It’s been a while, sorry bout’ that! But rest assured we were hard at work. Indeed, we have been rethinking the core balancing systems in Hive Blight, specifically the accessibility of each unit, trinket and equipment and it was no small task! In this post, I’ll go over the changes and why we’ve made it.

Originally, even though it made sense lorewise, we didn’t want to put the character you can choose from in specific factions. Indeed we wanted to avoid having a mechanic that gives you bonuses upon collecting multiple units of the same family, a mechanic which is often associated with factions in autobattler games. Instead, we thought it more interesting to give players access to a broad pool of units and mechanics—like poison, stealth, buffs, or lifesteal—and let them discover all kinds of wild combos.

This initial system had its merits, players could mix any units together and come up with unexpected strategies. This freedom also helped us during early development to experiment and see how different mechanics felt without the constraints of predefined clans. It further developed our understanding of our own game and made it easier to apprehend Units designs going further.
However, the system had flaws as well:

• As we added new units and mechanics, the synergy for any specific mechanic—like poison—got harder to achieve. Too many diverse abilities meant you might never see enough poison items to actually build a cohesive poison strategy.
  
• Each new addition risked making old mechanics too rare or creating overpowered interactions we hadn’t anticipated. Basically, any new addition could mean a rebalancing of all existing elements.

To resolve this issue, we thought of a different solution. We thought of giving players rerolls in order for them to have a chance to find the items or units they wanted. But as the pool grew, we’d have to keep expanding reroll options in order for players to hopefully get what they want. We felt like this wouldn’t feel satisfying as we want our player to engage in the mechanics of the game and make them work rather than get lucky. In the long run, this would never have achieved the right results.

We considered letting the game randomly “choose” a few mechanics each run (like poison + stealth + heal) to shrink the pool. But it felt convoluted and we didn’t want to force the player in a specific direction that they haven't specifically chosen themselves.

Eventually, we circled back on our idea to have clans - groups of characters sharing a theme and mechanics - but we knew that we still didn't quite like the usual “collect 3+ from the same tribe for a bonus.” It felt too straightforward and removed the joy of “outsmarting” the game by mixing unexpected elements from different factions. In the end we settled on a middle ground:
Limiting each run to two clans that the player chooses at the start.


Choosing two clans at the start accomplishes a few things.

Firstly, clans and factions allow you to strongly define themes and mechanics for each of them and use known archetypes which, in turn, help guide the player towards the right strategies. For example, the first two clans we worked are staples of the genre:

• The Vespadas, the warrior clan. Heavy hitters with big health pools, high damage and little to no range option (think of your typical run of the mill warrior or barbarian). This clan includes the likes of wasps, hornets and other spiky insects.
  
• And the Silent Cabbale, the assassin clan. Smooth and nimble characters that focus on poison, stealth and lifesteal. Mantises, mosquitoes, flies are legions in this one.

Secondly, players still have a lot of agency in their choices. Because you’re combining two clans, you can still form clever synergies. Maybe mix the stealthy tricks of the Assassins with the brute force of the Warriors. Would you expect the poison from the Silent Cabbale to trigger the effects of some mechanics of the Vespada? Interesting! We’re excited to see which combos players discover that we never even predicted.

Thirdly, the two-clan system makes balancing much smoother by keeping mechanics contained within specific factions.

Take our new Execution mechanic—effects that trigger when a unit lands a kill. We wanted to add a trinket, Moral Boost, which heals all allies by 2 HP when an Execution unit gets a kill. In the old system, this trinket would often be useless since Execution units were scattered in a massive pool.

Now, with clans, Execution-focused units are grouped together, ensuring mechanics like Moral Boost actually work as intended, leading to stronger, more reliable synergies.

Furthermore, this containment allows us to apprehend the combinations of the different mechanics more clearly and gives us room to make unique characters that have passives that might be just ok in association with some clans but shine brightly with others. For example, in our previous iterations, a character like Arilus, who gives his attack speed value to all allies upon dying, was problematic. Indeed, as it was fairly easy to build attack speed, he was good in almost any situation and was a “no brain pick” when you saw him in a unit draft. With the clan system, not only is he contained within a clan that we can balance on its own, even though he will always be good, he will only specifically shine in association with clan that have slow hitting units and/or good access to Attack Speed buff abilities. This way, it is back in the player's hands to figure out how good the unit is! Your new job will be to try out any combination of clans and find out how they interact with each other to uncover the perfect strategy!


All of this, however, wasn’t all sunshine - there were some big hurdles. Normally, we like to update the game on a regular basis so that we can have feedback on what we’re working on and advance alongside our audience. However, with such a big change, we had to shut down updates for a while as the games in its work-in-progress state would not be fun to interact with and feedback at that time might have been counterproductive because of it. Basically, the game was in a broken state for a while.

In addition to that, we had to reorganise and sometimes scrape a few existing designs (don’t worry, the overwhelming majority will make their comeback, they are just linked to other clans). We had about 25 units “tied” to five loose clans; some units could be repurposed with new clan-specific mechanics, but others had to go for now. That meant that in addition to repurposing some units, as we wanted each clan to have at least 10 units for replayability and variety purposes, we had to create 5 to 6 new units per clan.
As we wanted clans to make sense visually and thematically, we also had to reorganise the way we handle mechanics so each of them feels distinct. Now, every clan has bound mechanics that only them (or mostly them) use and they might be limited on other fronts, the Vespada, for example, have no ranged units. Bounding mechanics to contain pools of units ended up being liberating however. Indeed, we used to be hesitant about adding certain gimmicks since it could end up useless in a random pool. Now we can design those mechanics confidently because each clan guarantees enough synergy within them each specificity to matter.

Anyway, thanks for reading so far (if you haven’t, thanks anyway)! We hope this explains why we pivoted from a single mega-pool to a two-clan system and how it keeps our game both balanced and creatively flexible. We’re excited to hear what you think, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Let us know your feedback. We’re always happy to hear from our community and see the inventive combos you come up with!


ps: Bob says hi!

Hey everyone!


As of today, the game’s Steam page is live, and we couldn’t be happier to share it with all of you. Check it out, add it to your wishlist, and keep an eye on updates as we continue developing the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2886620/Hive_Blight/

Want to help shape the game, provide feedback, and get a sneak peek at what’s to come? Fill out the following form and let us know why you’d make a great beta tester. We're looking for players who enjoy auto-battler, roguelite, and deck-building games like TFT, Hearthstone Battlegrounds, or Slay the Spire, so if that’s you, we’d love to hear from you!

[forms.gle]We’ll be selecting a limited number of testers to join us, so good luck, and thanks for your support!

Enjoy!