Welcome back for another Decktamer update!
This time, we aimed to tackle one of the game's most frequently mentioned critiques: there's not enough choices outside of battle! While Decktamer is certainly a complex game when it comes to battling, the gameplay that happens outside of battles could feel lackluster because the player didn't have a lot of agency over their run. You couldn't really choose what event to have, what enemy to fight or what reward to receive. Today, we're proud to announce a new system that aims to fix this.
Encounter Choices
Before each battle, you'll now have the option to choose between two encounters. Each encounter presents a unique group of enemies to face, a set of rewards you'll earn upon victory, and a special event that unfolds in addition to the items. This system gives you more control over your journey, allowing you to influence which enemies you'll face (and potentially tame) and which rewards you'll collect. Need more berries? Pick the encounter with berry rewards! Looking for rare items? Opt for the encounter with valuable loot!
We believe this new feature will enhance the experience outside of battles and add more strategic depth to your overall run.
New Backgrounds
You might have noticed the backgrounds behind the encounter choice menu. Those are actually the new backgrounds you'll see in battle! We've redrawn them to be more immersive and overall better looking.
Eventually, we hope to add more biomes to further diversify the appearance of the game and also add particles and other visual effects to make them more dynamic.
Final Boss & Other Balance Changes
The final boss was never meant to be permanent and will eventually get reworked more in depth, but in the meantime, we still wanted to have a fun and engaging battle. Previously, the boss was immune to all negative effects and while this made the boss powerful, it wasn't necessarily that fun to play against it since it shut down a lot of synergies (especially poison).
We've reworked its talent to only make it immune to Weakness (the Attack minus debuff) and to compensate for this nerf, we've made the boss's minions give it armor instead of health.
In addition to this, minor balance changes and other miscellaneous fixes were made to certain moves and talents.
New Creature
We also have a brand new creature in this update: the Phiopoda!
This is a tanky Danger Level 2 creature that plays around the Poison mechanic. The game doesn't have a lot of tanks so it felt like a good idea to include more :)
Conclusion
That's it for this update folks! We hope you'll enjoy the new Encounter Choice system and the other changes we made. In any case, let us know what you think on our Discord server!