Rambling about upgrades and shit

Small introspection talk into the making the game. Nothing major, only read if you're curious.
Let's talk upgrades.

A big part of what should be a growth game for me is that feeling of getting more powerful as you grow, both in visuals and in gameplay. Until now, that was done in two ways, both related to leveling up. Firstly, your character's passive would get stronger, making your overall deck better, and its appearance would evolve. Secondly, you would get access to new, more powerful cards, and they would also depict your new character's growth in action.

While it worked as a way to get stronger, there are some issues.

• As you grow, previous cards would get obsolete. With a specific set of cards for every level, each level would only get so many cards, not allowing for impressive diversity.

• With both power-up mechanics being linked to the same threshold, leveling up is really centralizing, and allows for very few growth points.

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With Update 3, and progression being split into smaller increments, and meta-progression, the level system just didn't made sense for cards anymore. I also wanted to be able to reuse cards, so that there is more diversity.

That's all good, but we lose the feeling of growth. Not only cards don't scale well with higher levels, but the visual wouldn't match either. They would need to match your growth, to upgrade.

I thought quite a bit about how I wanted to implement card upgrades. Linking the card upgrade to the character growth is great for visuals, but would fall into the same pitfall of needing to level up to get all bonuses: passive upgrade and card upgrades.

Because of that, visual and effect improve independantly:

• Card art scales directly with your character level, so that it reflects their appearance

• Effect can be improved permanently as part of meta-progression, using runes, a collectible resource you can collect in the maze, and can be improved multiple times

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When making images for cards, I always scale them down and mixes the image with other ones to check if it's easily recognizable. Because the player needs to spot their cards easily, even if most of them are depicting the same character, with a similar color palette.

I know how important it is to keep the art and effect coherent, so that you can just see the image and know what the card does, but it seemed like the best call to me. To compensate for that, I try to keep the composition mostly similar so you can still easily recognize the card as its art upgrades.

Card upgrades are taking a long time to make, and I need so many images, but fortunately I have technology on my side to help with the process.

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Hopefully it all sounds good to you. I'm going back and forth on a lot of things during the development of this update, but I feel like I'm getting something coherent. Feel free to tell me what you think.