Design insights into balance changes [Public Testing Invitation]

Hello!

My name is Michael, and I’m the designer for Black Jacket. It has been so much fun seeing the response to its release, from its story and presentation, to the creative strategies you have come up with by using the suits and their powers. Today I would like to take a moment to talk about how we will work with balance patches moving forward, and what you can expect if you would like to help us make Black Jacket into the best version of itself it can be.

Public Testing

We have created a new branch in steam, which anyone can switch to, where we will put balance adjustments that are ready for playtesting. For this upcoming patch, the changes will be live on the test branch for at least 2 weeks, after that we will do final balance adjustments and localization before putting it into the main branch (accessible to everyone).

The test branch will only have changes in English. We expect that there will be changes done based on your feedback, so we are holding off on doing a localization pass until after this test period has ended. You can still play in your language of choice, and any changes will appear in English.

Before switching over to the test branch, it is highly recommended that you make a backup of your save files, just in case anything goes wrong. You can find your save files here:

C:\\Users\\YOUR_USERNAME\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Mipumi Games\\BlackJacket

Furthermore, after switching branches, please start a fresh run. If you continue a run, there will be some graphical bugs on the cards that were updated.

To switch branches in steam, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on Black Jacket in your Steam library and select "Properties"

2. Navigate to "Game Versions & Betas" and select "test-branch-public"

3. The game should start updating (the branch name will be in square brackets next to the title: "Black Jacket [test-branch-public]")

In order to give us your feedback, please join our Discord and create a thread in our new channel named public-test-branch-feedback!

Join by following this link: DISCORD

How we have worked with playtests in the past

Black Jacket was in full production mode for about a year. During this time, we did many closed playtests, usually in intervals of about 1.5 months. Many suits, such as Diamonds, were redesigned multiple times before reaching their current form. It is safe to say that the game would not have its current quality if not for the help of all the testers who played Black Jacket along the way, and there are many examples of player suggestions that made it into the game. For example, the “death” cards that get added to your starter deck due to difficulty levels was a player suggestion, as well as giving the game 21 total difficulty levels as a fun nod to the original inspiration itself.

Many of the cards that you now play with underwent many balance changes during development, and the final version that is now live is simply the “best state” we could reach before hitting the end of our timeline.

What is the purpose of balancing in a single player game?

The goal with all balancing efforts in Black Jacket is to make the game more fun to play. This might seem like an obvious statement, but I feel it is worth mentioning especially as some of the incoming changes will nerf a few cards. I believe a big part of the fun in playing deckbuilders is figuring out which strategies work, and how to best combine cards to make busted combos and strategies. To that end, strategies that are very powerful need to be challenging to achieve. For many players, if there is a dominant strategy that lets them win easily, they will use it, even if it is not the most “fun” or engaging way to play. It is our job to balance the game so that strong strategies require skill, theory crafting, and even a bit of luck to achieve successfully. This makes the game more interesting and fun to play, especially over multiple runs.

Balance Changes

In this upcoming patch, I decided to focus on a few of the suits and cards that I thought required the most immediate attention based on player feedback and gathered statistics. However, that is not to say that these same cards will not change in the future, depending on how you all receive and react to these changes!

The biggest changes are made to Tumors, Hearts, Greed and Flames. I have playtested all of these with successful journeys on difficulty 21, while doing my best to lean into using the changed cards.

Tumors

One of the strongest suits currently, with a per-card win-rate of around 75-80%. The stand-out card is the Tumor 8, which allows you to discard all cards on the table. This card will now have Exhaust, limiting its number of uses without reducing the power of the effect itself. When I playtested with this, it changed my playstyle in that I was more likely to keep one in my sleeve to play it at the right time.

• Tumor 3

  • Adjusted effect: Devour: Insight 2

  • Insight reduced from 3 down to 2.

• Tumor 4

  • Adjusted effect: Devour: Gain 7 and 0.

  • Reduced the second multi-value from 4 down to 0.

• Tumor 6

  • Reduced number of devour slots from 2 to 1, keeping the same effect: Devour: Play two Growth cards.

  • The strength of this card should primarily be the created Growth cards, instead of the devour slots and the increased card value gained from them.

• Tumor 8

  • Adjusted effect: Devour: Discard all cards. Exhaust.

  • Note that the card will exhaust even if you did not activate it, just like all other cards with Exhaust. The intent with this change is to force players to think more carefully about when to put this card down on the table, as its effect will only be available for use that round.

Hearts

The Hearts strategy too often boiled down to “play -5s to break their cards, then if you are feeling fancy mend them with -9 to bust them for an auto-win.” I wanted to even out the balance between the -5 and -10 to make that choice more interesting, while also adding more combo opportunities.

• Hearts -2

  • Adjusted effect: Hollow. Mend each card in this and adjacent slots.

  • This card now gives a proper alternative to mending both the -5 and -10, since you do not need to have hollow on those cards for the -2 to interact with them. This card now also has hollow, making it easier to overcome your negative values.

• Hearts -5

  • Removed hollow.

  • Having hollow on only the -5 and not the -10 simply added a discrepancy that could not be overcome by adjusting their individual effects. In an earlier version, the -10 also had hollow, and that led to that card being the much preferred choice over the -5. The solution to this problem comes from combos with either -2, or the new effect on -6.

• Hearts -6

  • Removed multi-value -4.

  • New effect: Each adjacent card gains hollow.

  • This card still has hollow itself, meaning that you can create some really fun combos that open up your board for continued play, if you place your cards right!

• Hearts -9

  • Adjusted effect: Mend each surrounding card.

  • Surrounding cards are cards to the left and right, opposing, and diagonally opposing to the left and right.

  • This card used to target the entire table, and I felt this went against the strategic element of having to consider card placement. Since this card can lead you to an auto-win by busting your opponent, it makes sense to me that it should require good positioning to pull off.

Greed

Greed is the lowest picked and lowest performing of the 4 unlockable suits, with a pick rate of about 2% as main suit (around 6% for the other unlockable suits), and about 1.7% as an in-shops suit. The per-card win-rate hovers around 60-65%. This will likely require more balancing changes in the future to get right, but for now, I have resorted to adding in a bit of hollow and multi-value into this suit to give it more versatility. Greed was designed as an option for players who really like Diamonds, and who would be interested in a different flavor of a similar strategy. To this end, it makes sense to bring over a few of the mechanics that make Diamonds so versatile.

• Greed 4

  • Adjusted effect: Hollow. Demand an awakened card.

  • This card now has hollow.

• Greed 5

  • This card now has the multi-value 0.

  • This card’s effect lets you demand a face card, so the idea here is that by giving it 0 as a multi-value, you could play out two face cards for a transformation without being restricted by this card’s value.

• Greed 8

  • Adjusted effect: Hollow. Discard the top 3 cards of your deck.

  • This card now has hollow, to compensate for its effect being very situational.

• Greed 9

  • New effect: Hollow. Each sleeved card Gains 2.

  • This card used to have the effect “demand an ace”. I felt this effect was too difficult to trigger, so instead I added another effect similar to Greed 10. Giving 2 as a multi-value is intended to combo with the 9, as together they make 11 which fits nicely with any 10 valued card.

Flames

Flames allow for the incredibly fun strategy of burning out your opponent’s deck. Since this strategy is very powerful when taken to its extreme, it should require a lot of planning and skill to implement. In its previous form this was not really the case, as you could fairly easily spam 2s, 3s and 4s and burn out your opponent with very little opposition. Not to mention getting powerful cards back with the 5.

With these changes, I am trying to make Flames feel more like controlling a raging fire. You are setting fire to the board, your cards and your opponent’s, and you have to make sure that your opponent stalls out before you do. I had a ton of fun playing with these changes, so I’m looking forward to hearing your take on them!

• Flames 2

  • Adjusted effect: Ignite all cards. Exhaust.

  • If you play this card late in a round, it will now ignite both yours AND your opponents! It creates some really fun moments where suddenly everything is on fire.

• Flames 3

  • Adjusted effect: Ignite the opposing and its adjacent cards. Burn this card.

  • Added a limiter to this card, while retaining its power level. This change also makes it so that the slot you play this card in becomes open again, which can actually be helpful in that it lets you fire off additional card effects.

• Flames 4

  • Removed multi-value 0.

  • This should prevent easily playing this card while your board is already full.

• Flames 5

  • Adjusted effect: Sleeve a random card you have exhausted. Ignite this card.

  • Added a limitation to how many times this card can be activated by use of self-ignite.

  • This card text used to clarify that you could sleeve a card that was either burned or exhausted. However, since the Ignite tooltip states that burned cards are considered exhausted, I removed that wording from the card text. The effect still includes all burned cards, just as before.

• Flames 6

  • Adjusted effect: Ignite each adjacent and the opposing card.

  • This effect used to be on Flames 10, and the 6 used to immediately burn adjacent cards. This adjustment should make it a bit trickier to get rid of the specific cards you want out of your own deck.

• Flames 8

  • Adjusted effect: Exploit 2. Ignite this card.

  • Removed multi-value 0.

  • I increased the Exploit from 1 to 2, to make this card’s impact a bit more noticeable. To balance it out, I removed the multi-value.

• Flames 10

  • Adjusted effect: Ignite each adjacent card.

  • This card no longer ignites the opposing card, to keep in line with other 10s having the weakest effect in their suits.

• Ignited Soul

  • Adjusted effect: Hollow. Burn this and ignite the opposing card.

  • This card used to ignite itself, giving it two uses before it burns up. Now it will burn immediately, forcing you to choose between adding 1 to your table value or igniting one of your opponent’s cards.

Additional adjustments

The following card / artifact adjustments do not require too much explanation, and some are kept intentionally vague to avoid spoilers. Most are smaller changes made to target specific strategies and card interactions.

Time suit

• Both cards in the Time suit have had their card text compacted. This does not change the effects themselves.

Family trio

• One of the early family cards has had its effect reduced from 2 to 1, to better match the power level of other cards acquired after a single transformation.

Shame trio

• The Crowd will now claim 1 instead of 2 for each card purged.

• The Shame card now has the value -2, instead of -3.

Artifacts

• Flaming Souls

• To slightly compensate for Ignited Souls now burning themselves immediately, this artifact now gives you 3 copies of this card instead of 2.

Future changes to bosses

Since opponents use the same cards as the player, some of the above changes will alter their difficulty. The plan is that we will first do a public playtest with the card changes themselves, then once those are finalized, I will do a boss balance pass to do any adjustments required based on how the cards have changed. It is possible that there won’t be many changes needed, but regardless, there will be another post about them in the future when we push these changes into the game’s main steam branch.

Thank you so much for reading this far, and for helping us improve Black Jacket! If you like or dislike any of the changes after you have played with them, please let us know by posting a thread with your thoughts in our Discord channel public-test-branch-feedback!

Your support is invaluable, we wouldn’t be where we are without it.

/ Michael, Game Designer