Devlog #7 – Threat Counter a.k.a. "Fail Faster"

As you might remember from the previous devlog episode our initial idea to shake the canon of the genre was Threat Counter. In a nutshell, it was mana in reverse: you could spend as many points as you want, but the more you spent, the more powerful attack or skill the enemy will launch in response.

It sounded both a simple enough alternative for the mana and something that would give the player interesting control over the game situation. As we were struggling with the multiple characters idea, the Threat Counter seemed to work well enough albeit a bit clumsy, so we thought all it needs is a bit of good old polish.

Iteration hell

Oh boy, it was no polish. It was a mayhem of crunching prototypes.

The idea was simple: the harder you hit, the more Threat points the enemy gathers to hit you back.

Every iteration sounded better than it worked.

The problem was always the same

when provided with a shining choice of biting a little for a measured response or hitting big for horrible backlash, the player always goes with the latter.

It just makes more sense

you want the game to be dynamic and epic, for one.

Second, even if you try to count your points carefully, the result of the equation still encourages you to play the most powerful combo and hope for the best, while limiting your actions just sounds like an unnecessary prolongation of the fight. Even if it wasn’t the case, we couldn't crack out how to signal when the level of point spending is enough without the feeling of punishing the players for doing what they're supposed to do: playing the best from their hand. Even on the UX level, it was clumsy: a connection between what the enemy does and why is it a consequence of what the player previously did wasn’t always clear nor immediate.

Fun first

Most of all, it wasn’t that we couldn't mitigate this issue, it was that we couldn’t do it while preserving what’s the most fun in the core of any card game: smashing combos and maximizing your output from each card played.

We had around four different approaches to the Threat Counter iterated in a course of around two months. I won’t bore you with explaining the details, but ultimately none of them worked.

Finally, we scratched the whole idea and went back to square one, with very fruitful and surprising results!

But that’s a story for the next devlog episode. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you haven't had a chance – you can already check what we came up with in free to play Demo of Nadir!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1535210 If you have any questions or feedback: let us know on Discord!

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