v1.15 - Money, Loot and Fatigue

Hello there! :)

A new update to Lost For Swords just dropped, with lots of improvements and additions:

• The biggest one: you will now find new cards for your deck IN the dungeon room. Instead of adding new cards between floors, the cards now appear directly in the rooms as Loot cards. The best thing: you get to use the cards you find right away! There are a few reasons for this change:
  from a game design perspective, I find it better when the deck improvement is more gradual. In earlier version you needed to play through a whole floor before you could add new cards, which felt a bit too long. I think finding new cards earlier makes a dungeon run “flow” better overall.
  Before the update, the sole reason for money to exist was to buy cards later on, and effectively, 1 money = 1 new card. This was ok, but not really interesting. Now that you find new cards in the rooms, this “frees up” the money mechanic and opens up new possibilites. Money is now used between floors to heal and upgrade cards. And you can even sell your unneeded cards and get a bit of extra cash!
  Offering new cards during play (and the ability to sell them later) hopefully encourages players to try out different card combinations and explore interactions more freely without a huge penalty.
  Lastly, looking at it from a thematical perspective… it plainly makes more sense! In a typical dungeon crawler, you’d expect to find new equipment while you explore the dungeon, not in some in-between-floors place.
  There are a few lose ends I still want to tie up, like how banishing cards should work (if it exists at all)… not sure yet about that. But I think the new system is good enough to release it and let people test it out. Got feedback? Let me know in the Discord! :)
• Change how cards are upgraded: instead of upgrading cards by finding/having a second copy and combining them, you now spend your hard-earned money on card upgrades. I was unhappy with the way the old card ugprading system worked. Granted, there is definitely strategy involved in that design, but I really disliked that upgrading cards often didn’t feel good or wasn’t the right choice. Case in point: when you had an upgraded card already and the only way to upgrade it further was to add unupgraded versions of that card. Essentially you had to weaken your deck (because you add weaker versions of a card that’s already in your deck) in the hopes of finding even more of them in the future… kind weird and hard to reason about.
  I think spending money to upgrade cards feels better and allows players to tune their deck much more rather than relying on luck. But ultimately, we’ll see how it works out when you play it! ;)
• You can now sell cards between floors! Selling card thins your deck and lets you get rid of unwanted or not-synergizing cards. And you even get a bit of money from it! This opens up new gameplay options. Players might want to reduce their deck aggressively, and hence open up the board. I also have a few card design around related to card selling: for example, an ceremonial saber that is really weak in combat, but sells for triple the price of a regular card. Would you take it? :)
  Heads up: upgrading and selling is without restrictions... for now! That might change in the future.
• Reworked money: I essentially 10x all money related numbers. This allows me to design more fine grained costs and prices. And introduce smaller rewards, such as…
• …when fully clearing a room, you now get 5 Emeralds as a reward!
• Reworked Fatigue into a random (yes, random!) damage taken when backtracking: I tried really hard to fit the notion of Fatigue into the game and encode it as a card/mechanic. But it always either felt too punishing or too miniscule of an effect. And because the Fatigue cards entered your deck, it had the tendency to draw the game out more and more. That wasn’t as fun! The new system: when you have to backtrack, instead of shuffling Fatigue cards into your deck, your hero loses a random amount of health between 0 and X (where X increases each time you backtrack). It felt a bit weird to introduce a random element here at first, but it works surprisingly well! It’s has an immediate effect on the player and it’s much more clear that there is a clear downside to backtracking and its best avoided.
  The low end of the potential damage is always 0, so you have a chance at surviving even with very low health… but you probably made a few bad decisions leading up to that point, so your fate will be deciced by luck at this point.
  Side note: there’s a similarity to how Into The Breach designed their building damage prevention. I found that system also strange at first, but it actually makes sense! Also go play Into The Breach! :D
• Reworked Dazzling Metal into a Trinket and renamed it Arthur’s Pendant
• Lots of new sound effects and visual improvements, too many to list
• New Cards
  • Burning Sin
  • Eirene’s Crown
  • Desire
  • Infused Dagger
  • Foresight

As always, thanks for reading and see you at the next patch! :)

Bye! (ʘ‿ʘ)╯