Comment by steve_mcdougall
2 years ago
The thing about that is, now instead of just printing cards and some rules, interested parties now need to program at least a large portion of the game logic to make this work which increases their cost a large amount. (Not to mention that most trading card companies would not have the in-house capabilities to do that.) The thing that makes trading cards so popular for kids is that they are cheap. When I was at school the Kaiba starter deck for Yu-Gi-Oh was $30 and I got 50 cards, a mat for the game area, instructions and some art. A 2" e-ink display is like $10-15 wholesale which means for the same price (even adjusted for inflation) I'd receive maybe two cards at cost price. That would not be enough to keep 11 year old me entertained and as a parent I would not buy things that can be easily broken for my kids.
For what it's worth, the actual Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games has rules and the anime uses a very loose interpretation of those rules.
Yeah, I know. I've been trying to design it in a way to push costs down the whole time, but it's still a far cry from paper. My idea was to target $80 for a "starter kit", making it the equivalent purchase of a video game.
For interested parties needing to program, I could probably partner with them and do the development myself (or have employees do it). The real hard part is designing a game, the software to run it will be pretty basic to start with, once I write the general framework for taking turns, etc.
Could you have paper cards that have a barcode or qr code that are "activated" when placed into the console and then represented by your 2-3 E-Ink cards? Then the paper cards could be boosters/environment effects and all/some E-Ink cards are affected by them.
Ooh yeah, that's doable.