Dear Denizens of Issilith!
It is our greatest pleasure to (re)introduce to you our Lead game designer and one of our Phages, the great Nikša Lučev! Today, Nikša will answer the game design question and give us some insight into his vision and thought process regarding Phageborn.
Q: Tell us something about yourself.
A: My name is Nikša and I’ve been working here in Games Revolted on Phageborn for the past five, six years. I’m an avid card game player. Well, mostly Magic, I’ve been playing it for more than 10 years, I can’t really remember the first time, it was around the Kamigawa block, and I’ve been a Magic judge for around five years. That’s my preferred card game of choice. I did play Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Hearthstone, Runaterra and that’s pretty much it. I do like board games in general and I play computer games. So yeah, I did start my career in game development by being a QA and then I basically came here by accident. It was by recommendation of a friend who worked with me in the past. So I came here, I talked with the guys, showed them some of my work, like the board game and the card game I did in college. And they loved it so much they gave me full-time employment here to do a bunch of stuff. Since at the beginning we were a really small team, all of us had to do a bunch of stuff. So I did UI/UX design, concepts, managing assets, and such. And yeah, I just think about all the cool stuff we can make. That’s it.
Q: What’s a typical workday like for you?
A: Well, a typical workday is… Dealing with stuff. Since I’ve been here for a pretty long time, I do an overview of all things that are going on so that we all have the same vision, then I do some of my scheduled tasks, and when I’m not doing that I'll do some brainstorming for future content. I do work on completing our Lore also, because that is the area we are not completely done with, at least with writing everything down. I'll also help out with various bugs and features, are they intended to work that way or not, and so on. That is a typical workday for me now at this point of development.
Q: What are you enjoying working on the most?
A: Mostly I enjoy working on new cards, new concepts, and exploring ideas and how to bring those ideas into the digital card game. It’s one thing to bring them to a physical card game and another to bring them to digital, so it’s a really cool process to do some top-down design.
Q: You said you did a lot of things regarding the design of the Phageborn, is there anything in particular that was your focus during the development?
A: My focus during development was managing assets that others are doing since I personally can't do anything besides telling others what to do. I really tried to make sure that everything is somewhat situated in this dark fantasy setting. Some things may deviate from strictly dark fantasy and are mixed with regular or high fantasy, but I did try to do my best to keep it in that tone throughout all of the assets I was managing. That was primarily through sound and visual effects. So I tried to keep it down to the ground and not too flashy and too out there, but still not going into full-on depression mode with things. I helped whenever we were doing concepts for new cards, new Avatars, anything like that, and I did have my say in some of the Phageborn design balance-wise. Before it was all a combined effort from multiple people and that’s about it.
Q: Where do you draw your inspiration from?
A: Well, mostly I draw my inspiration from other card games in general, like seeing what mechanics are good in them and why they are good, and I try to see how certain mechanics would work in Phageborn and figure out how to make Phageborn more fun. So my primary inspiration comes from board games and card games in general, characters and stories from video games, and old myths and legends. One big inspiration from the start was actually Heroes of Might and Magic and we talked about that a long time ago, and we did implement some of its elements but it didn’t work so we just made them better.
Q: What do you find most challenging about game design?
A: Nothing really, I’m perfect. Just kidding. Well, the most challenging part actually is when you have an idea, a mechanic that sounds really cool on paper, and you test it out and it’s still really cool and amazing and you know that you love it, even some people you test it with love it, but then the sad reality of life sets in and you figure out that it’s not intuitive, the UI mess is horrible, and there are a lot of problems that go with it. The novelty is refreshing but once that novelty runs out you just have a mess. So the biggest problem is to find something that is fun, novel, and engaging but also make it clean execution-wise, functional, and actually enjoyable to other people, not just you and the people who are already very well acquainted with the project.
Q: One of the things you mentioned is how a part of your job is to make sure all of you have the same vision. So my question to you is how do you reconcile creative differences inside the team?
A: Well, we pull out our ideas and we just basically brainstorm until we find the best solution. We gather multiple inputs, take them all into consideration, and just figure out which is the best approach to solve it. Although we rarely have some creative differences, when they do happen it’s pretty much finding common ground, compromising, and seeing what best fits into the game.
Q: Did you re-evaluate the game’s mechanics since our last update to the game?
A: Yes, we have been looking at some mechanics of the game, like the overall feeling of leadership thresholds and what can we do with them. Certain cards have their abilities locked behind the leadership thresholds and we want to see what it would be like if those abilities weren’t locked behind leadership thresholds but if the leadership threshold gave some other bonuses. So, exploring and thinking about what we could do if we make, I’m not gonna say overhaul, but a slight tweak to cards to keep their utility but still have their leadership bonuses, which is not a really simple task, because Phageborn is built upon the three attributes the player can use and we have to make sure that there isn’t a prevalent playstyle. In the ideal meta, the distribution would be like there are equally good leadership decks, equally good energy-only decks, and equally good 50/50 splits. So, I believe that the state of the game is pretty good now but we are always looking at certain aspects of the game and how we can make it better and how to make them not stand out too much, to somehow achieve that harmony of leadership, energy and leadership/energy.
Q: Can you tell us a thing or two about what you did regarding the balancing of the last build?
A: Well, since we never had the chance to openly put the game in front of hundreds and thousands of players, we only had a small group of people who could say their balancing problems and issues, and that all changed once we got a lot more feedback. So we looked at that kind of feedback and statistics, what cards are too used and what cards are underused, and we took those numbers and data in regulating the last balance update, but we still plan on balancing the game regularly until we reach something that is going to be enjoyable to the players. It’s not something that one person handles, we get all the data and then we make an educated decision.
Q: There was some feedback from the community about the high tempo nature of the energy system. One of the potential solutions was the implementation of dual-cost cards. What are your thoughts about that?
A: Well, from what we gathered during our, unfortunately, limited time on Steam is how there can be situations where you can get tempo advantage and never lose it but those situations aren't that often and we got an idea of how decks which use 50/50 energy and essence cards aren’t the best still. So, it’s not really heavily skewed into the tempo match-up and normally, having a card game that has two resources means that you can play double the cards, so, you know, if you have one player that plays two cards per turn and one player that plays one card per turn, naturally, there is going to be a tempo advantage but we didn’t notice that was a big issue because you also get out of the resources that much quicker. But the idea of dual resource cards, it is an interesting mechanic to explore but it isn’t something we would necessarily like to do on a regular basis because it kinda defeats the whole double resource aspect of the game which is like a big part of our game. And just because it’s hard to balance it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t embrace it to the fullest. So, we will try our best not to skewer the game into any one playstyle.
Q: How do you plan to innovate the game to meet the standards of contemporary card games?
A: First, we want to focus on the things that make us unique. We want to take advantage of the fact that we are a digital card game so we can do things you cannot do in physical card games. I mean other contemporary card games do that now, even Magic for some reason. But we would like to explore that area even further. And to do so we plan on introducing new Avatars in our future updates, new factions, new mechanics, and maybe even new game mods that will allow you to play Phageborn like you never played before.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add before we finish?
A: Yeah, I would just like to thank the community for being so patient with us and keeping their hopes up. This is a really good boost to our morale, that there are people that are still hyped for the game even after all these years. So that's really nice of you. It’s really hard for us to keep all this information back, we would love to tell you EVERYTHING that we do because there are some really, really good things we have in plan. And yeah, stay safe, and we’ll be seeing you soon on the battlefield.
Feel free to join our Discord channel to stay updated with more information about Phageborn and its development: Discord.
Yours truly,
Games Revolted