Pivoting the combat system, Steam DeckBuilders Festival
Hello there! Looks like the last post was almost two months ago, luckily, the Steam DeckBuilders festival is right around the corner, a good excuse to crunch the hell out of ourselves, isn't it?
The last post was about a redesign of the UI, part of a greater effort to make the game genre easily recognizable and, overall, make the game look more appealing.
We spent almost the entirety of February tinkering with prototypes and variations of the existing combat system, eventually releasing a somewhat-playable-by-other-people prototype that we sent through the newsletter (big thanks for the feedback!).
By the end of February, we settled for something: skills have become cards, and have sockets where runes can be plugged into. Runes empower skills, think Path of Exile support gems or Noita's wands & spells mechanic.
The idea is to use cards to get the genre recognizability of card battlers, while using runes as a mechanic to expand the game design space. Here's how battles look now.
We wanted runes to involve all other aspects of the game, this was, luckily, straightforward. In dialogs, choices will now include rune sockets that can represent a requirement or a power-up, that is, fitting the right runes would increase the probability of a good outcome or its magnitude.
Short of a rune? Perhaps a prayer can help! Indeed, prayers have been realigned to take in account the fact that there are runes in the game, i.e., some prayers will now provide temporary runes in exchange for water.
For more details take a look at the announcement post (please like 😛) or visit the steam page, because we got a new trailer!
Next
Satisfied with the look and the direction of the game we'll now start pushing towards a full vertical slice of the game (i.e. not just combat like the pre-alpha). The plan is to have a demo for the Steam Next festival (in June or October, we aren't sure yet). Before that, we'll have some playtests to tune the combat as much as possible.