EPTDiscord uses a victory condition based off life total similar to what you would see in Magic or Hearthstone. Due to Discord’s deck building nature, we discovered early on in playtesting that a simple and dominant strategy was to play all of your weak damage dealers early on and choose to leave them out of your deck. This would be at the expense of some early damage, but had the effect of making sure that every hand would consist of nothing but money allowing for an incredible increase in purchasing power.
The game felt boring as there weren’t meaningful decisions early on. To combat this we added the idea of prep slots. Cannons, which are the primary means of dealing damage, can only be played in an unlocked or rented prep slot. You have 4 prep slots and one is always unlocked. The others can be rented for a turn, or unlocked forever (unless a card locks them). If you rent a prep slot 4 times, you unlock it, but that rental cost doesn’t go toward the unlock cost. So if you rented a slot twice, you’d still have to pay the full unlock cost if you wanted to unlock it right out.
By introducing some restrictions on how many cannons can be played at a time, we found a nice balance where you could still remove the cannons from your deck to get your economy going a bit faster, but you also had to invest pretty significantly to make that happen. One of the most important themes of Discord is presenting meaningful decisions to players. No card is strictly better than any other card and a major focus is to make sure that a variety of strategies are viable. The prep slots are one additional way in which players have a bit more control over the type of strategy they pursue. Players can choose a lower economy with more initial damage to give up some early damage in favor of a faster economy or tech advantage.
One other major design pillar of Discord is scope. The scope of a project is basically a measure of how ambitious the project is in terms of the amount of different ideas and things it implements. Early on in development, the scope of Discord was simply to make a more interactive deck builder. Virtually any idea that fit within that theme was an okay idea to test. As the game became more well defined, the scope of it narrowed significantly. After a bit of play testing I realized that gameplay mechanics that didn’t actually involve deck building didn’t really fit the scope of the game. Some additional mechanics were so different from the rest of that game that implementing them would have meant almost making a brand new game. By limiting the types of additional gameplay mechanics and types of cards to ones that are more consistent with the theme and feeling of the game, I’ve been able to maintain a more cohesive product. As I near my deadline for a downloadable/printable prototype, the scope is narrowed even further. No new cards will be added for the last 2 weeks of playtesting to ensure the desired level of quality. Major mechanics are not being introduced either.
The most important part of scope is realizing that for every single thing I add to the project, the quality will suffer initially. As I mentioned in a previous blog, new ideas are almost always terrible. Many iterations are needed before the majority of ideas are at the level of quality needed and so it’s extremely important to the project that I refuse to pursue alternative ideas, no matter how interesting they seem. If an idea doesn’t fit within the scope of the project, or within the deadline presented, no matter how good it seems, it must be postponed to a future date. One final note on scope is that complexity increases non-linearly. When going from 5 gameplay mechanics to 6 gameplay mechanics, the complexity of the game and playtesting increases by more than 20%. Imagine if they added even one new unit to Starcraft. The amount of play testing required would be huge because of all the new interactions that take place.
Card teaser: Demolitionist
Demolitionist allows you to trash (remove a card from your deck permanently) a positive card in hand, and then gain 2 copies of a card equal or less than the cost of that card from the set of cards available to your discard pile. This card is really cool because it has different uses. The first is that you can use it to get a second copy of a card you already have, although you must make the judgement call of whether or not it’s worth not playing it the first time around. When you demolitionist a card, it doesn’t get played, so by doing it to an important card you miss out on being able to play it immediately. The second main use for this card is to deny your opponent important cards. Each unique card (except for the base set, which is plentiful) generally has 6 copies available per game. That means that you can easily deny your opponent the ability to buy a specific card via the demolitionist by purchasing most or all a specific card.The final big use for demolitionist is to remove cards from your deck that have outlived their usefulness. Some cards excel early on, but tend to lose some of their utility later or once your opponent has bought cards that counter it. Demolitionist allows you to shift your strategy quickly and efficiently.
