I'm making a Wizardcore Roguelike Deckbuilder!
Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
After gathering feedback on the last game prototype I made with Daan, we’ve got some cool news to share.
⚡️✨*BRAKOWWWW!!!* ✨⚡️
We are making a game called BIBIDI BIBIDI!!!
Bipibidi Bopidi Doo the game we will do…
The pitch: Bibidi Bibidi! is a wizardcore roguelike deckbuilder where you combine cards in your spellbook to cast unique and powerful spells. Crawl through twisting tunnels and fight maddening monsters to find the perfect build for your wizard. Every turn is a puzzle!
So yep! Expect some silly wizard puns going forward. Also, expect some wizard memes. They are the best and only memes I need in my life.
Some deckbuilder research
I did a bunch of research on deckbuilders, reading a looot of Steam reviews of existing games to get a feel for what people like and dislike. I also tried a few because I actually don’t have a lot of experience with this genre. The only ones I had played before this project was Dicey Dungeons and Balatro. LOTS of Steam reviews kept mentioning Slay The Spire and Daan kept referencing it too so that was the first game I picked up.
Initial impressions: Slay The Spire starts very slow, each run becomes a little more interesting as more cards unlock. A tad too slow in my taste. I haven’t found myself itching to get back to it like with some other ones. Personally I find Balatro is a much better experience from the start than STS is.
While I was doing this investigation I stumbled on a GDC talk about playtesting from the developers of Slay The Spire which cast some light on how they managed to make the game so well balanced.
Early on they did the standard type of testing, meaning; you watch people play and listen to their feedback. But they found this inefficient and time consuming, especially since they were just two guys doing everything by themselves and they were aiming to make the game in a year.
So they did some kinda hokus pokus to collect player data onto a server. Which gave them an overview of how people were playing and what was happening. They combined this with feedback from hardcore players and from their subreddit. They made daily and weekly updates to the game. Constantly tweaking it. In turn this also got the community excited because they really liked to see what would change and learn the new meta/exploits.
This method worked really well for them paid. You can see the proof by comparing the playable characters. The last character they added is the least popular, or considered the most broken/unbalanced. And that’s because they didn’t have time to run through this process for as long with her.
A big aspect of what makes or breaks a deckbuilder is its replayability. Which is directly connected to game balance and variety of gameplay. It’s extremely hard for anyone to make a game that measures up to the quality of STS. For several reasons.
There’s the technology barrier of setting up a system that track player decisions and stats and all that. Most teams, especially indie, probably don’t do this.
You need a sizeable pool of playtesters for the collected stats to be usable.
You need some dedicated players who keep coming back for more so you can tell if your changes are going in the right direction.
Lots of streamers played the game live, which was a great way for them to directly see how dedicated players who are in touch with the community sees stuff.
Not sure if we will do what they did. Either way it’s good to know what we’re up against and that it might be an option.
Another deckbuilder I picked up was Die In The Dungeon. Instead of cards it’s about dice. It’s still in early access but I really enjoyed it so far (honestly I’ve had more fun with this than I did with STS).
Progress on Bibidi Bibidi!
Back to Bibidi Bibidi!
Right now we are addressing the most important points we gathered from the feedback, thank you so much to everyone who played! Your thoughts have been so helpful!
And I’m replacing all of Daan’s placeholder art with my placeholder art. While he is adding more juice and tweaking some UX.
This is the first time I make a 2D game with actual drawn sprites. Even though all my games so far play like 2D games I’ve always opted for 3D graphics because I find it so quick and easy to whip something up in Blender.
I never quite figured out the workflow for 2D art in games. Mainly because I find a lot of friction drawing digitally and exporting and such. I no longer use Photoshop because I think Adobe are bastards and they ruined it. So I’ve been using Affinity Photo 2 for the last years, it works for drawing but they haven’t done any QOL updates that affect drawing (it takes self-restraint to not go on a rant about this).
I miss Photoshop.
I just added “look for another desktop software for drawing” to my to-do list. Lmk if you have any recommendations aside from Clip Studio, I already tried it and it’s so darn unpleasant.
Drawing on the iPad is great and all but it also slows things down a lot with graphics implementation. I love how exporting I’ve got exporting setup in Blender, where I can just do a button click and it updates the file in-game, AND I have all my assets in one scene so it’s easy to see all the sprites in relation to each other. When I work in Procreate and wanna put a sketch in the game I have to transfer the file to my computer and then move it to the right folder from the computer. I need to figure out a better workflow.
I sketched a bunch of the monsters we have in the game already and came up with some new ones. Sentient Wall is one of our favorites from this bunch, it will probably block you from attacking any other enemies.
We’ve made a rough plan for the entire project. It feels really solid right now. Our original plan was to make this in 3 to 6 months but we admitted for this to turn out as good as we want we would have to put a few more months into it. So the game probably won’t come out until sometime early next year.
That means we failed already at one of our goals, “build and ship quickly.” I think we both got so attached and started to believe in this so much, we don’t really mind right now. We can always adapt as things unfold.
Making a game doesn’t take so long. But making it great takes a while.
❓ Question time
Do you have any recommendations for 2D software for drawing? Excluding Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Especially if it’s something tailored to making game art.
I really miss good brush management, smart objects, and shortcuts for alpha locking layers/brushes.
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.
Take care and have a creative week.
Sentient wall is such a great one! Love the monster designs
Love all that focus on play testing.