Playground Construction Diary: Hybrid Stickers!

Howdy! ːmycatstareː

In this Playground Construction Diary entry we’ll go into more detail about the new hybrid stickers we’re adding to the game!

What are hybrid stickers?

Hybrid stickers bridge the gap between two different sticker themes, so they’re great if you want to combine the strengths of different types of stickers in your deck! We really like the idea of hybrid stickers since it’s fun to find synergies between different sticker themes, so we’re adding a looot of them in the next update!

We also asked our community about what kind of hybrid stickers would be fun in the game before we started working on them. Here are some examples of the ideas we got from you guys and how they turned out!

Paulinak4483 in our YouTube short's comments had an idea about adding more fish stickers with a quest! Maybe a kraken, leviathan or a sea witch sticker that depended on fishies!

This gave us inspiration for the new Orca sticker! The visuals changed from a kraken to an orca because a kraken might get mixed up with the Octopus sticker in the game.

A moth sticker has been quite a popular idea in our Discord! This was the perfect opportunity to add one in to the game. There were lots of ideas about what it could do in terms of its sticker effect, here's how it turned out!

You can try out the new stickers and other new things coming to the game by joining our playtest! Join our Discord here to take part.

So far, we’ve added a ton of hybrid stickers for bug, fish, quest and pirate stickers that combine them with other themes. But we’re still going to create more! Let us know what type of hybrid stickers you’d like to see in the game.

Matching art with the sticker theme

Our artist has been doing an amazing job drawing so many new adorable stickers (there's a lot of cute new critters...)

When we make the art for any new stickers, we try to keep these things in mind:

• The sticker shouldn’t get mixed up with other stickers

• Easy to recognize & communicate since we don’t display sticker names

• Fun & easy to make cute cards with other stickers

It’s also always a plus if the art can somehow relate to what the sticker’s effect is. We always try to capture the sticker theme in both the art and gameplay.

It isn’t always easy to get everything right, especially since there’s quite a few stickers in the game at this point so we need to sometimes be flexible with these rules, but we try our best! Getting ideas from our development team and our lovely community is a huge help when our artist has a head-empty moment!

Here’s a few examples of new stickers where we’re especially happy how the art matches the gameplay and vice versa!

The first two are hybrid stickers that relate to the pirate stickers, it was pretty hard to come up with the art for these since mixing pirate theme with others felt a little constricting because of how specific pirates are! But then our artist had a fun visual idea that worked well with the STEAL mechanics of pirates.

For the third sticker, it was really really hard to mix bugs and plants visually for some reason! But then our artist had the idea of a leaf insect, it seems so obvious in hindsight!

The sticker effects of all of the new hybrid stickers above might change, since we're still actively testing them and tweaking the numbers.

That's all for now! Please do consider taking part in our playtests by joining our Discord, since every bit of feedback helps us a ton! ːmycrabː