Hello,

I’ve picked up Slay the Spire this week. It’s crazy addictive!

I’ve been getting plenty of ideas and inspiration while playing it.

It helped me pinpoint things to improve in my own game even though the genres are quite different. (it’s a card game and mine is a platformer)

It’s also exciting to see what a small team (3 main devs) can accomplish with a few years of work.

Anyway, let’s get to this week’s ideas!

3 Gamedev Ideas

Don’t obfuscate information from the player if it’s just making it tedious for them.

Making them memorize or calculate something on their own when it could just be displayed is frustrating.

It could mean:

Showing how much damage they do after all buffs.
Updating the “unknown effect” description of next potions of the same color after they have discovered one of them.
Allowing them to see their deck while doing an operation such as removing or upgrading a card.

This does not apply if it’s part of the gameplay.

II.

In a roguelite, replayability is accomplished by having multiple layers of randomness.

Picking out random rooms from a pool is only the first layer.

Randomizing the treasure, the enemies and their level, the presence of traps or walls, the effects of items etc. is what create infinite possibilities and unique runs.

But do it within preset boundaries to avoid creating complete chaos.

Having too much unsupervised randomness can be as bad as having too little.

III.

If one player pinpoints an issue, it’s not always a big deal.

They have their own bias and it might not be the best thing for your game to change it.

If a lot of them pinpoint the same issue, it becomes your problem.

You have to put your emotions aside and fix it.

Until next week,

Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus