Chaotic card battler, built for ADHD players · 2026
Boom Sling
A chaotic, competitive card game where every turn is a race for the centre of the arena. Built for ADHD players from 7 up: the colour and effects are loud on purpose, and a running timer with instant consequences pushes a player to think one move ahead instead of deciding on the spot. It is now played by children at the CM Child Development Clinic.
Design pillars
The noise is the difficulty
To most players the exaggerated colour and effects look simple. For an ADHD player they are genuinely distracting — and that is the point. The skill the game asks for is keeping your attention on a single point, the centre, while everything else on screen competes for it.
Think before you play
An ADHD player tends to react and decide in the moment rather than ask what the next logical step is. Here the clock is always running and every card resolves at once, so a careless play is punished in the same turn. That pressure nudges a player to slow down and ask what a card will do before playing it.
Skill, strategy, a little luck
Whoever holds the centre stage the longest wins. Getting there takes skill in where you move, strategy in when you block or counter, and a bit of luck in what the deck deals you.
Process
How it actually went
Learning Unity by building the whole thing
This was the second game I made to teach myself Unity and how to program in it. 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.
Draw, move, counter
Every turn runs the same loop: take cards from a randomly generated deck, use them to fight your way into the centre, and counter whatever your opponent is trying to do. Movement borrows from Angry Birds — the omni card lets you pull back and launch yourself at any angle, 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.
Every pixel is mine
Every design element in the game is pixel art I made myself — the characters, the cards and the arena included.
One level, on purpose
Since it was designed as a school project, there is only one level. 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
- Played by children at the CM Child Development Clinic
- Second game built in Unity — coded solo, every pixel drawn by him
- Designed for ADHD players aged 7+, and for anyone who loves a chaotic, competitive card game