Think Like A Game Designer - Think Like a Game Designer: Ascension Tactics Inferno Special

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

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Hello and welcome. Today's episode is a little bit different. I don't have any guess. It's just me here talking about a project I'm super excited about, Ascension Tactics Inferno. Now, Ascension Tactics Inferno is coming to Kickstarter on February 21st. And so anybody that's excited about it and wants to help support, please follow the campaign, join back support. You can either just Google Ascension Tactics Inferno or go to Stoneblade.com and follow the links there to be a part of it. If you're listening to you're listening to, to this early enough. We have some special rewards for people that back on day one, but there's tons of great goodies and exclusives, including all of the exciting miniatures that can only be gotten through the Kickstarter campaign. But this is a podcast about game design. So I'm going to talk about Ascension Tactics Inferno and all the things I'm excited about, but I also want to make sure that there's a lot of great useful lessons for you. So even if this is not a project for you, please listen on and I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. So to give a little bit of backstory, I created the original Ascension deck building game way back in 2010.

Most listeners probably know that by now, but it was the first deck building game to ever use a always changing center row of cards. And over the years, we've created over 16 standalone expansions, collectors additions, promo packs, all kinds of goodies. And when it came time to make the original Ascension tactics back in a Kickstarter I did back in 2020, I really had to put a lot of thought into something that would be very exciting for me to work on. a new thing to bring to the genre, a new thing to bring to the world, but also staying true to the original Ascension brand, to the core of what the game is. And so I want to talk a little

bit about what it takes to make games that last, right? Ascension has been around now for 13 years. Ascension tactics finally hit retail last year, so anyone can find it anywhere in retail or online. You can also play it for free on tabletop simulator, if you'd like. But the core of being able to take people in this whole new direction where we were able to take the heart of a deck building game and the heart of a tactical miniatures game and combine them is a couple of things. First, you always have to know when you're trying to make a game that lasts, what is that simple, defined core of what you're doing? What is your game really about? In order to make expansions that give people something that's new, it also has to feel like the same game. And so

the heart of ascension has always been that ever-changing center row. The fact that I'm not sure what cards are going to be available and I have to react to what's available there, both for what cards I want, as well as the things I want to make sure that my opponent doesn't get. And so every single expansion for Ascension has always played with that tension. And so finding the hook that plays with it is a key part of what's going to make people excited about your new game. So Ascension tactics, now instead of having power that kills monsters, like a very simple mechanic in Ascension, now your power commands your champions and interacts with an entire tactical game.

One of the other key things that's really helpful when you're trying to make games at last is being able to use designs that are cut from your initial release. So this is something where I was able to do this, not just in Ascension Tactics, where I had a lot to teach people, right? If you know how to play a deck-building game,

it's very fast to learn Ascension Tactics, but if you've never played a deck-building game or you've never played a tactical miniatures game, then there's quite a bit to take on. And so I had to cut a ton of the mechanics I was very excited about and move them out of that project. Now, this could be very hard for designers to do. You have all the things that seem so cool,

and to have to cut them mercilessly to make your game flow is very difficult. So what I like to do is think of things not just as cut, but as delayed. And when you delay mechanics, then you can use them in really cool expansions, which is exactly what I get to do with Ascension tactics Inferno. Now that there's plenty of people out there who love Ascension tactics and are able to play it, We created this as a standalone game that can be played by itself and has all kinds of cool mechanics on its own, but also really builds on the world, the story and the mechanics of ascension tactics. So let's talk a little bit about and break those things down. First, one of the coolest things about this is being able to make great miniatures games.

My background, not only did I work on designing the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, but prior to that, I played games like Warhammer 40K and Hero Clicks and Memoir 44. I really enjoy that genre, even though I'm probably best known for card games. It's something I'm very excited about. And making cool miniatures is just sweet. If you search on our sites, we have, not only do we have some really cool, badass minis, over 50 of them that are coming in Ascension Tactics Inferno, but a lot of them are really hilarious and ridiculous, like a demon pug swarm and Beasel Pug, the Lord of Barkness.

This is another one of those keys to how do you make games that last is you have to make stuff that actually interests you, right? Things that you are excited to keep doing it, right? In order to keep making Ascension for decades, not just days, I want to keep making things that are exciting and fun. And these are some adorable, really entertaining minis, as long with badass dragons and giants and monsters and paladins and all that cool stuff. So building cool characters, exploring a world. We actually introduce an entire new terrain, entire new landscape, moving into the realm of Diofo, which is the sort of hellscape that the original villain of Ascension, Samel, comes from. and now the players get to move into this world and start interacting with it.

And we actually did something else that was really pretty exciting and something we'd never done, which is introduce a new faction into ascension. And that's the fallen faction. So what used to be just the monsters are now suddenly rising up and becoming their own faction. And you can play as that faction for the first time ever with starting champions, fallen heroes, fallen constructs. And so introducing a new faction to a game presents a ton of interesting design challenges. Each faction has to have its own unique feel and flavor. Each one has to mechanically be sound and play both within itself, as well as playing with other factions.

And so one of the key hooks to doing that is being able to use the new mechanics you introduce in a set and making sure that the new faction really gets to highlight those. Oftentimes you'll want to reserve some simple design space for new factions if you're planning to have them. Ascension has been around for a very long time, and most of the simple design space has been used up. So we really leaned into a lot of the cool new mechanics that are introduced in Ascension Tactics Inferno to help really make this new faction shine. So I'll talk about a few of those here. One of the ones I love the most is transform champions.

So what transform champions do is they start in a certain basic form. So for example, there might be a paladin that when they meet a condition, they, for example, the paladin, Jira the Unbreakable, has a slay power. Whenever Jira slays someone, then she transforms into. to Gisura and Mercy. Mercy is her giant Griffin that she gets to ride, and suddenly the character becomes more powerful for the rest of the game.

So these little mini goals are a really great way to create that feeling of satisfaction and growth within a game. Deck building games are great at this by default. In a standard deck building game, everybody starts with the same basic set of cards, and as you play the game, your deck gets better and better and better.

So even if you don't win, you still get that feeling of progress. Now the miniatures, the tactical part of the game, can have that same feeling of progress. This very visceral replacing a smaller mini with a bigger mini that dominates the board. So it's a really exciting way to create little wins within the gameplay. Similarly, we've introduced a new mechanic called quests. So quest cards can be acquired throughout play. They go into your deck.

They count as a specific faction card. When you play it, they replace themselves. They draw a card. But if you can also complete whatever the quest condition is, then they become a permanent attachment to improve your champions. And so again, a very explicit quest that we're able to give you, sub-goals, little ways that you can find wins, and dramatically transform a game, as well as really cool things you can do that help you to modify your champions over time, right? In addition to introducing all of these 50 miniatures and a bunch of new starting champions, by giving you lots

of ways to customize your champions, it creates more variety for each game, more opportunities for different modes of play, more sub-goals that you can go for, and a lot of different ways to play. I've talked about this before. And if you want to learn more about the design of the original Ascension Tactics, you can go check out my podcast episode with Ryan Sutherland, who is my co-designer for the original Ascension Tactics. And you can see a lot of the thought that went into how we build it so that these miniatures and that there's this infinite variety of play that's available. I've often said that Ascension Tactics, the original, is the most gameplay I've ever packed into a box in my over 20 years. of designing. And so, of course, when it came to Ascension Tactics Inferno, we had to make even more, more miniatures, a whole new center deck, a whole bunch of cool stuff. So there's really an infinite set of ways to play. Another thing that was really fun about Ascension tactics is we were able to bring in the cultist in a brand new way. In Ascension, the cultist is sort of a bit of a punching bag. It was a mechanic that we needed to have an outlet. If you had extra power and no way to spend it, what could you do with it? And so we had a mechanic that you could just spend two power and convert it into an honor. which is a victory point.

And once that kind of generic and boring mechanic, we replaced it with a cultist character that was always there that you could always beat up. It became a kind of funny avatar for the game and an occult favorite, so to speak. And so in Ascension Tactics, we made the cultist a champion that you could actually command and you could join your team. And so it being an always available champion that was worse than your other options typically, but a great way for you to spend extra resources and potentially swarm the board was really cool. In Ascension Tactics Inferno, we didn't want to just bring the cultists back because we've seen that before.

So one of the mechanics we introduced is introducing a new always available champion, which are the rats. And the rats are a callback to the Rat King, who was one of our first promo cards. I think it may have been the actual very first promo card we ever made. And they're one to command, one attack, one health, the smallest possible figures. And they only move two spaces, whereas everybody else moves three. and that allows them to be swarming the board, but swarming the board more slowly. And this is another little design hook here,

because part of the ways when you build a standalone expansion that also combines with the original, right, you can just shuffle the original Ascension Tactics cards in with Ascension Tactics Inferno and all the original champions, sometimes that can become dilutive, which means if I only see cards from Ascension Tactics because it's a giant center deck and randomness doesn't work in my favor, how do I know,

how do I make sure that there's an impact from the new set? And by having a new always available champion, it assures that every game will be impacted by the new set, regardless of which cards happen to come up in the center. So this was both a tool to make sure that the new set had a lot of impact, whether played standalone or played with the original. And it's just a fun way to, again, call back some of the characters that we loved and create some interesting different tradeoffs

and how you might want to spend your resources. In addition to fallen champions, we also wanted to make a callback to something we did do, in the original Ascension game, which was make dual faction champions. So champions that actually align with more than one faction. In order to do this, you had to make it so that they play with both of the themes. They actually interact with both. And very often we made these so that they interacted with different cards you could buy.

Different hero cards would power them up. They would create an allegiance power. And this is another great design trick. Whenever in doubt, try to build cards that change the dynamics of how you want to acquire new cards. This is true for any game that inquires drafting, any game where you're going to be fighting over the same set of cards and resources, creating a diverse sense of incentives so that my value of a given card or a given ability or a given resource is going to be dramatically different than yours, creates that tension of whether I maybe want to take something away from you, even though it's not as good for me, or that excitement when you see the exact right card come up for you. So dual faction champions play into that, and they create more possible intersections of the types of cards. where when you see it show up on the board, it lights up in your mind and it gets you excited

or gets you scared when your opponent gets one, right? So it creates those higher drama, higher tension moments. In addition, we also wanted to try not just adding an entirely new campaign and new scenarios, right? Because this is the thing with a tactics game that not only do you build the whole game,

all the cards, all the characters, all the rules, everything, but we actually build different scenarios and every single scenario has its own set of rules. So in essence, scenario is kind of a game in itself. This was something we realized when we designed a dozen plus scenarios in Ascension Tactics, there's an enormous amount of work to design and develop these correctly. So in addition to building a bunch more of those for players and doing some really

fun, kind of wacky off the wall types of scenarios, every set of Ascension Tactics, as well as Ascension Taxi Inferno comes with a pre-printed side of the board so you can just set up quickly and play the kind of quote-unquote basic scenario. And there's a new one that comes in Ascension Taxi's Inferno. and it comes with mobile terrain and a scenario book so you can actually build not only the scenarios that we have built for you and designed for you, but you can build your own and create your own and make modifications if you like. And so one of the things we wanted to introduce that was one of our most requested features from Ascension Tactics, in Ascension Tactics, you have player versus player. You can play 2V1, 3 player free for all, 4 player free for all, 2, solo mode, or cooperative. But in the cooperative mode in Ascension Tactics, you can only play 2 player. at most, and we were wrestling with how do we make more players available. And in truth, we were

restricted because in Ascension Tactics, we only had so many miniatures available. So to allow people to have enough miniatures, enough champions to both have their own teams as well as to battle against the villains, we didn't have enough to support four players. Now we do. In Ascension Taxis Inferno, you can play up to four players cooperatively. And we introduced a new mechanic that allows you to ready champions when you're playing with more than two players that allows you to manage more players on the board, more opportunities for people to play and creates this whole other play experience that opens up new gameplay. And even though my personal preference tends to be player versus player games, the cooperative experience is a really great way to bring more people

in. When you have a diverse set of skills between players, a player versus player game can become pretty boring or pretty frustrating pretty quickly. Whereas, when you have a different set of skills and you're playing cooperatively, now it actually becomes a benefit, right? You can help direct and help support your friends that are maybe new to the game. And then once you all get a chance to play together for a while or play a solo game with no pressure, then you can experience more of the PVP elements. So that's kind of a big overview of what I'm excited about with Essential Tactics Inferno. And anybody that has the original Ascension Tactics or if you got it in retail and you don't have a chance to get to miniatures,

we're offering the miniatures themselves, which are all really cool, custom sculpted miniatures that you can have, you can just buy the miniatures, you can buy the game without the miniatures, exactly the same gameplay but only standees. You can mix and match. You can get the original Ascent Tactics,

you can get Selectionx, Inferno. We're also going to have some cool exclusives that are only available for those that back the Kickstarter. So there's a lot of excitement here. And also, I encourage all of you that are interested in making your own games, whether or not you back a Sentient Tactics Inferno or whether or not you back a Sentient Tactics Inferno

or whether or whether or not, you choose to buy it, follow the campaign, right? You can follow the campaign, you can back it for a dollar because we talk a lot about not just the design of these games, which is critical in the part that I love the most, but also the marketing and sale of these games. And we put a lot of effort into how we market, how we build the campaign so that the Kickstarter campaign itself should feel like a game. It feels like a process of discovery with new things getting unlocked, new elements getting revealed, encouraging people to share the campaign, get excited, create their own cool new things around it.

And so hopefully this becomes not just an opportunity to see what my latest design project is like and see what it takes to build a game that lasts and how you evolve it over time, which is all illustrated here, but also how do we market? How do we market not just to the audience that we have and the people that follow, but also people that are never heard of Ascension before, right? A lot of these cool miniatures that we've developed, a lot of the cool mechanics that we've develop our design to help attract people in that maybe have never heard of a extension, maybe never even heard of me or any of the things that we're doing,

that this might draw them in and bring them into the universe and give them a chance to get excited about it. And so hopefully this will work well, right, as I'm recording this, where before the campaign has launched and we'll definitely be doing a debrief at the end and break down what happened, what worked and what didn't. But I really encourage you to just follow along and be a part of it. And of course, if you do back, if you do support, if you do share, that helps me to keep doing what I'm doing, sharing these kinds of podcasts with you.

continuing to make games for a living, which I'm very grateful to do. So hopefully you found this podcast useful. Hopefully you're excited about this game, maybe as excited as I am. It's very hard because I'm very excited about it. We have a large team that's worked for a very long time to be able to bring this together. And so I am very excited and I will be back next time with another great guest. And in the meantime, hopefully I will see you at the campaign. Happy gaming.