Hey friends! Hope you’re all doing as well as me. We’re not faffing about today, so let’s jump into some Bibidi news and then dwell on some games I’ve been trying out.

How Am I Doing?

I’m good! I had a nice social weekend with family birthdays, catching up with friends, and playing board games. I don’t really have much more to say on the matter, so let’s hurry along to the next segment.

What Am I Doing?

So Bibidi’s Afflicted Apprentice update launched last week, and we’ve gotten good reactions to it! We kind of botched the build at first. Somehow, we missed a massive bug where our Wizards don’t actually shout the spell anymore. That’s like the whole point of the game! If you want to read about how that could’ve happened, check out these patch notes. (Spoilers: it was a rookie mistake on my part.) Anyway, the fix was easy and live before anyone (except for 1 Streamer, sorry stephenjoys) caught wind of it.

So what’s next for Bibidi? Our upcoming milestone is called the Synergy update. With this one, we’ll be focusing on design. So far, we’ve found that the really addictive hook is missing for some players. We managed to distill that problem to a couple of causes:

• The basic cards lack creativity. In your first few runs before you unlock anything, you’ll mostly be just trying to pump up your damage output. For a game about crafting your own spells as a wizard, it feels quite run-of-the-mill.
• There’s a lack of real AHA! moments when it comes to making strategic builds come together. They do exist, but they’re few and far between and mostly reserved for advanced players.
• You don’t have a lot of control over the reward options you’re presented with. The shop and card rewards feel very random and often not related to your build at all.

Naturally, we have a lot of ideas on what can solve these issues, so our next course of action is to experiment a bunch and see which decisions are the most streamlined ones. Looking forward to it!

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Other than that, I’ve been working steadily through my backlog of games to play. So far I’ve been able to cross off a bunch of games that I wanted to try but ended up not being my jam, including: Die in the Dungeon, Binding of Isaac, Shadows of Doubt, and Deathloop. I really thought the latter two would be up my alley, but unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy spending time in them at all.

It’s kind of funny to play games with the goal of reducing your backlog, because you won’t dwell too long on games that don’t click immediately. Is that fair to the game? Probably not. But if it’s worth revisiting, I’m sure I’ll get it recommended soon enough to try again.

What did catch my fancy, however, was a demo for a deckbuilder I’ve been wanting to try out for research reasons. A game called BLOODLETTER. It’s a deckbuilder, but turns away from genre conventions to really do its own thing instead. You play a Dark Ages-inspired surgeon, trying to stave off diseases of the body and mind, as well as more spiritual horrors. The turn system is quite unique, and you’re focusing way more on balancing good and bad resources than making a cool deck to feel powerful. In a sense, it’s more akin to a board game like Pandemic or Daybreak than it is to a classic card battler like Slay the Spire.

The art style is almost exactly what I had in mind for a game I considered doing a while ago, before we started on Bibidi. Much inspired by these medieval paintings of skeletons that were gaining popularity with the advent of woodcut printing. It makes me want to jump back on that project as well. I probably won’t any time soon, but it’s at least we have good foundational tech and knowledge to make another card game if we wish to.

For now, it’s just the Demo, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the release of BLOODLETTER.