I have made a Deckbuilder
Since I'm trying to not put too much stuff up on Social Media, I'm trying to instead collect a bunch of stuff I did for Eswahr Eternal and put them into what's hopefully going to be monthly blogposts. As usual with this kind of stuff, a lot of the art might have placeholders in it, so avert your eyes, if you hate those.
What have I done this month?
I have announced the Game!
Obviously it would be great if anyone who reads this does the usual things, like wishlisting it on Steam and all that, but also please do me a favour and share my few social media posts about it around, if you happen to see them.
I removed myself from blsky, because it's the only way how I can make this game and talk about it, without feeling intense and deep existential despair.
If you haven't please also read the original announcement post, because I talk a bit about how I want to go about this whole thing and I'm happy to say that I still don't quite know the game's numbers.
There's also a trailer you can watch. I really like it.
Work on the Final Dungeon
At this point most of the "base game" for Eswahr Eternal already exists. All the major Dungeons are done, and so are most encounters and boss fights. None of them are what I would call "polished", or "balanced", but it's possible to play through the game from start to about the beginning of the final act.
My broad approach for this project is to make sure that I have a fully playable game, before I actually start any detail work, because so much of the game's important elements come from how its systems grow and interact with each other over time.
I can't really sit down and "polish" the stat growth and leveling curve for the early game when I don't know how it will change things towards the end. Same goes for the kind of upgrades and special moves you find and how those interact with whatever else I may have planned.
So instead of making what exists nicer, I started working on the game's final areas and boss fights.
The game's final Dungeon is the actual Castle of the King you are meant to dethrone. The Castle itself will consist of three separate areas: The approach and its gate, the main Castle and the approach to the Throne Room.
Because it's the most complicated, I started work on the Main Castle part first. In there you first need to defeat the King's Jester and the his Wizard, which then gives you access to the Central gate to the Throne Room, which is guarded by the Queen.
The Wizard's and the Jester's area both have a gimmick to them that influences the boss fight at the end, whereas the path towards the Queen is just a straight line.
Because the Wizard is obviously all about knowledge, he will occasionally ask you trivia questions, about the game and how it functions. Once you have reached the Wizard, he will then judge your performance, and depending on the results will either banish you (the worst result), or destroy himself (when you get every answer correct).
The Wizard also has a move that changes with each day of the Month. As of right now, there are around 3 days in each Month where you probably shouldn't try to fight him, because it will likely not go well for you. However, there are also a handful of days where he will be very easy to defeat.
Because I wanted to use the Jester as a bit of stand-in for your regular Game Designer, I actually created a whole Deckbuilding system for his fight.
His part of the Castle is a teleporter maze. When you step on the wrong teleporter, you get sent into a Pit where you have to fight Hippos in order to get out.
Each time you choose correctly, you have to choose one "Upgrade" out of three random abilities. Whatever you pick will get added to the Jester's set of possible moves.
Then during his fight, he will draw five random "Cards" out of his "Deck" and he lets you pick which Card he'll use against you.
He also has a move where he randomly uses one of your Words against you, so maybe don't come into his Fight with a bunch of Bribes and Banishments in your bag.
The Queen is just horrible. She's accompanied by two overeager servants who boost her stats and heal her. She has an attack that puts a pile of status effects on you. The first time you fight her, she will just sent you back to town.
Making these fights made me realize that my main approach for creating boss fights, or any kind of encounter to be honest, is mostly driven by that specific enemy's theme, and much less by purely systemic needs.
Take the Queen as an example: Her Attacks are based around projecting power. While she has regular damaging attacks, the biggest danger comes from her ability to overwhelm you with negative effects. Because she is a Queen, she also has two Servants who heal her, shield her from damage and boost her stats. So it's very hard to get any negative effects you apply on her to actually stick around for more than a turn.
However, due to how I ended up coding the moves and targeting for those Servants, they end up getting into each other's way. I didn't plan for this, but now it looks like the Queen is accompanied by two people who are so desperate to help her, that they end up occasionally blocking each other.
I have to be honest: The way it's build now, despite this systemic strangeness that ends out helping the player, the fight is almost impossible to win. However, I think this approach leads to much more interesting places, than if I were to sit down and say: "Okay the Queen is the Boss that rotates its resistances!", or whatever.
I'm pretty sure, you can find a path towards some interesting narrative implications, if you start out your boss fight with a central systemic problem you want the players to solve, but I personally find it much more exciting to start with "The Queen is all about projecting overwhelming power and authority", and while building it, stumble into the addage of "and she doesn't know that her fate is already sealed".
I also feel that this approach tends to lead to more fights where the path towards victory isn't immediately obvious, which then again takes me back to that whole idea where I want fights to be more like Problems, and much less like Puzzles for you to solve.
What's next
I'm currently in the process of building the fights against the royal army and the royal Knight. Their attacks are all finished and working, I just need ot put them into an enemy, give them appropriate stats and see if it's possible to beat them at a reasonable level.
By the way, my only measure of whether or not a fight is fair, is if I'm able to beat the boss without cheating myself extra stuff. Once that's possible I consider it to be done. I will probably adjust their stats later down the line, but as I said at the beginning, I can only really gauge how much I need to change things, once I've seen how it all plays out in an actual playthrough.
Once those two fights are finished, all that's left to do is make the King and build out the remaining two areas. After that the game isn't done quite yet (none of the aforementioned boss fights have sprites for example), but it will be in a state where you can play through it from start to finish and experience roughly what I had in mind when I first came up with the idea.
I cannot stress enough how much fun it has been to make this game. For each of these fights I've made over the last two weeks, I had at least one moment where I was absolutely ecstatic with delight. I really hope that at some point someone out there will have a similar reaction to it.
Eswahr Eternal will probably come out at some point in 2027. Please wishlist it on Steam and tell your friends about it: