback. Seeing as you're making a card game system this feedback is invaluable to me. There are so many things I would want to ask you. Would you like to join our discord? https://discord.gg/0q1HOSYDXzcJRg7h (Invite open to anyone btw, let's talk!)

These are all important questions and I'll be using this to help make our FAQ.

1) You own all rights to the game. We're just a host. The terms page will detail it. All cards and code is now available over the rest api and you can already export it. Check the network tab. There is a backend compiler for the dulst dsl that's our secret sauce, but if we ever end the project we'll open source that too. We're also planning on adding a "pro" mode with better/faster support, git based version control, and more code privacy so that your game can't be so easily copied. Right now the code is easily exportable.

2) 30-70

3) Yes, singleplayer is on the roadmap. Initially it won't be very sophisticated and we'll only support an onboarding / tutorialing process, however I expect it to get a lot better over time.

Thanks for all the compliments.

General:

1, 2, 3) Agreed. Thanks. Will send this to the designer. 4) Properties are used by rule cards. Rule cards are basically code but resides in the card effect building interface. You can find it on the rule cards tab when you go to the main card list. We'll improve the UI for this on the gameplay admin page, thanks.

5) Will fix thanks.

6, 7) Thank you will look into it.

8) The instructions for the new creator experience will be worked on. Right now the only way to understand it is to read the Rules.

9, 10) Rarity system will be improved and clarified with better docs. I'm unclear what you mean by decks in the last sentence. There is no way to precisely define what cards appear when, just higher rarities appear in higher packs on the market. This is the only place where rarity is used atm. Right now the rarity system is simplistic but I wanted to make the default experience somewhat fool-proof creators. I would love more feedback on what you would like to see so we can add more features for people that want advanced controls over card drops.

11) CSS editing is available. There's a button for it on the left in the board editor. Positioning the board elements is done in JS and not CSS. Hopefully it'll become clearer. We're going to be making some videos explaining this. Binding code to them is done in the Rule cards.