Puzzle Strike on Steam

Puzzle Strike is now available on Steam! It will also be coming to iOS just a few weeks later. (It's already available in physical form.)

Puzzle Strike is a deckbuilding puzzle game played amongst Fantasy Strike characters. It's inspired by puzzle games such as Puzzle Fighter. Gems fall into each player's gem pile every turn, and whoever's gem pile fills up first loses. Improve your deck (of chips!) by purchasing new chips as the game unfolds. Will you go heavy on economy, offense, or build an intricate engine? In any case, make sure to adapt to your opponents because Puzzle Strike has a lot more interactivity than most other deckbuilders. And like the other games in the Fantasy Strike universe, Puzzle Strike is designed to hold up to thousands of games at the expert level, and we fully embrace the philosophy of even-playfield competition.

The new Steam version of Puzzle Strike (as well as the upcoming iOS release) have these new features:

  • Runs natively on Mac, PC, and Linux (new!)
  • Cross-platform play with players on iOS, Steam or the web version on FantasyStrike.com
  • Chips have 4x the resolution as the web version
  • Issue challenges to people on your Steam friend list
  • Climb the leaderboards in Quick Match and check out replays of top players to improve your game!
  • New Puzzle Challenge mode: learn advanced character tactics and think outside the bag! Beat these advanced challenges to become a real Puzzle Striker!
  • Complete your Daily Quests to earn Jewels, then spend them to play "Puzzle Smash", a high-powered version of Puzzle Strike
  • Contains all 48 Puzzle chips from both Puzzle Strike Third Edition and Puzzle Strike: Shadows, as well as the promo chips, Combinatorics, Dashing Strike and Custom Combo
  • Practice offline against AI Puzzlebots for the first time!
  • Launching with English and French language support, with German and Japanese localization on the way

The Steam version of Puzzle Strike will retail for $14.99 USD and come with the first ten characters (Grave, Jaina, Midori, Setsuki, Rook, DeGrey, Valerie, Geiger, Lum, and Argagarg.) Additional characters will be available as in-app purchases and bundles.

Come join the fun today and follow along with our launch live stream on twitch.tv! And give a shoutout to #PuzzleStrike and @SirlinGames on twitter to tell us (and the world) your thoughts.

Go check out the game on Steam, here.

Patreon October Updates

Patreon has been such an incredible help to me that I'm giving a thank you shout out to the Patreon staff as well as to all my patrons. (My Patreon is here, btw.) Patreon is a way for people to directly support the creative people they want to support. It's not for a specific project like a Kickstarter, but rather for everything that person is doing. It's actually a lot more fun than kickstarter because I get to show all the in-progress stuff I'm working on.

Here's a rundown of what I've been doing over on my Patreon lately.

Last month, I offered early access to (physical) Codex cards. Codex is a new take on customizable card games. If you'd like to learn more about Codex, here's three articles about the game's design:

#1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources
#2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings
#3 Codex Design: Combat and the Patrol Zone

Anyway, all those Codex early access sets already shipped out and my patrons often play each other over Skype. If you missed out on that, you can actually still get physical cards through this post (requires $25+ patron level). Though you might as well wait until next week because there will be a balance update within a week.

Last week I posted a new Raw Game Design podcast episode (for $10+ patrons) where I discuss "reset buttons" in Codex (cards that blow up the board so you can possibly come back from a very bad position). I also discuss some changes to the Tower add-on. It's a way to detect stealth / invisible units and it's tricky to give the right amount of detection. Finally, we discuss what Geiger's moves will be in the Fantasy Strike fighting game.

I also posted an update to the Codex rulebooks today for patrons of any level.

Within a couple days, I plan to post a big update to the Codex print-and-play version (for $25+ patrons) that has dozens of balance changes based on the last month of playtesting. Within a week of that, the same changes will be available as physical cards to patrons of any level (for just the cost of printing + shipping).

Last and certainly not least, I plan to post a new playable version of Fantasy Strike, our simple-yet-deep fighting game (for the $25+ patrons). There's a little bit of info on the game here: http://www.sirlin.net/fantasystrike

The new build has loads of bug fixes, a few balance adjustments, and a new playable character, bringing our cast up to four so far. We have Grave, who has a projectile and is an all-around kind of guy. Jaina also has projectiles, and some rushdown capability, but where she really shines is zoning with her crazy obstacle course of flame arrows. Rook is a grappler's dream, having just about every tool a grappler could hope for. And our newest cast member is Valerie, a manic painter who's all about rushdown. She may bear some gameplay resemblance to Fei Long. ;)

We've been focusing mostly on gameplay so far, but we'll be upping our production values soon. If you're an expert 3D combat animator, or a visual effects artist (in Unity), or a 3D environmental artist, get in touch with us at jobs@sirlingames.com. We're also looking for a volunteer concept artist to help with our stages. Concept artists just need to know fighting games and the Fantasy Strike characters to work with us on the look of the stages. We need help in all those areas, but another experienced combat animator is what we need the most.

Thanks again to all my patrons. Your support is much appreciated and all the funds go directly into these projects.

 
 

The New Pandante and Flash Duel Are Now Available

Pandante 2nd Edition and a new printing of Flash Duel are now generally available.

These games were part of my fourth Kickstarter and the rewards have now all been delivered to backers—a MONTH ahead of schedule. Four out of four kickstarters on time! Anyway, you can now get your hands on these games if you missed the kickstarter.

Pandante

The joke about Pandante is that it's "for people who don't like poker and also people who do." There's actually something to that though.

For People Who Don't Like Poker

People who don't like poker might say that poker is not a very good family game and that it's way too psychologically intense to play with your children. They might say that they don't really find poker all that fun unless it's played for real money, which is pretty fair because even most poker players say that too.

Pandante is lighthearted enough in theme and mechanics that it's a great social game. The way it's set up ensures that probably about half the people are lying about their hand and everyone knows that they are surrounded by lies, which leads to lots of laughter at the table. The game is also gamey enough that it's interesting to play even without real money, like any well-crafted board game. There's fun abilities and tricks to pull off which give you more tools than poker, and the expansion is now included in the base set so you get a whole lot of content. The main mode has no player elimination, so it keeps everyone involved the whole time. For people who don't play poker, it's almost confusing to even think of this as a poker game rather than as a new card game.

For People Who Do Like Poker

But then there's people who LOVE poker. Poker lovers like that being more skilled at poker gives them an edge over weaker players. Stronger players get to crush weaker ones and take their money, which can be exhilarating. Poker has a lot of randomness, but having more skill really does pay off in the long-run.

Pandante has a higher skill ceiling than poker. This probably seems like some blasphemous claim, because poker is sacred, but just calm down and think about it for a minute. Pandante contains much of the skill elements that apply to poker, but it also makes more moves possible. There's a lot of nuance in how to use these extra moves, and so good players will be able to use them better than bad players.

One example is the "snacking" mechanic. You can pay for extra cards, but exactly how much a card is worth is a very difficult thing to know and depends on a lot of factors. Experts will be able to snack better than non-experts. Also, there are 6 abilities in Pandante and you can do up to two of them per gambit. It's easy to grasp what these abilities are (peek at another player's card, raise, add a new card to the table, etc), but of course there's quite a skill in knowing how to use these abilities. It's a whole new realm of opportunity to outplay your opponents. Thirdly, there's a lot of intentional information leak that goes on in Pandante. You bet on specific hands multiple times throughout the gambit. You snack or don't. You use abilities in a certain way, and sometimes that involves revealing a card. Even though players are lying very often, they are also dripping with information, and these tools allow someone who is good at reads to do even better in Pandante than in poker.

Pandante is quite hard to play WELL because its skill-ceiling is just so high. I think poker players will really appreciate this because they can get even more of an edge through careful play.

2nd Edition

In the 1st Edition of Pandante, we were very concerned with making it rock solid so that it held up to serious play for real money. The good news: it was solid. The less good news: we had to add several exceptions here and there and wrinkles that slowed down the game flow.

In the 2nd Edition, we were able to really vastly improve the game flow. I think we were able to get through a gambit in something like half the time and with fewer questions from players, too. If you want to know the exact rule changes, you can see a summary here.

Another ease of use thing is that there's now a central betting board rather than each player having their own. You often have to see who bet on the highest hand, and when all the bets are on one board, it's faster to see who bet on the highest hand.

Another big thing about the 2nd Edition is that it INCLUDES the entire expansion. You get Light and Dark abilities, casinos that change the rules each gambit, Panda Champions that give each player a unique ability, and the Diamond Dreams mode that makes the diamond chips into powerups. You can use any of that stuff in any combination you want, so you can choose how much craziness is right for your group. (Recommendation: start with Light abilities and nothing else. Then add Casino cards as soon as people understand the basic rules. The Dark abilities are cut-throat and take-that oriented, so only switch to those if your group wants that sort of thing. Throw in Panda Champions and/or Diamond Dreams mode if you want to up the mayhem level.)

Here's the standard version of the game. It now comes with plastic discs for betting:

And here's the deluxe version:

It has professional-grade clay poker chips and an awesome 2" diameter metal Panda Coin. The leatherette box with magnetic latch is really classy too, and has no product information on it: that's all on a sleeve that you can throw away.

There's also a few playmats leftover from the kickstarter. Playmats don't fit into the deluxe box, so it comes with a board instead, but I personally like playing on the mat. Get one while supplies last. ;)

Flash Duel

Flash Duel is a fast sparring match. Like Pandante, it also contains an expansion—actually two expansions—right in the box. It has a whopping 20 characters and whole bunch of modes that range from solo play, to 1v1, to 2v2, and even up to 4v1 in the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon mode (and another mode with a traitor!). Fast, simple, and a ton of variety.

The new version wasn't quite enough to call it a 3rd Edition, but it does have some nice upgrades. Component-wise, it now comes with 21 character standups instead of pawns:

Here's a list of the rest of the updates:

• A new rulebook (here) which makes the game less mathy and more about improv and bluffing. You don't know the exact contents of the deck anymore, so you can't compute things so completely. Also, you now draw more cards each round, so you have more chance to win before timeout.
• The "last hits" mechanic is removed, to simplify the rules and make the game more about trying to win before timeout happens.
• All game modes now use 40 numbered cards, rather than different modes using 25, 40, and 50 numbered cards.
• All cards and rules now gender-neutral ("their" instead of "his").
• Many abilities edited or rewritten to be clearer how they work or how they interact with other abilities. You can even see all the latest card images here.
• Many balance changes.

Further Reading

You can read more about:
The game design of Pandante
The graphic design of Pandante
Pandante on BGG (rate it and become a fan)
Flash Duel on BGG (rate it and become a fan)
Follow Sirlin Games on Facebook
Follow Sirlin Games on Twitter (and use #pandante and #flashduel)

You can get Pandante here, and Flash Duel here. They ship to anywhere in the world.

Codex Design: Combat and the Patrol Zone

This is the 3rd in a series of design articles about Codex. In case you missed the first two:

#1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources
#2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings

Codex is asynchronous. That means someday you’ll be able to play the online version without your opponent having to be online at the same time as you. You can get through your entire turn without having to wait for your opponent, then they can take their turn without you having to be there either. In offline (tabletop) games, it also means turns go smoothly: without the fits and starts of the opponent constantly interrupting you.

If the opponent doesn’t make decisions on your turn, then doesn’t that make combat too simple? Or not interactive enough? The patrol zone is the answer to those problems.

You can have any of your units or heroes directly attack anything with hit points—any unit, hero, or building of the opponent’s. You don’t have to wait for the opponent to decide how to block your attacks though because they *already* decided their blocking plan before your turn started.

At the end of their main phase, they chose which of their units and heroes to patrol, and which slots they'll go in. If you have an attacker that CAN attack one of those patrollers, you don’t have to attack with it at all, but if you do then it MUST attack a patroller. Patrollers are the defender’s first line of defense so you’ll have to get through them before you can attack something else.

Each patroller has a different bonus. When you’re setting up your defense, carefully consider which bonus you want each of your defenders to get.

The most important slot is the squad leader. Your squad leader gets one point of armor, which means it will take one less damage than usual, but even more importantly it has “taunt.” That means the attacker must attack it even before your other patrollers.

The elite slot gives your patroller +1 ATK, so a 3/3 unit would become a 4/3 unit while patrolling in that slot, letting it deal extra damage if it gets attacked.

The scavenger and technician slots give you 1 gold and let you draw 1 card, respectively, when the patrollers in those slots die. These slots are great when you’re taking a beating. The extra resources of gold and cards can let you mount a comeback as you try to hold off an aggressive attacker.

The lookout slot gives your patroller resist 1. This means the opponent must pay 1 gold to target that patroller with any spell or ability. Sometimes the biggest threat to one of your units or heroes isn’t dying in combat, but rather dying to some sort of spell or ability. The lookout slot gives your opponent a disincentive to mess that patroller.

That’s pretty much it. Combat works in a very straightforward way where one thing directly attacks another thing and they each deal their damage to the other at the same time. Damage is persistent in Codex, meaning it doesn’t get healed automatically at the end of the turn.

Flying

Flying is also worth mentioning here, it's especially powerful. It works like it does in RTS video games, rather than how it works in most card games. In Starcraft, a Zealot (ground melee unit) can’t hit a Mutalisk (flying unit) ever. The same is true here. Flying units can attack ground units and not get hit back at all! Flying units can fly over ground patrollers and are not physically blocked by them at all! 

That’s a bit of a double edged sword though; flying units also can’t physically block ground attackers. So if you patrol one of your fliers, an enemy ground attacker can simply run under it and get to your vulnerable heroes and tech buildings. Overall though, flying units are very deadly, just as they tend to be in RTS video games.

Patrol Zone Design Features

The patrol zone is the most unexpectedly good feature in Codex. It was originally developed as a way to make asynchronous combat interesting enough, but players liked it so much that they said it should be a central feature no matter if the game supported asynchronous play or not. It turns out there’s a lot of nuance in just how you patrol your forces!

Before the patrol zone existed in Codex, some players originally suggested putting "taunt" on particular units (meaning the opponent would have to attack those first), but it's just so inadequate as a solution here. You'd be at the mercy of drawing the right units just to be able to block at all. The patrol zone lets you give that power to any of your forces AND lets you stack more bonuses on them too, which is just way more flexibility to plan your strategy.

The extra bonuses the patrol zone gives your defenders solve some very deep problems that we had for a long time. There's a delicate balance in Codex between rushing down and teching up. At some points in the game's history, rushdown was too good, which makes the game degenerate. At other times, it was too weak which means there's nothing to "keep you honest" if you want to blatantly start going for late game plans way too early. The simplest rules were the ones that lead to rushdown being too good, so is there some way we can do a small tweak to them?

It turns out, the single point of armor you get in the squad leader slot (and to a lesser degree, the +1 ATK you get from the elite slot) matters A LOT. That gives you just enough defense that early turns are not based on degenerate rushdown that you can't do anything about, but your buffer of protection doesn't last you long. Soon enough, units and heroes get big enough to overcome those bonuses and crush a weak defender if they don't start putting up a fight.

Unrelated to all that, the card draw system is also tuned on the edge of a knife. It has the great property that you get to draw a lot of cards, yet "card advantage" still matters. That means if you can use one card to destroy two of the opponent's cards, that actually does help you (which we want). It's also great that you often have a tough decision on whether to play a worker because that helps your economy later but might hurt your card draw in the process. It's all interconnected and just what it needs to be...but I wished you could get *slightly* more cards somehow without having to build the add-on that's specifically for that.

Just like it was very hard to tweak the combat system to give you "slightly more early defense," it was very hard to tweak the card draw system to give you "slightly more card draw." But in both cases, the patrol zone bonuses saved us. We were able to keep generally simple rules and use the bonuses to get the effects we wanted. If you are losing too many units on defense and you're trying to stay in the game, the ability to put a unit in the technician slot to draw an extra card really helps a lot. Same goes for the scavenger, it's the same concept really. If you're losing a lot of units, you might really need more gold or more cards (or both) to get back in the game. So we give you the option to do that, but it's not like we just give you an extra gold and extra card every turn. There's opportunity cost here and you have to work for it.

It turns out that somehow the extra defense, gold, and cards you can get from these bonuses were exactly what we needed. Usually this sort of design is driven from mechanics first. You'd think all this stuff exists precisely because we needed it, but the truth is that players liked the idea of the patrol zone so much that we kept developing it and kind of stumbled into it solving a few other design problems along the way. The original need for asynchronous play was a mechanical need leading to the patrol zone existing, yes, but that we actually kept it and enhanced it as a core part of the game was all from player feedback and what they enjoyed (and what I enjoyed too).

It's also pretty nice flavor that you set your units and heroes to patrol to protect you during the opponent's turn, then you spend that time figuring out your build order (picking cards from your codex to add to your deck). It feels like an RTS thing. ;)

If Codex sounds interesting to you, please support it on Kickstarter while it's there!

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Sirlin on Game Design, Ep 12: Easy Special Moves

We discuss "easy special moves" in fighting games. We can pretty quickly say why they are a good or bad idea, but the bigger issue is trying to clarify what the term means to help others avoid muddled discussions on this topic.

What is a game with "easy special moves" actually trying to do? Moves being easy—in and of itself—tells you nothing about whether the techniques and combos in a game are easy to do or not. Examples from Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur 5, Smash Bros (including a plea for modders to make Sirlin a mod with simpler controls for Smash), Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 4, Rising Thunder, and Fantasy Strike.

Hosts: David Sirlin & Sean "MrGPhantome" Washington

Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings

It’s generally good in a competitive game when there’s a lot of interaction. In other words, if your opponent is up to something, it’s good if you can do something about that.

In Codex, your vulnerabilities are on the table and you have to defend them. If you want to cast any spells, you need a hero in play to cast them—and your heroes can be attacked. If you want to make anything beyond the most basic units, you’ll need tech buildings to do that—and your tech buildings can be attacked as well.

In combat, you’re able to attack anything with hit points: any unit, hero, or building. Your ultimate goal is to deal 20 damage to the opponent’s main building—their base—but along the way you’ll probably need to try to take out at least some heroes or tech buildings. Think of this like a “pre-counterspell” in a way. If there’s a certain spell that you really don’t want the opponent to cast, you can kill the hero who casts it, and you’ll have at least one turn of breathing room until they’re able to resummon that hero. If there’s a particular unit you’re afraid of, destroying the tech building that produces it will also give you at least a turn of breathing room until they rebuild that building.

Heroes

Heroes are the stars of your army. You can access them without any randomness: they wait to be summoned in your command zone; you don’t have to draw them from your deck.

Heroes arrive at level 1, and you can spend gold to level them up, even multiple times in a turn. As they level up, they get better stats and new powers (and keep their old powers too). Heroes each have a “spec”. For example, Jaina’s spec is Fire. That means only Jaina can cast “Fire spells.” When heroes reach their max level AND if you didn’t just summon them, they can cast their ultimate spell. Beware of letting your opponent cast ultimate spells—they are really powerful!

Heroes are also great in combat. When a hero levels up from its lowest to middle rank, and when it levels from its middle to last rank, all damage on it is healed. So it can get in an early scuffle and still be fine later.

Killing enemy heroes is so important that you get a bounty for doing so. If you kill an enemy hero on your own turn, all your own heroes (that are in play) level up TWICE for free!

Heroes are fun and flavorful and give the game a ton of character. From a game mechanics perspective, they’re really important because they force you to have your vulnerabilities (in this case, your ability to cast certain spells) on the table where the opponent can interact with them.

Tech Buildings

You start the game with some weak units in your deck that you can summon from your base. If you want more powerful units though, you’ll need to build your tech I building. If you have a tech I building, you can then build your tech II building. That then lets you build your tech III building, which can then produce absurdly powerful, game-winning units.

You have access to three different specs during a game of Codex. For example, an all-red deck would have access to the Anarchy, Blood, and Fire specs. Your tech I building lets you build units from any of those specs. In other words, a tech I building lets you play any card with a bronze bottom on it, regardless of the spec.

At the tech II level, you have to specialize and choose a particular spec though. You’ll only be able to make tech II units of that spec and you’ll be locked into that same spec when you build your tech III building. In practice, this allows for tighter counter-play. If you have no idea what the opponent might even build, it’s hard to develop counter-measures. If you at least know the spec they chose this particular game, you have some basis to choose how to respond.

What if you want to to use two different specs in a game though? You actually CAN do that. Your base can hold exactly one add-on building. There are a few to choose from, and one of them—the Tech Lab—allows you to access two specs at once. That can be powerful, but the other add-ons are useful too!

There are lots of tricky build orders you can use, but the most standard approach is to lean on one particular hero (for spells) and one particular spec at the tech II level (for units). These do NOT have to match. For example, you might rely on the Blood hero and his Blood spells, but you are free to have your tech II building specialize in Fire if you want. That means you have 9 different routes (3 choices of heroes x 3 choices of tech specializations) in standard builds. That doesn’t even include the many more build orders you can explore with strategies that rely entirely on spells, or that combine two tech II specs using the Tech Lab.


Pacing

You have to pace yourself when you build your tech buildings. Each one takes one turn to finish constructing and you can’t even start building them until you have the requisite number of workers. That means if you build them “on schedule” as soon as you’re usually allowed to, you’ll get your tech I building in place on turn 3, your tech II on turn 5, and your tech III on turn 7. But things don’t always go as planned!

Pressure your opponent and make them spend so much on defense that they can’t afford to build tech buildings. Or destroy a tech building if you can and slow down their progression. You can’t just play solitaire here; Codex is highly interactive so your ability to expand your tech or to deny your opponent’s tech is tightly linked to how much you’re able to pressure each other in combat.

Heroes and tech buildings add a lot of flavorful fun to Codex because they match RTS games such as Warcraft 3, but they don’t exist in the game because of that flavor. Quite the opposite: I chose the RTS theme specifically because the game dynamics are so good when you have to protect your ability to cast spells (from heroes) and your ability to make certain kinds of units (from tech buildings). RTS video games are a great match and there’s a lot of parallels for Starcraft and Warcraft 3 fans to enjoy.

Here's the next Codex design article.