Party card-battler for ADHD players · 2026
Boom Sling
A local multiplayer card game where you fight for the centre of a deliberately noisy arena. Built for ADHD players: the board is loud on purpose, and the timer and instant consequences push a player to plan one move ahead instead of reacting to whatever is brightest.
Design pillars
The noise is the difficulty
The exaggerated colour and effects would read as simple to most players. For an ADHD player they are genuinely distracting — and that is the point. The skill the game asks for is holding attention on one square while everything else competes for it.
A timer, and consequences you feel at once
There is no room to drift. The clock is always running and every card resolves immediately, so a careless choice is punished in the same turn it was made. That immediacy is what pushes a player to ask what a card will do before playing it rather than after.
Ten cards, four types
Movement, destruction, obstruction and miscellaneous — ten cards in total. Small enough that the whole game state stays legible at a glance, but with enough interaction between the types that a turn is worth planning.
Process
How it actually went
Learning Unity by building the whole thing
This was my second game in Unity, and still very much a learning project. Nothing was assembled from a template — the turn system, the deck, the bomb manager and the win condition were all things I had to work out as I went, which is why the scene hierarchy looks the way it does.
A slingshot instead of a d-pad
Movement borrows from Angry Birds: the omni card lets you pull back and launch yourself at any angle you like, while the directional cards teleport you exactly one block. Characters differ only in appearance, so what separates two players is the cards they hold and how they aim, never a stat.
Designing the deck
Six movement cards (up, down, left, right, the fish that swims through water, and the omni slingshot), one destruction card (the bomb, which clears obstacles and opponents), one obstruction card that bans a card from being played at all, and two wildcards — Misfortune, which fires a random effect at you, and Wild, which lets you pick from six randomised options.
One level, on purpose
It was built as a school project, so there is a single arena. That constraint turned out to help: with the map fixed, every difference between two rounds comes from the deck and the players, which is much easier to reason about when you are still learning the engine.
Gallery
Click any image to see it full size.
Outcome
- Going into use at the clinic for ADHD players, to be linked from their website
- Second game built in Unity — coded and drawn solo
- Ten-card deck across four card types