Orbellion is something I've been slowly working on for over three years. To summarize, it was an idea for an RPG card-based video game loosely inspired by Pokemon, Undertale, Slay the Spire, and Magic the Gathering. Players command monsters called Hellions with a variety of elemental affinities and play cards to defeat their opponents.

However, it takes a long time to develop an entire RPG with a team of one person, so in the meantime, I've recently made a physical version of the game's combat system with a few changes.

"In Orbellion, two or more players each command a team of three Hellions - magical creatures from the underworld with a variety of elemental abilities. Each Hellion comes with a deck of cards representing different actions a Hellion can make, and by combining their abilities in clever ways, players can defeat their foes."

There are already over a hundred unique cards in the Orbellion card game, each with a unique AI-generated art piece (for the sake of time and cost). The above "starter pack" product contains over 200 cards making up twelve packs with unique themes, and each player chooses three of these packs to form their deck. While the game is primarily designed for 1-vs-1 duels, the mechanics support a theoretically infinite number of players. That said, the rules recommend limiting it to four players, and the starter pack includes enough packs for that many.

I started making the Orbellion card game as a project for my Emergent Design class in Winter 2023. Together with a couple other group members, we built this game in less than 3 months based on some of my notes for the Orbellion video game.

We ran into many unforeseen difficulties during the design and production process, but we worked as a team to overcome these challenges and complete our product on-time. For example, playetesters were having trouble keeping track of their Hellions' HP when constantly moving them around. Our first idea was to consolidate each Hellion's HP into a single life total for each player, but this had unintended consequences that took a while to notice. Now "tanky" Hellions were way too powerful, and players had no reason to ever use their other Hellions. After brainstorming more solutions as a team, we came to the conclusion that we could still use our original HP system but change how players moved their Hellions, mitigated the issues playtesters were having without sacrificing the advantages of the per-Hellion HP system.

Instructions: (download)

All Cards: (Google Drive)

More Photos

Card Backs

The Box

The Instructions

Though I've made a couple of small prototypes for the game, most of the work for the Orbellion video game has been ideas. The majority of my plans for the game's combat system were used in the physical game, but I also have a decent amount of worldbuilding and story laid out.

To summarize, the player takes the role of a ~16-year-old kid playing what they think is a regular card game, but in reality, the game is connected to another heaven/hell-themed world called Elysium, and the inhabitants of Elysium are called Hellions. The company making the card game has allied with the evil Hellion that rules Elysium and are trying to take over the human world, and its up to the player and their friends to join forces with the Hellions of Elysium and beat bad guys at their own game.

For a super bare-bones preview, I made a simple adventure game for a class project that goes over a simplified version of the game's intro. You can find it here.

I have a lot more in the works, but I'll wait until I have something more concrete to show before posting it here. Stay tuned!