Think Like A Game Designer - Anthony Giovannetti — Crafting Slay the Spire, Nurturing Team Dynamics, Balancing Life and Launches, and Embracing the Magic of Mods (#59)

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

This episode is stand-alone, but if you’d like to hear more about the Mega Crit team behind Slay the Spire, check out last week’s episode!Anthony Giovannetti, the co-creator of "Slay the Spire" and a pioneer in digital deck-building games, joins us for a discussion following our episode with his design partner, Casey Yano. He delves into their early days of game development, emphasizing the importance of completing and learning from projects, regardless of the outcome. Anthony also reflects on balancing work and life during the intense launch of Slay the Spire and discusses the positive impact of embracing fan-made mods like Downfall, which significantly boosted the game's popularity and sales. I highly recommend listening to Anthony’s episode along with Casey’s to glean every bit of wisdom from this incredible design team. Having Anthony on the Think Like A Game Designer Podcast was an absolute blast—enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Anthony Giovannetti. Anthony is one of the co-creators of Slea the Spire and co-founders of Megacrit Studio. Now, if you listen to my last episode with Casey Yano, then you'll realize that he is the other co-creator and co-founder of Slate the Spire. And I thought it would be really fun to do a paired episode. So this episode does stand on its own. You do not need to listen to the other one for it to make sense. There's lots of great insights in here.

We talk about the strategy for monetizing and how the release cycle for Slay the Spire was assigned. We talk about burnout and the incredible amount of work that goes into making a game like this. We talked about growing a team and how you manage people beyond just you and a partner. We talk about the process of developing algorithmically generated games and some counterintuitive insights that they learned as they were developing and playtesting and relentlessly playtesting, the version of Slate the Spire that you maybe have played today. And the process of some of their earlier games that didn't go through such playtesting and the failures and lessons learned along the way. So there's a lot of great lessons in here. The episode stands on its own. I just thought it was really fun to dig in to both.

signs of this equation and kind of a rare opportunity to get the co-founders separately to take their different perspectives on the same design process and the same outcome. And then we really emphasize that you can hear how they emphasize different aspects of the process. So really fun, really interesting. It's a game that I realize now I've played easily over 400 hours of, probably over 500 hours of. So that was a very fun for me to get to dig back into the background. We talk even a little about some of my upcoming projects in the Soul Forge Fusion campaign mode that's inspired in part by Slith Aspire. So lots of fun stuff here. Really enjoyed the conversation with Anthony, and we even had a little bit of follow-up afterwards about some projects we might even collaborate on.

So it was definitely a great conversation. Hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Without any further ado, here is Anthony Fiovinetti. Hello and welcome. I am here with Anthony, Giovinetti. Anthony, thanks for taking the time to join me today. This is a really exciting conversation. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, so this is now going to be kind of an interesting part two of an episode in that we got Casey on recently.

And I really loved the conversation with him. And I wanted to both get your side of the story in terms of your working relationship, the creation of Slay the Spire, and your philosophy of game design in general. And I'm going to tell you all the nasty things he said about. you and see how you react. I'm kidding. But yeah, and so I told him that I had, you know, I played easily over 100 hours of Slay the Spire,

and it became a real passion of mine. And I was really excited about the game. And then since that, I time I checked. And it's actually over 400 hours on Steam that I have long. So very, very few games reached that level of addiction for me. So I just want to say thanks for the many hours of entertainment and excitement about moving the genre that I particularly love. forward. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Scott. You enjoyed it. So. So let's let's, you know, kind of start with the wayback

machine. I saw in some of your, your mind kind of research that you had, you know, you'd managed a game store while you were in college and you kind of got into tabletop gaming pretty early. Maybe you can tell me, walk me through a little bit of that and what that was like and what your journey was to get, to get to doing this. Sure. So I started playing magic at a really young age. I think this was back when Wizards of the Coast had, like, you know, they were actually in malls and stuff and they had physical locations. And I think my grandfather took me into a store, one of the wizards at the time, and I just bought some random cards because I thought they looked cool. And from there, I got super into magic. And then once while I was, and then, you know, I got into all kinds of, like, game store-related stuff, like Warhammer, Dungeons, all.

kind of stuff. But when I was in college and I was doing computer science degree, I actually had the opportunity to manage a game store while I was in college. And because I knew the owner of the game store and he was looking for somebody who could run it basically for him because he kind of wanted to be like an absentee business owner or he like wasn't there. So I basically did everything. And during that time period, I was playing, like, you know, all kinds of board games. I was always teaching board games to people. I was playing a lot of deck builder games, like Dominion, like Ascension, which I played a lot of. And, you know, I was kind of like super into that genre, picking up a lot, you know, at the time.

And then when we were in college, Casey and I, we were like, hey, why don't we make games? That sounds fun. So just as an amateur hobby thing, we made two simple, terrible games. We made a flash game. That was no good. And a little iPhone, Infinite Runner game. I don't know how much Casey told you about the games that we made in college. Not much detail at all.

Okay. So it's great. And I love, I love digging, you know, the games you made, the lessons you learned there. And then similarly, you know, I don't have, I think I've had a lot of, lot of store owners and store managers on the podcast. And I think that there's actually really great lessons that come from that kind of teaching games, direct interactions that I'm sure have applied to your design. So I'd love to get kind of insights from all those things.

Okay, cool. So we definitely learned a lot in making those two little amateur games. So the very first game we made, it was a shoot-em-up with, Icaruga mechanics. I don't know if you know what Icarugas, but it's a complicated shoot-em-up where you're like, there's two different shield colors

you can change between, and depending on your shield color, all projectiles of that color actually power you up instead of hurting you. So you're like, it's a bullet hell, you're switching between your shield type. We thought, okay, well, we'll make a flash game and we're going to take this core idea, except we're going to have

three colors of shields. And there's going to be RPG mechanics. So you would like level stuff up and there was like there was like skills and stuff. There was like a shop that you could buy upgrades and things. And it was super complex. And then, oh, and then also you could aim with the mouse to the direction that you could fire in. And usually in shoot them ups and in bullet holes like that, you're like just dodging. You don't really care we're aiming. So we had like, we had this just insane amount of complexity. And this was a flash game. And, and we poured like an entire summer.

into it and kind of released it without doing like really any playtesting at all. We were just like, yeah, you know, this is cool. We threw it out there. We did like one day of playtesting with some of our friends and that was it. And it was interesting because the reception was basically like, wow, this game is way too much. It's insanely complicated, like, you know, especially if you think about like people playing flash games. Like it just didn't make sense.

But then some of the reviews would be like, oh, my God, I love this game. like the best flash game ever. It's so deep. And at the time, we learned a lot about play testing and just how important it was. Like, we'd get no idea what we were doing. We were just kind of like figuring things out. And we

learned a lot about actually how important it is to like not just, you know, just staple constantly things together and build up complexity, but you know, the importance of elegance and like cutting things and actually trying to communicate to the player, like how to play in an elegant way without overloading them and just

losing like 90% of people. So this was our very first game. And we learned a lot from that. And then the second game that we worked on was just a simple infinite runner game on the iPhone. We had played Cannibal at the time, which was a infinite running flash game. And we liked it. And at the time, I want to say that there weren't that many games on the iPhone yet. I mean, this was, there were obviously games. I don't want to, but like, you know, the App Store was a lot younger back then. And coding on the iPhone just kind of sucked and I hated it. So we got that.

It wasn't very good. And then I was just like, yeah, okay, well, that was fun. We did like a little thing. and then we went and got our degrees and went off and did just like actual software development work. And it wasn't until meeting up after working in software for a while that we started to do games again, and that's when we started to work on Slate Spire. But so both of our first initial forays in game development was like super amateur, just kind of like figuring stuff out, just like, you know, there wasn't like,

we weren't like reading theory or anything. It was just like, hey, this sounds fun. This is cool. Let's just dive into them and see how it is and just like making, I think, mistake after mistake and just not knowing what we were doing. But we learned a lot from that. And it was, it was also very humbling because it's, you know, it's good to make something and then have it kind of suck.

And then you're like, oh, yeah, okay. I actually like see how this process works. And, you know, we learned about actually like finishing something, even just finishing something bad. Yeah, that's a huge accomplishment. A lot of people start things that don't ever make it actually to the, you know, even to the actual prototype, let alone something you release, right?

People, many, everybody comes to me with, oh, I got a great game idea. I'm like, okay, cool, that's worth very little. It's very little. Yeah, it's funny. I tell people nowadays that, because, you know, I have so many friends who are like, oh, I wanted to do game design or whatever.

And it's kind of like, I liken it to my parents' generation where it felt like everybody's dad had a book in them. They're like, oh, I got a great book idea in me. And they never started, of course. Or maybe they write a page and then that's it. And it's like the same thing with games for most people where it's that exact same avenue where it's like, I like the idea of having made a game, but actually doing it is like, nah. Right, right.

but um but you know we at we actually were like grounded out and uh you know it's it's interesting because i i don't think we had any like illusions about making any money at the time like like i said it was just something we're doing in college for fun but uh still it was like we were working on it like every day i would i would drive over to his house and i would stay over there till super late and like i killed an entire summer or summer in college on that And so just just like poured myself into it. I've killed summers in college on way stupider things. So, you know.

Yeah. So, so, yeah, so there's there's great lessons in there. Some of them are, you know, pretty straightforward and been echoed by, by most designers on the podcast of like, you know, look, don't, you know, the default assumption is that people want to make things more complex and add more stuff together. And probably that's not the right call. Often you want to be able to subtract things. You actually need to get playtest. feedback and iterate as quickly as possible. And I think the,

but I'm interested in like what is it that kind of, do you think drove you to do that, to have that level of work ethic to do the work, right? Because a lot, again, a lot of people say they love a game. I love games. They want to make a game design. And they kind of, maybe they start on the path. Maybe they have asset for a little bit. Maybe they program a little bit. You know, what do you think drove you and what helped you to actually get to completion

the way you did? Yeah, that's interesting. I kind of feel like the honest answer to this is going to be kind of maybe uninteresting or uncompelling, but it's like if I'm not like working on something that I feel like I can be productive on, I kind of get like antsy and I don't like it. Like I really like to just actually, something about my psychology is just if I'm like actually like getting into the weeds and getting into the work, it's just incredibly fulfilling.

And I actually like that significantly more than doing almost any other activity. So I'm just kind of lucky, I guess, which doesn't feel great, but it's just probably the part of me that likes to obsess over games, right? Like I was always super into getting, when I got into games, I would be very competitive with it. I'm familiar with this. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you were like a pro-magic player, right? Yeah. But like when I was in high school, I got really. really into Guild Wars, which is just an MMO.

And I was on one of the top guilds in the world on their top competitive team. And I would go home from a school and I would just play that religiously. And it's just like the obsessiveness, the desire to like tunnel and like go super deep. And honestly, like if like if you just don't have it, I don't know that there's a good like hack to fix that. It's just like it's just something I've kind of always had. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there, I think there are certain things for for most people. where if they find that the way I like to phrase it is something that's easy for you that's hard for other people, right? Something that like for you feels like this is not a problem. This doesn't even bother me. So for people, I think that the hack that I recommend is just like looking for that thing. Like it doesn't, you may not even notice it a lot of times because you're just, it's just easy for you.

You just, you like doing it. It's not a problem. But when you start to notice other people really, really complain about it or they look at you funny when you say that you love this. That's a great sign that this is something because you have to find the thing. that for whatever, for your psychology, your combination of traits is the thing you can just grind on. Because the grind is a key part of getting to wherever you're going to get to, whether it's game design or anything else, I think. That it doesn't feel like quite as much of grind for you as it does for other people that, like, is a superpower in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I think that's key. And calling it a grind, I think, is very useful because it really is, like, actually doing like the, that even just that, last 10% is just, it's just so much. The last 10% takes 90% of the time, right? Yeah. And then like, this is a classic thing. But it's so true. It's just, it's just a tough. Yeah, well, we'll get into, maybe we'll get into some of the stuff that I'm, I can be a little bit more open about the thing I'm in the last 10% on right now than really think you are. But, but, it's, it'll be fun discussions. So I don't want to lose the thread of the other thing I asked, which is about your, yeah, the board game and running a game store and things you learn from trying to teach games to people because I think this is so important.

And I think it comes through in the ethos of your, of Slay the Spire as the only game years I played, but this, this like real paying attention to like how you learn the material and what, how information is presented to you. And so I feel like there's going to be some lessons here. So is there anything that comes to mind or a story that comes to mind in terms of like where you realize, you know, certain types of games work or don't or what makes them work or don't? I don't know if there's like a specific story, but it was, it was,

it was incredibly useful just because I would have to explain games to people over and over and over again. And then like in doing so, you like pick up little things. You're like, okay, well, I can leave this out. This is too much. Like, you know, we'll start here. You kind of just start to like holistically build up a, like an internal model of how you should communicate things to people. And I think it was

good for just teaching me how to like model how much complexity people can handle at once. And so it's not like it was a specific, like, insight. Like, here's the sentence that describes how to do it so much as like it was a skill that I picked up and was like just forced to learn and get good at. And because if you don't, like, you don't want to be sit there and you're like just reading the rulebook to people and like nothing's happening. And at the end you like didn't even sell the game as a result or whatever.

or you like, you know, ran a super terrible demo. So it's just the big skill, though, like, kind of generalizing it is I think being able to just like model other people and model people, model people's like uncertainty and like see the inferential gaps. So like that's like the big insight. And especially as a game designer, right, when you throw people down in front of your game and you see them just like, obviously, you know, miss the thing that's super obvious to you, right? Basically, all that's happening there is there's a giant inferential gap between you, and you've got to figure out how to, like, cross that chasm.

And that's what we spent with Slay the Spire when we would go and we would do playtests. A lot of times we would just sit there and we would watch like a single moment where they miss something, and we would like write that down and circle it. And then we go back and then we would just spend tons of time figuring out, okay, well, how can we tweak the VFX to like, you know, just slightly communicate this more? Or what can we do to like, you know, slightly enhance this so we're not losing people? And so they don't have to turn back and like ask me a question. Because if, you know, whenever that happens, you failed.

Right, you failed. Yeah, that's great. So you would do, you would do in person testing and kind of sit silently behind them and right on your clipboard and note where they're messing up. Yeah, yeah. So we did a lot of all kinds of playtesting. That was one of them. In particular, what we would do, we try to make use of local indie events. Because there's a lot of Seattle indie indie game dev scene events.

And we would try to go to those. And we would show like earlier versions of our game to people. And that was incredibly useful to just get people out of our bubble, right? Like get people who have just huge range of game experiences. And then whenever we did that, that was an opportunity to do live testing and do a thing with the clipboards. We also did lots and lots of testing over Discord, although at the time we were using like,

I think Skype and Slack and stuff too. But, you know, but like- Same concept, yeah. Social channels, whatever private social channels. Yeah, and we were fortunate in this regard because I was really big in the netrunner scene. I was like friends with the world champion of that for multiple years. And I actually ran the biggest net runner site. So I was able to get all the good net runner players to come in and play our game early and provide a lot of good feedback.

Yeah, that's awesome. So, you know, then again, these are like, these are great repeatable steps that anybody can do, right? Going to conventions and game jams, finding communities that you already are a part of and connected to and finding people in those communities that you can do tests with. There's no fancy, you know, materials required. This is all either free software or just literally standing behind somebody. Right, these are just like super accessible tools. And it sounds like you've learned the lesson from your first game that's like, nope, we've got to do lots of playdressing iteration. Focusing on the first time user experience is the most important thing, like get people to the place where they can actually enjoy it.

And then, okay, obviously you've got to make a game that has like, you know, enough depth to keep them around. But like if they can't get past that first, you know, interaction, then the rest of your time is kind of wasted. Is that an accurate kind of summary? Yeah, I'd say that's an accurate summary. And then I would just want to emphasize that, like, it's kind of a, I want to say it's like the obvious advice you hear a lot. And it's like, yeah, you got to play test early and often. But I think it's even more than that. It's like you want to play test more than you think you need to.

Like whatever someone's intuition about how much you need to play test is even after hearing that feedback, it's like actually still insufficient. And you need to, you need to, at least my perspective is you need to play test until you're like absolutely sick of it and you hate it. And you're like, I've already seen this like 10,000 times. That was kind of my perspective is we need to test so much that actually we've just absolutely mind the insights that we can get or at least like all of the low-hanging fruit of it. Yeah, so let's stick into that a little bit because I think that the, you know, more than you need to is, I think almost certainly right for 99% of the audience or more. But let's get granular, right?

So I know from talking to Casey that you guys would do weekly build reviews where, you know, you guys would play through it yourselves and take the notes and one person would play and, you know, everybody would balancing notes that you would do these kinds of playtests with external parties. How often, how long, you know, how much did you do that or how do you know, if it's not necessarily, it doesn't have to be just the specifics of Whistlelight Inspire, but how do you know when enough is enough? Is it just you're sick of it? You can't handle it anymore. I can't look at one more goddamn playtest report.

I mean, okay. So honestly, part of why we launched into early access is we were just like, okay, like, you know, it had been enough that we're like, okay, we're ready for the next level, and we just can't even think about doing this anymore. Like, it had been two and a half years, and we had reached that level of saturation. But the other thing is we had, you know, we had a big amount of playtesters who were playing it continuously, like actually just wanting to play around their own. We didn't schedule things.

We just give them builds. They could play. And then we would, I've given a talk of GDC about this, but we would like collect metrics on it and for balancing purposes. But we were getting so much constant data from people that like if I would just wait a week, I mean, I would have, you know, we'd have our playtesters who had played countless games by then. So it really was just a constant amount. And then to kind of think about, is it good enough?

It was like, I have to, one, at the very least, I have to feel like holistically to me, my own impressions are that this feels right. When I go and I play the game, I can think, okay, this is feeling pretty good now, has it at least crossed that bar? And then is the feedback we're getting from people positive? Is there still stuff that we're getting where it's like,

okay, well, this is like a thing that we need to fix or not? Or is it all like we're getting to little minutia, like, okay, maybe we're getting to like pretty rare bugs, things like that, you know. We're getting to like more really subjective kind of balanced things where it's like maybe we get some people disagreeing about stuff. There's different

like, there's different levels, right? There's the kind of thing where you know, sometimes like a game will release a balance patch or something. And then it's like pretty obvious that something's broken and like the metal will like converge on that very quickly or something. That can be very different

than a game where a patch is released and actually, you know, it takes a while to kind of find the broken things. And there's like disagreement and things like that. There's kind of just you have to use your judgment on it. And this is where I think just luckily we had pretty good judgment, but there wasn't like a hard line in the sand. It's just you kind of got to be living and breathing it enough to where you can trust your judgment. hopefully you have good judgment because if you don't I don't know what a good way to fix that.

Well, yeah. Well, I mean, in my experience, you know, it's just it comes down to doing the reps, right? Like you're going to have, you know, when your judgment, your judgment is often wrong and bad when you start and then you watch players play and you or you teach players other games and you watch them with the different mindset, not just the player's mindset, but, you know, a designer's mindset of looking for those reactions, seeing where they drop off, seeing what things are happening. That's super helpful. And then on the kind of development game development balance side, that's a different set of skills that, yeah, you either are a good enough player and instincts to get there, or you've got to just rely on data from other people that are to help get you there, I think. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Yeah. You know, for me, it was like, and then maybe some of this is for you too. Like I came at this from a, you know, as a originally, you know, kind of pro player, like, you know, kind of very competitive gamer. So it came naturally to me to balance things and know where things were broken. But I actually ended up going way too far in the other direction where I made the first game I released under, it was a set I worked on for the versus system trading card game. It was so balanced that it was boring.

Right. It was just like nothing was, you know, like people don't realize that like balance does not mean everything is equal. Balance just means it's not just like one dominant thing you should do every time. Right. It's the you want people to have this variety of experience. And it's actually a key to what makes slay this. fire so engaging, right? Sometimes you just have these runs where everything's just working out and you get the right

combination of things. Just like, this is amazing. And then other times where you're struggling and that back and forth is part of the fun of it for any of these kinds of games. So I wanted to get into kind of the more of the launch. I heard some of the stories from Casey, but originally you approached him with the idea for the first light of the spire, right? I think you talk about this also,

but let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. So basically, at the time, I was working at a software job that wasn't too engaging. It was the kind of job where you do a lot of, like, you know, redidding and other things at the job. You know, it's like, there's a lot of idle time.

So I was like, you know, thinking about game design a lot. And I, at one point, for whatever reason, I was bored one day, I just start to like make a game. design document. I'm just, you know, could never, can never get the itch out of my system. So I had just been, I started noodling on this for a while. And then I just kept like slowly developing this document.

And then eventually when I met up with Casey, because actually while we were working in software, we didn't interact too much, very rarely. You know, we had kind of grown apart after college. But we met up again and we started hanging out again. and he was like, hey, I'm planning on leaving my job and doing games again. And I was like, that sounds actually really fun. I have an idea. You know, we can try it.

And he's like, oh, you know, this doesn't look too hard. We can. So, you know, this probably won't be too big of a game. And, yeah, and then so we just started with that because why not? I already had a design doc ready to go. And then Casey made the initial prototype. He did it super fast. I want to say it was within a week.

He had a product. I might be faster than that. He had like a super basic prototype. I just had some of the initial ideas in there. And then we took that to like a local indie event. And then we showed it to some people. And already they were like, oh, yeah, okay, I can see how this works. I, you know, this makes sense to me.

This is kind of cool. And so we had some initial promise. And we were like, okay, yeah, let's keep developing on it. And then it just kind of snowballed where we kept going, you know, as we put more time into it, we kept getting positive feedback. Yeah, yeah. So it's a great thing that, yeah, get to be able to rapidly prototype and move that ball forward.

I'm interested, you know, I know there was in part a, you know, you were sick of it and you ran out of time and you had the good data ready to launch, but you, the strategy for how to launch the game and the vision for it, you know, these kinds of games could easily have been, could have been built as a free-to-play model. There was clearly could have been expansions. There's like, you know, instead you kind of launched it. I forget if you lost it with one character or two characters.

We launched with two characters, just the Angline and the Silent. And then the plan, the plan, oh, so actually, yeah, I can't talk about this. Part of what inspired how we launched an early access and everything was dead cells. We had been watching how Dead Cells was doing their early access. And we thought, wow, this model looks really. good. It's a great way to keep developing the game, improving it. Pretty sure our game would do great

in this kind of a model. This looks really player-friendly, actually. And it seemed like the kind of constant updates was actually just a really good boon for keeping players engaged with the game. And so that was

part of why we were like, okay, this seems like the model for us. And then we model a lot. And so this is basically not just like having a kind of fixed purchase price for the upfront for the game and having a pre-planned roadmap where you're like every week or two, you're putting up new content and engaging or, you know, regularly adding new things that people can engage with, right? That's the gist of it. Yeah. And although because we're insane during early access, we did weekly updates the entire time, which was, which was nutty. But which I was only, we were only able to do because we had no life during.

that time. But yeah, and then part of, honestly, the truth is that like a free to play model never was even on the table. Mainly just because I don't like free to play. So, yeah, you know, just as a player, I don't like free to play. So I was just more interested in something that. And also, to be honest, I didn't think that Sletz Power was going to blow up to the level that it did.

Right. Like to do free to play and actually monetize it, you have. to have a lot of players. Our thinking at the time was like, I think if we had assumed the level of success that they inspired got, we would have had to be pretty delusional or at least very like, very cocky because I, you know, I was assuming like, okay, we were run like projected numbers and things.

And I remember being like, okay, this is how many copies I need to sell to just make up for leaving my software job. That would be really great if we could hit that, you know. And, and, and, and then I didn't expect Slay the Spire to become kind of the phenomenon that it has become. So it's, it's very, it was very weird, like, experiencing that happen as time went on. But we didn't, like, account for that in our planning. We were never like, oh, we're going to make, you know, we're going to, like, basically put the genre on Steam. So, yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, you never think that. I mean, honestly, like, I, yeah, same. It's just, you know, my first Ascension, when I released Ascension, it was like, I was making that me and my friends. I did not ever anticipate that it would become like this, what it became. And so it's a, you can't, you just can't know, right? Nobody, you can't. Exactly.

I made the kind of game I wanted to play. That was just my goal. I was like, it was more of an artistic kind of thing, I guess. Yeah, you know, just making the creative thing I want. It wasn't some crazy informed business decision. I'm sure that we could have monetized it way better, but. Yeah, whatever. Well, but so then, then let's, you know, let's talk through the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the back end of it, because I understand making those decisions up front.

And I think, first of all, making the thing that you actually want to play is just the best metric I found for, for success in general. Every time I've done that, it's succeeded beyond my expectations. And every time I've tried to make what I think the market wants or whatever, like, it's gotten terrible. So, um, but, um, you know, once you, you know, when I, I was on my back foot because I didn't expect the success that it had, but once ascension was a success, I was like, okay. well, I'm going to make more of that. I'm going to make expressions, and I've done it for 13 years now. And I've got to,

so what, what stopped you from going down that road? He's like, oh, well, sure, you can make more characters. You can make more,

you know, different types of encounters. Like, this is an infinite well that you've, you could have been, been mining. Um, it's true. And I mean,

it's interesting because we have actually had a lot of people be like, you know, oh my God, I would like, I want more content. so bad, like, please make more characters, you know, like begging us to do it. But it's kind of a complicated answer to this one, but honestly, just a big part of it is we were very burnt out. You know, at the end of, so we did two and a half years into before we launched in Early Access,

and we launched into the Access, and those were not 40-hour work weeks during those two and a half years. And then in Early Access, we were doing weekly updates, and those were not party hour of weeks either. And so at some point, you know, like the actual like physical and mental toll is just too much. And we just needed a break. I mean, that's the honest answer. We, we needed a break. And like creatively, we kind of just wanted to like take a step back, do some little like game jam level stuff, like just experiments, like work on something that wasn't Slave the Spire, right? Because, at least for me, I was just, like, feeling pretty dead and, like, done.

I totally get it. I totally get it. And, yeah, I definitely have had to. I like working on a bunch of different projects at the same time to help me if I get too burned out on one. I just shift gears and move to another one. But do you have different practices now that you've learned to not get to that level of burnout or you just don't work as many hours a week or is it just, eh, whatever happens,

happens. Yeah, I mean, so part of it is I just don't work that, like that way anymore. You know, I've kind of joked with someone before that, like, oh, I'm just like less hungry now. Like, you know, I'm fine working a 40-hour week instead of like an 80-plus hour week. This is, I'm fine with that. This is good. And maybe part of that is just me getting older. but you know, it was almost like you're just in this like frantic, almost manic pace and the kind of momentum just carries you forward. And that's how I felt about it. And now, like, but once I broke the momentum, you know, I was like, okay, I can just be comfortable and enjoy life while still, you know, still actually doing a lot of creative work. But I think just actually taking the time to enjoy myself and slow down actually helps.

to keep things more balanced anyway. Yeah, yeah. And I think that there's like there's, you know, different skills, different phases of life and where you are in your, you know, you know,

I think that this is an advantage of being young. I mean, even just like thinking back to the magic and card playing days, and I would just play all the damn time. I had sleep, I don't care, I sleep in the floor, somebody's hotel room to go to a convention.

I just, who cares? Like, doesn't matter, drive four hours to get to this magic event, play it for 12 hours and drive four hours back. Yeah, of course.

Obviously, I'm going to do that. Right? You know, just there's just a different thing. Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of like going to pre-releases and like doing stuff all day, all night. And then I would remember back back then, like, I'd go to Denny's after the pre-release with my friends and we'd draft and stuff. And it's like the idea of doing that now is just insane to me.

It's like I used to do land parties and I would just not sleep. And I would just play game. Now I'm like, nah, I need to sleep. All right. So, you know, it's just things have changed and that's just where I'm at. Yeah, and as you get older, you get a bigger, broader insight, your instincts get better, your ability to make creative leaps, I think gets better in some degree. And then there's, you know, but yeah, you don't have that same, you know, manic, uh,

level of drive and energy. So it's just, I've been trying to be very conscious of that. And it's also, I've made a point to hire really talented youngsters that are happy to have that drive to help me out. That is the other thing. You know, we've grown our team, you know, it was, we actually have like, 10-ish people now. So we're still small, but yeah, having having actual like, you know, full-time employees

is nice. Well, and so then, yeah, I'd love to hear about that transition some too, right? Because it was a big deal for me. So, you know, just to share my side of it, right? I started with just, you know, me working on my own or, you know, first working for other people, then working on my own and slowly having a small team and then transitioning from the, it's just you or you and a buddy working on something to, okay, no, we have employees. we have overhead, we have all the stuff that changes the equation a lot.

How do you think about that? How do you feel like you've managed it so far? And maybe I know you haven't launched a new thing yet, so you can't necessarily know for sure. But it's actually a great time to give these kinds of answers because it's easy when you're in retrospect and whether you succeed or not to tell a story. It's more fun to hear the story in the thick of it. Yeah, I can see how my prediction was in the future.

Yeah, it's actually something I've thought about a lot. lot, which is interesting because, like, just if you had asked younger Anthony, oh, do you think you're going to be spending a lot of time thinking about like hiring and like, you know, just managing people and all of that and how your processes are put in place? I would have been like, nah, man, like, what are you talking about? But, but I do spend a lot of time on that. And it, it's been an interesting transition overall. I would say, I've done it okay. I think we've been okay,

but not great, which of course makes sense because like managing people, managing a company, these are like orthogonal skills to game design. And, you know, you can do all the game design in the world,

but then you have to like go learn a whole new skill, which is like how to actually do all of that stuff. You know, and just like interfacing with everything, like all the tax stuff. And it just. Oh, yeah. Super fun.

Yeah, yeah, like looking at how do your health care and like different states for different people. So, so, you know, just there's, it's a whole different process. And luckily for, and also just hiring is incredibly difficult. You know, I don't think anyone has really figured out how to do hiring well. Like interviewing is very, very difficult. It's like very hit or miss, very easy to mess up, I think. and it's the kind of thing where just like with game design, I feel like we slowly get better.

We sometimes make mistakes. We learn lessons. We slowly move forward. And I've been building these skills. But it's the one unfortunate thing is it does like, it takes away from the amount of time you can like just do game design or just do like the fun stuff because it's not fun. It's not like glamorous.

It's just kind of the nitty gritty that you just have to practically do. Yeah. Yeah. The bigger team gets, the less time you get to spend doing the thing that you started loving doing, right? It's just a reality. And so I've lived that for sure. And it's actually, you actually end up on the other side where you have to have to actively protect your design time and your work time. That, you know, because it can easily get consumed by just that sort of management and logistics and everything that comes from it.

So, yeah, it's a, if you told me you were getting it perfect, I would, I would call you a liar. Yeah, no, no, definitely not. I think right now I'm happy with things are at, but it's been a process to get here. And we'll see how it actually goes when we release her game. Yeah, it's been full of lessons. We'll say that. Yeah, yeah.

Is there any particular lessons that come to mind or amusing shifts that you would want to share in terms of, oh, wow, I got to really actually think about this this way now, that might be helpful to somebody in our audience. That's a good question. So I don't know. I would say, I don't know if there's any particular thing. It's mainly just like, man, hiring is so hard.

And like, if I could have done it again, I would have almost, I think a thing that I should have done done would have been to actually just spend some time like doing more research, like talking to more people, kind of have gone through the things that I've had to deal now and like learn some lessons so that I wouldn't have to, or so it's that maybe I could have just started in a better spot. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's, it's been good that we went slow at least. I think it would have been, it could have been disastrous if we, like, just ran head

first and anything and we like scale right up to 50 people. And then, like, ended up in a huge amount of, like, technical debt or something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you're, and you're going to, you're going to hit a new crossroads, too, if you go above, like, I found in my experience, like, going above, like, 10 to 12, like, with, with anyone like 8 to 12 range, you could, you pretty much can know what everybody's doing. You could kind of manage, like, person to person.

But once you start getting above that, you really can't. And like your kind of metrics and systems management have to get better. Like, it's, you may already be there or in that process, but that's what I found. I hit a wall the first time I kind of crossed that threshold. I wasn't ready and made a lot of mistakes. So going slow is very valuable. In fact, that's actually, because that's actually where, you know, right where we are. And I think Casey and I have decided that we need to, we're like, okay, we're good for now.

Because I can already see that that's like, we're on like the edge of that. Yep. And what's interesting is just how much now I ask people, or like I become interested or ask people who have like, if I find someone and they're like, oh, I have a bunch of experience hiring people. I'm always like, oh, well, you know, hey, like, do you have anything interesting to tell me? But I still consider myself a new at this.

And I'm just like trying to assemble the heuristics in my head to make it work. Yeah. Yeah, I find interviewing to be very minimal value in general. Like, it's just a very tough thing to do right. And I don't know how I'm going to be with somebody till I start working with them. So usually if I, if it's at all possible, I try to like get a three month contract with somebody or do some work with before I like hire them full time because that tells you very quickly, are they good at their job? Are they good to work with? Are they do the things? Because anybody can sound really good for like an hour. You know, like an interview. Like people can people can pull that off pretty. sure. And also, many talented people don't sound good for now, right? They don't do well in interviews. And so there's a, there's a, you know, whenever possible, it's not always the case, but whenever possible, I try to just be like, okay, pass the minimal kind of smell tests and then let's just try working together and see how it goes. And then we learn a lot. It's always why part of why I advise other people to like, you know, you can get, you know, work for free, work for cheap, do internships, get experience, get interactions with people because you'll opportunity to show up from that like

all the time. And you learn a ton when you're on the other. the side of the equation. So, um, yeah, I think that sounds really good. I, I know people who do that and I make sense to me. All right. Let's, uh, let's shift back into game design, uh, and fun chats here because they, um, uh, you know, some of our audiences may be interested in this phase of hiring, but, uh, it's a,

narrow, a narrower group. I'm, I'm always interested in this stuff. Cause it's, you know, it's just, the creative process is not just about an individual being creative or you know, you and a buddy work together. It's really like, you know, you want to create things at scale. it requires you to be able to enroll and work with other people. And the more you can do there, the more creative opportunities are open to you. And so it's a worthwhile thing.

But, you know, designing and balancing Slay the Spire. It's just was a fascinating. So it's just you did a really phenomenal job with it. And, you know, again, I see a million of these games and I've seen a million knockoffs, you know, since you guys kind of got this genre ball rolling that very few execute at the same tier. Most are terrible, but that's the case. So how did you think about, you know, building, you know, an experience like this where it's this, you know, finite run and the process for creating the card pool and the process

for kind of creating the sort of drop rates and strategies? Like what, what, walk me through that, you know, I know a lot of iteration and testing went through, but walk me through that process a little bit and I'd love to dig deeper there. Sure. So I think, so starting at like a, a hundred. high level. Part of what I think the core design

of Slate Aspire is, is like risk versus reward. And the, the basic idea behind the game is just, we want to have it where you're constantly presented opportunities where you can push your luck. And if you

push your luck and it goes well, you can get stronger and try to like, you know, get extra synergies, build snowballs. And then we, we, we give the availability to the player to totally pop off, get that disgusted, broken feeling where everything's going good. And if we can get things right, our goal is that those are hard to get to and rare,

you know, less rare for better players, and they're rare but achievable. And like it's that risk reward and pushing your luck that we kind of like wanted to bake into everything. So my goal was to make it so that there would be different layers of decisions that you could make. And those would work together so that you could constantly be making like super meaningful, interesting decisions pushing you in a direction. And then ideally the big thing is that you wouldn't just like always pick the strictly best thing for all scenarios.

But a guiding principle was that we want things to be good. sometimes, not good other times, and that it would be very context-dependent. Because I think card games work best if the space of deck-building decisions is such that you at least have to think about the decisions you're making, and it's not just, okay, this is always correct, this is always the obvious thing. And those were kind of guiding high-level principles behind stuff. As we started to dig into it, other things came about.

We kind of had strong opinions on presenting information to the player and being clear about randomness. So, for example, in our, generally, like in our events, will tell you the outcome of a choice. That kind of came about because I've played a lot of games where you get to something like that event screen and Slay the Spire. And it's like, well, here's some lore and here's some lore, make a choice.

And I hate those. I've always hated that as a player because I either do one of two things. I either just go like, okay, random, whatever, or I go and I wiki it because I'm that kind of person. And I hate having to do that. So a lot of things were kind of influenced like that. Like, what are things that I hate as a player? And then how can I fix it? And then

And then it was all based around kind of the risk reward It was like the driving vision. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And of course, having the decisions be contextually interesting. There's a challenge that comes up, you know, with deck building games in general, right? That the value of added card to your deck diminishes over time,

in fact, and often adding a card your deck is negative in many cases. how did you think about that in terms of the sort of pacing and strategy around Slayness? I know that instead of a card choice, you can take a coin reward instead so you can opt out. Most players, that's not fun, right? Most players don't want to do that, even though it may be correct. How did you think about that challenge? Because it's a subtle one. A lot of players don't even see.

Well, yeah, we don't even give you a coin. If you skip it. Yeah, fair enough. Something some other games have done. They've added, like, a coin. We have a relic that you can get. stuff on skip. Oh yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so it's interesting because that is like one of the big unintuitive things is people having to learn that actually skipping a card here is good. And I mean, honestly, I was just like, it's something that people will learn or they won't

and it's okay. Right. And the big thing is that overall, the length of the run is such that you can by kind of the end of Act

2, a lot of people's decks are kind of done at that point. Yeah. Like a lot of times you're going to Act 3, maybe I mean, you're not like fully done, but you're like most of the way there. Your deck has like a shape, a texture.

You kind of like know whatever else you're doing. It's not too many things you're looking for at that point. And because we were when we were like figuring out the game, length. We kind of like noticed this happening and three acts seemed like the right way to do it anyway. So we also had kind of a time we were looking at. So like we wanted the runs to be under an hour ideally because rogue likes I think work best if you have a quick iteration loop.

But in terms of like the knowing when to skip and stuff, we just assume that by default, most players are not going to like pick that up at first. take a while, that's going to be something you learn. As you play more, it becomes more obvious. Like, once you start to finish your deck, you're going to hit these times where you're like, you know, I don't want to eat these. Players just kind of like pick that up. And we don't need to do too much to encourage it, actually.

It's like a pretty emergent behavior that players can kind of get. It's not, it's not like obvious. But if they don't pick that up, it's actually not the end of the world. Like they will actually probably be okay. They can still get pretty far. You know, and they're not going to be the best players, but they can probably still actually win runs.

And so we actually have like a lot of leeway. And then we can, you know, we can do things like we can have that relic that rewards you for skipping cards and things like that that can kind of give you little nudges into things that you learn. In general, I'm actually totally okay with letting players learn like kind of higher level

strats like that. and not just like immediately knowing it right out the gate. I think that's fine. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, it's the kinds of things where you don't. So, you know,

we had the same problem with Ascension, right? Like banish cards exist. High level players gravitate to them and realize that they're, they're potentially some of the most powerful things. They love them. New players hate them. In fact,

they don't even like, why would I ever want to get rid of cards? That's ridiculous. They don't want to get rid of their starting cards, right? Like they just don't, they don't get it. And so we had to,

we did shift the balance of the game such that those players don't just get rolled over, right? Like we had to make the, you know, so it wasn't, you don't have that same problem in a sense. It's just a matter of like what's your starting difficulty level, which I'd heard a story from Casey that started out way higher than it. Oh, yeah, yeah. The game, yeah, the game in our internal beta was incredibly hard compared to what we launched. Right. So, yeah.

Right. So you want to be able to feel like they're making that, you know, they can make progress and do well even without that knowledge, that secret knowledge or whatever. that they can learn. And I think that that makes sense. So people, if players don't get something that's like critical to gameplay, they don't understand like what is happening, then it's a real problem.

If they don't understand some high level version of strategy and don't optimize that it's not a problem until, you know, they learn that it's a problem, in which case it's no longer a problem because they've learned it. Exactly. And quite frankly, like most people can get through their first run of,

like, or actually their first many runs of, say, the spire and not need to know that they need skip cards. Yeah. So it's fine. Were there other interesting design choices or shifts that were on the cutting room floor here or the things that were pretty big or non-intuitive changes that ended up making the game better that come to mind? The biggest thing that we've talked, I've mentioned to other people, is the intent system was something that wasn't in the original design doc, but we added did Casey already talk to you about that? No, he didn't talk about it.

Okay, so originally, I think the intent system is like a huge part of what makes this latest firework and what makes this engaging. But actually wasn't in the initial design doc. We didn't have it for quite a while. Originally, it was just like your enemy would just do their next move. And it was like you're in a final fantasy fight or something. So you didn't know what they were going to do. And then what we found is that people kept saying like, oh, man, this feels like really random.

you'd like block when the enemy wasn't going to attack and you'd waste your block cards. You know, people couldn't fully make meaningful choices as a result. So we were like, okay, well, this seems really bad. Maybe we should do something about this. And then we tested out like a very early version of the intent system where we would, we had up in the top bar, we had a giant like UX element. And it would say the enemy's next move, there was like a name and then like it would just like say what they were going to do.

And we tried that out. And so one, it was not good. Like it was a mess. But two, it was still better than what was there before. We were like, huh, okay, well, this is kind of interesting. And then we like iterated on it until we got down to the symbols because, you know, symbols are great. They can be a lot of information very easy.

And like as we kept going just directionally in the right way, we were like, man, this is actually amazing. Like now players can think way more about their turns. We lowered randomness and increased strategic complexity a lot. Like this is great. So it was like this huge thing that we kind of like stumbled our way into just because we were like just listening to the players. And we were like, how can we solve this randomness thing? We already have so much randomness in this game.

We don't need randomness here. Because randomness is just a tool and we had plenty of it. Right. Yeah. finding that balance where you the randomness isn't like what cards do you get presented with but the strategy is you being able

to make good decisions with the cards you have at any given moment. Yeah, exactly. Great. I love it. Okay, so let's shift then to the next generation here. So I think that we build on the games of the past.

You mentioned you obviously took the deck building genre and now added in the Rogelite genre and brought those together. I think that there's I know I know your current project is kind of still top secret, but do you have a sense of, I don't know what you're able to talk about in terms of like, what's motivating you to kind of move into this next space?

What is it you're driving at? Or is there anything you can say in that what's changed or what's driving you to this next project? Oh, man. I can't answer is okay. We don't, we don't have to do it. All right. Well, then I'll go.

Yeah, that's sorry. No, it's totally fine. What I'll talk about is my project then, because my project is partially inspired by your project. So, you know, so I've been working on SoulForge Fusion with Richard Garfield now for, well, we worked in the original version of SoulForge over 10 years ago, which is a kind of card game where TCG, where digital TG, where your cards level up as you play them.

We reintroduced it as, okay, great. So SoulForge Fusion, we reintroduced recently as an algorithmically generated deck game. So there's two, instead of fully customizing your deck, We give you an algorithmically generated deck and you shuffle any two decks together to play. Like KeyForge? Like KeyForge, but you can customize by shuffling your two decks together. So KeyForge, you have a fixed deck, right?

You can't do anything with it. And so we're building a, every deck also comes with the QR code and can be scanned to played into a digital version of the game, which is not out yet. But we will be coming to early access on Steam soon, TM. And one of the things I wanted to do was make there be a version of the game. It's not that the digital version of the game is not just like the tabletop, right? So you can play table like the game. You can play your physical deck in the digital version and you can play it against somebody else

just like you would. But I wanted to build a, what is a kind of rogue-like campaign mode around it. And so we've been building that. It's very much inspired by Slay of the Spire. And I had the experience, I said, 400 plus hours of the game where I'd, you know, after which I felt like I'd kind of explored pretty much all the space that was there for me. And I'd unlocked everything. And I felt like, okay, cool.

And I like your many other customers, like, I want more stuff. And so I'm building it, something that's more like that in the sense that we now, instead of having it, there's infinite number of possible commutations because each deck is one of a kind, and you pick your main characters and shuffle your two decks together. And throughout the campaign,

you're doing different upgrades to your deck. So it's not so much you're acquiring new cards, but you're modifying the cards that already exist. And so you're able to create a custom, you know, variations and get the deck building, experience. And again, I brought up the issue about the challenge of adding cards to your deck, because this is the way I've tried to solve it. You're not adding cards to your deck. You're just adding new powers, new improvements, new relics in, insulated, inspired turns.

So it's always an upgrade as you go. And then, of course, the bosses and enemies get harder. So I'm talking about it because of, you know, I said, you guys were in inspiration for it. What are your thoughts on that kind of approach or how, what things come to mind in terms of maybe ideas or potential pitfalls of the way that I'm approaching this new genre that builds on what you've built. Okay, I mean, it sounds very interesting. It sounds like a game I would like to play. I can arrange for that. Actually, actually, I still have Keyforge decks. Actually, I should play a fair bit of it.

And I was hoping somebody did something with the Key Forge unique deck mechanic in a digital space because digital just seems like it makes more sense. Yeah. But it's interesting. So, I mean, I don't know, this is like totally shooting from the hip. I guess a potential thing could be like if the player is always guaranteed getting stronger at the end of every fight. Do you have problems with scaling like the enemies to the player over the course of an entire run? But I could see ways of working around that.

It's not like terminal. And then I guess. the other thing would just be like, how interesting are you going to make the upgrades to cards be? But again, this is like just content. Yeah.

But, but like how much like variety and design space can you do in the various upgrades? So I'm excited to see what it is. But that's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to, I'm happy to share it with you. And of course, you know,

there'll be lots of more details coming for the audience. But, you know, we have, we have some alpha players now. And we have some Kickstarter backers who are going to get access shortly. And then eventually we'll move into early access where everybody can see the game. But I like to sort of, whatever, I love talking about the sort of stuff. And obviously, conversations with you, it felt appropriate. Because there's the variety of encounters and upgrades, right?

There's the degrees which the game is a very numbers-centric kind of game. You play the original Soul Forge, so you kind of know the basics of it. So it's easy to just give numbers increases, but they're not that interesting. And so you want to give either new powers and things that change the way the game is played, obviously the hardest things to build, but also the most fun for the players.

And one of the things that I definitely have been wrestling with is sort of the number of variety of encounter types that need to be there, right? So you guys ended up with, I think from what I heard from Casey, you started with a lot of different varieties of encounter types. You ended up with, you know, what basically four, or five regular regular

encounters battles, boss battles, events, rest and merchants. The shops. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, where do you feel, you know, obviously you kind of land in a specific place there. Do you think that there's a, there's something that you wish was in there that you didn't have that

would be a cool spot that you're like, ah, this is a tough one to cut, but boy, would it be sweet? Yeah. I mean, so I think the most obvious things would be like different ways of modifying your decks, like your deck that are like more evergreen.

So for example, like you can imagine a card removal kind of node where you would, instead of using the shop as your primary card removal source, you could have like a node on the map and you go there and you get to remove a card. That would be like the kind of thing we were thinking about. you're like maybe you go to a note on the map and you get like a transform or something kind of the things that we already have as like evergreen verbs in the game but that could be doled out still at some regularish cadence the problem that we we would run into because this is actually something um so on slay the spire we have a map of laying out all of our nodes and in like the middleish there's a row of treasure and the reason why those treasures are all together on the same row. We actually did not start that way. They used to be like randomly generated on the map like other nodes,

but then map mapping like your character up and the path you would take was trivial. What you would do is you would go, I can get the most treasures, the most relics by taking this map and through this route. And you would just always take that route. And so the challenge is if you have like too many like rare things and those rare things are particularly good, it can make the whole like, map seeking part of the game kind of trivial and that was what we've found. Yeah. Yeah. So then this this ties into the separate question of how much fun and how important

is the map seeking part. So I'm somewhat inclined to obfuscate it in our game. And just like you know what your next choice is. You don't necessarily know what's ahead. You know where the boss is, but at some point you're going to end up there. But you don't necessarily map the entire journey. How do you feel about that relative to the kind of some more uncertainty in that path? I think it's a reasonable approach. I think, okay, so Slate the Spire is better for the map, I think, but in particular because of the amount of rooms that you see,

the map helps a lot. If you have less rooms, I think it's better to not require a map. The less rooms that you see, the more value a map adds is less. So, like, have you played Monster Train? Yeah. Okay. So like Monster Train, their solution is you just pick like left or right or up or down, I forget, whatever.

You pick one of two paths every single time. So they still have like a choice you make and you're just making a trade off every time. And you only see like 10 different nodes, I think. I'll send down there's like 10 battles or so. And that's like a pretty reasonable compromise, I think. But when you're seeing like all of the, I don't think it would work as well at the scale

of the amount of fights you have inside the spire. So that's like how I think about it. Now, I could be wrong about that too, but that's like how I think about it. It's like the less choices you have, you can kind of condense and get rid of some of that like complexity. Because like if you're only having like five encounters or whatever in an entire run, a big map doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's kind of where we're landing. Like a game, a single game of Soul Forge takes longer, you know, by a good chunk than a single game of, you know,

single encounter and slay the spire. So we have less total to keep us within that, you know, 60 to 90 minutes as a kind of high end of what I want to run to go for. So that tracks with how we're thinking about it. Yeah, it's a super fun design process. And then the other,

I guess, interesting question is like, you know, how many, you know, what level of variety of encounters? I actually don't know what, what you guys started with or how you,

how you paste adding them in terms of like, the number of different possible events, possible, number of possible encounters. And then did you, you know, I assume you probabilistically weighted them so that some were much more rare than others, but I don't know that for sure. How did you think about those things?

Yeah, so we probably have more than is needed, to be honest. Although, I don't know, I think we're on the high end. We'll get like other similar games. But like in a given act, you'll have like 10-ish different enemy encounters and then three elites and then the three-bombales. and then the three bosses and then like 10-ish events for that act and then act agnostic events.

But we just kind of like some of these numbers. I think I was like, yeah, three elites sounds about right. Like that's a lot of content. And then we just kind of did it. Honestly, it was never like we were like super complex in how we settled on the numbers that we settled on. I really like threes, obviously. So we have three boss elites and three. elites. But, and then, yes, we do have waiting. There's not a lot. So, like, the elites are all

weighted the same. The bosses are all weighted the same. But some, uh, enemy fights are weighted differently. And, like, events are weighted differently, too. Yeah. And I think that's all pretty reasonable. But, but we have, like, a lot of, of content. But, um, I don't know anything about your game yet. But, um, depending on the, like, how the enemies look like if they're an entire another's, you know, deck equivalent than they can be less, then you can have less variety or more. It just depends.

I haven't thought about it. But I think the numbers we settled on were pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it. I think having like more than that per act would have been too much because the players wouldn't be able to like reason about things as well.

It's kind of nice that there's like three elites you have to worry about in an act. So you can be like, okay, I'm in act one. Can I beat the gremlin knob? And you can think about the greblin knob specifically as like a problem for you to deal with. And I think that's like a useful thing to have. If we had like 10 different elites or like 20 different elites, players wouldn't be able to do that.

They'd be like, well, I hope I don't hit the one elite that wrecks me. Like, that would suck. And then you just kind of like do your thing. But instead by having a B3, you can be like, okay, there's this set problem. How can I fix this problem? And then like look for solutions when you're drafting. Right, yeah, yeah, I like that a lot. And I mean, I noticed like, you know, kind of the elites and the challenges you sort of

mentioned it this way, but I think it's worth highlighting that, you know, they are designed to present specific problems or to thwart specific strategies so that the players have things to fear or play around or, you know, that that becomes like if I know the narrow approach I need to take here, I could fix it, but I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to get. But I, you know, I think that creates a really great tension. Okay, well, we'll defer further discussion on my game until I get you a copy to play. But I just thought it was a fun.

And I like doing this stuff out in the open, right? Because I don't know all the answers. You don't know all the answers. We've got a lot of experience with stuff. We have instincts around it. I think it's just kind of, I like to share this stuff with the audience. They can see what that process is like and as it's developing. And who knows, it may change quite a bit by the time we actually release it.

That's cool. So the other thing I'm interested in is, You know, you, we talked earlier about not making a Slay the Spire expansion and, you know, being burned out and wanted to move to the next thing. But you, you guys have kind of authorized there's a, there is a slay the spire expansion that was made by the fan community, the, I think called Downfall. And I'm curious what that has been like for you and how that came about. And it's really cool to see fans making mods for your game. But it's like a, it's kind of a weird thing. I don't know if I would be like, okay with that.

It's just a weird, it's a weird thing to be like, somebody else is going to put this out there. And you know, did you like have approvals on it? Did you like kind of feedback on it? How did that work? So it was super interesting actually. So basically we've always been super pro modding. Been like, we've done everything we could to encourage modders.

Because we're like, well, I think it's only going to help us. And I think it has basically only helped us. It's like created lots of community engagement. You get lots of like free media and like YouTubers and streamers engaging with all those mods and like, oh, look at this cool new mod to play. And then like it, you know, it kind of has these positive feedback loops. And then because of that, you know, we had a, we had like a thriving part of our discord for moders. And they would, they would like meet up in there and work on like big community like your long mod events and stuff. And then they would just collaborate with each other.

And they started working on downfall. And I don't, I'm not 100% sure on this, but it was either they reached out to Valve or Valve reached out to us. And they were like, hey, what do you think about this? And we said, sure, why not? So, because they have to, they have to unslaid this buyer to get downfall. And we were like, you know what, this is okay. We can, we can do with this. This will just be like a value add to our players.

were very big on like supporting the community and downfall has only increased sales. It was like a fail bump for free. I didn't do any work. Like yeah, you didn't you didn't like give them feedback on the game. You didn't dev it. You didn't do it.

You just like whatever. Fans made this. They want to release it for free. That's cool. I was like this is cool. Yeah. And then I, the most I did is I think I streamed on Twitch me playing through it.

So, um, which is like a fun thing. occasionally, like, we'll go on Twitch and maybe I'll, like, stream some mods or something. But, um, but yeah, like, I did basically no work on this at all. Um, and it's just kind of cool, uh, from my perspective, I'm like totally cool with it, but I can totally understand being one to be like, no, you know, this is like RIP. Like, this is like very important. But, uh, again, it, it did give us sales. So like, yeah, it's, it's wonderful. I mean, you know, it's those kinds of things was like,

there's these interesting. I mean, it's, yeah, It is, as you said, just a value add to your, to your customer and to the players that are, and it's such a, how cool must it be to just, like, have fans that care so much and love this so much as they're willing to put in. I mean, because I played it. It's like, you know, it's a lot of work that went into this thing. It's like pretty amazing. Yeah, the word, the word I was used to describe kind of like the position that we ended up in is

surreal because it's just like, it's, it's like incredibly strange to just be like, oh, yeah, I just worked on this thing. and now it like has taken on this huge like life of its own it's become an entire like big like you know like IP and community and like everyone knows about it and I it's just it's just very bizarre but yeah it's cool so I am uh yeah I I don't know it is surreal that is the best word for it so yeah no it's it's it's awesome I mean it's it's it's a great it's a great success story It's great to be able to recognize it. And that's why I like to dig into the backgrounds and the hard work that gets you to hear.

And even the sort of interesting counterintuitive decisions like this one, right? Most game companies would not allow this sort of thing to happen. And so the fact that it has worked out for you. I mean, I remember we could take us back into the wayback machine now because like I, you know, when I released Ascension and then we were going to make a app for it. And we're going to sell the app for $4.99. I was terrified because I sell the base game for $39.99. Who the hell's ever going to buy the game when they could buy it for $499?

That's crazy. And then we release the app. And of course, like sales of the physical game shoot up. And then we eventually make the app free because it's just better that way. And, you know, it's like so there's a lot of interesting counterintuitive truths that end up. You know, you just get your game out there. You have a great game. Get it in people's hands and it's going to work out.

Yeah. I will say it is amazing to me the number of people that tell me, oh, I have bought your game. game like three or four times across like every different platform. And it's just like, oh my God, like that's crazy. Like I never do that with games. Yeah. No, I bought it. I bought it twice.

I did. I was like I had, I said I played the 400 plus hours on Steam. And then I was going on a trip somewhere and realized it was on, on iOS, whatever, download on my iPad and played on the flight. So you even got more than that number of hours for me. So it's no, it's great. It's just, it's really well done.

I have, I have even more crazy ideas, which I don't think I'm, going to share on the podcast, but I'll share with you after about things I would do with this genre going forward, which I think would be really cool. But this is one that I think is a, it's a big, it's a big project. But we'll chat about it offline. I'll tease the audience about it for now. Great, man. Well, we covered most of the things I wanted to make sure to cover.

Does anything else come to mind either as topic to discuss or things you want to point people to? I know your new project's still a secret, but we're, you know, where should people go or is there any other to find things about you or is there anything that would be cool to chat about before we run out of that time? Let's see. We have

megacrit.com. We're at megacred on Twitter. Recently we've been putting out like new merch and we recently did a board game Kickstarter that went well. Yeah. Awesome.

In all places we will post or we will when we make an announcement it will definitely be on Twitter and all of the socials and everything. I forgot about the tabletop game. So yeah, let's use a few minutes on that. So like talk to me about the process of making the tabletop game. Okay.

So for the tabletop game, to be clear, I am not the key designer. Basically, the story of how this came about is somebody reached out to us. This is Gary. He's the board game designer. And he like shipped me a physical prototype of the Slay of the Spire board game. So he said, hey, I haven't. working on this, you know, can we do this? And I played it with my friends and we had fun with it.

And so I talked with him and we worked it out together. And, you know, he is in charge of it. I provided feedback on it. Like downfall, I did a bunch of playtesting, gave him a bunch of feedback. I've been involved in the process. But he has been the one who has kind of been guiding and doing everything and ran the Kickstarter. It has been making it happen. So this is another interesting thing where it was like,

because I could have easily done it, you know, not easily, but you know what I mean. Like I have, it's in your wheelhouse. Yeah, but it was just like,

well, you know, I'm busy with other things. I feel like doing all of that would be a lot of work, like Kickstarter. I don't really want to run a Kickstarter. Yeah, there are a lot of work.

Yeah. And, but, you know, Gary made it happen. But it's kind of interesting because basically, if he had not taken the risk to like actually reach out and he, you know, he did a bunch of work beforehand.

He had something that he thought was like engaging and he actually mailed it to me. And, and I say, hey, I'm going to try this. Like, this is cool. Like I had a bunch of proxy bits, you know, that he had assembled together and made it work. But it was just his initiative made it happen, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. Well, that's a great. Yeah.

So I'm glad we uncovered that because it's just, I mean, I mean, just think about the lessons for the people that are listening out here, right? They've got their favorite games. They've got these ideas like somebody that's willing to put in the work and just reach out and make something like that happen. It's an incredible success start. Maybe I feel like I don't want to have every podcast be about Slate the Spire at this point. But maybe it's worth having him on in the future at some point to hear the story from his side. I just like followed the journey along for everything that touches this project.

I haven't done this format before. I just thought it was really interesting because I really enjoyed talking to Casey. and I knew from that I would enjoy talking to you. And it turns out I was right. So so far, so good. But I really do. I appreciate you taking the time and for contributing to the genre the way you have. And I'm eager to, well, one, I'll get you a copy of my game.

And when it's right, I'm looking forward to playing your next one. Awesome. Thanks. Pleasure. It's been fun. I've enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.

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