Ivan is grinding out cards while I am stuck in the figurative Hell that is exam season. So the least I can do is show him, that yes in fact I can write. Well maybe not with punctuation and grammar, but I get the general Idea. 

In this post I will focus on the transformation of the battle structure for our game Zvery. Especially how it evolved from the complete mess it was in the beginning to the state it is in now.

Now this image shows the terrific change our visuals went trough (all thanks to Ivan). Trust me, our game design experienced a similar dramatic transformation. But before we get into that, let us start with the current state of the battle system. Now in our manual there will be a rigid explanation of how everything works, but here let me break it down in simple terms for you.

Step 1: Roll 5 dice
Step 2: Use dice to activate abilities to damage your opponent. Once all his creatures are below 0 health. You win!

That was easy enough now let us look at a better example. You have the following insanely cute creature.

It has this strong ability. Every creature always has 1 ability.

 

You roll and have the following dice: 1 4 5 2 2. So now you can use your 1 and activate the 2nd skill on frantic overload (the card just before I wrote this) to deal 3 DMG to an opponents creature.

That is the basic Idea roll dice and use abilities. As you can see there are a some other effects you can activate, for example STUN or you can give your creature more strength. How these work in detail will be explained another time. Just know we have a ton of effects up our sleeve to create exciting gameplay for you! Mechanics to create, remove and manipulate dice. Mechanics to destroy your opponents, to outwit them and of course dunk on them.

Anyway let us talk about our transformation. Here is an old screenshot of how our game looked straight from a play testing session.

Bruh. Ignoring the bad old non existing art what is going here? (Sorry Ivan for calling it bad but be real).

Compare this to how it looks now.

Now you play with 2 creatures each having 2 abilities.

Before we had 3 creatures each with 2 abilities. That is 3 times the amount we have now. Turns used to take fucking 10 minutes! I am not exaggerating. We had play testing sessions of about 5 hours where we needed to take breaks. Now the whole game takes about an hour.

Also of course we had additional arbitrary rules of who could attack who. Aka the sun is up and I spun 3 times before so you can not attack now. It wasn't that fun. It was just exhausting trying to keep track of 64 skills (each ability has 4 skills).
This made you always feel like you are missing out. Not the best feeling to invoke in our players. However we still felt like that at its core there is something there.

There is this Idea in design out there of having to kill your babies and man I am telling you the amount of babies I killed while designing
this game would allow me to run for office. To be honest with you at this point I like killing them. Getting there was a long journey partly owned to my stubborness.
I love tactical games where you can think deeply about the interactions that are happening, and I thought getting that into Zvery - you better buy it when comes out - was by having this complexity in combat.
However there is a big difference between shallow complexity and deep complexity. Shallow complexity to me boils down to memory. It is what we had. It is the äquivalent of asking you to remember 40 words in latin while your dad yells at you for being a failure. It might be a complex emotional challenging experience, but it is nowhere near fun. Deep complexity is trying to prove a theorem, come up with an algorithm, solve a chess position. This is what we wanted. I mean not to that level, but more of that.
But Simon this obvious! I say fuck you imaginary r/gamedev browsing hater. It is way different once you are doing it yourself. Just one of these countless lessons people can tell you about but you only understand once you experience them yourself. Or maybe I am just completely braindead.
Either way after letting go of this fixation we went on to have 3 creatures with only 1 ability. After we saw that it was good we moved to 2 creatures but they gotta have 2 abilities again! Cant cut to much. And after we saw that it was good we finally went on to 2vs2 with 1 ability on each creature.
This might be a long winded way of telling you, lmao we removed some stuff but this whole process took about 1 year. Which in retrospective is crazy.
It brings me to one of the biggest design lessons I learned during Zvery, just go overboard with it. Bring out your biggest kitchen knife and just start cutting these ugly ass babies. Especially in the beginning if you think a small change improved something immediately try the same thing but way bigger. The whole I thought that removing creatures would make the game dull and boring and would remove everything I like about Zvery (come on just buy it when it launches fam). But the second we tried it 2vs2 with one ability we both knew we would never go back. Now we have more fun and rewarding gameplay, since this change allowed us to focus
the game on what is fun. The individual abilities. Rolling a ton of dice, comboing into even more dice, outplaying your opponent with more dice and then dealing big damage.
How these abilities evolved I have to tell you in the next one because I have been rambling for way too long and have to get back to hating myself while studying.

Until then I hope you remove some stuff from your games so you can also feel one of the biggest joys in game develop, carving out that fun you always knew was there.

Simon

(Was this ending inspirational enough for you)
Also at some point this should be a youtube video. I hope writing this will help me finally make the video. Its been in "planning" for half a year now. So go subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=channel%2FUCX1bO7BQH6bNiY73FdSHvlQ