What's up, punks!👋🏽
It's Brenden here and it's New Demo time, baybee!
We've been a bit quiet with our "normal" devlogs because we've been busy working, and really, these event announcements are also just devlogs but with a little extra news.
Anyway, we're doing well, hope you are too, and we've been doing a bunch of work on the core game. So this new demo is going to be available from July 31st to August 13th, as part of Six One Indie Demo Days and Tiny Teams!
Before we get into it, I do want to say that if you liked the demo, please give it a review! It'll help make the demo more visible and more folks will know about it and wishlist our game which makes the Steam Algorithm like us more and show us to more folks.
So the previous match screen worked, but we noticed that due to our busy art style, people weren't really getting the game, and were focused on the wrong parts of the screen. This is also a big problem since our art style is just so busy, it makes the problem worse.
We decided to go back to the drawing board, even got someone in (Thanks, Guido!) to clean up the Match screen and make it easier to understand. This is recent work and this isn't final, but we already feel great about these changes.
The previous demo had 32 cards, but with a lot of simple variations. I mean cards with the same or similar abilities but with higher damage and effort values. We basically had about 21 unique cards, and most had 0 effort values, which really made you just buy every card and scale way too fast. (Which, admittedly, was fun, but doesn't hold you for very long.)
So seeing that hey, the core game works, I worked on designing the final set of cards and abilities we're going to have for our 1.0, and this demo has a completely new set of cards.
What's important for me is that these cards are distinct from one another, interlock and play with each other in a fun way, with as little repeat abilities as possible. It's been fun to create these puzzle pieces that work off each other! We also changed the effort/damage maths so that there are very few 0 effort cards.
(Of course, this all means completely new decks for the characters and rebalancing! In this demo, you'll get access to 3 characters.)
I don't want to get too detailed, but basically, there's five core sets in the full game (plus one unthemed set of cards), and in this demo, you'll get access to three! "Stuffer", "Discard", "Exhaust". The names should already tell you what kind of strategy these cards allow.
And...
We've also changed how a run starts!
So you pick one of the characters and they come with a 7 card starting deck that guides how you play.
We'll then show you a selection of 5 cards and you'll have to pick 2 cards to add to your deck before you start, which will change how the run goes.
In this image, you can also see the words "Card Sets Available This Run"! What does that mean?
Well, in each run of the demo, the game will pick two of the three themes available that we talked about earlier. So for the example image, that means the shops for the rest your run will only have cards in the unthemed, "exhaust" and "discard" sets.
In each demo run, you'll end up with a set of 30 cards to build your deck, and each theme contains cards that compliment the other theme, that will only appear if you have the right theme combination. So for example, Hit the Pedal will only be available in this run preparation and later shop screens if the run has both the Exhaust and Discard theme.
Right now, you can just reroll for free, so you can explore the different sets, but we might change that later. And in general, we're thinking that the full game will give you three out of the five themes in a single run.
We also changed a bunch of maths for the enemies, but the interesting thing to talk about is the Overkill mechanic!
While in the demo there are no cards that will just give you overkill (that's for later), the Overkill mechanic has been updated once more. We started with a 1 overkill = 1 euro, and then overkill is calculated as a percent of potential deck damage... but we decided to make it more tied to the enemy, which makes more logical sense.
(and, embarrassingly, when I came back to the game after being out for a week, I completely misremembered overkill as being tied to enemy health. When I realised that it wasn't, I took it as a sign that it has to be tied to enemy health.)
Also, we now show you how we calculate Overkill. So we just divide the overkill you've done, with the enemy's health and give you some cash depending on the percentage. That means low HP enemies will be easier to overkill, but they can do a lot of damage to you, so it's riskier. It's just up to you how you manage the risk.
A few more events have been added, including a rare event that allows you to actually remove cards from your deck.
This is a really powerful ability (that can also really mess up your deck if you're not careful). Right now, we have an event that will allow you to remove cards that you have added in your deck, including the two that you're forced to add in the beginning of a run.
So while you can't change your character's core deck, you can remove something that maybe didn't synergise as much as you hoped for. It's okay, after all, it was the Nubbel's fault.
Hmm? You don't know who the Nubbel is? Oh, he's just the guy we're burning.
© Superbass / CC-BY-SA-4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons) Link to original image.
In the spirit of how we add real cultural references in the game but use German words so non-German speakers will have to look it up, I won't explain it to you. But you're most definitely not alone, most Germans won't know who the Nubbel is either!
This one is a real Cologne local culture reference, so I'll be nice and give you the wikipedia link.
And of course, more art in general. A few new enemy art, card art, event art, etc. We're slowly carving through the work that is all of the art required.
This is the next big task for me. We've kept the demo the same scope all this time. Two acts, and supplies are right now a very basic currency and you just unlock new characters with supplies. I'm itching to overhaul this system.
I already have a few things in mind to support that infinite run structure, we just need to sit down and finally add them!
Anyway, that's it for now. Please have fun with the new demo!