I recently listened to an interview with Jay Ma (one of the developers behind FTL and Into the Breach). She talked about how in her new game (the amazing Fulcrum Defender on PlayDate) she chose to have a replenishing health bar, because she got a bit tired of roguelike games that punished players for early game mistakes. Meaning that if you lose health in an early battle you would carry the consequences of it throughout the rest of the run.
I liked this thought a lot. And it seemed like it could help me solve a problem I had. I previously basically applied the Slay the Spire formula for map progression: you choose a path with battles, events and rest points - the latter of which gives you an option to upgrade a card or heal your character. However, I want my game to focus a bit more on upgrading (evolving) the creatures (especially since I want players to experience stacking evolutions on one creature), so I need more opportunities for the player to do so. Also, whenever I choose the healing option in Slay the Spire I felt like I chose the 'boring' option.
So I decided to give the player the option to heal or evolve a creature after every battle instead of only on specific map points. Now you can easily mitigate early game mistakes (albeit at the cost of losing an upgrade opportunity) and you have lots of chances to upgrade your creatures to ridiculous levels.
I spent some time rebalancing enemy strengths around this new feature and started playtesting it. Aaannd… I like it. I think it’s a keeper.
You could argue that removing consequence from the game is a bad thing or that it devalues smart playing. But I think the game should be more about crafting a working deck. And if you don’t manage that, later game enemies will usually crush you, regardless of your health. Plus, I can always reduce the healing amount in later ascension stages. But we’ll get to that (maybe in next month's post).
June 2025 progress report
I tried to get the game ready for a demo release on itch.io, but I didn’t manage it. Halfway through June I realized that my evolution UI didn’t work and I basically threw the whole thing away and redesigned it. I like it a lot better now, because it doesn’t rely on vertical scrolling through 54 rows of dice anymore (yeah… what was I thinking?).
Before:
After:
And then I tried to get the game as bug-free as possible, but I still have some work left in that regard. So let’s shoot for the end of July for that demo release.