You seem to have grown a little since the last time we met. Perfect! Today, we are here to talk just about that.
No card left behind!
You know the feeling when every few encounters, your once powerful attack instead of beheading your foes, now just tickles them? Or when your supposedly mighty set of armor gets shredded, as if it was a mere cardboard box? Yeah, that’s the one. Fun, right?
Our goal was simple. We wanted to avoid even touching card upgrades. You see, card upgrades work insularly. No matter how many upgrades we hammer into them, basic cards feel like a burden later in the game. They require our attention and worse, our resources to stay in play.
That’s why in Nadir no card is meant to be obsolete. We want you to feel your entire deck progress as you slash your way down into the depths of Hell. What kind of black magic is that you ask?
Character Progression
Think of it like this: Let’s say you’ve hit the gym and gained some muscle (may not apply to our Jeanne here). Even if you’re still using a rock that you’ve picked up back when passing the gates of Nadir, those demon skulls crack a whole lot easier, don’t they?
The strength of a card is inherently tied to character statistics. Upgrade the character and performance of your deck follows. Simple as that!
Here at Team Nadir, we all love skill trees in our RPGs as much as the next Sinner, but why keep them boring? Instead of the bog standard way of upgrading stat points directly, we offer you this wonderful, charming pentagram scheme. How fitting…
You start buying your skills in the inner circle and go outward to get access to more powerful ones. So if you’re eyeing that tempting “Demon Slayer 666” upgrade, sorry, but you need to do some work first.
Do you know what else is progressing? The development of our game of course! Stay tuned for new exciting updates next week and come say Hi to us on Discord!
Devlog #12 – Character progression
Welcome back, Sinners!
You seem to have grown a little since the last time we met. Perfect! Today, we are here to talk just about that.
No card left behind!
You know the feeling when every few encounters, your once powerful attack instead of beheading your foes, now just tickles them? Or when your supposedly mighty set of armor gets shredded, as if it was a mere cardboard box? Yeah, that’s the one. Fun, right?
Our goal was simple. We wanted to avoid even touching card upgrades. You see, card upgrades work insularly. No matter how many upgrades we hammer into them, basic cards feel like a burden later in the game. They require our attention and worse, our resources to stay in play.
That’s why in Nadir no card is meant to be obsolete. We want you to feel your entire deck progress as you slash your way down into the depths of Hell. What kind of black magic is that you ask?
Character Progression
Think of it like this: Let’s say you’ve hit the gym and gained some muscle (may not apply to our Jeanne here). Even if you’re still using a rock that you’ve picked up back when passing the gates of Nadir, those demon skulls crack a whole lot easier, don’t they?
The strength of a card is inherently tied to character statistics. Upgrade the character and performance of your deck follows. Simple as that!
Here at Team Nadir, we all love skill trees in our RPGs as much as the next Sinner, but why keep them boring? Instead of the bog standard way of upgrading stat points directly, we offer you this wonderful, charming pentagram scheme. How fitting…
You start buying your skills in the inner circle and go outward to get access to more powerful ones. So if you’re eyeing that tempting “Demon Slayer 666” upgrade, sorry, but you need to do some work first.
Do you know what else is progressing? The development of our game of course! Stay tuned for new exciting updates next week and come say Hi to us on Discord!
Devlog #11 – everything OP!
Sinners!
Last week we started a little tour around Circles of Wrath and its lovely denizens. Time for the second round!
Chain effect
The horny (as in: corneous) fella below is the Acolyte of Wrath. Ace up his sleeve is the Chain effect. What it does, you ask? Well, usually when you throw a card on a stela, the stela launches its written effect or two and turns around, indicating the turn is over (nomen omen). But if the written effect is the Chain, a neighboring stela is now triggered as well – it launches its written effect or two and turns around.
The what now? It’s TWO stelas that hit me at once? Is that even legal? Oh, yes, I’m afraid so. That’s a lively example of a lovely design concept called Everything OP.
Everything OP
The oldest design concept in the world comes from the oldest game: chess. Chess philosophy assumes all elements to be like a math equation: simple, elegant, and perfectly balanced. Eons later, some unsung heroes of design said something on the lines of: “screw it, let’s try the exact opposite of that”. That’s how Everything OP concept was born.
It stands for “everything is overpowered” and it’s especially effective in roguelike games. You learn the basics and they’re pretty much all “chessy”. Then, when you’re finally starting to get the gist of it, this new rule suddenly kicks the chair and turns all game mechanics around.
It sounds like madness from a dry design perspective, but it allows for neverending series of OMG moments when this new monster does WHAT NOW? and you think you can’t possibly win, but suddenly a new card comes to play that can do WHAT AGAIN? and now you’re on top (if you figure out how to combo it properly, of course).
And that’s the game feel we’re striving for!
Stay tuned for the next monday update and if you have any questions or feedback: let us know on Discord!
Devlog #11 – everything OP!
Sinners!
Last week we started a little tour around Circles of Wrath and its lovely denizens. Time for the second round!
Chain effect
The horny (as in: corneous) fella below is the Acolyte of Wrath. Ace up his sleeve is the Chain effect. What it does, you ask? Well, usually when you throw a card on a stela, the stela launches its written effect or two and turns around, indicating the turn is over (nomen omen). But if the written effect is the Chain, a neighboring stela is now triggered as well – it launches its written effect or two and turns around.
The what now? It’s TWO stelas that hit me at once? Is that even legal? Oh, yes, I’m afraid so. That’s a lively example of a lovely design concept called Everything OP.
Everything OP
The oldest design concept in the world comes from the oldest game: chess. Chess philosophy assumes all elements to be like a math equation: simple, elegant, and perfectly balanced. Eons later, some unsung heroes of design said something on the lines of: “screw it, let’s try the exact opposite of that”. That’s how Everything OP concept was born.
It stands for “everything is overpowered” and it’s especially effective in roguelike games. You learn the basics and they’re pretty much all “chessy”. Then, when you’re finally starting to get the gist of it, this new rule suddenly kicks the chair and turns all game mechanics around.
It sounds like madness from a dry design perspective, but it allows for neverending series of OMG moments when this new monster does WHAT NOW? and you think you can’t possibly win, but suddenly a new card comes to play that can do WHAT AGAIN? and now you’re on top (if you figure out how to combo it properly, of course).
And that’s the game feel we’re striving for!
Stay tuned for the next monday update and if you have any questions or feedback: let us know on Discord!
Devlog #10 – new demons!
Greetings, fellow Sinners!
This week we’ll have a little detour from the grand systems and mechanics diary to give you a quick look at the new pack of monsters we’re currently implementing into the game.
Circles of Wrath
After the Prologue, some of you were asking us, will there be some more “proper” demons in Hell, with horns and spikes, and all? The answer is: well, duh! So I want to show you a little sneak peek of the Wrath circles of hell, where more “standard” echelons of the underworld army reside. And also, some nice new game concepts are introduced.
Let’s take Imp Outrider for example. He’s known for a bit unorthodox walking habits. It’s a relatively weak creature for this part of Hell but has a twist: multistrike. A series of weak yet numerous attacks in a single turn of a stela.
Paper-Rock-Scissors
This is where little Paper-Rock-Scissors philosophy can unfold. Some monsters smash heavy single strikes, some have a range of multistrikes. The armor can only take so much, so the advanced response of an adventurous Sin Avatar such as yourself can be either Weak debuff or Shielded status effect.
Weak decreases Damage a little, but for ALL attacks, regardless of their number. It’s very powerful for multistrike, not very effective for a single punishing blow, as 50 minus 5 is still A LOT. But works like a charm when used against our hands-on-the-ground imp friend.
Shielded on the other hand blocks a single attack and that’s it. But blocks ALL of it, regardless of its power. So it’s great against one fat smash, useless for a multistrike, as it wears off after even a simple 1 Damage and makes you open for another, say, 9 more. The imp will be alive and very much kicking, but his bigger brothers and sisters of the Wrath division probably won’t.
'Nuff said, a smart Sin Avatar should have a bit of both for any occasion! But won't it clog up your densely-combo-packed little deck? Yeah, no one said it'll be easy in the deck-building world.
What about those bigger brothers and sisters I mention? That’s the story for the next Monday devlog!
See you on Discord
Devlog #10 – new demons!
Greetings, fellow Sinners!
This week we’ll have a little detour from the grand systems and mechanics diary to give you a quick look at the new pack of monsters we’re currently implementing into the game.
Circles of Wrath
After the Prologue, some of you were asking us, will there be some more “proper” demons in Hell, with horns and spikes, and all? The answer is: well, duh! So I want to show you a little sneak peek of the Wrath circles of hell, where more “standard” echelons of the underworld army reside. And also, some nice new game concepts are introduced.
Let’s take Imp Outrider for example. He’s known for a bit unorthodox walking habits. It’s a relatively weak creature for this part of Hell but has a twist: multistrike. A series of weak yet numerous attacks in a single turn of a stela.
Paper-Rock-Scissors
This is where little Paper-Rock-Scissors philosophy can unfold. Some monsters smash heavy single strikes, some have a range of multistrikes. The armor can only take so much, so the advanced response of an adventurous Sin Avatar such as yourself can be either Weak debuff or Shielded status effect.
Weak decreases Damage a little, but for ALL attacks, regardless of their number. It’s very powerful for multistrike, not very effective for a single punishing blow, as 50 minus 5 is still A LOT. But works like a charm when used against our hands-on-the-ground imp friend.
Shielded on the other hand blocks a single attack and that’s it. But blocks ALL of it, regardless of its power. So it’s great against one fat smash, useless for a multistrike, as it wears off after even a simple 1 Damage and makes you open for another, say, 9 more. The imp will be alive and very much kicking, but his bigger brothers and sisters of the Wrath division probably won’t.
'Nuff said, a smart Sin Avatar should have a bit of both for any occasion! But won't it clog up your densely-combo-packed little deck? Yeah, no one said it'll be easy in the deck-building world.
What about those bigger brothers and sisters I mention? That’s the story for the next Monday devlog!
See you on Discord
Devlog #9 – Deck Binding, 2nd approach
We start here where we left off in the previous devlog. We had a working paper prototype with a simple action-reaction loop. Now was the time to start implementing it.
At that point in development, we still worked within a classic turn-based scheme. You have a hand-drawn at the start, you play the cards on either you or the enemy, the stelas turn around until you feel you’re done or out of cards, you end the turn and the rest of your hand is discarded. Now the demon responds with three actions you just set up and your turn begins again. Also, at this time you couldn’t choose the stelas directly, it was automatically assumed to be the leftmost of the matching color.
No reaction from the monster when playing a card. And that critical hit; somehow it’s still in the game.
Change one thing, forced to change 10 other things
We quickly realized we can’t just repaint the wall from white to pink, leave the rest of the furniture unchanged and call it a day. The pink (well, red-and-blue, actually) forced full renovation. All classic solutions had to go away to be replaced by new ones that fit into the grinds of Deck Binding.
The biggest issue we faced at this stage was the lack of cards combos, something that you want in your card game, right? On this build, players were playing their cards more to position stelas in the best configuration for them, rather than use cards for whatever they had written on them. You could play more tactically of course, but randomly throwing cards around was similarly effective.
We were not as devastated as we had our paper prototype that proved to solve most if not all problems with the game! But in order to not completely break the mental health of our programmers, we decided to introduce the changes slowly, in phases. What sneaky little guys those designers are, right?
Steam Next Fest
The Steam Fest Next – a demo festival – was approaching, a great opportunity to test out some of the latest updates to the game. Phase 1 of our “reach the paper prototype stage” began. We added two small changes that really helped with the game:
No automatic discard at the end of the player’s turn.
Targeting the stelas instead of the monster.
Sounds like not much, but it really helped to flesh out the gameplay before we could move to what we thought are the more fundamental problems of the game.
Enemy playing all his “moves” one by one during his turn.
With no redraw after each turn, you could save some of the cards for later, and not spam them up, since you know you won't be seeing them for some time. Stelas targeting improved the UX of the game, literally highlighting the main gameplay feature of Nadir.
The demo got some pretty positive feedback, players showed their interest in the game and they were curious about what we’ll do next. Remember the bigger issues we thought we were having? So it seems that nobody noticed them. So time for Phase two!
Code bending
Goal: you choose a card, play it on one of the stelas of the right color, apply the card’s effect, the monster reacts with the effect of the chosen stela, we get a new card? Simple, right?
That’s where you are the wrong boyo! What was very easy to prototype on paper required a complete overhaul of the turn system, you know, a pretty big system in a TURN-BASED card game.
But before the programmers started throwing stones at us, we decided that we can get rid of turns… by not getting rid of turns;) The path of coding is a perilous one, but one that can be bent in multiple ways. In this case, we just made the turn very short. You played the card, bam, that’s your turn. Now it's the enemy's time to act, and voila – we have our paper prototype in a playable form!
Of course, it was not the end of our journey (yeah, it’s not that easy), but we will continue on the next devlog.
We start here where we left off in the previous devlog. We had a working paper prototype with a simple action-reaction loop. Now was the time to start implementing it.
At that point in development, we still worked within a classic turn-based scheme. You have a hand-drawn at the start, you play the cards on either you or the enemy, the stelas turn around until you feel you’re done or out of cards, you end the turn and the rest of your hand is discarded. Now the demon responds with three actions you just set up and your turn begins again. Also, at this time you couldn’t choose the stelas directly, it was automatically assumed to be the leftmost of the matching color.
No reaction from the monster when playing a card. And that critical hit; somehow it’s still in the game.
Change one thing, forced to change 10 other things
We quickly realized we can’t just repaint the wall from white to pink, leave the rest of the furniture unchanged and call it a day. The pink (well, red-and-blue, actually) forced full renovation. All classic solutions had to go away to be replaced by new ones that fit into the grinds of Deck Binding.
The biggest issue we faced at this stage was the lack of cards combos, something that you want in your card game, right? On this build, players were playing their cards more to position stelas in the best configuration for them, rather than use cards for whatever they had written on them. You could play more tactically of course, but randomly throwing cards around was similarly effective.
We were not as devastated as we had our paper prototype that proved to solve most if not all problems with the game! But in order to not completely break the mental health of our programmers, we decided to introduce the changes slowly, in phases. What sneaky little guys those designers are, right?
Steam Next Fest
The Steam Fest Next – a demo festival – was approaching, a great opportunity to test out some of the latest updates to the game. Phase 1 of our “reach the paper prototype stage” began. We added two small changes that really helped with the game:
No automatic discard at the end of the player’s turn.
Targeting the stelas instead of the monster.
Sounds like not much, but it really helped to flesh out the gameplay before we could move to what we thought are the more fundamental problems of the game.
Enemy playing all his “moves” one by one during his turn.
With no redraw after each turn, you could save some of the cards for later, and not spam them up, since you know you won't be seeing them for some time. Stelas targeting improved the UX of the game, literally highlighting the main gameplay feature of Nadir.
The demo got some pretty positive feedback, players showed their interest in the game and they were curious about what we’ll do next. Remember the bigger issues we thought we were having? So it seems that nobody noticed them. So time for Phase two!
Code bending
Goal: you choose a card, play it on one of the stelas of the right color, apply the card’s effect, the monster reacts with the effect of the chosen stela, we get a new card? Simple, right?
That’s where you are the wrong boyo! What was very easy to prototype on paper required a complete overhaul of the turn system, you know, a pretty big system in a TURN-BASED card game.
But before the programmers started throwing stones at us, we decided that we can get rid of turns… by not getting rid of turns;) The path of coding is a perilous one, but one that can be bent in multiple ways. In this case, we just made the turn very short. You played the card, bam, that’s your turn. Now it's the enemy's time to act, and voila – we have our paper prototype in a playable form!
Of course, it was not the end of our journey (yeah, it’s not that easy), but we will continue on the next devlog.
Designing Nadir's unique fight mechanic was a real pickle, as previous devlogs might tell you. The last time we visited the wretched designer’s room, there was a brilliant-at-first-sight-but-not-really Threat Counter feature flushed down the toilet.
The pickle
Now what? At this stage we’re pretty depressed about our design skills, throwing away every original idea we had, looking at a game that barely stood up to the description of an intense demon slay. Or so we thought until one snowy afternoon…
It was just one of the series of conversations on how to make Threat Counter work, but we suddenly went into a heated argument on the very basics of the game. Should we give up and just make another Slay the Spire or Hearthstone clone? Should it even have to be a card game?
The Great Brainstorm
“All right, calm down everyone, I got this”, I said… no, I didn’t, I’m not very good at managing my emotions in such instances (a guy from the same room: he really isn’t). “Let’s list our problems and crack them one by one”.
Single enemy? Bad, not the idea itself, but for the lack of choices.
Gathering Threat? The limit of spending is blurry at best, punishing at worst.
Combos? There’s no fun to it, no engaging play of interconnected parts.
OK, now, let’s follow what we want to accomplish, not what we have. A duel, where we replace artificial point spending with a system where the cost of your moves is paid by the enemy’s response.
We began an intense puzzle brain-squeeze.
More choice? Maybe the points could be colored, adding a more abstract choice layer?
More combos? What if actions from our cards and the enemy were interconnected somehow?
More clarity of consequences? Maybe if we just show exactly what reaction will the enemy partake?
The solution
So let's say we have two colors of cards matching the colors of enemy points to use. But not just abstract points, clarity, remember? Certain actions to activate! But how make them predictable? Oh, that’s simple (no, it’s not, we are already two months into bouncing this back and forth, but, you know… simple after you got the solution). Instead of making a predefined action list going one at a time – as in Slay the Spire and most of its followers, where you only know the immediate following move of the monster – let’s make the enemy’s actions to be picked up BY the player.
Oh, that was an exciting idea. Dangerous for the design team (we’ll get to that), but very empowering and intriguing. That is the choice of your card multiplied by the choice of enemy action. Choice squared!
It was a big chunk of code to smelt and reforge (...again), so we cut corners with a paper prototype. It not only proved the idea right but forced a neat design choice: the list of actions is presented as three double-sided cards coined stelas with the effect written on them. The sequence is simple: you activate one, and you reverse it. If the card cost is two or three, you reverse the corresponding number. Color division work as a limitation to force some planning and sequence to player’s moves.
We called our new baby Deck Binding mechanic. Isn’t she pretty?
So, all that’s left was to polish the feature and, you know, do the frickin’ rest of the game. But more on that in the next devlog episode!
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you haven't had a chance – you can already check what we came up with in free to play Demo of Nadir!
Designing Nadir's unique fight mechanic was a real pickle, as previous devlogs might tell you. The last time we visited the wretched designer’s room, there was a brilliant-at-first-sight-but-not-really Threat Counter feature flushed down the toilet.
The pickle
Now what? At this stage we’re pretty depressed about our design skills, throwing away every original idea we had, looking at a game that barely stood up to the description of an intense demon slay. Or so we thought until one snowy afternoon…
It was just one of the series of conversations on how to make Threat Counter work, but we suddenly went into a heated argument on the very basics of the game. Should we give up and just make another Slay the Spire or Hearthstone clone? Should it even have to be a card game?
The Great Brainstorm
“All right, calm down everyone, I got this”, I said… no, I didn’t, I’m not very good at managing my emotions in such instances (a guy from the same room: he really isn’t). “Let’s list our problems and crack them one by one”.
Single enemy? Bad, not the idea itself, but for the lack of choices.
Gathering Threat? The limit of spending is blurry at best, punishing at worst.
Combos? There’s no fun to it, no engaging play of interconnected parts.
OK, now, let’s follow what we want to accomplish, not what we have. A duel, where we replace artificial point spending with a system where the cost of your moves is paid by the enemy’s response.
We began an intense puzzle brain-squeeze.
More choice? Maybe the points could be colored, adding a more abstract choice layer?
More combos? What if actions from our cards and the enemy were interconnected somehow?
More clarity of consequences? Maybe if we just show exactly what reaction will the enemy partake?
The solution
So let's say we have two colors of cards matching the colors of enemy points to use. But not just abstract points, clarity, remember? Certain actions to activate! But how make them predictable? Oh, that’s simple (no, it’s not, we are already two months into bouncing this back and forth, but, you know… simple after you got the solution). Instead of making a predefined action list going one at a time – as in Slay the Spire and most of its followers, where you only know the immediate following move of the monster – let’s make the enemy’s actions to be picked up BY the player.
Oh, that was an exciting idea. Dangerous for the design team (we’ll get to that), but very empowering and intriguing. That is the choice of your card multiplied by the choice of enemy action. Choice squared!
It was a big chunk of code to smelt and reforge (...again), so we cut corners with a paper prototype. It not only proved the idea right but forced a neat design choice: the list of actions is presented as three double-sided cards coined stelas with the effect written on them. The sequence is simple: you activate one, and you reverse it. If the card cost is two or three, you reverse the corresponding number. Color division work as a limitation to force some planning and sequence to player’s moves.
We called our new baby Deck Binding mechanic. Isn’t she pretty?
So, all that’s left was to polish the feature and, you know, do the frickin’ rest of the game. But more on that in the next devlog episode!
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you haven't had a chance – you can already check what we came up with in free to play Demo of Nadir!
