Hey all, just keeping you updated to let you know that the next large update is coming in the 2nd half of June! This update will include some new cards, plus a lot of Quality of Life changes, improvements to the new player experience, and performance optimizations.


Just for fun, here's a preview of a crazy new card:

You can also see what the new card keyword tooltip system looks like here.

This is one of the wackiest cards I've ever made. The flavor is that the card gives you control of a lost relic from the warrior Erimos, but controlling that relic causes enemies to hunt you down.

The card itself adds a random miniboss monster to the battle, and they all have varied abilities. One enters play angry, one is immune to arrows, another has 25 life, and another duplicates itself. Why oh why would you choose to do that?! Well, you get to play Blade of Erimos. This card deals 1 damage and gains you a gold, which is already respectable for 2 energy. But it ALSO lets you get cards from a special card pool that only includes Legendary and Black Market cards, which tend to be powerful and unique. This can give you very powerful options that would be way overpowered if there wasn't some drawback.

In a way, this card makes every battle its own mini-roguelike. The randomized boss (which you get a peek at) sets the challenge for you to conquer, and you must use cards from the randomized legendary/black market card pool to build yourself up during battle. So far this card has totally delivered on the premise for me, making every battle completely insane! I love seeing which boss is coming, and deciding what crazy legendary/black market cards I'll use to take it down. Not a card I'd use every run, but when it shows up it's pretty fun!


I'm excited for the enhancements to the new player experience! I've been watching a new player play the game for over 50 hours now and have taken a LOT of notes. I'm fixing all the little things that can confuse new players. I'm adding card tooltips, as well as visual indicators that will let players know what's going on during the game. It's crazy how many little things can be confusing until you add a little visual indicator or animation for them!


As one example, take this card BEFORE the next update:

This version of the card could be very confusing to new players. It had no animations when it lost counters, or when it activated. When it did activate, the cards in the monster deck simply disappeared, and you didn't know which monsters you'd destroyed unless you checked the game log.

Cards and artifacts that synergized it were confusing - one artifact said "Cards that remove monsters from the monster deck remove one more." When a player got that artifact in a vaccum, they might not have a compatible card, so they didn't know what it did, or might have thought it did something else. When the player DID have a synergistic card (such as Assassin Network), they might not make the connection immediately because of its long-winded non-keyworded description.

This card also had the old "Void Stone" symbol (that black diamond symbol near where it says "Scheme".) This indicated that it was removed from battle after use. I've generally found the best way to remind a player of a card's effect is for that information to be in its text box, so an icon like this was a bad way to display that information.


So, let's show how we've updated that one card:

The new Assassin Network has the monster removal effect keyworded as "Banish". Now effects that affect Banish can simply reference the keyword, making things less confusing.

The card text is also cleaner, and the "Banish" keyword lets players know this is a notable effect that shows up on multiple cards.

On top of that, Scheme cards like Assassin Network now glow when they lose counters, and when they activate. Also when Banish activates, the cards pop out of the monster deck, float, then disappear! This is the effect I use for Enflame and it seems to be intuitive for players. This is all punctuated with new sound effects. Note that the "Void Stone" symbol has also been removed here, and replaced with the "Deplete" keyword. I find this has helped explain the effect to players a lot better than the symbol.


That's just one example of the many ways cards were updated.

One problem the game has had is that it tends to only attract experience deckbuilder players. I want to make the game more accessible to everyone. The gameplay systems are actually fairly simple to learn, we just need better indicators and animations! So I thin working on this will help the game a lot.

I currently have an Excel file I've been working through with 176 lines of different cards and effects to update for this purpose. Some are small things. For example, the card "Knockback" previously had a "sword slice" sound effect and no animation, which made no sense. So I updated it to have a punch/hit sound effect and added a puff of dirt that appears over the monster you hit. Small changes like this will add up in the long run, and make everything more clear for new players!

So I believe the upcoming update will improve the user experience greatly, plus there will be new cards, quality of life changes, and performance improvements (which should reduce the game's memory usage and possibly make it work on more people's systems.) I will also include a roadmap for the rest of 2024 in that update. This update will be out in mid-late June. Talk to you then!

-Brett
supermegagames.net