[Background Blog] Astatos - Resolve

Hey Patrons, Compymono here again. Today I wanted to share a design preview of a new mechanic coming soon to Astatos.

Resolve is a new gameplay mechanic for Conquest Trials that aims to give players more control, and purpose when playing on Mukaki’s side.

Resolve

Resolve is gained whenever Mukaki's side activates a Hero Ability. Resolve points are displayed along the right side of the screen above the Deck Space. Use your Resolve in order to keep others on your side!

At the end of Mukaki's turn, a corresponding number of players will become Resolved. When Resolved, a player is protected from flipping sides. This effect lasts until the beginning of the next Hero Stage.

The player/s with the lowest power will become Resolved first.
[Power = (Energy x 2) + Cards]

If tied, a player without Energy will be picked first.

Design & Prototyping

During development of Astatos, we felt that Conquest Trials had some key gameplay issues when playing on Mukaki’s side.

• When playing on Mukaki’s side, players could only achieve victory via strategy and knowledge of the game mechanics. Conversely, players on Makari-Hari’s side had a finite win condition that you progressed towards regardless of skill.
• Usually if Mukaki’s side won it was by pure chance, it didn’t feel like you have any direct consequences over it.
• Because of the fluidity of flipping sides, players don’t feel attached to winning.

Generally, we knew this was ok for the original card game as it was a party co-op experience, but we knew it wouldn’t fulfil those looking for more focused and competitive gameplay. That’s why we made Takeover.

However, that didn’t mean we felt satisfied with the gameplay of Conquest, as the above issues still remain. My general thoughts to resolve this focused on how to make players a little more “sticky” to Mukaki’s side.

We’ve been thinking about the above issues since before release, and finally worked out a mechanic that felt like a natural way to improve this, from the initial thought:

• Makari-Hari’s side flips Seal Cards when activating Hero Abilities.
• Mukaki’s side does nothing when activating Hero Abilities.

From there we can slot in the idea of making players “sticky” to Mukaki’s side:

• “When Mukaki’s side activates a Hero Ability, they become immune to flipping for 1 Round.”

It didn’t take long to considered about how completely overpowered this would be. Next we need to downscale the effect"

• “When Mukaki’s side activates a Hero Ability, they toggle immunity to flipping for 1 Round. This effect happens immediately as Heroes are activated.
• i.e. Activate 1 Hero = Immune
  Activate 2 Heroes = Not Immune
  Activate 3 Heroes = Immune

This the first version of the mechanic I implemented for testing along with a few players from the community. The general feedback was:

• The gameplay felt better and more focused.
• Mukaki’s side had become overpowered. Combining the new effect with Drusus and another hero led to a very high win rate.
• The toggle part of the mechanic felt convoluted, and often made Mukaki’s side hold back when they didn’t need to.
• The balance scaled poorly to larger groups of players.

Taking this into account, we came up with a third variation of this mechanic, roughly:

• “When Mukaki’s side activates a Hero Ability, they gain 1 Resolve Point. At the end of their Turn, 1 player becomes immune to flipping for each Resolve Point accrued. Weaker players will be effected first.”

This way we could resolve the following points from the previous iteration:

• The effect scales better with the amount of players, and amount of energy they have. Bad gameplay will still leave you without protection.
• Players who are already in a good position won’t be protected as easily.
• The Drusus exploit is avoided as the effect is only applied after all Hero Abilities have finished.

Development

Now that we have the mechanic down I need to develop it into something that’s presentable and well-communicated to players. The following work has to be done:

• UI design & animations.
• Testing
• User manual update
• Playable tutorial update

For the UI design, we needed to communicate the accruement of points, the buffed state of any players, and when a player is protected from flipping.

For the accruement of points, I mirrored the UI for the seal cards over the deck space and then made use of the existing light trail effect to directly show both the gathering of Resolve and Seal Cards. For the buffed state, a light border is made drawn around player’s profiles at the top of the screen. This animation is removed once the effect is no longer active. When the “Resolved” effect prevents a player from flipping, that player’s profile will flash and some popup text will appear beneath them.

When it comes to testing, luckily this mechanic was relatively simple to implement. (Although there’s always bugs that come out of nowhere when things get released haha) Many players may not realise at first that Mukaki is also considered a Hero Ability activation, but once you do it opens up some additional strategies.

After the gameplay was ready I had to update both the user manual and the playable tutorial, thankfully both were easy as the manual is just a little time consuming while with the playable tutorial I was lucky that none of these changes affected the overall scripting of the two Conquest Tutorial Trials.

All in all, I hope players enjoy trying out the new mechanic when it’s made available in the game next month! (the update is just pending translations right now) I think it is a really fun new addition to Conquest, and I’ll be interested to see how it shapes up in the wild.

- Compymono