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Changelog v0.1.5

✨ Added the ability to switch between metrics/imperials units;
✨ Added a primitive form of a size chart to visualize the size of the actors sitting on the battlefield;
✨ Added a primitive inspector to see the opponent status and explore its public zones;
🔧 Reworked the rules engine. Changes affects the damages, healing effects, HP scaling, and others. Contextually, added options to toggle between the new formulas and the old ones;
🔧 Reworked the opponent chrome and added informative badges to clear up the UI;
🔧 More general UI polish;
🗑️ Removed the dynamic text changing the text of the cards; 
📊 Changed the analytics events to send out the options used (and have context about the results). Also, routed the "leave match" options to send out the match_ended event.

Thank you so much!! I haven't given up on it - it's just on hold for the moment while I work on my other game. I definitely want to come back to this one eventually and give it the revision it deserves, although I honestly don't know when I'll be able to get back to it. It may take quite a while, but I'm really glad to know there's interest in it! :)

Changelog v0.1.4-hf

🔧 Reworked the zone explorer: cards now scroll properly in large zones, the anchored side is indicated, and hovered cards are brought to the top; the explorer now also works for the library; 
🔧 Zones are now ordered by card number for more consistent browsing;
🔧 Moved the card inspector from the mouse wheel to right-click to avoid weird zone behavior while overlays are active;
🐛 Fixed a discard regression when the hand is empty or contains no discardable cards; Ephemeral cards are currently treated as non-discardable;
🐛 Fixed a UI desync caused by the scry overlay bypassing the stack pop signal;
🔄 Reworked several Ebony cards to use “resources” instead of “sources”, and formalized the distinction in the How to Play section;
🃏 Reverted Bloodied Insight to cost {1}{T}{T};
🃏 Flea Market Flip — anchoring a card from the library no longer counts against the anchor-per-turn limit;
🃏 Borrowed Skyline — removed the “until end of turn” duration;
🃏 Floorboard Cache — the effect now lasts until the beginning of the next turn, giving it stronger defensive value; this is a temporary change while I investigate the behavior of size-changing spells with turn-based durations;
📘 Added more tutorial pages covering resources vs. sources, Manifestations, and controls;
📘 Added a small keyword lookup to the battle menu to make reviewing rulings easier;

Many thanks to Trainstar for their insights and suggestions!

I wouldn't call your critique negative at all — if anything, it's really constructive. Honestly, all your observations are spot on, and I really value this kind of feedback, especially when it comes to UI/UX, since I'm still taking baby steps in that field 😅.

So, first of all: I'll definitely give the overlay some more love in the next update, and the UI issues you pointed out should be fairly straightforward to tackle.

For the cards in hand, there's actually already an "inspector" mapped to the mouse wheel — it just currently works in that zone only. I'll extend the same behavior to the other zones too, except for the Stack. The Stack will have to wait a little longer, since I'm still figuring out what I want to do with it.

I'll try to get those changes into the hotfix I have planned for this week. If they're as easy to tackle as I expect, the update will land probably Thursday evening/night (CEST).

The other two are a bit trickier, mostly because I'm getting tangled up in the order in which I want to tackle things.

For healing, I want to be a bit cautious. Since you mentioned testing the latest cards, I assume you were playing with the Meissa Deck — if so, I don't think healing is necessarily the solution. I think her deck suffers from a few other design issues, and I've already gone back through some of the Ebony cards and reworked them to see if I can improve the deck and make it more fun to play without messing too much with its identity. But yeah, if that doesn't do the trick, I'll definitely explore other options.

Then, you're absolutely right about the missing explanations, and about the tutorial already lagging behind. They are on the radar, and I'm hiding behind two big reasons here. First, those things require me to "solidify" the rulebook and commit to the wording — and, admittedly, I'm a bit scared to do that right now. That said, in the next update, I'll add a couple of pages—including the controls—to the tutorial as a cheap little patch. And your concern gives me the idea to make the very same tutorial accessible right from the battle, maybe in a compact version, where you can quickly look up indexed keywords. Being mostly plain text should be a compromise that doesn't add too much strain on the maintenance timeline.

The second reason is related to that: I really want to improve the effect descriptions and add an oracle to the card inspector to improve the overall experience and consistency. But—big "but"—both of those are currently gated behind the DSL revision, which in turn is gated behind collecting more examples and edge cases. That mostly means wrapping up the six demo decks, at least.

Technically, you can already see me messing with that process. The fact that "On Anchor" is bold on the cards comes from me parsing the current handwritten text — something I eventually want to have generated directly by the card itself, and therefore something the system will already know about. The dynamic text, when it turns purple, is another early experiment, and one I already think is, more often than not, more confusing — or just plainly wrong (e.g. Cited Reference) — than helpful. So... very early, very wrong explorations. Luckily, I'm pretty sure most of that code won't survive into the 0.2.x versions 😅.

For now, all I can really do is ask for your patience and understanding. The project is still at a very, very early stage, but it is moving forward, and I really do care about making these improvements ASAP.

And seriously, thanks a lot for taking the time to write all of this up. Again, this kind of feedback is incredibly useful ❤️!

Thanks so much for flagging this! 🙏 I really appreciate you taking the time to report it. 

I've already got this one addressed in the dev version. It was part of the same regression I'd run into previously, so hopefully it won't be around for much longer - and your report gave me another edge case to test the fix against, which was really helpful.

Thanks for bearing with me while the fix makes its way into a release, and sorry for the trouble in the meantime! ❤️

Gotcha. Just to clarify, did this happen when you played a card that requires you to discard something as a cost? We have a bug right now (like with Apprentice Hesitation) where if your hand is empty, the game just lets you play the card for free without discarding. Is that what happened to you?

Known bugs of v. 0.1.3

• 🐛 A discard-cost regression was discovered while testing Apprentice Hesitation. The issue also affects other cards, causing their costs to be skipped when the hand is empty.

20/09/2026 - Version 0.1.3

• ✨ Added Meissa — fourth MVP heroine, with the Ebony starter deck (hoard / anchor ramp);
• ✨ Heroines powers redesigned — activated abilities are now ephemeral power cards in hand each turn, instead of separate hero buttons;
• ✨ Reworked the effect stack — clearer full-frame overlay and pacing for long trigger chains and opponent actions;
• ✨ Reworked the zones explorer — scry-style browse of graveyard, exile, and other zones from the battle UI;
• 🔧 Removed hero-granted opening mana from the MVP roster — turn 1 is anchor-only again;
• 🔧 Results screen — extreme size values are easier to read; 
•  🐛 Fixed the CPU occasionally freezing on long combo turns;
•  🐛 Fixed battle UI crashes during scry and some choice prompts;
•  🐛 Fixed "Save PNG" on the results screen failing in some cases; 
•  📊 Optional anonymous analytics — helps me see how long people play, which modes/heroines are popular, and match length/outcomes for balancing. No account, no personal ID. You can turn it off anytime: Analytics on the title screen (bottom-right, next to the build version);
• 🃏 Fixed Ravenous Plunder — cards exiled by it now can be anchored, as intended;

Glad you liked it! And believe me, I'd love to see what I have planned next too!

A downloadable version isn't currently planned, unfortunately - and since it's an HTML5 game, downloading it wouldn't necessarily fix whatever the browser is unhappy about anyway 😅. 

If you tell me which browser and version you’re using, though, I’d be happy to see if I can reproduce the problem and figure out what’s going wrong ^^.

Uhhh… that's nasty! 😬 I assume you mean in the discard phase? I'll investigate immediately. Thanks for flagging this - this is gold!

Me skipping proper tests 😅.

Short version: the game logic was actually doing the right thing, but I forgot to update the FSM for this particular choice. The UI didn't know what to do with it, crashed while refreshing the battle view, and made it look like the battle had disappeared 🥲.

Yeah, I think that idea is definitely worth some tinkering. 

Your call is really good. I like the idea of giving the player some kind of desperate last resort before decking out - something like a "fatality" move. Or, alternatively, the game could give you a chance to disanchor a few random cards from your reserve as a last-ditch escape. Need to think carefully about that and evaluate whether it could potentially be abused.

Either way, nice call. I think there’s probably something interesting to build around that moment rather than simply saying, "welp, you lose." 😅

Thanks for the feedback ❤️

12/09/2026 - Version 0.1.2

• ✨ Added a new Challenge Mode with content-driven matchups;
• ✨ Added Size Ladder levels and relationship UI;
• ✨ Added post-match stats;
• 🔧 Slightly adjusted the heroine roster’s base stats;
• 🔧 Added UI polish and various quality-of-life improvements;
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where scaling used mass instead of height due to an incorrectly set dirty flag;
• 🐛 Fixed Invite to Silence and Hard Lesson misbehaving because “until next turn” conditions on opponent-attached effects were being checked incorrectly;
• 🐛 Fixed a UI softlock when discarding multiple cards. Many thanks to reallyoldman123 for spotting it;
• 🔄 Card Changes
  • Equalizing Judgement: Effect reworked and buffed;
  • Holy Judgement: Effect reworked and buffed;
  • Predatory Dominance: Effect reworked and nerfed;
• 🃏 Card Balance (early/gut pass)
  • Aegis Pulse: Shield reduced to 3;
  • Titan’s Tribute: Cost increased to {T}{T}{T} to prevent a turn-one play;
  • Committed Punch: Damage reduced to 6;
  • Sudden Strike: Damage reduced to 4;
  • Bloodied Insight: Cost reduced to {T}{T};
  • Sacred Shield: Shield reduced to 6;
  • Smite & Shelter: Shield increased to 3;
  • Divine Retribution: Damage increased to 5;
  • Eternal Aegis: Cost reduced to {X}{X}.

08/09/2026 - Version 0.1.1-hf

• 🐛 Fixed: A crash in Rite of Cleansing that could cause the battle to go blank. The effect-removal selection UI should now work correctly for both you and the CPU. Many thanks to agent 0 for spotting it;
• 📘 Added Rate / Feedback / Follow links to the title and results screens;
• 📘 Added the ability to copy or download the match log from the in-battle menu - handy for bug reports.

I think I found the root cause, and (at least in one instance) I was able to consistently reproduce it. And you spotted it: Cleansing seems to be the main culprit. Fix in progress. I hope to drop a patch today. Thanks a lot ❤️!

You have, unfortunately, discovered a genuine deadlock. 😅 

There are dark forces in motion here. First comes the math. Then, later today, comes the article about it.

For now, I have a very easy fix: if you become X times larger than your opponent, you win. Or turn cap and end in draw. Problem solved. But I’m not entirely convinced I want to do that. Not because the stalemate isn’t important - it absolutely is - but because I can already imagine someone thinking: "Wait... how big can I actually get?". 

So yes, this is an oversight. I’m going to think about whether the right solution is to eliminate the possibility entirely, or to put some kind of interesting endgame around it. 

I’m curious, though: if you were designing the escape hatch during your match, what exit condition would you have expected to see? A turn limit? A size threshold? Something else entirely?

In the meantime: congratulations on reaching 169m. You may have accidentally become the first victim of your own defensive strategy :)

Errata: I’ve just realized there actually is an exit condition here: if you've anchored all your cards, can no longer draw from your library, and your graveyard is empty, you lose (the unfortunate part is that I hardcoded the AI to anchor enough cards to be able to cast its most expensive card, maybe plus 1-2 more if I remember correctly. So I’d still call this an oversight, but the underlying game does have an escape hatch!).

Thanks a lot, I will investigate ASAP!

Thanks for clarifying - that helps.

On Bellatrix/Alya specifically: those aren't meant as settled "identity copies" so much as bare starter decks to poke at mechanics. Roughly, Bellatrix is my burn/pressure stand-in, Alya is the combo/filter one, and Andromeda is more midrange-ish - basically classic CCG archetype shapes. I wanted a kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship between them, so there would be some natural strengths and weaknesses rather than one deck simply being absolutely better than another. I don't know DD's deck design deeply enough to say whether the similarities are coincidental, but if the archetypes naturally map to things like aggression, control, combo, recursion, ramp, cycling, etc., then some mechanical overlap is probably inevitable. Both of us are drawing from things that already exist and are well known. :)

Anyway, the key here is that I intend to grow this game into a proper deckbuilder (the "CCG" framing is basically me planting that flag early), so these hero decks are scaffolding for testing the systems before actual deck construction exists. The heroine gives you the power and stats; the deck will eventually be user-made, with collection, progression, boosters, etc. One day, maybe. We'll see. :)

The "what changes when you're bigger vs. smaller" layer, for me, is mostly a game-design problem I ran into while building. I'd be curious to hear how you came up with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason was the same, because it is pretty obvious, but for me it started very simply: early on, I mostly wanted the fantasy of going big.But if mass is already feeding HP, damage, etc., the lead snowballs hard. That's okay. But if the CPU somehow gets bigger than the player, for example, the player can end up with no real way to catch up. The current build isn't balanced yet, so I'm not saying this is solved, but I really don't like situations where falling behind effectively means the game is already over.So I started looking for a simple comeback/catch-up handle: if you're behind on size, there should be things you can take advantage of because of that, rather than simply being punished for being behind. Having cards that care about being behind was me addressing that precise problem.

Thanks for the good luck, too - means a lot.

Hey - thanks for bringing this up carefully. I appreciate that.

To answer directly: Dwarfing Dreams was not an inspiration for Celestial Scaling: CCG. I was aware of DD before publishing, and I recognize that "size changes how cards work" is an area where the two games overlap. But I didn't build CS:CCG from DD or set out to reproduce its particular design. I can understand why seeing that overlap, especially in a niche space, would feel uncomfortable though.

The size-changing ideas in my games actually come from the earlier Celestial Scaling project. A big part of the concept came from wanting size to be something that could be communicated very clearly through numbers, charts, and visual feedback.

For the CCG specifically, it came out of a headless game engine I was building for a larger game that is much closer to MTG in its design. I wanted to make something lighter and more contained in between the longer projects, so CS:CCG became a way to use that engine and experiment with the card-game side of those ideas without turning it into another huge project. Some of the things still visible in the game are honestly just artifacts of that process too, like the unchecked Scry keyword I apparently left in there :).

And from my perspective, the actual gameplay ends up being pretty different from DD as well.

That said, I do think DD looks great, and I genuinely like the UI and presentation. I don't want to dismiss the similarity you're pointing out. At the same time, when you're working with size as a fantasy or mechanic, representing relative size through ratios or size differences feels like a fairly natural way to express it, so I don't think that particular concept is something I can reasonably attribute to one game. What I do want to be clear about is that the overlap wasn't the result of me taking the core mechanic from DD.

If there's a particular card or mechanic where you feel the similarity goes beyond the general size-based concept, I'm happy to look at it and talk about it specifically.

Thanks again for raising it directly :)

If you encounter a bug while playing, or have an idea or suggestion for the game, feel free to let me know!

🐛 Found a bug?

Please use this thread to report bugs and other issues you encounter.

If possible, include:

• What happened
• What you were doing when it happened
• How to reproduce it, if you know
• Any other details that might help me track it down
• If you’re still in the session, please export the logs!

💡 Have a suggestion?

For ideas, improvements, or things you'd like to see in the game, feel free to speak up.

I can't promise that every suggestion will make it into the game, but I'll definitely read everything and keep an eye on the feedback.

Thanks for helping me improve the game, and thanks for taking the time to report things or share your ideas! ❤️

Thanks for asking, and thanks a lot for checking the game out! :)

At the moment, this game is actually undergoing a bit of a restyling/rethinking, so I'm still figuring out its direction. As for a browser version, to be completely open, it's tied quite a bit to the development of C# support in Godot, so I don’t think browser play is likely in the short term. I have scheduled some time to look into an Android build, though, so that's a little more likely to happen first.

In any case, an update to the game itself will still take a bit of time. I’m admittedly a little distracted by my most recent one at the moment, while for this one I'm mostly progressing and polishing the narrative for version 0.3.0. 😅

Thanks again for passing by and for your interest in the game! It really means a lot.