Hey friends! Hopefully, my mail client issues from last week are fixed. You’re supposed to get this on a Tuesday morning. I took a long weekend to relax, played some games I have observations about, saw a great live concert and made a prototype for a game idea. Let’s dig in!

How Am I Doing?

I’m straight chillin’. Had myself a long weekend after we launched our Bibidi Bibidi Synergy Update #1 last week. Bibidi has really become a marathon at this point. We’re chipping away at it, and it feels a little better every update, but the broad shapes has been hacked out of the stone already. Now it will be a stretch of polishing and tertiary features, so there won’t be too much interesting design work to do for a bit. And that’s OK! I sometimes have to remind myself that what I’m doing is actual work, not just fun and games, pun intended. Changes are incremental, but necessary.

Apart from that, we saw Ichiko Aoba live in Salle Pleyel and it was amazing! She has amazing voice control, is incredible at playing guitar and has this very playful persona where she literally flits onto the stage like a little butterfly. I was also surprised by how good the lighting and stage design was. Using only lights, no projections or anything, they managed to create the illusion of a breathing forest in the background. When I looked back and forth between the artist and the stage, she seemed to grow tinier every time. At some point I was really sold on the illusion that she was a tiny forest fairy next to a mushroom on the forest floor.

What Am I Doing?

During my long weekend, I played two games: Darkest Dungeon II and Feed the Void.

I am a big fan of the first Darkest Dungeon, and was aware that the sequel departs from the formula, at the critique of a lot of its fans. I understand them. It’s significantly different, in a way that feels like the developers are not playing to their strengths. I do like it, but it should’ve been a spin-off. The combat is strategic and visceral and the atmosphere is great as always. But the roguelike elements of the game feel under baked and confused. The progression is a massive slog. I’m 10 hours in and still didn’t manage to get close to finishing the first act’s boss.

What I do like however, is their take on character’s story beats. You can find these shrines during a run that allow you to unlock a hero’s skills, while playing through their backstory essentially. What’s interesting is that they have these “combat” encounters related to their history. It’s these puzzle-esque vignettes that are not necessarily fun or challenging, but a good way to exposit narrative through mechanics.

As an example, the Man-at-arms character has this vignette where he’s commanding a squadron of nameless soldiers. Usually, this character is a front liner, taking hits and taunting enemies. In this mission, he stands at the back with only one skill available: Inspire, which is supposed to buff the soldiers in front of you. When you use it however, instead of buffs, the soldiers get demotivated and they take more damage. You can only stand and watch as the soldiers die and get replaced with more. It’s a total inversion of what the hero is supposed to do. That’s effective storytelling! This one definitely goes into my bank of examples for future New to Narrative blog posts.

Incremental Deckbuilder?

The other game I played, is more of a prototype-esque demo thing than a full game supposedly. It’s a self-described incremental deckbuilder, something that I hadn’t seen before to my knowledge. The idea is that instead of building a deck dynamically as you play, like roguelike deckbuilders such as Bibidi Bibidi, you create it over multiple runs.

It also allows you to upgrade cards individually using an incremental game type economy. That means that you can essentially keep powering up your cards ad infinitum, but at an exponentially increasing cost. It’s an interesting idea. You’re expected to lose encounters, grind up currency while doing so and slowly improve your deck until you become powerful enough to go to the next encounter. There’s also a prestige mechanic, which resets your cards and progress but gives you other permanent upgrades like new items in the shop and more available types of upgrades for your cards.

Naturally, I became inspired by this set up and made a pen and paper prototype immediately. I essentially copied the whole basic starting set of Feed the Void because I didn’t want to get bogged down by combos, card mechanics and balance. No, what I was interested in testing was the context of the progression. You see, I think the incremental part of the game was actually the least satisfying to me. Grinding encounters with no tension just to make number go up on a bunch of cards felt like a waste of time and didn’t tickle my strategy brain.

No, what I was interested in was the collectible card game aspect of building a deck before you go on a run. I think being able to buy and modify cards permanently to tweak your deck is the thing that catches my fancy. So I designed a gameplay loop around that instead. The basic setup is this: you are a thief that goes door to door to burgle loot from rich peoples’ houses. The catch is that each door has an increasing number of locks on it, up to thousands. So your deck is essentially a collection of tools to lockpick all those locks as fast as possible.

One thing that I was missing in Feed the Void was pressure. Incremental games are very averse to make you lose progress or resources. I don’t feel tied to the same limitation, so I changed the context a bit. In this prototype, you carry around a backpack with limited space where you put the loot you stole. Loot could be stuff like consumables to help your run, cards to add to your collection, relics, in-run currency and items worth meta progression currency.

Each turn, you gain Heat. When you reach a certain Heat, you drop your backpack and lose your run and consequentially, your loot. Between doors, you can choose to stop a run early to make a clean getaway with your loot, which will then be converted to a meta progression currency. What’s interesting is that you will have to make the strategic decision to cash-in safely at some point or keep pushing your luck against more challenging doors. Like an extraction shooter, kind of!

I realize that my prototype actually looped all the way back to roguelike progression, so it’s not incremental anymore at all. But it still has that permanent card collection element to it that I like. I think it has potential!

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I feel my creative antennae feeling around lately. Part of it is the question on what to work on after Bibidi comes out. It’s still a long ways away, and honestly what I do after completely depends on how well it’s received at launch. If it does well enough to create a small runway, the most financially sound decision would be to make another card game. We’d have the audience and the tech ready to go.

I have a backlog of ideas for roguelike deckbuilder card battlers, but I’m pretty sure I’d be burned out on that particular genre after we just shipped a full-length one. That being said, I love card games very much, so maybe something with a different context with enough of a twist, like my prototype above, could be just the thing. I guess we’ll see!