Unity Card Battler: Code a Deck-Building Card Game in C#
Build a complete card battler in Unity 6 - decks, turns, unique cards and a boss who hits back.
Your Deck Won't Build Itself
Ever Played Slay the Spire and Thought: I Could Build That.
Every card battler starts with one card that has to feel right.
You'll craft your first card prefab in Unity 6, get it on screen, and lay the foundation for everything that follows.
Structure Your Code Like You Mean It.
Hand-coding every card is how card games die in prototype.
You'll use ScriptableObjects so one prefab renders every card in the game, and adding a new card means filling out a data asset, not editing a class.
Make Your Cards Feel Alive.
Click, drag, hover, snap.
You'll build card movement that feels satisfying to use, with hover scaling, smooth snapping back to position, and cards that stack and order correctly across your deck, hand, and discard pile.
Wire Everything Together With Events, Not Spaghetti.
The moment combat touches three systems, direct references start eating your codebase.
You'll decouple with C# Events so playing a card fires OnCardPlayed and damage, sound, animations and turn management all react without knowing about each other.
Watch It Click.
A boss that just sits there isn't a boss.
You'll build a full turn system that alternates player and boss, lock the hand at the right moments, add a Fisher-Yates shuffle and put health bars on both sides. Then drag a card onto the field and watch every system fire at once.
What you’ll learn
Build a fully playable 2D card-battler in Unity 6, from empty scene to deck-builder, combat and persistence.
Use ScriptableObjects to make cards data-driven so one prefab renders every card in the game.
Decouple gameplay systems with Unity Events: card-played, hit, draw, reshuffle, turn start/end.
Implement Fisher-Yates shuffle, a Turn System, drag-and-snap cards and a discard pile that locks at the right moment.
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Never get stuck with our teaching assistants on call.About the course
You have stared at a blank scene and wondered how all the pieces of a card game are supposed to talk to each other without turning into spaghetti. This course shows you the exact path from that empty scene to a working deck-builder with persistent decks, animated combat and a polished discard pile.
Everything is built with Unity 6 and a deliberately light architecture. Cards live as ScriptableObjects so one prefab handles every card in the game. Combat runs on C# Events so adding sound or a new effect never means hunting through five files for another if-statement.
What's in the course?
- 40 lectures split across four clear sections that take you from setup to a finished, persistent card battler.
- A complete turn-based loop with player and boss turns, health bars, healing, and action locking.
- Deck builder scene whose changes survive when you switch back into combat.
- Fisher-Yates shuffle, drag-and-snap placement, event-driven sound, and practical advice on Singletons and GetComponent choices.
By the final lecture you will have a game you can actually play and extend instead of another half-finished project.
Curriculum
Instructors
Grant Schonhoff
Hello there! I'm Grant. It's really nice to meet you!
I graduated from college with a Computer Science degree in 2019 and worked as a full-stack software engineer for several years. It was a good living, but after a while, it wasn't enough for me. I really wanted to do something I loved—something truly meaningful to me.
Like most of us here, I’ve been an avid gamer most of my life. Eventually, I started learning game development, mostly using Blender and Unity. As someone who loves to create and learn new things, I couldn't stay away. It was like a whole new world opened up where I could reconcile my technical background with a creative side I’d never really tapped into before.
My other hobbies include fitness, reading, journaling, hanging out with friends, going for long walks while listening to a podcast, or entertaining my extraordinarily clingy cat.