A dragon and electromagnetism

Most of the week was spent designing a new character. A dragon to boot. Here's the good fellow:

A primeval dragon, manifestation of a fundamental force in nature, electromagnetism. Named him "Magnes" after the mythological real-lfe figure of Magnes the shepherd, who supposedly discovered natural magnetism. Although he of course uses that name only as an alias, as a proud dragon would not so casually share their true name.

There's a few details here and there about its design based on electromagnetism, such as the tips of his horns having the typical coloration of magnets, or his frontal horn kind of being based on a lightning rod. The wings too show shapes somewhat reminiscent of the classic lightning bolt symbol. Not sure why I picked green for the main body color. It looked reasonable, I suppose.

Plot-wise, next chapter involves entering a city with electromagnetic mind-readers (it only makes marginally more sense in context), and so seeking a pact with this good fellow to somehow circumvent that. Gameplay-wise, a pact with a dragon grants the lucky partner the ability to "fuse cards" for stronger, usually non-standard effects. This implies using up two cards in a single turn, which can leave you at a disadvantage later on, so it is a tactic that requires a bit of care.

Most cards resulting from Magnes will use magnetism in some fashion, which is a gameplay mechanic that is halfway programmed. The problem isn't quite so much programming it in (although that isn't trivial), but rather making it intuitive to grasp.

The idea is that units (or obstacles) can be positively or negatively charged, and every turn they will attract/repel each other according to basic magnetism laws. The simplest case would be two characters of different polarity attracting each other, or two with same polarity repelling each other, This could be used, say, to keep enemies close together to more easily hit them with AoE attacks, or to maybe keep dangerous foes away from your weaker units.

The problem comes with more than two units. If you had, say, one negative character and two positive ones, the negative one would be attracted to the other two, and the two positives would simultaneously be repelled from each other but also attracted to the negative one. What if the negative character was positioned between the two positive ones? Wouldn't the attraction forces pull in both directions at once and cancel out? And of course, this gets just stupid when you have a larger number of charged characters.

I will have to think a little more about the entire concept. Still, it probably won't be a very frequent mechanic, reserved primarily for the player and a few specific enemies.

I also spent some time solving some elusive Android bugs having to do, of course, with aspect ratios. But that should be solved now.

Not much more to say. Stay positive. (Although then you would attract the negative, so maybe stay neutrally-charged instead?)