I'm back to talk about the gameplay design of Zvery. Last time I focused on the battle structure, 

this time I will dive into the ability design. All abilities are built out of four individual skills that you can activate by using your dice. Let's look at a current example:

The Icon in front of the 1st skill means you can use any die you want to activate the effect. When you activate it, your creature takes 1 stun, which means you can not use it until you spend one die to heal it. Then you can roll a new dice.

At first that might seem like a bad deal. I lost 1 dice to activate the skill and my creature got stunned but I get to roll 1 new one.

But I promise this is not bad design!

The skill can in itself be useful. You trade one dice which you cannot use for one you could use. That is often helpful.

However, it gets better once you look at the 4th skill.

The chain icons here mean straight. No, that is not straight as in definitely me. It is straight as in Zvery is straight fire. So you can activate that skill by using 3 dice, for example with values 2 3 and 4.

This skill allows you to take dice you already used and combine them with other dice. So you can use a 3 on the first skill then activate the fourth. Now you can combine the 3 you used with maybe a 2. This allows you to deal 5 damage to a creature. As a cherry on top after using this, you also get a new dice with value 5 which you can spend on skills again. This is a small example how skills play together in our game. It gets real fun once you have 2 skills and start combining those skills with the traits of your creatures. If you do it right you suddenly can use 10 dice and deal a bunch of damage to your opponent.

That wasn't always the case. In the beginning abilities were dull and joyless. This had multiple reasons. One of them was that I was really inspired by Roguelikes and wanted the game to have that same experience. So instead of having 1 ability with 4 skills every ability only had 1 skill. The idea behind that was, that just like in The Binding of Isaac once you combined a ton of singular effects you would get something incredible. This was very misguided, because in Isaac or other Roguelikes every character can attack by default. So the effects can focus on doing something interesting since no matter what you will still be able to do damage. The problem for Zvery was, that if you get 4 random effects that each do something incredibly cool, you might not be able to do any damage anyway. Or you only get damage skills and can't do anything fun. To mitigate that, all abilities tried to do both a little and ended up utterly mediocre. Just like Avatar 2. We definitely didn't want Avatar 2 nor did we want Avatar 1. We wanted Avatar the last Airbender (the show) design. (Ivan's comment: well, I do aim for Avatar's level of creature design.)

So we moved to have 4 skills on abilities. It was better. Maybe it was Avatar 2 but only the scenes where they swim in the water. So still a lot of room to improve. There was another big obstacle hindering us from making a fun game. 

Focus on balance.

But balance is important! Of course that is true. In my mind it even was the most important thing. Here is the thing tho. If someone wants to play a perfectly balanced competitive game they can just go play league. Ok, you got me. What I meant is they can go play chess. This is a big realization I had. Players do not like your game because it is balanced. No one after playing a match of COD ever said: "Wow I am glad this game is so balanced". No you want to get big killstreaks and destroy. After playing Hollow knight or Dark souls you don't go, "wow what an enjoyable experience this was. I am glad it is so balanced." I am not suggesting balance should be an afterthought. It has to be always present in design or else players will hate playing your game or be bored by it. The goal tho is not to make a balanced game. It is to make a FUN game.

Ivan got me to realize that after relaying the following advice. "Show me too much." I do not know who said that (Ivan: here's the sauce), I do know it is one of the best advice I ever got and lead to us designing some of the most fun cards we have now. For example

Boom. One shot your opponent with 5 times 6. But that chance is astronomically low. Alright alright. Check this out.

Take your dice to the next turn. Don't worry, you still get to roll 5 new ones. Or the last skill on this ability.

Shatter means you can split one dice into 2 and then use them.

Suddenly, the game was fun! People are trying to combo into more and more dice and deal huge damage. Sure, some attacks are too strong some are too weak, but you don't care once you combo into Super Gau becuase you are having fun. So, if you want a perfectly balanced game, choose chess or go. If you want to try some wacky combos and experience a different gameplay experience, try Zvery. Don't worry it is still competitive, you will not get steam rolled or steam roll every time. If you play it right, though, you can pull of some incredible combos.

At this point, we had a ton of fun playing Zvery. One ingredient is still missing. We still wanted that roguelike feeling. We wanted to keep the game fresh the 100th time you play it. We wanted you to always be able to find new ideas in there which you hadn't thought about. That will be the next subject of my post.

Keep an eye out for mutations.