ENDGAME

In the initial stages of the project, our primary objective when designing cards was to draw the player into the murky and morally questionable world of The Wanderer. The player was confronted with a morally ambiguous scenario and then was able to approach it in a few different ways. This captured the vibe we were hoping for, but had a few shortcomings. Firstly, the outcome of the player’s choice was predictable (once the player had encountered the card a few times, he would know which option to select for the best outcome) and so replayability was limited. Secondly, it had no real link to character progression. Apart from some loot, the player wasn’t really gaining anything lasting from his choices in cards.

To resolve these issues we introduced player skills. We decided on Survival (his knowledge of surviving in the unforgiving world of The Wanderer), Physique (his brute strength and intimidation factor), Agility (how nimble and dexterous he is), or Influence (his persuasive powers). The game would measure the player’s progress in each of these skills, and all the card options would be linked to one of them as well. This helped replayability because the optimal option would change depending on which skills the player had been levelling. It also helped give the game a sense of progression, and to tie the cards in with combat better - because the option the player chose in a card would benefit one of his skills, and this in turn earnt the player perks, which give the player more options in combat.

The game became much more replayable when these changes were made. We did notice another problem though, and that was that the player could pick a pet skill and always focus on that. The more he levelled it up, the more it became an obvious choice for upcoming cards, and the more it was used in upcoming cards, the more it levelled up. It meant that the choices became less interesting as the game wore on, because the optimal choice was always to choose the skill you’d used most previously.

The way we resolved this was to give each skill-based option a difficulty rank - Easy, Medium or Hard. This means that even though you’ve focussed on one skill a lot previously, it might be Hard in the current card, but another skill might be Easy. So therefore you might be more inclined to consider the easy option. (The actual difficulty of each option in a card is calculated by taking into account the option difficulty level as well as the player’s skill level in that skill.)

Although we were considering the different options in our playthroughs after these changes, we hadn’t really thought about game balance too heavily before. Cards had some options that would grant the player a reward if he passed the skill test, but punish the player with combat if he failed it, and some options that would also give the player a reward on success, but not punish the player at all on failure. This was a big problem because it meant that the player could coast through the game without fear of negative repercussions if he simply knew which options to favour.

The solution to this was to carefully revise each card, making sure that all options were appropriately balanced for risk vs reward. Sometimes this required rethinking the card situation, reworking an option so that it made sense to have a negative on failure, or scrapping the card entirely in some cases.

It was a long and difficult process, but in the end we emerged with a set of cards that is intriguing, well connected to the rest of the game, and well balanced in terms of risk vs reward. We think the game’s come a long way, and we’re excited for people to play it when it’s released!

Posted by @ndkovac