Greetings, fellow Sinners!
Designing Nadir's unique fight mechanic was a real pickle, as previous devlogs might tell you. The last time we visited the wretched designer’s room, there was a brilliant-at-first-sight-but-not-really Threat Counter feature flushed down the toilet.
The pickle
Now what? At this stage we’re pretty depressed about our design skills, throwing away every original idea we had, looking at a game that barely stood up to the description of an intense demon slay. Or so we thought until one snowy afternoon…
It was just one of the series of conversations on how to make Threat Counter work, but we suddenly went into a heated argument on the very basics of the game. Should we give up and just make another Slay the Spire or Hearthstone clone? Should it even have to be a card game?
The Great Brainstorm
“All right, calm down everyone, I got this”, I said… no, I didn’t, I’m not very good at managing my emotions in such instances (a guy from the same room: he really isn’t). “Let’s list our problems and crack them one by one”.
- Single enemy? Bad, not the idea itself, but for the lack of choices.
- Gathering Threat? The limit of spending is blurry at best, punishing at worst.
- Combos? There’s no fun to it, no engaging play of interconnected parts.
OK, now, let’s follow what we want to accomplish, not what we have. A duel, where we replace artificial point spending with a system where the cost of your moves is paid by the enemy’s response.
We began an intense puzzle brain-squeeze.
- More choice? Maybe the points could be colored, adding a more abstract choice layer?
- More combos? What if actions from our cards and the enemy were interconnected somehow?
- More clarity of consequences? Maybe if we just show exactly what reaction will the enemy partake?
The solution
So let's say we have two colors of cards matching the colors of enemy points to use. But not just abstract points, clarity, remember? Certain actions to activate! But how make them predictable? Oh, that’s simple (no, it’s not, we are already two months into bouncing this back and forth, but, you know… simple after you got the solution). Instead of making a predefined action list going one at a time – as in Slay the Spire and most of its followers, where you only know the immediate following move of the monster – let’s make the enemy’s actions to be picked up BY the player.
Oh, that was an exciting idea. Dangerous for the design team (we’ll get to that), but very empowering and intriguing. That is the choice of your card multiplied by the choice of enemy action. Choice squared!
It was a big chunk of code to smelt and reforge (...again), so we cut corners with a paper prototype. It not only proved the idea right but forced a neat design choice: the list of actions is presented as three double-sided cards coined stelas with the effect written on them. The sequence is simple: you activate one, and you reverse it. If the card cost is two or three, you reverse the corresponding number. Color division work as a limitation to force some planning and sequence to player’s moves.
We called our new baby Deck Binding mechanic. Isn’t she pretty?
So, all that’s left was to polish the feature and, you know, do the frickin’ rest of the game. But more on that in the next devlog episode!
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you haven't had a chance – you can already check what we came up with in free to play Demo of Nadir!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1535210
If you have any questions or feedback: let us know on Discord!
