In here I will attempt to provide a more in-depth explanation of the design goals. Hopefully this format will allow for more detail (and I will still try my best to curtail excessive rambling).

The first thing I want to address is "Why just these seven events? Aren't there more events with only two options?" Yes, it's true that the game contains more events that could fit into the space of "boring and binary" however there exists a core set of events in the game that fulfill two major purposes and I think are better left untouched. I'm referring to the core 'shrines' of the game, which provide an upgrade, or a removal, or a bundle of gold. These very simple basic events serve as a core that fills out the empty space in the event list, and can be encountered multiple times per run. From a design perspective, they are to the event pool as "Strike" and "Defend" are to the card pool. They provide the most basic and fundamental things required of them, and form the basis on which to compare everything that comes after.

Next, why do a collection instead of doing something larger scope for each event? Well, first of all, I wanted to experiment. Doing a number of events together allowed me to design in a different way than usual. Secondly, I have received a few requests for a collection pack, and this was a means by which to try out such a task. If this get a positive response, I will look into doing more of this in the future. Thirdly, not every event has the theming and design premise to be fully fleshed out as previous events in the BetterMod series have done. I think these events stuck a nice balance where they didn't need a full rework, just some extra spice added. Lastly, by reducing the scope at which I was seeking to redesign events, this allowed me to handle seven events in the time it would normally have taken for one, while still giving the same level of love and care to each.

Now that I've gotten those larger picture questions out of the way, let's go into the content.

"Ancient Writing"

With this event, the theming led naturally to the notion of what can be gained from reading passed down knowledge? The obvious answer is Insight, and so we felt that it made a fun and balanced alternate option. This event is already one of the most powerful events in the game, given that you can upgrade as many as 10 cards with no downside. Compare this to Shining Light which require 20% of your max health to upgrade 2 cards, which are often your strikes and defends since it can only be found in Act 1, and they will make up most of your deck at that point. That being said we didn't want to try to power creep the event, nor did it feel right to tone down the power of a staple event, so we tried to provide a sidegrade option that will still be picked less than the other option, but sometimes will be worth choosing.
Originally, I tinkered with the idea of having a rotating pools of knowledge related options to gain, making each encounter of this event feel more unique, but in the end nothing felt as thematically pleasing as gaining Insight, and thus we stuck with that. (That's not to say that we didn't still add some fun interactions to alter the options at least a little).

"Scrap Ooze"

This event stemmed from an idea we have discussed back during the design of Better Note. Part of what makes that event so fun is the idea of "breaking the game" in that you aren't supposed to have a card from another class, but using that you can sneak one in. Prismatic Shard also allows this, but it does so in a way that (potentially) destroys the normal reward process of the game, and can often lead to not finding another good card for your deck for the rest of the run. We wanted to provide more opportunities for this kind of cross-class sneakiness. It also just made perfect thematic sense to find the tools of another adventurer in the scrap ooze. On the backend, we made sure to do some cleansing of the card pool to remove (or at least drastically reduce) the instances of being offered useless cards that require synergies to which you don't have access.
We also love the unique way in which Wing Statue involves the cards in your deck with your event options. Building on this premise, we figured it made sense that there probably isn't any limit on how much treasure a slime could have accumulated over the years, so a sufficiently geared player would be able to delve even further into the ooze and find greater rewards. This also builds on and further extends the push-your-luck nature of the event which in the base game is not very interesting. Mathematically, it means you'll take an average of 11.6 damage and get a relic. Now, the event will often be able to take the player to the brink of death should they be bold enough.
This was also inspired by the data from Better Skull and Better Match where, for example, the players are 3x more likely to choose a relic than an upgrade, despite taking an upgrade resulting in an ~40% increase in win rate. Players like getting more stuff, and they like new stuff.
Due to the higher complexity additions to this event, I believe we elected not to tinker with any major hidden interactions or secrets here.

"Secret Portal"

This was a personal vendetta of mine in many ways. Personally, as a player, the goal for me is not to win, but rather to become as powerful as possible across a single run. The option to skip right to the end if I think I'm powerful enough is essentially choosing to stop having fun. Now, not every player has the same goals, or plays the same way, but this is a fairly common psychological path for enjoyment. This is all to say, I hate this event with a burning passion. That said, this event is unique in a couple very interesting ways. It is one of the only parts of the game aside from scoring that is tied to the in game timer (The game hard locks the player from finding this event until a certain time criteria has been met). Additionally, the event can move the player to a different place, which normally is functionality limited to the map screen.
Both of these aspects were very interesting to think about, and left room for a lot of creativity. This felt like the obvious place to return to the concept I mentioned earlier of having a small set of third options that will be different each time the player finds the event. The player can encounter six different portals that will take them to various places. Observant players will be able to ascertain the theming of these portals fairly quickly, but I won't spoil it here.
This event is an Act 3 exclusive, so the scope was really wide open for a range of balance approaches. Ideally, every portal should be potentially good for the player based on what they need, but some will be better than other depending on the circumstances. Additionally, in what might be my favourite interaction due to the perfect matching of theme, lore, and gameplay, the Prismatic Shard is especially useful to have for this event.

"Shining Light"

As mentioned when talking about Ancient Writing, Shining Light is also an Act 1 event that is demonstrably worse than Ancient Writing, and yet is still a very powerful event. I'm almost always happy to see this event, however, it still suffers from the problem of except in the situation where I'm particularly worried about my health (which is rare in Act 1) I always choose the upgrades. With that in mind, we knew thematically, right off the bat that we wanted to create a situation where we could sass the player for walking into a heat ray and getting burnt. We tinkered with some ideas, and eventually realized this only worked if the player can fail the option. Taking a look at Better Match (which at the time of writing is still the second most popular event in the BetterMod series), we noticed that player really love the all-or-nothing option (It's picked more often than the vanilla option with 5 choices).
This led to the development of a sufficient reward for a satisfying risk/reward cost. We eventually settled on Apotheosis+ as that fit very nicely thematically, is one of the most stored cards in Better Note, and generally is a powerful enough card to merit a risky all-or-nothing option. To speak a little more to the design theory behind it, I wanted something that would justify having a low success rate, and still sometimes be worth it. In this manner, it enables the player to have these "high" moments when they succeed an option that they shouldn't have, and got a great reward for doing so.
All of these factors converged in such a beautiful way that it became difficult to imagine another other design.

"The Nest"

Here, we actually revisited a concept that I had made a full prototype of months ago but never did anything with. Lore-wise, the cultists are very interesting, and thematically we love a lot of the ties between the cultists, rituals, the byrds, madness, etc. With this, we liked the way that getting the Ritual Daggers card could potentially shake up your playstyle in a major way. From there, we wanted to further the concept. The ritual dagger hints at going insane, but what if you could go full insane? Enter the Ritual Mask. We went through a number of designs before finding something that felt fun, while also delivering on the promise of being fully mad.
Gameplay wise, it functions similarly to spending a full turn playing demon form, but allows for much great synergy and interaction from other effects. At a fundamental level, the player gets to choose how much madness to keep, as they can always play all of them on the opening turn, if they don't want to keep any, but they can choose to save some for later if they should so desire. Maybe they're playing some high cost cards, maybe they're more willing to with so much madness available, maybe they are trying to pad their deck or discard for size based synergies without just taking every card offered to them.
This was a very fun event to think about, and even just writing the additional dialogue lines, both for the event and the mask, was an enjoyable process.

"The Sssssserpent"

This is my personal favourite of the events worked on in this collection. This event very clearly deals with the concepts of wealth and greed. It also has very clear ties to the biblical story of the serpent tempting innocents to evil (The event is even called Liar's Game internally). With all of these themes in mind, I read quite a lot of Friedman and Marx to really get into the mindstate of Capitalism and it's pros and cons (not really :P). With all of these references clear in my head, I found it weird that the Leave option here is instead called Disagree. That gave way to the notion that the third option had to be an equally as radical rejection of wealth and greed. Something that truly aligns with disagreeing with the serpent.
Much like the choice of Apotheosis for Shining Light, the obvious reward here was Enlightenment in exchange for a staunch rejection of wealth. This was my favourite one to write for due to the theming of it. From a gameplay perspective, I except players to think Enlightenment is too weak a reward for giving up so much gold. This reaction actually further fits the satire of the theme in a very pleasing way, but also since this is an Act 1 event, the player is likely to not have much gold, possibly next to nothing if they just visited a shop, so the fluctuation of the cost is high, but the actual cost is unlikely to be very high. In the same vein as Scrap Ooze, getting a card like this very early on can also open up very divergent play styles that are otherwise highly unlikely to ever manifest naturally. A deck full of high cost cards can suddenly become a very consistent path with a common way to access a major synergy enabling card like Enlightenment.
Additionally, this event provided the most interesting access to cross-event interactions, not just from your decision on wealth and greed affecting you in the current, but also in future interactions ;)

"World of Goop"

This event was the first one decided on, but the last one I actually implemented. We knew right off that bat that we wanted to do something similar to the Nest where we give the player an option to take a relic that will effect their gameplay for the rest of the run. We also didn't want it to be quite as impactful as the Ritual Mask, due to it being an earlier event, but also because smaller choices can be as important as larger ones. For this, we wanted something that would deliver an avenue for high moments to the player, rather than alter the playstyle significantly. There are still plenty of ways to synergize with this relic, but mostly the status cards are there to add a continual balance effect to the power of the relic.
Similar to the Ritual Mask, this relic also went through a number of iterations before settling onto the final one. I try to make most designs theme-forward, so much of the final design stemmed from wanting more and more thematic fulfillment. A common theme across slimes (in most mediums, but notably in StS) is the notion of items, adventurers, weapons, etc getting stuck inside them. This led to the notion of a protective slime barrier that also had the drawback of leaking into your own supplies. The flavor of having enemies get lodged in your slime protection, and thus getting weaker was the final breakthrough that really sealed in the flavor of this design.



Alright! To anyone who made it all the way through all of that, I hope you enjoyed reading it. I realized I was hitting a much more conversational tone pretty early on, and so I went with it. Probably been watching too much GDC content lately. I think usually my writeups are a bit more technical, so I'm curious to see if people enjoy this more, or prefer the more clinical voice.