Learn how the Kickstarter Campaign will be used to get this uniquely Australian Gothic Psychological Horror game into production.

In Dolven: Runes Gambit, victory isn’t about the strongest card, it’s about building the smartest combo at the perfect moment.

I was designing cards to be looked at, not understood. So I started over. Stripping things back. Rebuilding. Testing. Failing again. Then tightening further. We reworked the cards several times, and through that process I learned a simple but hard truth:

If a player has to read your card to understand it, you failed.

This post breaks down the principles I learned while redesigning the UI for Dolven: Runes Gambit—how I moved from cluttered, confusing cards to something players can understand at a glance.

A simple too, yet one that makes the development build a breeze.

We built it to get over a pain point and we are now making it available to You!

Due to the remoteness of the community and the challenges of maintaining consistent communication, securing those approvals proved difficult. Rather than risk moving ahead without the right foundations, we chose to step back from the historically grounded version of the project and create a fictional version that recounts the history of the Cold War era in Australia with a game that takes players into the cold-war mindset.

Covyne Entertainment Begins Development on a Cold War-Era Survival Game Exploring Australia’s Nuclear Past

PAX 2025, the year of Dolven’s release and the start of Maralinga’s Journey.

X300 is now on Kickstarter

First trip to Maralinga, March 2025