Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #22 [26/03/2025]

Hey everyone!

Today's development log is mostly focused on the big balancing changes I teased in the previous log. As I've continued to play around with the various parameters, I've made more and more significant changes to the gameplay to the point where it'd be accurate to say this is a full on balancing revamp.

Now I'm pretty much just stuck in the testing stages to make sure everything else in the game is adjusted to work with the new values before letting it all out.

There won't be any new storyline content in this one, as all of the work done is gameplay related - plus several new cards scattered across existing content to fix the current small pool of options. As such you can expect this update to be out sometime next month.

... but aside from gameplay, there was one other thing I talked about last month. And that one lets me show you some funky pictures, so let's start with that!

Guess what? I changed my mind

In the previous log, I showed off a brief clip of the talking animations I decided to add to the game. I also mentioned that I wasn't 100% happy with the results, but decided to leave it be.

I didn't actually get into how it works at the time though, so let's take a moment to go over that now!

The talking animation consists of 2 hand-drawn frames: the "neutral closed" mouth, and then an "open" mouth sprite.

This mouth sprite is laid over the character model, and then animated by flickering between the two mouth images. Standard animation stuff. But because the actual animation itself is only two frames, it looks quite stiff and artificial on its own.

Thankfully, with a bit of stretching trickery, we can make the animation look like there are far more frames and movement than what there actually is. Here's the result I showed last month:

(Much better!)

As you can see, the mouth looks like it actually opens and stretches, rather than just switching between two images.

There is however, still one issue, and that is the fact that all of the characters in CoG have multiple facial expressions. The "closed" mouth frame of the talking animation is merely the "neutral" mouth expression for Gordon. But a problem arises when the open mouth sprite is matched with any other expression...

 (Oh boy... that looks unfortunate.) 

So what do we do now? The obvious solution is to draw a talking equivalent for every mouth sprite there is.

Let's do some quick math: there are currently about 30 characters in the game. Each character has at least four mouth expression: neutral, smile, concerned and horrified. That brings us to around 120 additional mouth sprites I would have to draw.

... not exactly a task I was eager to tackle. Which is why I went with a different approach a month ago. Allow me to bring up the results one last time:

Now that you know what the issue is, you can probably see the oddity going on in there: the talking animation plays using the 2 neutral frames, and then once it finishes, it cuts to the expression. The result is good enough, hell I'd even say the way it cuts between some of the expressions creates a satisfying effect that looks quite lively.

... well that's what I thought a month ago as I went on to finish the talking sprites for the rest of the models... before I reached Ricky.

Now I don't want to say I have favorites, but if I did, Ricky would probably be somewhere near the top, because he has the most facial expressions out of all the characters in the game with a whopping 7 mouth expressions.

(I don't even think the last one appears in the game anywhere yet...)

I don't know what was going there, but clearly I had a lot of fun because the expressions themselves are quite varied and also exaggerated, particularly the smiling ones. And therein was the problem.

The solution of using a single talking animation and then cutting to the expression worked well enough for most of the character models, but for characters with very expressive faces, it didn't work well at all. Here's another one that would be an even bigger issue:

 (Look at that tongue go!)

Needless to say, I eventually caved in and just decided to create bespoke talking sprites for every single expression. Here's a showcase of a few of them!

Seeing them side by side like this sure makes all of the effort worth it! It's quite satisfying to look at, and it'll go a long way to making the game feel more polished and alive.

Now let's talk game design

Like I mentioned at the start of the post, the main bulk of work I've been doing is rebalancing the various values of the card game aspect. In the previous post, I merely teased things with a screenshot. This time, I'll tease things with a shot of two existing cards.

(Well would you look at that? We have updated card visuals!)

Originally I intended to do something a bit more ostentatious, but I really struggled to come up with a design that both looked nice and was legible, so in the end I just went with adding a few embellishments to make the cards look a bit less generic.

And in case of Planning Ahead: yes, signature cards now have a fancy unique appearance to distinguish them from other cards. Neat!

Aside from that, you can also see the result of some of the work I did on the Keyword system I mentioned last time. I decided to add a little fancy formatting with them to make descriptions slightly easier to parse - italics and color highlighting.

Finally, you might've noticed the completely different Energy values. That is, not only the cost: 5 and 3, but also the fact that Planning Ahead now recovers a whopping 10 Energy. That's right, one of the main changes that'll be brought by the balancing revamp is Energy values.

If you remember the screenshot I teased last month, one of the changes hidden within it was the fact that the player had 4 Energy - which is supposed to be 3 Energy when Wgt is below 10.

This was one of the first steps I took in an effort to decrease the massive gap between gameplay at lower Wgt vs. higher Wgt. Because Energy recovery used to increase every 10 Wgt, this meant that the gap would often be as large as 3 Energy vs. 7 Energy - that's when facing off 0 Wgt vs. 40 Wgt. That's more than double the Energy per turn!

This meant that lower Wgt not only gave minimal advantage, but it was also just boring and slow to play. With that amount of Energy, you would usually only play around two cards before shrugging and ending your turn. It also makes many cards completely unplayable at low Wgt, while higher Wgt allowed one to just pop them around like they were nothing.

Another aspect I wanted to address was the granularity of Energy growth. First off, the Energy increase happens every 10 Wgt: quite often throughout a fight. Sometimes this would lead to slightly strange situations where one would want to delay attacking if the Opponent was at 9 Wgt, so that they would not get the extra Energy.

There is also a bit of a strange disconnect between Energy, and the other escalating mechanic: starting card draw. The draw at the start of one's turn goes:

• 1 (Base) -> 2 (20 Wgt) -> 3 (45 Wgt).

Not only does it not happen every 10 like Energy, it... just doesn't happen in any consistent way at all? If it at least happened every 20, that would be one thing, but what's up with that 45!?

To really drive home the insanity, please enjoy the simple chart below that illustrates just how weird it all is.

Needless to say, I've changed Energy and draw escalation to be more unified and consistent now: both happen at 20 and 40 Wgt.

Number go up

Alright, so that's the Energy growth rate, but that still doesn't explain the large numbers on the two cards up there, does it? Gain 10 Energy? 

There was one more issue with the old values that is more so a problem for me in the game designer cave in the back, rather than a front-facing gameplay issue: the range of card costs I could employ when designing cards was very limited.

Card costs typically ranged from 1-3, maybe 4 and 5 for the real big chunky ones. However, this meant that there was little to no room when it came to designing cards with similar effects.

Take "Menu for Two" for example. It costs 1 Energy and inflicts 2 Wgt. If I were to design any other card that inflicts around 2 Wgt, but with an additional effect or some kind of catch, my options were this:

• Option 1: Make it cost 1 Energy as well. This just makes it unanimously superior to Menu for Two and can just completely replace it.

  (Side note: this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Because of the RPG structure of CoG, it makes sense for stronger cards to crop up over time, but there is only so much the ceiling can be raised by before the entire thing crumbles.) 

• Option 2: Make it cost more - the next cost would be 2, but that's twice as expensive as Menu for Two. The extra effect better be absolutely banging in that case.

Neither of these options are particularly appealing, and that has stopped me many times in the past while designing new cards.

A similar issue happened when a card was too powerful or weak and needed a change. If the card cost 1, then changing the cost was out of the question: making it cost 2 would make it doubly less effective.

I needed to set the environment up in a way that gave me more flexibility when it comes to designing cards.

You know what the fix is by now: it was to make Energy more granular, or rather, change how valuable 1 point of Energy is by inflating the overall Energy pool. That's right folks, inflation comes for everyone us all, even in CoG!

... although it's probably not the kind you expected.

And so, for the first pass, I went big and tried to multiply all of the Energy values in the game by 5.

• Energy recovery went from 4 -> 20.

• Cards like Menu for 2 went from 1 -> 5.

• ... and Exercise from 2 -> 10.

This gave me a lot of freedom, because at that point I could easily tweak the cost values to my heart's desire without worrying about completely changing the usability of a card by merely adding or taking off 1 cost.

... but after a bit of playtesting I realized there was a problem: it was a real pain to manage your Energy now. Or more specifically, it was a real problem to do all that mental math.

Because all numbers are 5 times bigger, it's kind of a pain to calculate all of it in your head. Before, you didn't even have to count higher than a single digit, but now? Here's a screenshot to show some of the madness:

(Try it out yourself and think about how you would play that hand to make the most use out of that 37 Energy!)

Needless to say, I needed to re-think my approach a bit instead of just multiplying everything by a giant number like a madman. Eventually I settled on something in the middle - multiplying things by about 2-3x.

Interestingly enough, this still changes the way one has to approach Energy management. Because the costs are much more diverse, it seems to be much easier to end up with 1 or 2 Energy that you don't have any way to spend.

There's something interesting going on there with odd and even Energy costs, and I don't exactly mind that as there seems to be something there that I can play around with in the future, so look forward to that!

And that's it! You've made it to the end, past the wall of design thoughts!

There are a few more changes in the balancing revamp that I haven't talked about yet, but since it's all subject to change as I go on to do more testing, and for the sake of keeping up a little bit of mystique, I'll leave those for you to discover once the update goes up!

As always thank you for reading and for supporting the project!