Howdy!

I've been working on the UI part of the Cards System over the past week, and there’s some good news and some bad news.

The bad news:
I ended up spending about two days trying to come up with a fully dynamic way to generate the entire web of unlockable cards — and no matter what I tried, something always felt off:

• Separate skill trees for different towers – easy to implement, but problematic when cards needed to interact across trees that were far apart.

• A Path of Exile-style structure – felt like complete overkill and way more work than a few hours would justify.

• Spreading outward from the center – led to chaotic, stretched connections and would have required sorting cards by a "depth" level, which I wasn't happy with either.

The good news:
After a bunch of trial and error, I came across a post on BlueSky with a simple instruction:

1. Make it work
2. Make it better

And I thought to myself: "How often will I actually need to rearrange these cards? Is it something that eats up a lot of time?"
The answers were "maybe once a month" and "not really", so I decided to just go ahead and lay it all out manually — at least for now.

This way, I have full control over where each card goes, so the connections don’t end up looking weird or messy (the lines between cards are still generated dynamically, though!).

Here’s the result:

It even handles cards with multiple prerequisites and diagonally positioned "children," so I’m more than satisfied with it for now!

What’s left is to make sure the player actually pays to unlock the cards — and that those unlocked cards are available to be drawn during gameplay. That’s the next thing on my list.

In the meantime, I also added a simple Debug Panel to the Main Menu section, where I can tweak my level and credits as needed. 😉

And that’s it! I’m hoping to have the card system wrapped up by next week and finally start working on Devlog #2.
It’s about time!

As always, have a great week!

CHANGELOG (30.06.2025 – 06.07.2025):

• Cards UI 🃏 - A work in progress!
• Debug Panel - Simple Panel to alter player's Gamestate values
• Resetting progress now refreshes all the UI values automatically

Wishlist Squars here: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3547120/Squars/