Events and May 2026 update

Let's talk about events, because I recently revised a few of them a little and added some new ones.

Events are a staple of the genre. You enter a room and instead of a fight you have some kind of situation and have to make a choice about it, usually knowing the consequences of each choice.

I love events as a player. When I play Slay the Spire I try to hit as many events as possible. I am not quite sure why. But I can tell you that there are events I like and events I don't like as much. I found that events that have one clearly optimal choice are kinda boring. I like the events where I have to gauge the risk versus the reward (lose some health, but gain something else) or where the choices favor different strategies of play.

Some of the first events I added to the game didn't adhere to this insight. I had an event where you lose 20 HP, but raise the ceiling of your max HP by 5. Yes, it's a trade-off, but it's a boring one because of fixed values. I tweaked it a little today. It now starts with 3 HP loss, and 1 max HP gain, but you can keep going and after each time the numbers double. So eventually you would lose 48 HP and gain 16 max HP ceiling. It adds the 'when do I stop' factor. You could seriously jeopardize your run by losing that much health, but if you can heal before you die, you are better equipped for the rest of the run.

So now I will try to make the choices in each event interesting and meaningful, without filler content events.

Events are also interesting balance-wise. Every event you enter lets you escape one fight, but also lose out on the fight's rewards (a new skill for your dice and some exogenic energy, which is what I currently call the currency in the game). Basically, I want to steer the player to play in a way where it's wise to seek events, but where it's also a likely a losing strategy if you enter too many of them. My map randomization is not sophisticated enough to prevent theoretical possibility of having a run in which you can hop from one event to the next without doing any battles at all (until the unavoidable boss fight at the end of each stage). But if you happen to get such a map and don't enter a single battle, I want you to lose to the boss.

I am now also playing around with conditional events, meaning evets that only appear if you have fulfill certain requirements like having the right party members, having made certain choices in other events, and so on. I haven't really seen that done in other games (although admittedly, I find myself more and more out of the loop of recent deckbuilder games.

Ok, this has been more rambling than usual. Let's get to the progress update.

Progress Update May 2026

I have made some good progress last month in making the game look more professional and pretty. After I receive some new battle background artwork there is really only one more major visual clash in my opinion that needs to be addressed and I don't quite have a solution yet. I am talking about the icons in the game. I like them a lot, but the visual style of the game took a different direction overall and the icons need to follow suit. The problem is: they are pretty much the most important UI elements, since that is what players will be clicking on for the core gameplay. They need to fit in the rest of the game's style, be immediately recognizable and distinguishable from each other. And I have planned around 300 of those. Yeah, we'll see how that goes...

The visual updates aren't just fluff, however. I made some significant improvements to UI readability, especially in the evolution system screen, where now both the evolution die and the sacrifice die are displayed simultaneously.

Apart from visuals, I have also added a bit of content, mainly in the form of new events and abilities. I think I am creating a game that will be very difficult to balance. But, you know, balance shmalance. As long as it is fun.