http://www.cardhunter.com/2011/11/dev-diary-17-building-the-campaign/ More info to whet our appetites! One typo, though: I think you mean "That set is not finished..."
Whoops! I proofread this before it was posted, and pointed that out also. I guess Jon thought I'd fixed it. I've now fixed it. Everything is fine. Carry on.
Ok so building the campaign! . . . Any questions? I cant think of any. Untill BlueManchu guys drop us with a bombshell, we kinda already have an idea of how things are going to work out.
The basic fact that they're thinking of progressing the campaign through game mechanics, and not just enemy hit points, is something. I can see this will have an impact: it places single-player gaming before multi-player gaming. Your multi-player opponent may be forced to have equivalent character level to you, yes, but he/she may also have advanced further in the game mechanics than you. And so we see that the designers are doing what they said and focusing on single-player first. Other than that, all that's on my mind is I noticed Tim Stellmach in the comments area. Yay, Looking Glass people!
I'd actually call this a kind of "level design" along the lines of how platformers like Mario or Megaman and games like Portal teach you skills gradually, giving you a chance to master basic skills and then advancing you to new skills and mechanics. It's a good way not to overload a player, and continue to give the player interesting challenges and give him a sense that he's learning and getting better at the game. Generally, it's just good practice. ~ On a different note, maybe I missed something, and I certainly don't know a lot of relevant details, but if everyone discards down to 2 cards at the end of their turn... how can Devastating Bash be too overpowered? And the other card discards the "two oldest revealed" cards? Maybe I am not remembering the discard rule correctly. I could go look it up, I guess...
Yes. Slightly unusual in terms of how we often think of level design, though, since your access to cards is permanent and linear while not everything else is so linear: as you advance, you get new mechanics that you can turn around and apply again at the earlier "levels." (Assuming you can just restart earlier modules, which is surely an easy assumption to make.) Good point. Your hand IS two cards. You also draw two each turn. So, the oldest two in a character's hand could easily be the entire hand you kept from last turn. Interesting. And I believe we'd need to know more about the damage various cards deal to judge the "overpowered"-ness. But 11 damage does sound like a lot, given other previews.
You discard down to two at the end of the turn, BUT you draw two more at the beginning of the next turn (plus a default move, I think that also counts for "in your hand"), and you may have card-drawing cards like Inspirational Thinking. So you might be holding 4-6 cards at a given moment. Any or all of them could be revealed before the end of the current turn by various means. ("Crystal Ball" card, perhaps?) Devastating Bash hits them all. Now it seems that the Bash family of cards is focused on raw damage with boosting abilities, but even so that boost could be considered overpowered. That said, Sir Knight is right that we don't know much about what the range "should" look like. P.S. Yes, the "two oldest revealed cards" are likely to be the cards kept from last round, or even over the course of several rounds -- the valuable cards that you really like to have. That's what will make the Dazing Bolt extra powerful.
Ah, it finally clicked for me: I was wondering why they said "immediately." You don't usually have to say "immediately," because everybody expects newly-played effects to (let's see here) take effect when played. But Dazing Bolt also does damage. And damage can be reduced by armor. And armor can be a revealed card, discarded as an effect of the Dazing Bolt. So, in what order do you run A) the discard and B) the damage/armor check? Answer: discard "immediately" and then pound the weakened foe! This card is situational, in that you'll really want to play it once you've exposed all your opponent's armor cards and not a moment before. That is, Dazing Bolt does a point less damage than Bash, so any unrevealed armor would hurt Dazing Bolt even more. This is fun.
Ah, I see where I had a disconnect. For some reason, I thought that each player does all the actions for his characters, and then discards, then it's the other player's turn to do the same. Looking back into the Dev diary, each player takes turns playing a card for any of their characters.
I've been trying to think a step ahead about how one might counter such a devastating card, and so far I came up with the Shield Block. Blocking reacts to being targeted before the effect happens, so a good shield could stop Dazing Bolt in its tracks (I hope). Now you've got me thinking about order of operations -- is "immediately" the same simultaneous instant the card is played, or is it an effect that takes place before reactions to effects? I would expect that "immediately" actually means after the Blocking check. I'm not 100% certain, but I think it likely because the Block cards do not return to hand: the counter-strategy is to get them used up or slip past the die roll rather than to have a card that works against them (as far as we know). Order of Resolution (speculative) A) Original card is played. A1) Player chooses target.A2) Target has chance to react to being targeted. Blocks, Parries(?)B) If not blocked, original card takes effect. B1) All immediate effects occur unchecked.B2) Target* has chance to react to regular effects. Armor, Dodges(???)B3) If not blocked, regular effect or remaining portion thereof occurs.C) Final results are displayed, all played cards are removed from board. C1) Cards with return to hand property return to hand.C2) All others are discarded. * The actual operation is more complex than the word 'target' first indicates, since Maze of the Mind and the damage boost of Bash are reactions to an effect that doesn't happen to the character holding the reaction card. ? Parries and Dodges are uncertain, because Jon has said they exist but we haven't gotten any previews. I just took a guess at where their effects might lie, and I flipped them around a couple times while I was working. P.S. Idle thought while studying the grey Armor cards: we still haven't heard anything further about how the black "they may not all be drawbacks" cards will play.
I wonder if there will ever be a use for targeting your own characters with Dazing Bolt. Even if there currently isn't, I love that the description doesn't prohibit this use.
Hmm, I would think you could just discard if you want to get rid of something. Unless an Ogre Bruiser with Devastating Bash is headed your way and you need to get rid of those cards in a hurry. I hope there is some sort of signal to remind us which of our own cards have been revealed. It could be strategically beneficial to save a weaker but hidden card since any card that's revealed has these vulnerablities.
Slightly off topic(edit: ok, really off topic), watching their twitter feed after the dev diary i saw them use "egregious prescience" and wondered if there was an example of such ridiculousness. i punched it into google and the first thing that pops up is the feed from their twitter with that statement!
Ha ha! What this refers to is the client revealing information to the player that they really shouldn't know yet, i.e. "prescience". Farbs and I were talking about bugs of this nature and particularly bad or egregious ones. I'm heading off the my lawyer to trademark this phrase now.
Haha, yep, our game logic is decoupled from our UI code, and sometimes it races a long way ahead. The server-side AI might be choosing which card to play while you're still watching cards be discarded from the end of the previous round. This is usually fine since the anims are all very snappy, and we have added a lot of hurry-up click handlers so that super impatient players can zoom through it even faster. The prescience problems only appear when the player inspects the game state and sees feedback from the current battle state, rather than from the battle state as it's currently displayed. I'm currently working on some throttling code to keep the battle and UI much more closely aligned, which'll fix most of these issues quite nicely. If we ever run out of things to write about in the dev diary I might cover our system architecture, but I can't imagine anybody would actually want to read that. For now you should imagine it as a complex machine composed of wooden planks, Mushroom Warriors, and Coffee Pouring Skeletons.
