Blogs - HotSauceBread

Hello Everyone!

In a matter of weeks we will be heading to the Ottawa Geek Market again. This is an event that is near and dear to my heart because it was really the first time we showcased Haste to the masses. To mark this occasion, I’ve decided that we’d take a look back at the different art styles we were tinkering with really early on and how they’ve evolved.

It should go without saying that with a development team of two, the game has gone through a great many changes over the years. From day one, the basic conceit of Haste relied on its mechanics so the art direction was up for a lot of interpretation. As the scope of Haste grew, so did the overall quality and the best example of this is the in-game character art.

Pixel art?

Yes, pixel art. It is no secret that Haste pays homage to the 16 bit era of JRPGs, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that we started the project with pixel art. Below you will find Jacob’s very first character sprites for Garric, who would be the only character made for these early styles. They aren’t much to look at now, but they were stepping stone to get to where we are today. In the end we ditched the pixel art style relatively early on. The quality of the art had room to grow, but one thing that always bugged me was how the animations looked with pixel sprites. Because we use ‘Spine’ to animate the characters, the pixels floated around in a weird way.

Smoothed over

Next up came this lovely chap. This was basically a way for us to see how the characters would look without the pixel look. I have long been a fan of the cell shaded art in games so I naturally pushed for Jacob to test it out. As we kept adding more characters into the game, the new roster would take huge leaps in quality leaving this poor fellow looking pretty janky in comparison. Eventually we swung back around and created the Garric found in Haste.

And there you have it! I’m sure it’s pretty cringy for Jacob to look back on, but I think it is the most visual way of showing how far this project has come. Looking at where we started, it’s pretty neat to think how two friends from Ottawa could take a cool little project and get it to a polished and engaging state.

This month as been a lot busier than most as we work to get a solid build ready for our booth. By getting a solid build now, we can look into signing up for other events throughout the summer along with some other exciting plans to be announced. We hope that you stick by us as we barrel forward and please expect some exciting things happening this year.

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone,

This is the third and last blog post ripped from back in 2018. The last two posts talk about some of the UI changes that we made coming out of CGX, but today’s post gets a bit more meta. This post explores why we had made such poor design choices in the first place given that the solutions were so obvious. By doing this, I hope to show how important it is to re-evaluate even the smallest details to see if it works for your game.

It’s clear at first glance that one of our biggest influences was the card game Hearthstone. When development moved past the planning phase, Hearthstone acted as a sort of baseline for a lot of our UI and card aesthetics. While at CGX, we got a lot of great feedback but one statement stuck in my head. During one of our coaching sessions, were told that Haste wasn’t really a card game. Now whether you agree with this or not, it definitely gave us a new perspective of Haste. Obviously Haste *looks* like a card game, and arguably plays like one. Players still draw cards randomly and play cards from their hand based on the state of the ‘board’. Alternatively, Haste is not a traditional card game in a lot of ways. Our game plays in real time, requires party management, doesn’t allow for any deck building or card collections, and doesn’t play with the complex rulesets. As a result, borrowing game design elements didn’t always work out with Haste. Today’s post will dive into some of the UI and design choices we mirrored from Hearthstone that simply didn’t work for our game.

Order

From the beginning, we had cards drawn into a players hand on the right side and didn’t allow players to reorder their cards. As we discussed in our first post, we talked about how bad this was for the UX of Haste. In Hearthstone, a player’s hand is drawn in the same way but it functions just fine. So the question becomes why this works for Hearthstone and not Haste.

The set up we had for our cards prior to CGX.

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The set up we had for our cards prior to CGX.

First off, the order in which a card is drawn actually matters in Hearthstone. Because cards never get rearranged, it allows players to track cards chronologically for themselves and their opponents. For pro players, tracking an opponent’s hand is very important as it gives vital information on playing patterns. Doing this allows pro players to make educated guesses on what their opponent’s cards are. Watching any high level streamer of Hearthstone generally gives you an idea of how they do this constantly throughout a game. In theory this could also be done with Haste, but with the much faster pacing and simpler cards, there would be little point. Unlike Hearthstone, Haste’s real time play doesn’t afford the luxury of staring at an opponent’s hand while waiting for your turn and the information gathered wouldn’t be nearly as helpful.

Even if players were able to order their cards in Hearthstone, it would be very difficult to decide on how hands would be organized. In Hearthstone, there are a bunch of different ways a hand could be ordered. Do you order your hand by mana cost? do you separate out the spells from minions? do tribes get grouped together or are things split by class vs neutral cards? As you can see, most cards hold a lot of attributes and the priority of these attributes change with the state of the game board. In Haste, however, there is a very important way of grouping cards due to the fact that only one out of the three characters can play cards at any given time. This sets a very defined line that needs to be clear for players at a glance.

The current state of the game. Note how the cards are split by characters and how they are highlighted to show which cards can be played.

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The current state of the game. Note how the cards are split by characters and how they are highlighted to show which cards can be played.

Lowlighting

Easily the most impactful change we was the highlight/lowlight of cards. When looking at other card games, the lowlighting of cards isn’t done. There may be effects in games like Hearthstone that draw a players attention, but rarely if ever do cards get blacked out in a way to actively discourage a player from choosing it. Of course, games like Hearthstone don’t need to discourage a player from using a card because all cards are playable with sufficient mana. One could argue that Hearthstone could grey out cards that a player can’t afford, but even if they tried to play the card nothing would happen. With Haste, however, we didn’t think about lowlighting cards until people got confused on what could and couldn’t be played. This is a problem that is unique to our game and was overlooked despite how obvious the fix seemed after the fact.

This was an unexpected pitfall when we designed our card UI. By using another game as a baseline, we didn’t stop and think about why they had made the decisions they did. Instead we took it as ‘best practice’ and plowed ahead. Though it wasn’t the most refined, I am glad we made the mistakes we did. By getting feedback and acting on it, we were more mindful for the rest of our development, especially when it came to the UI. I hope you enjoyed our three-part series that came out of CGX. I know we gained a lot of insight on design and the real moral of the story is to get out there and showcase what you have. Taking criticism can be tough, but if you find the right crowd it can be very positive and constructive.

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone,

To bring in the new year, we will be talking about our ultimate moves and some of our struggles balancing them into the game.

When creating the cards for Haste, we did not put much emphasis on the ultimate cards until all the characters had their mechanics fleshed out. When we finally did get around to brainstorming these ultimate moves, we had to figure out how to balance them. Earlier in development, we had planned for decks with a set number of cards. Like in most card games, the cards are drawn from the deck randomly which raised some issues for balance. If a player drew an ultimate early, it could be too much of an advantage to start off the game.

In most other card games, strong cards came with high resource costs like ‘mana’ or ‘energy’. Games like Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone trickle-down resources one at a time, stopping players from playing their big cards early. Our game, however, doesn’t have a traditional ‘mana’ resource so all our cards could be played at any time.

We were left brainstorming other negatives attached to a card to prevent them from coming out too early. The most basic example would be dealing damage to your own team when playing an ultimate card. Other examples include discarding your own cards or even sacrificing a friendly character to reap a strong benefit. These costs would have ideally dissuaded players from using them too early, but came with another set of problems.

Balance in a game like Haste is one of the biggest challenges from a design perspective. Having a giant, powerful card that can be played at any time would need a very serious cost to it. In the end, coming up with 9 different negatives became way too complicated. We took a step back and thought about other solutions to the problem.

In the end, adding the ultimate bar ended up being a perfect solution. We talk about it quite a bit in another post, which I highly encourage you check out. In a nutshell, by including an ‘Ultra’ bar, players wouldn’t have access to their ultimate moves until the game is well underway. Despite this, we didn’t fully remove all of the built-in card costs. Adding a detriment to playing an ultimate allowed us as designers to make the main effects more powerful without breaking the game. It even increases the skill cap as players learn to play around these negatives. For example, the goblin, Skrill, can be sacrificed to resurrect another character. By waiting until Skrill is very low in health, a player can to get the most out of the move.

Keeping this feature gives Haste a wider range of effects in both scope and power. Weaker ultimate moves could occur more often with no downsides while powerful ultimate moves can be saved for precise and ideal situations that pop up. This goes beyond a simple balance solution, adding flavor and truly differentiating the characters.

I hope you enjoyed our Chopping Block segment again. This was the first post from the new year and we are working to make this a big year for our game Haste. Please stay tuned as we’ll have some exciting news about Haste coming up in the new year.

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone,

Today is a short a sweet post where I grab some old assets that we’ve since replaced. By nature of the blog, a lot of our topics are retrospective. Unlike the other posts, however, I wanted ‘A Look-back’ to highlight some of our humble aesthetic beginnings. Quite honestly, Jacob might not be thrilled about his earlier work being showcased, but I feel that it shows how much he’s poured into Haste to make it look and feel the way it does.

For this post, I wanted to showcase Jacob’s background art for our working build. As you can see above, it is a far cry from our newer backgrounds made by Patricia Kelen (more to come about her later). To get a good idea of how the game would look and where to place everything, Jacob got to work on the background art you see above. You could probably guess by the game’s look, that Jacob really took a page from ‘A Link to the Past’ and other JRPGs that we loved so dearly in the golden SNES era.

After we had fleshed out a lot of the basic mechanics, Jacob put in the time to make a polished version of our working map. This was actually meant to be one of the maps made for the final version of ‘Haste'‘. Truth be told, I don’t think the new backgrounds were necessary and I was told exactly that by other developers. Jacob had poured hours into this background and if we shipped with this, it would have been fine. Instead, we shifted to a different vision on how the game would look. Jacob’s character art is great, but to really make it pop we needed a softer background with painted tones. We took some random images online from other games and overlaid our characters over it just as a tester. After years of using the one background for development, the change in look was a refreshing. The decision was immediate and the hunt for our first artist was on.

Thank you for dropping by and taking a look at some of our early assets. If you like this segment and want to see more, let us know. You can comment below or message us on one of our socials!

~ Cedrick

Though the game is moving steadily ahead, it has been a rollercoaster of a month for myself personally. Because of this, I will just put out a small teaser on what we are working on here at Hot Sauce Bread Studios.

As you can see, we are working hard on the online aspects for Haste and I can confirm that we have matches running smoothly. We are very excited about the progress we’ve made, especially given the PVP focus of Haste.

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to another installment of ‘Chopping Block’, a deep dive into some of the mechanics or ideas that were scrapped from Haste for one reason or another. Today’s post delves into Forging and helps give some insight on how we explored a lot of options before landing on our game’s main mechanics.

When we described the Forge mechanic previously, we discussed why we chose to implement the version that we did. As a recap, forging in ‘Haste’ involves grabbing a card and merging it with another card of the same type. This combines the two into a single, stronger version of that card. Since we talked about what we’ve already done with the mechanic, today we’ll discuss what we didn’t do with it.

If I was to look at our game having no prior knowledge, I would instinctively ask why cards can only be forged with themselves. If one character has a Forgeable card and a different character had another, wouldn’t it be cool to do a tag team attack? Not only did we think of this function, it was originally how we envisioned the mechanic from the beginning. Inspired by the ‘Dual Tech’ moves in Chrono Trigger, characters were originally planned for duo attacks.

If implemented well, between-character forging would add in immense amount of depth to Haste with very little learning cost. Players would already know how to forge basic attacks and what the different special moves do, so why not? We brainstormed a few ways this could be implemented into Haste. We decided that for simplicity and learning-curve reasons, each character’s forgeable move would react in the same way no matter which card it was paired with. Also, some effects would have to be randomly assigned as different special moves targeted differently. For example, a Paladin’s lightning attack mixed with the Healer’s heal card would have him attack as she healed a random party member. Stepping back, we realized this approach would give very little reason to forge the cards instead of just playing them outright. Cut and paste mechanics wouldn’t enhance a card, but instead just make them feel uniform and uninteresting.

© Marvel Comics from ‘X-men Vol 1 #114

What makes between-class forging interesting is taking the strengths of two characters and combining them in an interesting new interaction. Dipping into the world of comics for an example, the ‘Fastball Special’ is a move where Colossus tosses Wolverine claw-first at the big baddie. This is iconic because it takes unique aspects from their power sets to do something neither one of them could do alone. For our game, we could avoid uniform effects in lieu of unique combinations and animations. As mentioned above, Chrono Trigger did this with ‘Dual Techs’ to great effect, so why not this approach?

Though this is our first game as a studio, there are plenty of lessons that we’ve absorbed by simply analyzing other games and speaking with other developers. The warning often given and rarely heeded is scope. If we allowed forging between all 9 of our characters, it would result in 36 new pairings that we would have to develop, animate, and balance. This doesn’t include the 9 forged cards that we currently have in our game. This is an absolutely huge task in a game that is already quite taxing on a small 2-man indie team.

On top of this, removing the cut and paste effects in our original plan requires that the player memorize all of the default effects. What made this mechanic work so well in Chrono Trigger is that in the RPG genre, players can be introduced to new mechanics over time, learning new moves as they progress. In a competitive game, this is not the case. Playing against other players can be quite unforgiving by nature, so asking a new player to learn the ins and outs of a complex system is far too much.

Hopefully this week’s post shed some light on how keeping our project in scope can help temper our aspirations for ‘Haste’. Though it is exciting to think of all the possibilities we could explore with ‘Haste’, far too many games go unfinished because of a failure to reign in ambition. For us to get Haste to the hands of you, the player, we first need to make sure that the game is even completed.

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone,

Today’s post will delve into Ultimate moves, a mechanic we have shown a lot in person but rarely online. Ultimate moves were always slotted to be a part of our game. Mechanically, they give nice spikes in power that lead to some powerful turnarounds. This shakes up matches and makes them more dynamic and interesting. Stepping back from sheer mechanics, I personally feel that the real power of an ultimate lies in the feel and spectacle of the moves. Ultimate moves are fun, plain and simple. This is why implementing them into our game had to be done with a subtle touch to ensure they kept the power balanced mechanically while still feeling epic.

Haste, as we originally conceived it, had a set number of cards for each player much like a physical deck of playing cards. These decks would be comprised of basic attacks shuffled in with cards from each of the 3 characters. Since the ultimate cards were powerful, we decided that only 1 ultimate card from each character would be shuffled in. This resulted in the problem where players could potentially draw an ultimate card in their opening hand. An opening hand with an ultimate card would of course give an early spike in power that would be a huge advantage much too early in the game. To resolve this, we tried several solutions including built-in downsides for cards that discouraged playing them early. This will be further discussed in the ‘Chopping Block – Ultimate Costs’ post coming up. Until then, the best example of a downside designed for late game would be Skrill’s Devour ultimate which sacrifices Skrill to resurrect another player. This card couldn’t be played until one of the characters died, and even then the card retains less value while Skrill has high health. Other solutions included a hidden card counter that would stop the player from drawing the ultimate cards for X number of turns. Unfortunately, this still gave a huge variance on when a player can access the ultimate card before their opponent.

After brainstorming, we landed on an Ultra bar. Despite the game’s RPG aesthetics, Haste is very much influenced by fighting games. Early on I mentioned how Haste is closely related to fighting games like Street Fighter due to the constant action from the real time aspect. Naturally, we looked at games like these for inspiration, which lead to our *ultimate* decision. sorry...

The Ultra bar works out great for a few different reasons. First off, it solves our issue with ultimate cards being drawn too early. Stopping players from randomly drawing ultimate cards also meant we could remove all detrimental costs attached to them, though we chose not to for several of the moves. One unexpected advantage of using the ultra bar, was that we could now play around with how fast a hero could build their ultra bar. This not only gave us a new balancing tool, but also allowed us to make different ultimate moves of different power levels. The longer it took to get your ultimate card, the better the payoff could be.

More broadly, the ultimate bar adds a sense of build-up and tension. The bars on either your own characters or your opponents’ let you plan for upcoming ultimates to be used or defended against. Also, with the bar comes a new risk/reward consideration when choosing who to put into the line of fire. If players are on their last legs and need that ultimate for offense or defense, chances are they’ll play a lot more desperately to get that ultimate out.

The last point I will make is that ultimate moves feel great to play after they’ve been ‘earned’. By working towards the ultimate, the player now has a sense of investment even though they just played the game as they normally would. This ‘investment’ increases the perceived impact of a move which actually allows us to lower their power level. Granted, some of the moves are still quite strong, but this isn’t true for all of the characters. The ultimate bar in conjunction with Jacob’s epic animation effects give players the feeling of importance and power without breaking the overall game balance.

Hello Everyone,

Today is a very important update for Hot Sauce Bread Studios. I would like to officially announce the new name for our game: Haste.

As you can see, we have a new title card for the name, as well as a nifty new logo to go alongside it. These logos have gone through a few iterations, but we are pretty happy with how everything turned out. Along with updating our website and social media profiles, we also snagged the URL www.hastegame.com which will redirect back to the game’s section of this site.

So please spread the word! Let everyone in your feeds know that Haste is the next big indie being developed! With such a small team like ours, this helps us out enormously and we would greatly appreciate any extra eyes on the project that we can get.

All the way back in March, we attended the Ottawa Geek Market and I wrote up a post discussing our experiences there. This marked the first time that we brought the game out as a playable demo to the general public, so we took all of our feedback very seriously. For the most part, the reactions to the game were very positive, which we were thrilled about. Moving forward though, we turned to the criticisms to see what we could improve. Skimming over some of the quality of life and bug fixes that were brought up, one major issue weighed heavy on our minds… the name.

Our title, ‘Sigils of Kairos’ was never meant to be a placeholder, but it was definitely born out of necessity and a looming deadline. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t begin titling our game until much later in the development cycle. It wasn’t until a potential opportunity came up for us to push the project out to people that we felt the pressure to slap a name on the game. As a result, we came together and came up with Sigils of Kairos. But how did we come up with that?

Jacob was leaning towards a more obscure name that would be unique on the market. Names influenced by old languages that touched on deeper meanings would be great for differentiating ourselves from other games. Game titles along this line would be ‘Terreria’ or ‘Nidhogg’. The problem with this approach is that the names were often too obscure, making it hard for our audience to latch onto.

I had a completely different philosophy, focusing in on catch words that rolled off the tongue well. Catchy titles include games like ‘Clash of Clans’, ‘League of Legends’, or ‘Battle Ragers’. The problem with these mobile-like titles was that they didn’t stand out in any way. These titles are so dime-a-dozen that you probably didn’t even question the fact that I made that last one up completely.

By looking at these two problems, one can see that Sigils of Kairos was actually the worst of both worlds. Though we thought the name ticked off the boxes of being both easy to say and unique, it managed to somehow be both obscure and bland at the same time.

This all became clear with our feedback to the game. Though it was only a few people who even mentioned it, the truth was that the name wasn’t great.

I should also mention that there were inklings that the name wasn’t the strongest. Even going into the Geek Market, I suggested using Hot Sauce Bread for the T-shirts since it was a much easier name to remember. Jacob correctly pointed out that we should be pushing the game over our company, which totally makes sense.

So what do we do now?

Was it too late to change the name now? What would be the best approach to naming the game? All of these rang through our heads as we debriefed after the Geek Market.

After a bit of back and forth, we took stock of how much we’d need to change and could take at a loss. Monetarily, we had invested a few hundred dollars in the banner, T-shirts, mousepads and the URLs for Sigils of Kairos. Even as a small company, those are relatively small costs to eat.

This unfortunately left us back at the drawing table. How would we go about finding a new name?

For weeks we began to brainstorm ideas, but were still trapped in our typical patterns laid out in the last post. As Jacob and I started bouncing ideas off of each other we started talking about our different approaches and why it wasn’t working out. We needed a new angle to the naming problem.

This is where Jacob set up a frame work which helped rethink the problem. In an ongoing email thread about this he wrote:

In my opinion there are three important things which the name needs to accomplish:

1) Be memorable - the most important thing is people remember it and associate it with our product

2) Aesthetically match the feel and atmosphere of the game - the flavor of the word... I'm not talking about the meaning of the words, but rather the look and sound of the word. Short vs long, soft vs hard sounds, strong vs weak looking characters.

3) Convey the nature of the game semantically - Aka the words can describe (through their meaning) that the game is about

So if we look at "Sigils of Kairos", I think it fails #1. I think part of the problem is both "Sigils" and more so "Kairos" aren't things people are familiar with, so it's hard to tap into pre-existing associations. Some people have never heard the word "Sigils". Almost no one has heard the word "Kairos".

For #2, I think "Sigils of Kairos" does an alright job. I think it conveys the fantasy aspect of the game well. I think it doesn't convey the feel of the game well (fast paced combat). I think it's something you mentioned earlier, that it would work well with an adventure RPG.

For #3, I think "Sigils of Kairos" does an alright job. I think the Sigils portion does somewhat align with the whole card-icon-inside-of-circle-thing. The problem with Kairos is, while you and I know a bit of the mythology, no one else does. People shouldn't have to read a wikipedia entry to get understand the allusion we are trying to convey.

And with that, we hit the ground running again. This helped us get a new approach on our naming conventions and had us narrowing down our choices to a select few. One of the front-runners, Haste, ended up being our winner. Jacob broke it down like this:

I think it nails #1 - it's short, it's a word people are familiar with. I think it would work very well.

For #2 - i think the visual aesthetics of the word are good - the lettering are all strong characters, the word is short, the letters have decent symmetry - it would be easy to make the text look strong. I think strong and short lettering work well to convey the fast paced, impactful combat. It doesn't really convey anything fantastical or strategic. On the auditory side, it's a bit weak. The "A" is good, but it lacks a strong consonant. But it's a short word, the A might carry it.

For #3 - I think it alludes to MTG, to the fast paced combat. But that's about it.

As you can see, the name Haste wasn’t perfect but it was a heck of a lot closer to what we were aiming for than anything else. Packed in there are some other concerns such as the ability to search up the game (SEO), but there are clear steps we can take in the future to make that less of an issue. Using the new SEO tools and advertising potential, we just had to ensure we grabbed hastegame for the URL and social media accounts before going live.

And that is the basic rundown of the name swap. As you can imagine, this was an issue that gnawed at us for quite a while until we made the final decision. I think that Haste is a great name for our game, and we really hope you all do as well. Please stick with us as we work through this passion project of ours and we will do our best to make Haste the best experience that we can!

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone,

This blog has been around for quite a while and I am very happy to share our design discussions with you all. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth re-iterating that we are a small two person operation and as a result we have been working on this project for quite a while. This explains why pretty much all of the blog posts on Hot Sauce Bread have been retrospective takes on our design process.

In a way, I really like this format as it gives us the advantage of hindsight to unveil some hidden consequences of our design choices. Unfortunately, this also means that our game often looks like it’s at a standstill when it very much isn’t. Today we take a peek at what is happening with Sigils up to this point.

Victory and Defeat

If you’re an avid follower, you might have noticed a twitter post with the new victory screen. Though there are going to be some tweaks to the design of the font, we are both really happy with how this looks and feels. I personally really like the arcade aesthetic, and I feel like our game really benefits from it. Unlike other card-based games, Sigils plays much more like an arcade game which I don’t think comes across well when looking at our screenshots.

Character Select

This is our crack at the character select screen. We needed a way to showcase the characters while still lumping them into their respective roles. I think Jacob made the right choice on this one because it looks pretty straight forward and clear.

Inventory

This is a mysterious shot posted on our social media accounts a few weeks back. What does this mean for our game? Well, I think it’s clear that we’ll be adding cosmetic items, but I will likely go over this more in the future. The only thing I can say now is please don’t jump to any conclusions, especially in regards to how we plan on monetizing. In all honesty, we aren’t completely sure of which route to take, but we have a few different ideas kicking around.

We have some more things we’re working on, but this is a general look at some of the updates that we’ve made. Unlike a lot of our other devblog posts, this one seems more similar to what a ‘normal’ dev blog looks like. I hope you all enjoyed a peek behind the curtain, and please help us out by giving us a bit of feedback! You can reach us via the Contact page or making a comment directly on this post. If you want us to get back to you, you are welcome to leave your email address or sign up for any new updates. As usual, if you want to see some of these screens before they hit the blog, you can also follow us on our social medias like twitter or Instagram. This summer is wrapping up at an alarming pace, so we here at Hot Sauce Bread Studios hope you make the best of it.

~ Cedrick

Hello Everyone!

Time for yet another discussion about design choices for Sigils of Kairos. Today’s post I will be talking about trap cards. I’ll start by discussing the reasons for including them, how they’ve changed from that original idea, and then touch on the different traps available. Let’s go!

First off, one would assume that trap cards came about from playing Yugioh or Hearthstone. This is probably subconsciously true, but it is important to note that I played neither of these when they were included into Sigils. Traps were actually a natural and obvious solution for one of my initial worries, Hand Dumping. Even before my initial mock-up for the game, I knew that there had to be something in place to make players think twice about throwing down a card. In fact, I liked this idea so much, that I left three spaces for traps for each player! Thankfully, when Jacob agreed to take on the project, he quickly noted that this is overkill and would serve only to frustrate.

Touching on a design philosophy so wonderfully explained in an Extra Credits video, traps were a perfect way to add a lot of depth with very little complexity. By this I mean that the traps added a lot of strategy and thinking through plays without having players learn any difficult-to-grasp rules. Any player can understand how a move could get blocked by a trap, but good players know to bait out a trap by throwing out a weak attack before unloading their special moves. As our game evolved to include the forge mechanic, this became even more important. Forging powerful cards meant that a player was putting more eggs in one basket. If that move gets blocked by a trap, that player didn’t just lose one card, but 2 or 3. That being said, let’s take a look at the traps that we’ve included in Sigils.

Otto’s Ward

This is probably the most important of the traps as it cuts right to the main purpose of traps. When triggered, the tank shield doesn’t just prevent one attack, but three! Throw in the ability to upgrade this to a 5 shield trap, and it’s easy to see why this card defines Otto’s role as a tank.

Skrill’s Ward

The most standard of the different trap cards, Skrill’s bone ward blocks a single attack and throws a bit of damage their way via poison damage over time. This move (as well as Bone Cage) helps classify Skrill into the support role and pushes back against the idea that support roles are simply just healers.

Stalagg’s Ward

Another seemingly standard trap card, Stalagg’s frost ward (Pictured above) blocks a single attack while slowing the attacker’s draw speed. Though this may not seem very useful this move serves to slow down the entire game, which was a major goal when designing Stalagg. This allows the player to breathe and plan out their moves against an aggressive enemy team.

Amyth’s Ward

One would have thought this would be the most boring of the traps, but Amyth’s flame ward comes with its own unique mechanic. Unlike the other traps, the flame ward actually runs on a timer. This means that over-zealous players can hit this trap twice. We don’t extend this prolonged trap time for very long because Amyth doesn’t fall into the tank or support roles, but it opens doors for future trap designs.

Lynx’s Ward

Last but not least is the trap for Lynx. I had planned for this to be another run-of-the-mill trap, but Jacob took this in a completely different direction. When he had first brought up the idea, I wasn’t sure how it would play out. After seeing the animation, however, I was instantly convinced it should be in the game. Mechanically, Lynx’s portal ward ended being a very powerful tool. Perfectly suited as a strong support move, the stakes for falling into this trap are very high. By losing a key character like a tank or healer for a short time, the player is now left very vulnerable.

That about does it for this post. Though I don’t post on a weekly basis, I do hope that you find these insights worth reading when I can get them loaded and ready to go. Though I would love to engage more with you all, please remember that for now we are a small two man team working between our regular jobs. Our saving grace is that our build is very far along and playable, despite needing a bit of fleshing out and balancing. We would like to express our ceaseless gratitude for showing interest in our small project in our grassroots days and we look forward to bringing you all the very best gaming experience we can. Until next time.

~ Cedrick