[Background Blog] Astatos - Disparity

Hey Patrons,

Today I wanted to share a short preview of an upcoming mechanic being added to the next patch for Astatos which has been a good while coming, and also talk a bit about the design behind it.

First let's start with a description of the new mechanic.

[Takeover Trial] Disparity

Disparity is gained whenever a player fails the Trial Stage. Gain enough, and you'll be able to activate a Disparity Action to help turn the tide of the Trial!

Select the Disparity bar to preview the current Disparity Action. When the action is available, select the bar again to activate it.

Currently, only the action Disparage is available for multiplayer. More Disparity Actions may be made available in the future— although more likely used for NPC characters in the upcoming Story Mode Trials.

And that's about the gist of it. Adding a mechanic like this has been something that's been on my mind ever since before the release of the game.

As Takeover Trials are a 1v1 adaptation of the Conquest 3-8 player gameplay, the fundamental scope of the game changed from flipping 5 Seal Cards, or all your opponents, to just flipping a single opponent. Influence points and the tug-of-war style gameplay came out of a need to make "flipping" your opponent take more effort so longer games were viable and so it wasn't possible to lose on the first round.

As a consequence, Takeover doesn't have the soft "round limit" that Conquest has— Conquest games ending when Makari-Hari's side activates 5 Heroes, flipping 5 Seal Cards. This meant that upon release, it wasn't uncommon to see Takeover games with no added Hero Packs to go on in an infinite stalemate— definitely not the best gameplay experience, but one I didn't have a good way to solve without changing the nature of the game.

Adding Hero Cooldowns consequently were a double-edged sword. On the positive side, they prevented repeated use of the same Hero, cutting down on Herclaus spam and forcing players to make more varied moves. (Herclaus spam resulted in one player being denied actions until being rescued by good RNG, or killed by bad RNG.) On the other side, it drew out Takeover games longer, in particular games with no Hero Packs added.

With the upcoming additions of the playable Tutorial, Single Player Trials, and the mobile client; I finally sat down and tried to think this out.

• If I added an equivalent "round limit" mechanic to Conquest Trials, I would likely lower the strategic ceiling of Takeover Trials, forcing one side to win outside of the player's direct actions. This would likely take the form of an "erosion" system that slowly reduced the maximum number of Influence points each side has. I put this idea aside as it didn't feel like it was the best option, but it might be reintroduced for a story scenario.
• As the God Cards are designed to be a powerful game-ending action when used correctly. However, in Takeover, once you used this the ability would be lost for the rest of the match. This is where the Hero Cooldown system came in handy, allowing players use these abilities multiple times in a game— albeit infrequently by putting a 5 round cooldown on their activation. This was implemented into the game, opening up more strategies.
• Adding extra Hero Cards into the "Pack 0" was an option that was considered— but it was difficult to find any characters who would feel natural to be included. (Vitus & Volesus were shot down as options from a lore perspective by the writers) While adding some new cards into this pack would increase options, it would also make learning the game less accessible to new players. In the end I felt it would be best to look into making a change that was inherent to the mechanics, rather than relying on a specific Hero.
• Additional Spell Cards were another option that we considered. While it's likely we'll add more Spell Cards in the future, having them available will rely entirely on the player's deck settings and the card draw RNG, so they weren't a solution for the issue in question.
• In search of a more robust solution we came up with the idea of special kind of Spell Card that can be equipped and activated at any time, basically acting as a secondary God Card. However, we felt this idea was too clunky and difficult to implement, requiring additional art and being difficult for your opponent to see what you have and strategise around that.

All this sat around for a while until we were playing a match and I thinking over some player feedback. Some players have expressed the feeling that they don't like relying on RNG for card draws. From a game designer perspective, we have to consider where sort of statement really comes from.

We're confident that the card draw RNG is a critical part of the design of the game, allowing for more varied situations, clutch moments, and lucky wins. Thinking back to the Herclaus spam issue we observed at launch— players don't like feeling that they can't do anything in a round. This happens when they fail the Trial Stage or have their Energy taken away from them.

We also observed this during the original version of Spell C (now called Consecrate) which allowed you to remove 1 Energy from your opponent. It caused a lot of anxiety in 1v1 situations where both sides would try to perform a fake-out during the Trial Stage, leaving the timer until the last second before playing their Element Card, just to avoid their opponent from being able to steal their Energy from underneath them.

This brings us to the key thought behind Disparity— what if losing the Trial Stage was also a benefit, and sometimes a valid tactical decision. With that, it wasn't long before the idea of building up a secondary bar towards a powerful action was considered. After considering a few options we settled on "Doubles Influence gain from Hero Ability activation for 1 Round" as the most robust action. It naturally ties into the existing mechanics, and requires the player to thing strategically about when they activate it. Since you still need Energy to make use of the action— it's powerful without feeling unfair for the other player.

My favourite part of Disparity is how it ties naturally into the existing mechanics of the game, and how a new player could intuit how the mechanic works by observing the interface, so there's a low barrier to entry.

Now with an idea, it was time to implement it; which was kinda tricky since it's always tough to find natural new places to put UI elements in this game.

I was thankful that the Influence bar didn't take up the whole vertical space between the two players, allowing some room to add in another UI element for this mechanic. At first, the bar had a similar design to the Influence bar, with different segments that would fill with colour. 

They were too similar and players would likely confuse the two so this was broken into segments instead.

Next Disparity was moved above the Influence bar to avoid the gap between the two bars caused by the shifting stars representing the Influence points— although I worry a little that it makes the activation button a little tricky to hit if the display the game is played on has any overscan, it was the best option I had.

Here you can see how the Disparity bars turn into an activation button when filled up. Hovering over the bar reveals a description of the action, for both you, and your opponent. This gives us the room to change the action depending on the scenario in the future.

The next step was to implement this interface into the game engine itself, including animations, and making some popups to better reveal when both you and your opponent have hit the activation button.

Above you can see some of the draft popups for the disparity activations.

And here are the finalised graphics as they can be found in the game! Recordings of the animations were made and sent off to the sound designer so we could add some unique SFX to this mechanic. I hope players appreciate the animation details, such as the graphic featuring Mukaki and Makari-Hari, and the button hover animation!

While working on the implementation of the mechanic we did some testing which had us make some small changes which deviated from the original design.

• Firstly, the number of Disparity required to activate the action, Disparage, was reduced from 5 to 3.
• Secondly, originally only the button area saying "Click to Activate" was clickable. After some internal play testing we extended this clickable area to the whole bar.
• And finally, this mechanic heavily affected the gameplay style of Makari-Hari's side in takeover. With a combination of Disparage and Makari-Hari's Ability, you could win the game with only 4 Energy or less.
  
  It felt balanced with just "Pack 0" but adding in any additional Hero Cards heavily weighted the game in Makari-Hari's favour unless the player on Mukaki's side learnt to control Makari-Hari's card.
  
  This resulted in a buff to Mukaki's Hero Ability which now also summons Makari-Hari's card to Mukaki's side with 0 Energy, regardless of where they are in the game. (Similar to Nikos' Ability but without the Energy condition)

While I'll be watching to see how players react to these changes, I'm pretty excited to finally introduce them soon as they fix a lot of the issues I had with the core design of Takeover Trials— plus it gives us some more varied gameplay options when introducing Trials into the Story Mode.

With that out of the way, I hope everyone enjoyed this little look behind the scenes into the gameplay design of Astatos, thanks for reading!

- Compymono