This month I (among other things) finalized my infection mechanic (which is analagous to curses in many other deckbuilders). So let's have a look at how it works!
The curse mechanic I'm familiar with is that you draw a curse like any other card and then it usually does something bad unless you can discard it before the turn's end. And I tinkered with a similar mechanic for my dice-based game: Just occupy one die face with a curse and issue the debuff if the player has not been able to reroll that die before that turn's end.
However, not only did it not fit very well with the game's theme, it also posed new design problems with the dice. What if there was no space on the die? Would the player just get of scott free? That would further incentivize players to fill all their dice with crap as soon as possible. Or would I have to remove a creature? That seems like a real downer in gameplay.
So the solution was that not the die faces would receive the curse, but instead the creatures on the dice. This also gave me the idea of how to fit the mechanic into the theme of the game: It would be called an infection. So you'd have an infected pangolin or an infected bullet ant for example. And since that is a similar mechanic to the evolution system, it would allow me to stack infections on top of each other. Think of a twice-infected or thrice-infected mantis shrimp (that also seems mean to the players, but in a fun way!).
I have two types of infections so far:
1. Infections that execute their effect when you play the creature. So the infected pangolin will still give you shield, but it will also make you weak or exposed or poisoned, etc. The intention here is to give the player another meaningful decision: Do I play the creature and suffer the infection or do skip the debuff but essentially lose the creature's ability?
2. Infections that execute their effect when they are rolled. That would be for effects that need to happen immediately for them to make sense, like having less energy or making the infected creature more costly or losing a reroll this turn.
Can you get rid of infections through the evolution system?
I'm going to indulge in the (utterly unlikely) fantasy that you, dear reader, read the other monthly updates and remember that evolving one of your creatures entails sacrificing another (i.e. removing it from the die). When I designed this infection system I wondered if that would be a good way to get rid of infections. And it might, but for now, I have a system in place to prevent it, because it feels like it would devalue infections too drastically. They would be of too little consequence.
I could of course simply prevent infected cards from being eligible as sacrifices, but that would take away a choice from the player and I don't like that. Instead, any infections of the sacrificed creature will be transferred to the evolved creature. Again, this makes sense with the theme: The alien infection would attack the genome of the affected creature. And the evolved creature would not only gain the sacrificed creatures healthy genes but also the compromised ones.
+++++ May 2025 Progress Report +++++
Implementing infections took a good chunk of the first half of the month to design, code and tweak. The other larger feature I added in May is controller support. I absolutely love playing deckbuilders with a gamepad or on a handheld device. So it feels good to now have the ability to playtest Life Altered with my trusty Xbox Controller.
The rest of the month was filled with further content updates. I'm not adding any creatures at the moment, but I still need to flesh out all the evolutions for the ones I already have in there. My goal is to have a rudimentary but fun to play demo live on itch.io by the end of June. So fingers crossed that this is going to be the topic of my next update here.