An update and thoughts on roguelike design

As always, this update is live now and can be played for free in browser at https://isochronalgames.itch.io/timelinegame. Updates like this will be coming out every week, so please follow if you're interested in seeing future updates!

We've got the boss fight of the bots and a couple new cards this week!

-The Engineer is our first fight with enemy reuse. In the full version of the game, there would be multiple versions of every fight, mixing and matching enemies, so that's not something I want to avoid. It also implies that the Engineer made the Trons, which I like thematically.

-It also technically comes with two new enemies, although they may look familiar. Take out the originals to see these!

-The first new card Accelerate is based on the copy mechanic, although it doesn't actually use it. Its ramping power just means it synergizes very well with it.

-The second card New Tricks does use the copy mechanic directly, taking an enemy card and placing a copy directly in your draw pile and deck. That means you have it for the rest of the run. It also uses the new Purge keyword to remove itself from your deck, so this new card basically replaces it.

Here I'm using New Tricks to take a Lightning Shield from the Warbot and turn it against it. Turns out it's very good against the Buzzsaw attack!

I really like the idea of the New Tricks card, but it presents an interesting balance challenge. Every enemy card is now possibly also a player card. There are a couple ways I can see to deal with this, and probably some others I haven't. If you have any ideas, feel free to leave a comment below!

You could balance every enemy card as if it was a player card. However, this presents multiple other challenges. Enemies should get harder as you advance in the run - if they can't have more powerful cards that limits how you can scale that difficulty.

You could also take actions to limit the effects of the card. For example, if the copied card only gets added to your deck for that fight a single overpowered card can't steamroll the rest of the run. That's easy to implement and probably the safest option, but in my experience it tends to feel bad. When a card has limitations that imply a different, more interesting version of the card that isn't available, I always end up wishing I had that card instead.

The third option and the one I'm going with for now is just to not worry about it much. One of the beautiful things about the roguelike structure is that if a strategy or tool is overpowered, that's okay as long as you can't use it consistently. In this case you need to get a specific card, find an enemy with an overpowered card, and then line up New Tricks with that card. That's multiple chances and most likely a sacrifice of health. In my mind that is enough to make it an interesting choice and not too powerful, but I will have to see once we've entered the balancing phase!

In development - Next week we start the next and final set of enemies. Give me a follow to be alerted when it comes out!

Gifs in this were created using ScreenToGif - thank you ScreenToGif!