u/gerhb

I love getting to the end of a roguelike, looking at my pile of cards, and seeing a weird mess of synergies I had never played with before.

Sometimes you find a playstyle you like and you gun for it as often as possible. I love Body Slamming builds in Slay the Spire. But experimenting and finding those playstyles is one of my favorite parts of playing roguelikes. I wanted to really maximize the exploration phase with my game, and here's how I went about that... (TLDR at the end, this was longer than I expected).

I started, like many card game developers, by copying notes from Magic: the Gathering. Specifically, I looked at the way you can combine any number of colors in a deck. Immortal Coil's five color domains are Teal (slow and steady), Pink (ecosystem engines), Purple (scrappy spell slinging tempo), Gold (I hit hard), and Rust (control). Each color has its own variety of mechanics and importantly each color combination forms their archetypes.

For instance: Pink can discard cards from hand for Rust to use as fuel or reanimation targets. Teal's lingering spells make it easy for Purple to trigger its spell chaining mechanic. Gold's sacrificial tribute mechanic makes triggering Rust's on death keywords a lot easier. Add in another color, or do all five, and there are a ton of ways for these colors to do all kinds of wild strategies. (My personal favorite is a slow, drag-out control deck with Teal, Purple, and Rust)

You start a run by picking two 10 card starter decks and combining them. These can be the same color or two different colors, and they will determine what cards you can trade for in bazaars and battle rewards (when a card is traded, it must be traded for a card of the same color). Over the course of three acts, you will expand your deck with three new offerings of 10 cards. You can stay in the same colors, or you can branch out eventually gathering all 5.

You might be thinking- 50 cards, that's a lot! It is! Having so many cards certainly keeps each battle feeling distinct, but it is also brings a lot of inconsistency. So my game gives you another consistency tool: for each 10 cards in your deck, you also have 1 Icon Slot - the Icons go in a secondary deck which you can draw from every three rounds of battle. You might put your key synergy cards here, or maybe fill the Icons with removal cards, or maybe Item cards to reliably equip your units. In addition, each time you expand your deck, your starting hand size increases. You'll have opportunities to duplicate important cards. And of course, you can thin out your deck over the course of a run.

As you play, you'll unlock new starting decks (there are 30 total, 6 per color) and you'll unlock new cards to find in bazaars (73 per color, 365 total). You'll find Augments (the relics of Immortal Coil) to build your decks around. You will also pick one of three Edicts (cooldown abilities) at the start of each run.

Even after a year and half of playing, I am still finding new strategies I hadn't considered. I'd love to go into more of the mechanics of each color and their crossovers, but this is already really long.

Having a lot of playstyles is great, but to keep the process of experimentation meaningful, I also designed this game to be challenging. You will lose runs, even with great decks. But you will still sometimes find that absurd combo that tears through everything. My design philosophy is that powerful cards/combos should still require clever play to pull off.

TLDR - Lots of starter deck combinations, 5 colors to mix and match, thick decks with consistency tricks, and lots of hidden synergies.

Demo coming soon!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3858030/Immortal_Coil/

Thanks for checking out my game! It's a lane-based, strategy card game with both a roguelike and constructed vs AI gauntlet mode. I'm running a Kickstarter for more art, VFX, and SFX and some fun stretch goals to boot!

Check it out on Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/3858030/Immortal_Coil/

Follow the Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1143448165/immortal-coil-0

Hey there! Dev of Immortal Coil here (digital card game with a deckbuilding roguelike mode and a constructed gauntlet mode).

I've mostly been plugging away lately at preparing the Steam Store, trailer, and a Kickstarter, but I wanted to talk a little about some of the design!

Immortal Coil's cards each fall into one of five color domains (Teal, Pink, Purple, Gold, and Rust). For this example, I'm focusing on Rust - the color of eternal devotion and control. Rust's most distinct mechanic comes in Burning cards in the discard pile. This usually functions as an extra cost, allowing a card to be more powerful at a lower rate if you have the discarded cards to Burn. Some cards have additional effects when they are burned from the graveyard, such as drawing cards or buffing units. In the case of the Eternal Phoenix, it gets recreated onto the board immediately!

Filling your discard pile with multiple phoenixes and then playing a card like the dragon Karnophrax (7 cost, Burn 3, Weakens all enemy units) allows you to drop the big dragon along with up to three resurrected phoenixes!

I'm a big fan of alternative resources in card games. Rust's Burn was definitely chiefly inspired by Delve from MTG. Each color has its own alternative resource (Teal - Time, Pink - Discard, Purple - Pay Life, Gold - Sacrifice Units). Bringing all these together gave me a lot of room to design synergies, within a single color and between them! For instance, Pink can discard the Eternal Phoenix so that a Rust card can Burn it right back! Gold's sacrifices can also fuel Burn costs. Teal's spells linger over time on the battlefield, allowing Purple to activate combo synergies more easily for chaining spells together.

My design really leaned into open-ended synergies because I love when deck building has more varied potential. There is value to parasitic mechanics that only function with themselves, but I've never been as big a fan of those. I designed most cards to feel like they could have a place in various color pairings. There is a trade off- more synergy means deckbuilding can be a little more intimidating, more options to consider, more cognitive load.

If any of this sounds cool to you, I'm still looking for alpha testers! You can join the Discord and let me know you'd like to try it out! (Windows only for now, ports will come at a future time)

And look for announcements about the Kickstarter and Steam page soon!

The Immortal Coil Discord - https://discord.gg/gh8Xnjjg9

Hey there! Dev of Immortal Coil here.

There's a bunch of awesome cards I'm looking forward to sharing- including a few more big dragons. I've had a blast design the 365+ cards in the game, and I'm really enjoying seeing play testers get their hands on them. Your feedback has been super motivating and encouraging!

Yndrova is a unit that costs 9 MP to play- expensive, but game changing. On entering the battlefield, she stuns all enemy units, allowing your allies to attack without reprisal. Yndrova is a Teal card, a color that loves defending and stalling until you can play cards like her.

If you're interested in joining the beta, you can follow the link to my Discord!

https://discord.gg/nvGNYxq9b

I'm a big fan of the color pie in Magic: the Gathering, not just mechanically, but also for the philosophies it encompasses. That system of card grouping has been present in the majority of card games that have followed in one way or another. Here's my own spin on colors and deckbuilding for Immortal Coil:

During deckbuilding, you have 5 color slots (Columns) to choose the colors of your deck. You can choose combinations such as all Purple, or 2 Teal and 3 Gold, or even 1 of each color! Each column includes 10 card slots for cards of that column's color. So you can't splash a single card from another color. Every color choice is a commitment. It's a really simple deckbuilding constraint, but it causes some really interesting composition choices!

Each column has 1 additional card slot: the Icon slot. You can place any card of that column's color into the Icon slot. At the start of battle, Icons are shuffled into a separate, smaller deck which is only drawn from every 3 turns, starting on turn 3. This makes the Icon deck slower, but more consistent. This invites another really cool deckbuilding question: what kind of cards should you put in the Icon slots?

I've seen players use them to guarantee synergy pieces, or removal, or counter-magic, or items, or even just so a couple of late-game bombs always make their way into the battle. Even after a year and a half of development and watching dozens of play-testers, I'm not actually sure which Icon building strategy is the best!

Each color and combination of colors have overlapping synergies and strategies. For instance, Teal creates spells that stay in play for multiple turns, while some Purple spells get a combo boost when you have another spell in play. Pink can discard the Eternal Phoenix, which Rust can then burn from the discard pile to resurrect it. And Gold... well it can play with others, or it can just punch really hard.

If you would like to see what wild decks and color synergies you can build, I'm looking for beta testers now! You can get a Steam beta key by joining the Discord (Windows only at the moment).

Join the Immortal Coil Discord : https://discord.gg/RZt8UXZS7

I'm always excited to see what color or color combo ends up being a player's favorite!

I've been working on Immortal Coil for about a year and a half, and its been a blast to build. Gamemaker is really where I learned to code, building small games and also trying to develop games that were way out of scope. This project has also been a real challenge in managing scope, mostly on the design side. On the code side, Gamemaker has been a really smooth fit for turn-based, 2D pixel art (even if my code is spaghetti and full of alarms and giant switch statements).

I'm sure there's a lot of places where there were much better practices to get the same result, but I really tried to find solutions with what I knew and dig in to documentation when I was clueless.

Player decks are saved in lists, storing just the tag of the card. When the card is created from the list, it runs a script that checks the the tag, providing stats. The tag also corresponds to an image_index so that the card knows what to draw. The color variable of the card determines which image_index of the card frame to draw. The behavior of a card is state based, where each state has a script for if the card is in hand or on the board or elsewhere. Cards are played to lanes, each of which is a controller object storing the presence of player and enemy cards; obj_lane also do some work in tracking conditions for the behavior of the enemy.

Enemy behavior was the biggest question mark for me in whether I could design a game like this, where the opponent uses the same card pool as the players. I considered a system where the enemy played through loops of future turns to determine the best play, but it was too intimidating. Instead I kept it simple, the enemy evaluates a score for each card in each lane it could play. When a card is built, it also contains a list of evaluation patterns to use. If its a removal spell, it scores a lane based on how threatening the player's unit is. If its a unit, it considers how the stats of the units match up against player units, and whether an aggressive or defensive play is more pertinent. Because both players take turns back and forth, the enemy also considers when passing is stronger, and will sometimes even probe with cheaper costed cards. I was worried I wouldn't be able to create an enemy with appropriate difficulty, but it actually turned out quite challenging!

I incorporated FMOD for music and sound effects, at the request of my buddy who provided music for the game. While integration was a learning curve, it's been an awesome tool. We used parameters to add a tension track to the battle music when the player is at low HP. If anyone else is considering FMOD, feel free to ask questions, I'm happy to share what I've learned.

One of my favorite bits of polish was the pseudo-3D effect on card dragging and card flipping. It took a lot of tinkering to feel right, but I used a little bit of rotation and image scaling to create a pretty effective illusion. Dragging a card at different speeds and directions modifies how the card tilts. When the enemy plays a card, it flips over by narrowing the image_xscale to 0, then changes it's image_index and re-expands.

I'm working on a Steam page, social media, and a Kickstarter, but those aren't public yet. I do have a Discord. And if you're interested to try the game, drop a comment and I'm happy to share a beta key and invite you to the Discord.

https://discord.gg/aWgN5tgqR

I'm also happy to talk any design or dev work if you have any questions!

I love the strategy and deckbuilding of card games, so I decided to make my own! I've been working on Immortal Coil for a year and a half, and the finish line is in sight! I've had a blast designing and building this game, and I'm both excited and super anxious to start sharing my work.

If you're interested to try it out, drop a comment and I can DM you a beta test key! I'm super grateful for any feedback!

It's a lane-based board with back and forth play (akin to Legends of Runeterra or Artifact). You and your opponent take turns playing cards, including units, spells, auras, and items. Each lane can have 1 of each type of card, and placement strategy is critical. Spells and units activate at the end of the round. Spells cast from left to right, making the lanes something like a visual stack. Units attack simultaneously, with any excess damage trampling over to the opponent.

The game has both a roguelike mode and a constructed deckbuilding gauntlet mode, with each giving you rewards to unlock cards and cosmetics (and eventually ascension-type extra challenge modifiers). There are over 365 cards with all kinds of wild synergies. Cards are divided into 5 colors, which can be mixed and matched for cross-color strategies or built mono-color for really focused game plans.

I'm still working with artists to finish the last handful of card arts, more boards and sleeves (which can be customized to your deck), and more VFX. Narrative and event writing, including an intro-cinematic to set the stage, are all in the works. Still exploring ideas for end-game challenge modes, whether Slay the Spire type ascensions or toggle-able modifiers. And it's about time to reach out to more play testers for more balance testing and bug hunting.

Steam page is still in the works, but I do have a Discord if you enjoy the game and would like to chat about it in our community!