Now we need to clean up our dirty, dirty prototype code and take on the next big design problem: board size? Too big? Too complex. Follow us to find out 😊

So we're going with a traditional combat-draft-combat-draft design and a traditional hand system within combat. It might seem "safe" but we feel we can innovate *within* this structure and still do some cool stuff with the tactical RLDB space.

So we A/B tested:

🅰️ The reserves
🅱️ Traditional RLDB hand

Ultimately we realized that 🅱️ a traditional RLDB hand was more intuitive, gave us better card cycling, and simplified the design overall.

However, with a traditional combat-draft-combat-draft design, the reserve didn't make sense anymore. It was just kind of "there", bloating the game screen.

So, in the original design when one of your units died, it went back to a reserve queue. The reserve queue moved by one each round until it eventually ended up in your hand to play again.

Unit healing and reserves were a solution to: what the heck happens to your units when they die in a single, long combat run? We needed your units to stay around during the long run, but we needed a cost for their death.

We dove head-first into the pivot, but we realized that two parts of the game no longer made much sense with the new design: unit healing and the reserves queue.

So we pivoted to a more traditional combat-draft-combat-draft structure. It's tried and true, and we could still lean into what was thematically unique about our game: North African sci-fi and hit & and run tactics.

We originally had a design where your run was a single, long combat. Enemies and purchasable cards would stream in, and you would go on fighting until you beat the run boss or died.

We felt it was innovative, but it made designing enemies difficult, since the board state was infinitely complex.

Oh wow, this art is going so hard! Kudos.

Sorry for the radio silence recently. We're back and we can't wait to sure the latest design with you :) Follow us for more updates. (7/7)

Very achievable within a traditional combat-draft structure, it turns out. *And* we get to design each combat with distinct enemy group identities. So it seems like it was wise to walk away from the current design, and embrace a more tried-and-true framework. (6/7)

We were worried that this would take away a lot of our game's personality, but we realized that our game's identity is actually separate from the "one run as a match". We want short runs for our game, & we want board chaos, lots of board attrition, & hit & run tactics. (5/7)

While there may have been solutions to this that work within the current design, we weren't landing on anything we liked. So we decided to eat some humble pie and go with the traditional combat-draft-combat-draft phases. (4/7)

You want to give an enemy group synergies and a distinct personality. However, when the combat *is* the whole run, the enemy grid can have a massive number of states that an enemy will deploy into. So you design bland enemies to compensate. (3/7)

TLDR of the current/initial design: you deploy your cards on an autobattle grid. The game takes place as one long run; no discrete combats or drafting phases. This felt innovative to us, but it came at a high cost: Designing enemies was very difficult. (2/7)

Hey‪ @ggstudio.bsky.social, thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday!

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with control-style decks in our North African–inspired sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

Here’s one of our latest additions: 👇
bsky.app/profile/kole...