#rogue deck builder

[vmlowell]

don't have many of my own posts but have GOT TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT TOUHOU LOST BRANCH OF LEGEND

infact wrote up a whole review here:

[firesourcegames]

Dev Blog 2 – The Deck-Building-Rogue-like-Auto-Battler-Tower-Defense

When we started working on Bad Hand: Rise of the Discarded, it was a very different idea from what it is now. It even had another name: Back then, it was called Nunaq Errani and the idea was to create a rogue-lite action-RPG with an intriguing spooky story. Style-Wise, it was supposed to be a pixel-art game, both out of choice and out of necessity: With no artist on the team, buying in pixel art is both easier and cheaper than having someone external designing a full game in high definition. But it was a choice, too, since all of us genuinely liked pixel art. (We still do – that’s perhaps the only part of the game that didn’t change).

We were making good progress on the fundamentals of the game, when one day, as we were discussing the way forward, we suddenly came to a very sudden and unexpected conclusion:

What we were building right now wasn’t very new.

Sure, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a rogue-lite dungeon crawler. We all played and loved Hades and Dead Cells and Binding of Isaac and Crypt of the Necrodancer and Spelunky and of course Rogue Legacy and …

Yeah.

So, the concept wasn’t very new. There are plenty of great games out there to compete (take Hades for example: If you haven’t, you should grab a copy immediately and play it!) and although we had some mildly unusual spins in our idea, and, of course, a pretty original story, at the end of the day players had a lot of titles to compare our game to.

Well. The head is round so the thoughts can change course, right? After a short bit of brainstorming, we came up with a wonderful idea! Why not turn the concept around? Stop being the hero that invades someone else’s property – become the owner of said property! A property that is, to your never-ending annoyance, overrun by countless “heroes” ultimately trying to kill a boss – yourself.

Of course, turning the premise around like this also invalidates the genre of the game. If the “hero” is not being controlled by you anymore and you are the property owner, then the game gets a way more strategic aspect to it. Some kind of management or base building game comes to mind, where you try to design a maze that gets rid of the attacking hero. Perhaps with some sort of tower…

Congratulations! We just invented Tower Defense! Not quite where we wanted to end up. But the thought of a game akin to Dungeon Keeper stuck, even if we didn’t want to go full Tower Defense. We just had to move a bit away from real time strategy, away from defense against hordes and towards a more unique way of building and managing a dungeon as an evil overlord.

Cards! Managing your dungeon by playing magical cards. That was an idea you didn’t see too often. It was a budget-friendly for the needed graphics assets and offered a lot of opportunity to integrate an evil sense of humor as well as a deep story the player could uncover. Since hero after hero would try to infiltrate your dungeon, we even had the rogue-lite aspect to it, even though it was no longer an action RPG.

The best part about this change of course was that it came at the exact right time. Our game world would still be pixel style (unlike our cards), so nothing we had built was lost.

The idea was refined in countless iterations after that, but to our surprise, we found that despite the difficulties to name the game’s genre, the cogs fit together extremely well. Being the big bad overlord defending against hero invasions, building up your dungeon using cards – it just clicked. There was – and is still – a lot of work in front of us, but we firmly believe that the foundation for every great game is an innovative idea. And that we have with Bad Hand: Rise of the Discarded.

In the next dev blogs, I will dive a bit deeper into the game mechanics. Until then: Stay awesome!

-Michael

[browniefox]

I am once again wanting to make a video game

[rogercheetoofficial]

BUILDING THE FINAL DECK also working on a commission

[crossflux]

It ain't much, but it's honest work!

[foob-r]

sorry btw for everyone watching at home i beat inscryption in under 3 days and its currently all im thinking about so. fanart be upon your dashboard

[wolfleblack]

Power Chord Review - Misses A Few Notes

A rogue-lite deck builder built around battling demons and heavy metal music. Running down that checklist, it seems Big Blue Bubble was trying to make something just for me. It’s an appealing mix and I’m always down for some tasty riffs that make the ears bleed and the soul plead for more. After spending a dozen hours in Power Chord battling demons, collecting cards and hoping that this run was…

[tubapun]

Gonna multiclass my tarot card using bard so as to become better at picking locks.

I wanna be a deck builder with rogue like elements

[cornerattic]

Anais' Attic- Balatro.

Have you ever wanted to play Poker, but it's actually Yu-Gi-Oh, but it's Slay the Spire? Well that's what you'll get out of Balatro, the latest Deck-builder Roguelike to hit the market.

I'm a fan of roguelikes/lites, both Clo and I have been for a long time. Risk of Rain 2, Rogue Legacy 1 & 2, Hades, even Enter the Gungeon to a certain extent- and of course, Slay the Spire. Hell, even in Honkai Star Rail we ended up only playing through more of the game so we could unlock more Simulated Universe content.

There's just something about the addiction of “Just one more run, just one more run, cmon, can't end on a loss, just one more” that scratches the lizard brain’s itchy rash like freshly manicured nails, and Balatro definitely hits that urge. It's the prestigious winner of two of our personal rewards, one of which is that in an effort to not have to stop playing, we decided to purchase it on both Ps5 and switch. Sure it's only 15$, but that should tell you all you need to know about how good it really is.

But in case you'd like a full breakdown, here you go.

As stated Balatro is, in essence, another deck-builder roguelike. You win battles, earn money, and proceed to use said money to acquire new cards so you can win more battles to earn more money and so on. Same loop, new software. But one of Balatro's unique things is that it uses your standard 52-card deck as its base to build from. It's more complicated than that by the end of the average run, but that is where it starts. If you've seen a 52-card deck, you've seen every card in the starting deck. Where it gets wild is the different jokers you can use to build into getting all sorts of wild combinations, like turning all your cards into the same suit, or giving you a 4x multiplier for playing a four of a kind.

Because that's Balatro's other shtick- it's a poker game on top of everything else. You know all the memes you can find joking about Chess 2? Well this is Poker 2. If you know how to tell a three of a kind from a straight flush, you're a bit ahead of the curve, but you'll find your advantage means little when you need 300,000 points to beat the end boss of an ante, and you're barely making 30k with your hands. You're in Balatro's casino now, and you're gonna play by its rules.. But hey, at least it'll tell you the rules. That's more than you'd get in vegas.

Balatro is, however, all gameplay. Not so much as a scrap of an excuse plot. If you imagine a scale with “Roguelike storytelling” on it, then Balatro is far on the other end, about as far away from Hades as it gets. If that turns you off, no big deal, I don't judge. But I will tell you you're missing out.

Balatro has exploded in popularity, and it's been mostly to its benefit. I say mostly because while the game did manage to sell over 500k copies in two weeks, it didn't manage to escape without an 18+ Pegi rating, and an outright ban in South Korea as of the time of this writing. Banned and outrageously rated for the same reason there's no more game corner in the Pokémon games- it's too much like gambling, even when games that are essentially gambling and encourage gambling are not only allowed, they're shoved in your face.

If you're just looking for a thumbs up or down, let me answer that with a cautionary tale. Clover and I were told to give this one a try by a friend, and it proceeded to consume just over 30 hours of our sadly limited time on this earth over the span of a week. Given we work a dayjob, but have the ability to play for an hour at lunch, that's essentially nothing but Balatro in every spare moment. Which is why Balatro is the recipient of our other personal reward, being awarded the honor of getting deleted just so that we could get any work done.

After all, if the house always wins, then the only winning move is not to play at all. - 🌙

[harmincreasion]

ohhhh, rogue lite deck builder! sorry it sounded like you said "gauche trite dreck filler" ! yeah tell me about your game where you draft backgammon pieces

[sharkgirldick]

What video games?? And does games in general imply board games/ttrpgs? 🤩

I'm all over the place on video games. Pokemon is the thing I've been into since I was a kid. Boltgun has been fun recently. I'm into rogue-likes and deck builders.

Yeah, I love board games and ttrpgs!

[animesickos]

Do y’all still have a discord? How do I get on that, I want to talk at someone about mega man battle network and how it’s the best deck builder(non rogue like)

Do we ever! The link is here: https://discord.gg/62jkkWHRXG And if ever you want a link to Sickos stuff, we got a linktree: https://linktr.ee/animesickos

[mr-double-downer]

now what if we made the rogue like deck builder in first person

[rogercheetoofficial]

[goatmattersinc]

Guys, Balatro is real good. 😬👍🃏💯🔥

It's a Rogue-Like Deck Builder, but you're just fucking up the rules of poker and it's... just so easy to pick up and get sucked in..

[calchexxis]

Rogue Lords game rec

Ever wanted to play the Devil himself directing a cadre of infamous evils against an oppressive church, all for the sake of bringing yourself back from Hell?

That’s admittedly a very specific desire, but it’s the premise of the game that has my attention, which is Rogue Lords. It’s a really excellent roguelike that has done what all roguelike’s aspire (and fail) to do, which is that it’s mastered its gameplay loop. Other games that I would consider to have achieved this notable milestone are games like Darkest Dungeon, Hades, Iratus, and FTL.

So you know this game is, at least in my opinion, sitting amongst storied company.

I’d actually compare this game most favorably to a Deck Builder like Monster Train, because with the bevy of skills also come a map location called Sacrificial Altars, which not only remove and replace a skill from one of your villains’ loadouts for that run, it also prevents that skill from appearing during that run when you acquire new skills. This allows you to weed out damage or skill types that aren’t favorable to your current run, and permits the player a lot more control over their builds.

The basic loop is this: Select three lords out of the available colorful villains you’ve unlocked (you begin with Dracula, Bloody Mary, and the Headless Horseman), and start a book. Each villain has something like twenty (give or take) different skills that can create a variety of interesting builds, and you acquire skills at random along the way, which is where a lot of the skill comes in.

There’s a lot of Hades in this particular game mixed with a robust turn-based combat system. Every villain’s abilities cost AP to use, you start with a default of 5 AP, with abilities and permanent-for-that-run powerups called Relics that are able to add to that number. 

There are a lot of mechanics to manage in each book that allow for different bonuses: Things like your Terror level, which can provide free relics, bonuses on upcoming event locations, and also increases the rarity of skills that you’re offered when you acquire them through battle or otherwise. Managing map progress and planning your route is incredibly important, as taking risky battles usually provides high rewards.

But the big mechanic is the thing I’ve been saving for last.

You’re playing the Devil, and the Devil cheats.

When you start a book, you begin with a certain amount of Essence based on the difficulty you’re playing on. You, as the player, may stop time at any point either during battles or in the overworld to spend essence in order to cheat the system. During battles you can do things like adjust health and move status conditions between enemies and allies, on the overworld you can open demonic portals to skip your party past unfavorable locations and even replace certain locations with a random one that might be better suited or more useful.

I love this. I love being able to just actively cheat. You have to carefully manage your essence, though, since the game accounts for this in its difficulty. During the course of each book there are necessary Elite fights you need to complete to progress, and oftentimes if you don’t have enough essence, you’ll simply lose because you couldn’t manage the battle efficiently enough. 

Overall this game is a strong 9/10: It’s incredibly creative, colorful, and devilishly charming, with the only small annoyance being that the enemies do get repetitive after awhile. It’s always the same types of enemies no matter which book you’re progressing through, and although there are enough to make the first couple interesting, they eventually become (in some cases annoyingly) familiar faces (I’m looking at you, Polaris Sisters).