Greetings, fellow Sinners!
When we sat down with Nadir, we wanted to shake the genre a little. We thought single-player deck-builders are a bit stiff genre, especially when it comes to battles: you have mana, you play cards until you run out of mana and/or cards, then the enemy punches back, repeat. We asked ourselves: how can we make that fresh and different?
Making the difference: Threat Counter
We decided: no mana. What if the cost of your actions would be paid by the size of the enemy's reaction? As in a duel, the ground you take or leave gives the enemy his space to act upon. Every blow and cover blocks the opponent somewhere but opens your defense elsewhere. A very neat idea! A completely new approach to the very core loop of a card battle.
Well, easier said than done. By the time we saw the finish line on the horizon, the studio’s bucket of designers' tears and sweat was beginning to overflow. And it still looked quite tiny next to the coders’ bathtub.
Our initial idea was something we called Threat Counter. In a nutshell, it was mana in reverse: you could spend as many points as you want, but the more you spent, the more powerful attack or skill the enemy will launch in response. It sounded both a simple enough alternative for the mana and something that would give the player interesting control over the game situation, as per our initial assumptions.
Hard choices: multiple characters
Before we realized it wasn’t the way to go, we first stumbled upon another dead-end design choice: multiple characters. It was, too, a reversal of standard card game or even any battler practice: usually, the number of enemies was greater than the number of player characters. We thought: what if we scrap all numb minion fights and focus on the big guys?
You know, the game is a series of battles against demons, you expect demons to be more powerful and dangerous than one, nay, a dozen poor souls trapped in Hell. So if we had, say, three characters on our side, each with their own mini-deck shuffled into the main player deck. The character dies – his/her deck goes away as well. All of them surround the big fat hellish guy, trying to match him in an uneven fight.
That sounded cool, but… just didn’t work. Like all ambitious developers, we wanted to leave some added value to the genre, sometimes way too much. Multiple decks caused a lack of focus in our deck-building and a single enemy dumbed down the size of choices during a battle: since you can’t decide what enemy to punch – there is just a single one in the picture – a lot of tactical choices present in many other games went away.
Resolution: simplify & amplify
The first issue was very easy to solve: we removed multiple characters. One turned out to be more than enough and the deck structure became much sharper when it wasn’t divided into subparts. Another easy solution wasn’t as easy as it sounded: adding more enemies would be costly from the backend perspective at the time. So we decided to focus on polishing our main feature: the Threat Counter.
Not really surprising at all, when I think about it now, our work on a game that takes place in the hell took us to the actual development hell: reinventing the core gameplay mid-work by the mayhem of rapid prototypes. It turned out, however, to be simply the best that could’ve happened to Nadir.
But we’ll get to it next Monday in Nadir Devlog #7!
P.S. Good news: in the end we found the way to go for some really fun and unique gameplay. Try it on your own in a free Prologue on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1535210/Nadir_A_Grimdark_Deck_Builder__Prologue/
If you have questions or want to share your opinion and suggestions about the game and Prologue – join our Discord channel!
