The Codex Kickstarter is now live. It's a customizable (but not collectible) card game with an RTS theme.
If you'd like to know more about the game design of Codex, check out these three articles:
#1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources
#2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings
#3 Codex Design: Combat and the Patrol Zone
And also stay tuned for a new series of articles about each hero and their associated "spec".
See you on Kickstarter!
I've been working on the Codex card game for a lot of years, and it will finally be up on Kickstarter early next week.
Instead of having just a deck of cards, you actually bring a "codex" of cards to the game, and that's the card pool you can pull from. You build your deck from that as you play, and there's a couple turns of lag time between when you add cards from you codex to your deck, and when you actually play them. This happens to fit really well with the RTS video game theme (like in Warcraft 3 and StarCraft) of build orders under a fog of war. The "build order" is the particular set of cards you chose to get this game and the "fog of war" means that you and your opponents don't quite know who is building towards what until a little bit after it's already in motion.
Plus, it has a bunch of great art. Here's some sample cards. Notice how each card type has its own card frame so you can immediately tell which type of card it has.
The unit cards are closeups, rather than battle scenes, so you can actually see the portrait clearly even when the card is across the table from you. The spell and upgrade cards show giant icons, as if that was the button you'd click in an RTS video game to cast the spell.
If you'd like to know more about the game design of Codex, check out these three articles:
#1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources
#2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings
#3 Codex Design: Combat and the Patrol Zone
Even though the game has been in development for many, many years, I still need your help to actually manufacture it. So please consider joining next week's Kickstarter if you're looking for a deep strategy card game with hundreds of viable decks.
Thank you to all the patrons supporting the Fantasy Strike fighting game. The $25+ patrons are getting builds of the game as we go (latest build here), as we aren’t actually ready to show the game publicly yet. In the meantime, your support is helping us keep going to the point where we can eventually get a lot more players involved. Our team is incredibly grateful.
There’s a lot of new things in our latest build, so I thought I’d share the change list publicly so you can see the kinds of things we’re working on, even if the build itself is just for patrons (feel free to sign up!). We have worked on gameplay-related things, as well as non-gameplay things. The highlights are:
--A new character!
--”real” alternate costume colors for some characters
--First steps toward new menus
--Performance improvements
I’ll give a list of gameplay-related stuff first, then go into the non-gameplay stuff.
GAMEPLAY
-----------------
SETSUKI
--New playable character!
--Setsuki is the most difficult to play character with the highest skill ceiling right now. This is because she is based on the idea of “speed”, so to fulfill that, she can do a bunch of stuff really fast. She has the fewest hit points in the game (five), so that means to be effective, you have to actually use her tools well. See tips at the end of this section.
--Normal moves do cancel to specials, but the specials don’t actually combo. Instead, they create mixup opportunities.
--Normal moves DO cancel to super. Tacking on guaranteed extra damage costs her meter, in other words. (A fair exchange for her various other advantages!)
--B special is a teleport kick. This can go through the opponent to cross them up, even in the corner. Hold the button down to instead do a special throw (wow).
--C special is Starlight Tumbler (aka hooligan throw). When she tumbles in the air, you can press the C button again to throw them (air to air or air to ground). You also have the option to press A to divekick from this move, or even super to air super from it. This move CAN be yomi countered (that’s when the opponent lets go of all controls) in order to prevent it from being unbeatable as a meaty attack.
--Air A is a divekick, note that holding back or forward let you change the angle of the dive.
--Air B is a kunai projectile. Note that holding back or forward let you change the angle of the kunai. This move is very useful to throw out just before approaching the enemy.
--Air C is “Flying Fox”. This is a floaty air dive move. Although its priority is low, it’s a very deadly move because you can cancel it to itself on hit or block. Even if you don’t hit with it, you can perform another air action after it, such as second Flying Fox (even a backwards one that runs away), an air kunai, or divekick, or a super.
--Ground super is a very fast dashing attack. The startup is vulnerable, but the speed and distance is so great that it can punish a lot of things and extend your combos.
--Air super is an air parry. It currently has the same implementation as Grave’s air parry, though later on Setsuki’s will work a little differently and have more of a ninja flavor to it.
Tips:
--Be aware of your max damage bread and butter combo. Air C (Flying Fox), air C again, normal attack when you land, super. That’s 4 damage. It takes a bit of practice to perform the Flying Fox properly to do that, but it’s not actually difficult.
--An air kunai can cover your approach with Flying Fox.
--Go crazy with lots of quick stuff like hooligan throw, cancel to dive kick, jump and flying fox, land and teleport kick, etc. Once you are able to actually control all that stuff you’ll be all over the place and can hit opponents with things they “should” block just because they are so confused.
--If you land a double palm attack (forward + A), it’s often worth it to spend the super to get a guaranteed 2nd damage. But at the very least, be ready to do a mixup with either teleport kick / teleport special throw, or hooligan throw into either “really throw” or divekick or air parry super.
GRAVE
--His projectile now has back / neutral / forward versions that are slow / medium / fast because that’s what you expect anyway. Before he had neutral (slow) and non-neutral (fast) to make sure that all commands work even in a possible future 1p mode that had enemies on both sides of you. We’ll relax that requirement and make the commands whatever they need to be for the main mode, then slightly modify them to work in that other mode if we ever actually make it.
JAINA
--no change
ROOK
--no change
VALERIE
--Revised a lot of things. I’m not really happy with her previous version OR this revised version, so she will likely see several more changes in the future. The issue is that rekka punches are inherently super good in this game and so she’s a rushdown character that a) can do crazy damage and b) can get in easily, always. Also, the way characters fly when hit out of the air does not really work properly yet, and the issues with it hugely favor Valerie by making juggling with rekkas easier than it should be.
--You can now do rekka 1, 2, 3 all the time, rather than only in manic mode.
--Manic mode removed (it existed only for the reason of stopping you from doing rekka 3 all the time.)
--Rekka 3 no longer combos. The animation has been replaced with Flying Rainbow Stroke (aka chicken wing), so that it’s obvious that it wouldn’t combo.
--All three rekkas do block damage. That means if you block all 3, you’ll take 1 point of real damage but you could have done something to hit that 3rd hit probably.
--Rekka 1 and 2 now have back / neutral / forward versions that go short / medium / far distance.
--Walk speed slightly increased.
--Divekick replaced with a more normal air attack. This slows her down when she’s trying to get in, but the attack itself is pretty good. Very wide, so it’s good at crossups.
--Ground super (Chromatic Orb) now has 13 frames of invulnerable startup after the super flash.
GEIGER
--Flash gear (aka flash kick) startup increased by 2 frames
--neutral kick startup increased by 4 frames
--Time spiral (aka sonic boom) shorter hitstun. This combined with the change to the neutral kick means that point-blank time spiral no longer combos into neutral kick. This was a weird-feeling bread-and-butter combo for him, so it feels better that you don’t have to worry about doing it anymore.
--The input detection for differentiating between “press” and “hold” on his backfist (for traveling forward vs not traveling forward) has been improved. It is less likely to make you travel forward when you didn't want to. But it STILL needs work and will likely be improved again in the future.
--It is no longer possible to have his air special gear and ground special gear on the screen at the same time. If you have one of those on screen, and activate the other, the first one will be destroyed and your new one will appear. By allowing them to both be on at once (in the previous build) it meant you were basically forced to constantly spam them a lot, which did not feel very “Geiger-y”. I’d rather he mostly stays on the ground and does sonic booms than constantly has to jump around.
--Air special gear is slightly buffed because of the previous change. It travels slightly faster and it will not be destroyed if Geiger blocks or gets hit. That said, its overall power level is low (somewhat intentionally). We might adjust or revise this move entirely in the future. It’s difficult because he doesn’t even need this move and we don’t want it to be a thing he does all the time, whatever it is.
--Air super. Your super meter no longer refills while the Cycloid gears are on the screen. (Was way too good.)
--Ground super has been completely replaced. We tried many versions of time stop, and they were always too weak or too strong. It was very hard to deal with it, so it’s been replaced with a move sort of like Charlie’s multiple sonic boom super. Geiger can throw three gears with this, and he can delay the gears too. The graphics for this super are so placeholder that it does not yet give the feel that we want. The real animation will start with a “time stop” where he fills up his gear meter 3 times, then gameplay will resume. This first pass doesn’t have that, but does have basic functionality.
GENERAL
--Super flash (the cinematic at the start of supers where the game is briefly paused) increased across the board for most supers. They don’t have proper animation, but this is to test the general timing to make the supers a bit more dramatic.
NON-GAMEPLAY
------------------------
--New alternate colors! Grave, Jaina, and Rook all have 8 costume colors now. This is the first time we’ve had intentionally designed alternate colors, as opposed to just stuff for testing purposes. (Note that these are the three characters that have “real” character models. The other character models are placeholder.)
--The placeholder character models now have different 3D shading applied to them. This is not important because their models and shading will be completely replaced anyway, but this makes them look less awful in the meantime.
--Rook now turns into a big stone “trap” when he does his air C move that pounds the ground.
--Jaina now has a new model for her bow. (Note that it still doesn’t correctly show her flame arrows yet).
--Main menu revised. In the middle of the screen, the menu emphasizes the main modes where you actually play. Other features that aren’t about playing are below, and use icons so they look different from the gameplay modes. Then tertiary features are small and in the corner, to give more focus to the main modes. The “Play” menu item will lead to online play, but as a temporary measure it’s hooked up to single match vs CPU right now. Many functions shown on the main menu are not actually implemented, but I want to start getting things in place so we get a sense of how to organize it all.
--The menus are designed to work with mouse OR gamepad. They are designed to look good on your computer screen OR tv that’s across the room. That said, this version broke mouse support in some situations and we know that. The mouse still mostly works, but we are aware of several bugs with mouse use on the main menu items in the upper right corner and on the character select screen and we will fix them in a later build.
--Character select screen revised. It now shows 3D characters at a more reasonable size and orientation. It now also has on-screen UI for selecting costume colors.
--There is now a smooth flow from character select -> stage select -> versus screen (the screen showing “Grave vs Jaina” before the fight starts). Various elements stay constant across these three screens so it all feels coherent. 3D character animation also works smoothly across these screens now.
--The versus screen now stays up longer on purpose, rather than going away so quickly that it feels like a glitch. During this time, a quick pre-fight music fanfare plays, but the music itself is placeholder. (Note that all other music you hear in the game is real and finished music from OC Remix.)
--Graphics settings completely revised, now simplified down to 4 settings (very low, low, medium, high). On setting below high, we managed to improve graphics quality AND improve performance too (nice trick!). This was possible because some of the tradeoffs on quality vs performance in our previous builds really made no sense. Lower setting disabled some graphics features that mattered a lot, in order to keep other features that don’t really matter much.
--Screen tearing used to occur on about half our graphics levels, but now never happens, even on the lowest setting.
--The background was rendered as blurry in some areas on about half our graphics levels, but now it’s never blurry, even on the lowest setting.
--In previous builds, the shadows were not handled well some of the medium settings. One of those settings made shadows so transparent that it was hard to even see them, yet you were still taking the performance hit for rendering them. On another setting, the shadows were very visible, but the quality was so low that they appeared jagged to the point of being obnoxiously glitchy looking. In our current build, the top three settings have shadows at high / medium / low quality, where they still look reasonable no matter the setting. The lowest setting has no shadows at all. In future builds, we will eventually add “blob” shadows to this quality setting.
Tip: If you’re trying to run the game on a low power computer, especially laptops, remember that in addition to changing the graphics quality from lowest / low / medium / high, you can also change the resolution. Running it in 720p rather than 1080p might help you a lot on low-spec computers.
That’s a ton of changes in this build! We have lots more in the works too. New menu features, new character models, and even some new animations are finally in the works. Stay tuned on Patreon for more updates!
There's a new episode of my Raw Game Design podcast up for my ($10+) patrons, here. This podcast series is part of my thank you to all those who support my various projects on Patreon. That same podcast link also has links to all the other episodes of Raw Game Design too, btw.
In this episode, I discuss an advanced kind of fighting game AI for the upcoming Fantasy Strike fighting game (playable builds for that available for higher tier patrons, btw). The twist about this AI discussion is that the trouble here is really all about the way we present it, and that's heavily tied to the in-game menus. Which modes even exist? How are they arranged? This menu stuff is incredibly hard in the first place and the prospect of amazing AI calls into question a bunch of things we might have taken for granted before.
This is "raw game design" in the truest sense in that we are lost in the forest here. Since recording this I have at least slightly more idea what to do and I think we were barely starting to head in the right direction by the end.
I also do a separate podcast series, Sirlin on Game Design, which is free for everyone and generally more polished. The Raw Game Design series is intentionally unpolished and gives a glimpse at what it's really like to work on design problems.
Thanks again to my patrons for your support!
We discuss the release of Starcraft 2's third expansion, Legacy of the Void. This is a look back at what we liked about Starcraft from the very start, what things Blizzard changed for the better over time, and what things we think they really should also have changed too. Starcraft is a very difficult to play game, and we complain that while some of this difficulty is great and makes the game interesting, other sources of it seem totally out of place. Specifically, many aspects of the UI don't capture the player's intention and it just feels "wrong" rather than "strategic" in these cases. That said, we are still generally fans of the series!
Hosts: David Sirlin, Richard "Leontes" Lopez, & Sean "MrGPhantome" Washington
Puzzle Strike is now available on Steam! It will also be coming to iOS just a few weeks later. (It's already available in physical form.)
Puzzle Strike is a deckbuilding puzzle game played amongst Fantasy Strike characters. It's inspired by puzzle games such as Puzzle Fighter. Gems fall into each player's gem pile every turn, and whoever's gem pile fills up first loses. Improve your deck (of chips!) by purchasing new chips as the game unfolds. Will you go heavy on economy, offense, or build an intricate engine? In any case, make sure to adapt to your opponents because Puzzle Strike has a lot more interactivity than most other deckbuilders. And like the other games in the Fantasy Strike universe, Puzzle Strike is designed to hold up to thousands of games at the expert level, and we fully embrace the philosophy of even-playfield competition.
The new Steam version of Puzzle Strike (as well as the upcoming iOS release) have these new features:
The Steam version of Puzzle Strike will retail for $14.99 USD and come with the first ten characters (Grave, Jaina, Midori, Setsuki, Rook, DeGrey, Valerie, Geiger, Lum, and Argagarg.) Additional characters will be available as in-app purchases and bundles.
Come join the fun today and follow along with our launch live stream on twitch.tv! And give a shoutout to #PuzzleStrike and @SirlinGames on twitter to tell us (and the world) your thoughts.
Go check out the game on Steam, here.
As this holiday season approaches, it's the time for game sales!
Starting today, Yomi is part of the Autumn Steam Sale. It's 34% off, and so is Yomi expansion too.
Get it now
And there's more! The Sirlin Games tabletop store has some specials.
Pandante Deluxe (2nd Edition). $125 -> $99.
Puzzle Strike Deluxe Bundle (comes with 3rd Edition base set, strategy guide, randomizer cards, and promo chips) $88 -> $69.
Yomi Complete 2nd Edition Bundle (comes with all 20 Yomi decks and the EX Powerup expansion to store it all in, with 100+ Destiny cards and special oversized Deathstrike Dragon card): $240 -> $199.
So check out Yomi on Steam and the Sirlin Games holiday specials.
Happy Holidays!
Patreon has been such an incredible help to me that I'm giving a thank you shout out to the Patreon staff as well as to all my patrons. (My Patreon is here, btw.) Patreon is a way for people to directly support the creative people they want to support. It's not for a specific project like a Kickstarter, but rather for everything that person is doing. It's actually a lot more fun than kickstarter because I get to show all the in-progress stuff I'm working on.
Here's a rundown of what I've been doing over on my Patreon lately.
Last month, I offered early access to (physical) Codex cards. Codex is a new take on customizable card games. If you'd like to learn more about Codex, here's three articles about the game's design:
#1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources
#2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings
#3 Codex Design: Combat and the Patrol Zone
Anyway, all those Codex early access sets already shipped out and my patrons often play each other over Skype. If you missed out on that, you can actually still get physical cards through this post (requires $25+ patron level). Though you might as well wait until next week because there will be a balance update within a week.
Last week I posted a new Raw Game Design podcast episode (for $10+ patrons) where I discuss "reset buttons" in Codex (cards that blow up the board so you can possibly come back from a very bad position). I also discuss some changes to the Tower add-on. It's a way to detect stealth / invisible units and it's tricky to give the right amount of detection. Finally, we discuss what Geiger's moves will be in the Fantasy Strike fighting game.
I also posted an update to the Codex rulebooks today for patrons of any level.
Within a couple days, I plan to post a big update to the Codex print-and-play version (for $25+ patrons) that has dozens of balance changes based on the last month of playtesting. Within a week of that, the same changes will be available as physical cards to patrons of any level (for just the cost of printing + shipping).
Last and certainly not least, I plan to post a new playable version of Fantasy Strike, our simple-yet-deep fighting game (for the $25+ patrons). There's a little bit of info on the game here: http://www.sirlin.net/fantasystrike
The new build has loads of bug fixes, a few balance adjustments, and a new playable character, bringing our cast up to four so far. We have Grave, who has a projectile and is an all-around kind of guy. Jaina also has projectiles, and some rushdown capability, but where she really shines is zoning with her crazy obstacle course of flame arrows. Rook is a grappler's dream, having just about every tool a grappler could hope for. And our newest cast member is Valerie, a manic painter who's all about rushdown. She may bear some gameplay resemblance to Fei Long. ;)
We've been focusing mostly on gameplay so far, but we'll be upping our production values soon. If you're an expert 3D combat animator, or a visual effects artist (in Unity), or a 3D environmental artist, get in touch with us at jobs@sirlingames.com. We're also looking for a volunteer concept artist to help with our stages. Concept artists just need to know fighting games and the Fantasy Strike characters to work with us on the look of the stages. We need help in all those areas, but another experienced combat animator is what we need the most.
Thanks again to all my patrons. Your support is much appreciated and all the funds go directly into these projects.
