Hey Dawnseekers,
Back in July we tore out combat and rebuilt it as a card battle system. It fixed the fight. It did not fix the run.
Here is what kept happening in testing. Fight one was tense. Fight two was tense. By fight five you were playing the same fight again, with the same deck, making the same reads. Every battle worked on its own. Stacked end to end, a climb started to blur.
A roguelike run is supposed to go somewhere. Ours went in a straight line.
So we added the thing that was missing.
DRAFT A CARD AFTER EVERY COMBAT
Win a fight and three cards appear. You take one. The other two are gone.
• ACTIVE CARDS: New cards that drop straight into your deck and get played in combat. Your deck stops being the one you started with and becomes the one this run built.
• PASSIVE CARDS: Effects that run for the entire climb. SCRAP SENSE doubles every resource you earn for the rest of the run. ADRENALINE RUSH makes you hit 25% harder while you are under 30% HP. COMBAT HIGH gives you +5% damage for every turn you survive in a fight, stacking to +25%. IRON HIDE just quietly takes 10% off everything that hits you.
• THE CHOICE IS THE POINT: Three cards, one pick, no take-backs. Do you take the safe armor, or the greedy one that only pays off if you let yourself get hurt? Do you build the run you planned, or the run the cards offered you?
The compounding is where it gets interesting. Iron Hide and Adrenaline Rush together make a real case for staying hurt. Cave Eyes on a Tinker who already dodges everything gets ridiculous fast. Some of those combinations we planned. Others turned up in testing and we left them in because they were more fun than the plan.
No two climbs are the same now. The deck you carry into the final ascent is one you assembled on the way up, and if that Dawnseeker dies in the dark, it goes with them.
WE ARE IN STEAM NEXT FEST
Deep Rise will be part of Steam Next Fest, running October 19 to 26.
That means a playable demo. Free, for everyone, for the whole week. A real slice of the climb: the card combat, the drafting above, the outpost between runs, and Dawnseekers who stay dead.
We would rather find out what is broken from a thousand of you than from one of us.
Wishlist Deep Rise so Steam tells you the moment the demo goes live. That notification is the entire reason the button exists.
And tell us in the comments: three cards on the table, you take one. Greedy or safe?
See you in the depths.