The game is moving towards the goal at rapid speed. It’s time to file off the last edges to make everything as good as it can be. And I need your help!

So recently I found myself thinking about the following issues, based on player feedback and my own observations:

• Combat doesn’t look cool enough in screenshots

• Levelling your leader isn’t strong enough

• Sharing items feels too much like busy work

• Forgetting leader cards is both too hidden and too readily available

So to solve these issues I’ve been building things and testing out a few changes in the beta branch. I’ll be speaking about a different issue and my thoughts and changes over the next few days.

And today, we’re talking about LEVELLING:

Speaking of it, if you’re interested in joining the Beta: Send an e-mail from the address used for the itch.io account used to purchases the game. This way I can verify your purchase. Simply reach out to [email protected]

STRONGER AND STRONGER

When you collect enough experience points you can level up your leader. And that means you can pick a new card to permanently add to your leader deck. Also your health maximum increases, making you more robust. The card you can pick from was determined by your level:

• Levels 1-3: Common card

• Levels 4-6: Rare card

• Levels 7-9: Legendary card

• Level 10: Mythic Card

Unfortunately this may not feel as useful as it could. For one the first few levels are filled with common cards, which are not necessarily stronger than the cards from your starting deck. Also the HP increase was never clearly communicated. So considering that leveling also costs some batteries it might lead to some players not leveling as much as they could.

So, what can I do? The direct answer is to overhauling all leader cards to make them more powerful. But the problem with that is that many enemies make use of the same cards so that would then make the enemies stronger too. Another alternative would be to create duplicate cards and then only increasing the leader cards. That however needs a lot of new artwork, which I’d like to avoid.

So, instead of that I changed which cards you can pick from.

STRONGER PICKS

When leveling you get presented five face-down cards. You can flip over three of these, and then pick one of the face-up cards. While so far all cards were from the same rarity, now the rarities blend into one another. So as you increase in level, more rare cards are added to the spread of the 5 face-down cards.

The cards are spread out as follows:

That means on level 1 you get to pick from 5 common cards. While on level 2 there’s already one rare card mixed in. Of course you’ll have to first turn over that card.

Initially I though this might feel to arbitrary - sometimes you will get the card, sometimes you won’t. But in my playtest it made the flipping more interesting, and created some good choices: Do I take the rare card that is more powerful, or the common that fits my playstyle a tad better.

It also has the added benefit of making the increase in level different - you don’t get the same selection 3 times in a row.

Also another step to make leveling feel better is to make the Health increase more transparent. So far the increase was never communicated, so you would eventually notice it but it never felt like a reward you got for reaching a higher level, so now there is a short visual after picking your card that shows who much health you gained.

If you’ve played the game you will also spot a new icon there: The triangle icon stands for FOCUS POINTS. These are a new resource added and they are used to remove leader cards from your deck, something I’ll cover in another update soon.