Backpack Battles: Game Designer Ride-Along | Design Club

And now we're live on YouTube. Hi. Hello. Our apologies for the delay. It turns out that updates continue to be terrible. They're just want me to Well, I have some pregame show for us today. I I also have pregame show. So, by all means, you we are late because somewhere between my video calls yesterday when I was using my camera and this morning, an update got installed that disabled on something else that disabled my camera and made me have to go back and do a full update on my camera, which turned out also then had an update. So, I don't know if they were supposed to like be parallel updating and one thing did and the other didn't, but Yep. Uh, so I have I have uh two two fascinating occurrences uh within the past 24 hours for your consideration. Would you like the design one first or the notes design one first? Oo, and I'm going to throw a gross one in the middle. Oh, great. Okay. Uh but um let's

go with the non-design to get us started on. All right. Uh here is your regular schedule reminder. Dear friends of the internet, check who you are friending on Discord because through no fault of mine, to the best of my knowledge, it is now the case that I have been impersonated upon Discord. So, yes, it just came to light as I was preparing for this stream. So, I posted a safety ping in our Discord and elsewhere. But yeah, um it turns out that uh the um the I have we have officially reached the level of prominence where it is worth someone's time to attempt to impersonate me. So, some things about my account that you should know. Um my join date is in November 2016 and I have uh Ruby soon to be uh Opal Nitro. The impersonator account does not. It also spells the username incorrectly and doesn't have my previously known as username badge. I have also linked my

new account to my blue sky. So, that's another level of verification. But in general, I will tell you in a Discord server that we share that I am going to friend you before I do so. I'm very annoyed. I I got to tell you, Jeeoff, I'm very annoyed. I hate this cuz it's a bunch of very necessary work because it's community safety, right? But at the same time, I don't want to do this. I don't want to go through all these extra steps. So, so because of the way Discord is set up, here's the thing. I don't know. Mhm. Because I've never actually There isn't like a place on Discord where you can say this user of yours is being bad, is there? Uh there is. Um, you can uh if you if you interact with them, you can rightclick on their name. Okay. And uh there is a feedback mechanism of some sort. There's a block and report. Yes. And we can also

if they made it into our Discord, we could block and report them there. Unfortunately, that's not um a thing. Well, okay. So, here's the problem. Here's the problem. mode. You would think that it's a fresh account, but it's not because this account is older than my account or they spoofed the join date. The the join date for this account is February 2016 and mine's November 2016. So, I don't know. That is an old account. It's a very old account, right? Um, and it doesn't have a previously known as badge or has chosen not to show it for obvious reasons. Um, but it has the same almost the same profile. Uh they've got some punctuation errors in there likely on purpose to weed out people who are too smart to fall for a scam. So uh I've posted on Blue Sky about it. I've posted in the Discord about it. I'm telling all of you about it. So now it's on camera and anyone who watches this VOD will see it. Um but please be safe out there. I'm going to be dealing with this for a while. I I bet uh with multiple accounts

cuz um uh friend of the channel and uh a partner of mine, Alchemy, um is uh also dealing with this. So we we have we have seen somebody spoofing them, too. Yes. So um we're not exactly sure how it's how it's all going to go down, but it's you know that's what it is. All right. Uh and now you had uh gross. Do we have to I have this one one more reason that we should pay our teachers more. Oh dear. What what happened at at at child's school? So I have learned I I think I have previously reported that um preschool is a place children build up their immunization or build up their um immune system. My words are going immune system. Thank you. because they get exposed to all of these things because kids have families. Lots of families therefore track lots of

things. And when those kids catch them and continue go in not knowing they're sick yet, they vector spread it. Yep. I have learned there is another thing that gets vector spread. Oh dear. Which is small bugs that live in your hair. Oh no, not lice. Oh, that's awful. and to the point where one kid had a sister who got it who gave it to them who's in and my wife is on a mom's chat group and all the moms are freaking out and so I'm getting like playby-play reports. The poor kid actually the mom of the kid who got it owned up immediately. My kid got this from somewhere and because of that most likely headed off the entire school getting it. Like this is one of those things that can be very embarrassing to report. My kid has this and I might have exposed you. But if you don't report that, right? I was talking to the principal of the school yesterday because she showed up to say hi to parents walking into the class. She's like, "Thank God someone did this

because last year someone didn't and we had the lights continued to show up for months." Yeah. Because because somebody because the more kids get it, the more likely it is that in getting rid of them, someone misses enough to reinfect everyone. Yeah. Yeah, it's right. And so, but I I have learned a whole bunch about that vector spread as well, but the poor teachers in my son's classroom, I saw came in this morning, they were spraying everything, and we just got a report that one of them had also got it. Yeah. And so, young 20something teacher with nice long hair has now been infected as well as the poor children. Oh, no. And I I mean, I feel bad enough for the kids, but I feel really bad for the teacher. Yeah, absolutely. Um, all right. Okay. And then I have that is not a thing you signed up for as a teacher. No, it is not. Um and then I have one I have one design idea for. Okay. Okay. So, um this is this is not the show. We'll we'll we're sort of warming up. And also um chat uh I should mention one of the reasons we're warming up is that

I have changed the audio settings again. How do we sound? By all of my meters and testing and everything else, we should sound more even and roughly about the same otherwise. Um there shouldn't be any uh by the way, I'm testing this out and getting the communal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely. Um so uh mine is we've we've lauded patch notes as a way that developers communicate with a community, right? that they are a tool that gives communities, particularly communities of crunchy games, right? As opposed to like a gallery game, right? Journey probably doesn't need as many patch notes other than we fix some stuff, right? Versus um League or Magic Arena or Hearthstone. PvP games are notorious for doing ongoing p balance patches. Actually, excuse me. They are games as a service do the most because as you continue to

add com content surprise surprise you may need to tell people about it and as you add things you may have to rebalance other things. Correct. Okay. So all of these things are true and we've lauded them forever. What is your initial reaction, your gut check reaction to a developer of a PvP game saying that they intentionally don't want to publish patch notes to allow for discovery of new things in the game? I guess it depends. So, A sounds odd. B maybe it's a game about discovery. Like without knowing the game, if you were telling me that was League, I would say that's an awful idea. If it is you know, Spelunker's secret PvP cave exploration game maybe, or even some rogike where they wanted to sneak new events in if there was like a PvP competitive rogike and they're like, "We don't want to tell people about the events because this is part of the experience, right?" So, here, but

normally normally I would say, "Hey, when you change a thing on a game people play competitively, you should probably tell them what you changed." Yep. The Bizaar decided to do this uh yesterday. In fact, they didn't announce that there was going to be a balance patch. They announced that there was going to be maintenance and then hotfixed in a bunch of balance changes and fundamentally overhauled one of the characters who had a unique starting setup to no longer have that unique starting setup and scored a ridiculous own goal because they got dozens to hundreds of bug reports immediately because they didn't tell anyone that the character's unique starting setup was changing, right? So everyone reported it as a bug because obviously this character's worked the same since the beginning of the game and you changed it without telling saying anything. Therefore must be a bug, right? Basic thing in software. If something that was working stops working, it's probably a bug. Correct. And um I I think this is uh you know

this is also a really good one. Anti-che or anti-bot. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Right. If you are if you're patching in uh in things that help prevent um bad actors in your space, that also makes sense, right? Um yeah. Uh like actually even as far back as EverQuest, a very long time ago, there were certain parts of the patch we didn't mention because people were continually trying to hack our system and do packet sniffing and other things to get advantages about where certain spawns were. Yep. There were certain things we just changed in the background that no normal player would notice that was specifically done to mess with people trying to parse our code or parse our packets. Like we would rewrite things, send extra strings, change some stuff around just to mess with them. Yeah. Because a normal player would never see that. The other problem is that in particular here, um, experienced players of the bizaar don't read tool tips

because why would they? Because you would tell them the items changed. So, it's inefficient to read tool tips because you know how the item works or how it should work, but then they changed it in a game that doesn't have all the information constantly displayed. So, hm. So, uh, the community has been having some pretty big push back on that, but it is kind of interesting to think about. Like I I definitely think there is a world where it is possible for a PvP game to not do complete patch notes, right? I would say a PVP like a competitive leaderboard game. Yes. I would say there's what you wouldn't necessarily because there everybody's going in with the same correct thing and it's not directly I bumped into a player who suddenly has a whole different setup than it used to. The the other problem is of course that um as of right now Bizaar doesn't have for hot fixes doesn't have any in-game indication that anything has changed. Oh man. So you could literally have finished up a match

queued up for the next one and things are different. Correct. or even in the middle of the same match because when hot fixes happen, current ongoing runs are suspended, not terminated. Oh wow. Yeah. So your entire build league at least is very good about Yeah. You get out of a thing before a thing happens or it's just like server's coming down for the patch, right? Yeah. And they have uh no, they stop queuing a period of time before the I believe it's maintenance start an hour, hour and a half. plenty of time to finish an entire match, right? Yeah. They basically figured out what's a really long match, added a little bit on top of that. Yep. And did it? Yep. Though they will still let you cue bot games, so if you want to just go like practice or stuff until the servers come down, you can do it. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. All right. It's good. But yeah, that seems that seems like a decision that um is going to have repercussions different than they

thought it was going to. It's an excellent way of putting it. Yeah. The uh the very vocal concerns of some parts were being dismissed out of hand in the discord and uh it escalated pretty fre pretty uh pretty freely from there. Um, imagine that people like knowing because a reminder reminder the ability to go into a ranked run in the bizaar when we did the we did the ride along has a cost. You can either earn a ticket, you get one free one per day, you can earn a ticket or if you are really just desperate to play more faster than you can earn them, you can pay money for an in-game currency to buy more ranked runs. Yeah. which means that they're changing the formula for a game that people are potentially paying real money to play per run without telling them, which is uh not great. Not great. So, they've um yeah, th this is uh this is kind of an an interesting

uh terrarium. I feel like The Bizarre has been an interesting terrarium in watching a studio publish their first game and seeing like the community reactions and their reactions and trying things differently because they're intentionally and unintentionally trying to buck a bunch of other trends. Very interesting. Um I think it definitely makes for good conversation if nothing else. Um so why oh let's see. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Can I tell you, Will, this is a minor spoiler secret. Sure. But we have a new series of shorts coming out on Extra History. Uhhuh. that in a regular universe we wouldn't have to do but we're doing on this one which is a series of shorts called recently deleted history where we go back and cover events that for some reason are getting

struck from governmental history. Yeah, that seems um like an important thing to do and I'm real bummed that we have to do it. Yes, I am too. But you know what? F that we're doing it right. No, I feel like yeah, it's it's very important to do. I um yeah, I have I have complex feelings, but let's let's not dive too deeply into that or I will spend two hours screaming. Um yeah, so um yeah. Uh okay. Yeah. And um Twitch chat, you now do have new tools with which to um display your displeasure uh about some things. You have uh old man shaking cane at clouds. You have Zoe pet, Zoe cheer, and um or pet uh cheer old and clap are the new ones. Uh and there will be more coming soon. And YouTube, of course, we're going to be getting you emotes as soon as the membership gives us enough uh slots to YouTube does it a very

interesting way where they unlock the ability for us to give the community emotes based on how many people are members, which is you pay like $2 or $4 or five. I I can't remember. It's Yeah. But and doing that when you hit enough unlocks more emotes and then when more people know they unlock more. They basically make members pay for us to give you emotes. Yep. That's how Twitch does it, too. That's sort of the industry standard in streaming, which is weird. I don't know what to do with it. Uh okay. Um so, uh today's I learned a thing. Yeah. Uh it it's very strange. Today's topic is going to be a ride along of a game called Backpack Battles Chats Sound Off. How many of you have heard of Backpack Pedals? I know Twitch chat has cuz I've played uh some of it more than I thought of of it um on on stream. Um but I'm very interested to see if

anyone in YouTube has heard of it. Uh because this is a very interesting game. So um we're going to do our fade to black. We're going to come back. I'm going to introduce the game. Then we're going to jump into it. Uh if you've never been to one of these before, we'll explain a little bit more after we come back from our intro. But Jeff has not played this game. I have and I love this game. I'm going to be walking Jeff through his first experience with it. And Jeff's going to be doing systems design commentary essentially. This is if you haven't seen them, Will and I do these like once every other month or so. And yeah, he'll pick a game that he's played at least a little, often a lot and I will go in having not seen it at all, but turning on designer brain and do basically live design analysis while Will is also showing off the game. Yep. This as a secondary thing is a great way to see if a game that Will thinks is interesting is one that's interesting for you. Yep. And get some initial look at it. Yep. Okay. Uh we are going to go to black and then we're going to play a stinger and we're going to come back and

we're going to record for Nebula. All right. Uh don't panic. [Music] Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club. The only game design show on the internet that brings you a thing we've done before but not like this. Haha. I am your humble design. Everything new is old again. Yeah, that's right. Everything old is new again. Both. Both. Yeah. I am your humble design club. Well, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Hi Jeff. Hey everybody. I am Jeffrey Zigan. I am the studio director of Extra Credits and I am coming to you from the west coast today where Will over here is coming to you from the east coast and we are in our amazing virtual Extra Credits coffee shop that serves everywhere all at once all the time only somewhat similar to the movie. Does that mean that our our

coffee shop is like across the street from the restaurant at the end of the universe? because I feel like that's what you're implying and I feel like I like that idea a lot. Somewhat similar. I mean, if you look out the window, it's it's a nice day outside, which I'm not sure it is on the very last day of the universe because the restaurant at the end of the universe is every day at the end of the universe in a time bubble, which lets them repeat this on a consistent basis, which is And don't don't think too hard about anything presented in Hitchhiker's Guide. You will give yourself a headache. Just Oh, the cow, which freaks our throat out in the restaurant. Is a nice touch. Yeah, it's a great touch. Um, so, uh, today for your today for your viewing pleasure, we are bringing you a ride along. So, we've done these in the past, but never on YouTube. So, we'll explain real quick. Uh, occasionally, uh, once a month max. Um, we'll do a every month or two. Yeah, every month or two, we'll do a ride along. So, um, today we're going to be playing Backpack Battles. We're going to

show you Backpack Battles. I'm going to explain the game and Jeff has never seen it before. So Jeff is going to be doing some designer brain analysis, talking about his first impressions while I show off the game uh and see um what what comes out of it. I think this is a very interesting game uh because it is one of very few in this very niche subgenre. So the I'm going to I'm going to pitch the subg genre as inventory management auto battler games. It's not words 10 years ago I think I would have ever heard together. Correct. Because backpack battles is an auto battler that whose fundamental mechanic is inventory Tetris Diablo style. Um, and by the way, inventory Tetris used to be considered a game feature that we were trying to I won't say learn how to get rid of, but learn how to make better. Sure. And it became a thing that people enjoyed

enough in a weird perverse kind of way that it actually turned into its own thing. That's correct. Yeah. Which I mean is mind-blowing, right? Like that that people would enjoy creating um bags full of loot set up in particular ways enough that this has become a reasonably popular game. Um there is one other um that I'm aware of Gabe in this which is the Bizaar but that we've covered that before and um it's still chugging along. Uh Backpack Battles is almost out of early access. It's in version 9.38B as of today. Um they're pretty good about updating regularly. So um Jeff, do you have any questions? Is there always a B at the end for a backpack? No. Oh, I was just curious. Yeah, I I think it'd be kind of funny if there was. I think B is hot fixes. Okay. It could also stand for beta where they may have appended things based on where they feel they are in the pipeline. There is surprisingly both a

lot of consistency and inconsistency on how people name things. The only big one that is almost universally agreed upon is 1.0 is when you have gone to what you consider your first live version. Yep. And everything before 1.0 you know, if you are unfamiliar with this system is we're still building it. So, you said they're on version what? Uh.9.38. So, they feel like they're getting close to release based on the number.9 being close to 1.0. Yeah. And the it should be noted that Backpack Battles has had a long and very interesting history of updating. Their initial release was actually a demo. They used a demo that they released as part of a Steam demo festival. Steam does a lot of them. They're great for finding new games, but we've talked about the costs associated with company making a demo. They chose to take advantage of this. They released their beta as a demo. So, they used the

demo feature on Steam to release an open beta, which let everyone try the game during one of these festivals and gave them a bunch of information so they could continue developing the game. Uh, and then they've been updating it pretty regularly since then. Yep. Um, so I think, uh, with all that having been said, let's By the way, hold on. Phil just pointed out um, yeah, yeah, you can easily go to point. This is technically correct, but very very seldom used. One exception. Minecraft. Minecraft is just its own exception. Correct. The Minecraft exception is there are lots of rules that apply to lots of games and Minecraft is doing its own thing in its own special little bubble and we don't worry about what they're doing because they are doing their own thing. Um, right. And the nice thing for Minecraft is they never really feel boxed in. They

just go for it. At least their programmers never suffer from a case of brain block anyway. Anyway, they're really bad at square roots. Okay, we're going to dive into this game before Jeff and I get into a punoff that will never escape from. So, this is Backpack Battles. There is I'm drinking. There is some amount of sound, but not enough that's relevant. It's things plinking here and there, and I'm cutting it out so that we can have a talk without it uh being distracting in the background. So, this is the landing screen. Um there's some information behind me that you can see. Jeff, landing screen first thoughts. So, landing screen, first thoughts. Number one, they've chosen a very interesting art style in that um it is reminiscent of kind of an old medieval style but done in a new digital format. Like this is meant to evoke a certain feel. Yes. This art style with color scheme basically says medieval fantasy.

There is no time I have ever ever ever seen anything in kind of this color scheme and layout that was not medieval fantasy. Just straight up. So they are color coding this to let you know what kind of the genre theme is going to be from the beginning and they're playing to a recognizable trope on it. Yep. Um, the one downside to this is it's this color palette is sometimes a little bit muddy and that it can be hard to differentiate basically foreground and background. And to fix that or compensate for that, they have minorly animated the character. You'll notice that is the only thing other than the droppy things, which we'll get to in a moment, that is moving on here. And that kind of gives you a, oh, there's my character. Because if she wasn't moving, it would be very easy to overlook her initially. Yep. Um I think they also decided we needed some extra movement. So we have random thing droppy and Boppy

from the sky. Correct. Um the other one is Will. Is that usual? The little like loading thing on the new unranked game. There's a little swirly or is that where your mouse is? Oh, that's another thing that that is not that is that's an OBS aberration. That is not that. Okay, let me fix that. Just was checking to see because that was a visual anomaly bit otherwise based on it. Yep, that's that. And now it's gone. Haha, there's a transparent layer that should have been disabled and wasn't. Anyway, continue. But um they're on the, you know, they're giving you the title on the little bit of the left of that. They're giving you a little bit of a clue of what it's going to be. The most important things that they think are basically joining games. So that is the interface that is middle center in big bright colors. The new unranked, new ranked game, new unranked game, other game modes. They're doing an interesting thing in they're exposing a lot more

interface than a lot of landing menus do. If you look on the right, um, you've got your wardrobe, your history, some sort of score, items, recipes, um, your streaming stuff. Those are usually things that you see one layer down on an interface or not initially exposed. And you generally would have like a a big splash screen with the title that says start. Yeah. And here they're looking, it looks like they're trying to skip that level, so they're just putting it all on one screen. Yep. My guess is you're in the middle of a run because I'm seeing a character on the left. Either that or you have a long-term persistent character that you're continuing play with, but they're showing your character stats. Correct. There. These are the starting stats. So the ranger starts with 12 gold, 25 health and five stamina. I am currently ranked 50 platinum in ranked. Um but

that is the starting stats. Also relevant is that the um above that above the character stats that is the starting backpack or one of the two starting backpacks for the ranger. Um and I can toggle between them here. So these are the two different essentially loadout options. Uh and they're Yeah. And there are equally four classes that I can toggle between. Ah, okay. I would initially I'm very I surmise something else. B and I was a little confused on why there would be both a character stat as well as choose a class. Mhm. This is I'll honestly say slightly different interface than I would guess what it would have have done. Mhm. But it also is not terribly confusing once you click on a couple things. Yep. So I wouldn't say it's bad, but I also wouldn't say it's optimal. Yeah. Uh okay. So um that is that's

that's a very good start. So um I think the best way to get in is probably for us to start a run. So I'm going I'm going to suggest that we start with this bag and the ranger because they're the first this is the first set you really use. Can I see real quick? Can you just flip between the classes? So, we had Ranger. This is Pyro. Pyromancer. Um, who's hot? Uh, h this is the uh me Reaper. Reaper. Uh, and that's her uh default coffin. Oh, looks like a little coffin. It It actually is. It's a storage coffin. Um, and we have the Berserker. And it's also worth noting that if you hover over these, you can get complete tool tips for what they do. So, for instance, this is a bag. All it does is add four slots. This is a duffel bag. It adds uh and it's a unique berserker bag. It adds six slots and then it has some triggered effects that occur. Okay. Go back to the pyromancer a sec for me. Sure. Okay. I was just kind of curious and

then so yeah, start with whichever one you think makes for a good first view. Yeah. Uh and let's hop in. Yeah. All right. Let's uh we'll start an unranked game. Okay. So, here is one of two screens in the game. Okay, this is uh one of them. So, uh we're going to go through a couple of things that you can't see because of where I am, and that's just sort of unfortunate. We're in the first round. I've won zero times and I have five tries. Uh my goal is to get to 10 wins at which point I will be given the option to go for additional wins if I would like to. Um, that's sort of a riskreward mechanic in ranked. But in unranked, it just lets you play with the build longer if you'd like to. Or you can tap out at 10 and say, "I'll take my winnings here. Thanks." Similar to Bellatro where you need to get to round eight to win, but you can keep going if you want after. Yes, absolutely. Okay. Uh, all right. Let's take a look at an item. We're going to look at the sword.

So, okay. Every item that we use has stats. In this case, we have a damage range of one to three, which averages out to 1.4 per second. It has a cost stamina cost of one. Wait, wait, that's a weird that is not the actual average damage. It's not uh correct because it's a 1.4 second cool down. Ah, okay. And because I they're are they also factoring in the accuracy? I believe they are. I don't remember. I will be totally honest. Because normally on a 1D3, the average is two. And the way, by the way, if you ever need to figure out on a base thing how to get the average, you add the the least and the most roll, add them together, and divide by two. Yep. That is the average. Yeah. So, uh yes, it's very strange,

right? Okay. Um, so we have uh a damage range of 1 to three. And by the way, the a the average damage per second matters a lot less in some cases. That number gets very spiky um because of other effects. Um so we've got a stamina cost of one. So every 1.4 seconds it will consume one of our five stamina. And uh it has okay it has an accuracy percent of 90. It also has um because it is inside this bag is a 12% chance to critically hit and gets an additional 3% for each luck which is what we gain from lucky clovers and several other other things. Mhm. Um so, uh and it's also worth noting that, um we can hover over this, right? And this is uh you'll gain gold every round, your health will increase, and your stamina, right? We

currently regenerate one stamina per second. So, we have additional um and the sword takes one stamina per second. The sword stamina takes one every 1.4 seconds. Really don't start you out with a simple math example, unfortunately. I really wish they did, but they don't. And is the fourleaf clover taking up a space? Yes. Okay. All items with one convenient exception we'll we'll talk about here in a second are either bags that are sort of the background layer of your backpack that indicate what what spaces you have to put things in or they're items that go in that and each of them takes up a number of slots. Um you can see as I hover over these right that they have an outline. So this one takes up two. This one takes up nice four. This one takes up four in a line. Um the broom Oh, can you rotate objects? Could you rotate your sword to the left and therefore put the broom in? Okay, that's

what I Yep. Does that still count as being in your backpack for being lucky? Yes, it does. Okay. You have already beginning to see correct. Dipping into main backpack is an interesting mechanic. Okay. Yep. Um, yeah, two average damage per hit with a cool down of 1.4 is approximately 1.4, but it does include the point multiplier. Yeah, that that makes sense. Yeah, for those listening along but not reading, chat is now trying to dissect part of the math for this. Yeah, because and that's one of the reasons I like this is because right now, no time pressure. And that also uh makes a game um very uh easy to have these conversations about, right? We saw a lot of really great suggestions that I'm gonna work on figuring out in the future, but some of them were for like action or racing games, and those are cool and great and hard to have these conversations about because I h uh have a streamer debuff where my brain focuses

on the game and trying to read chat and having a coherent conversation about complex design analysis is very difficult under those circumstances. Will and I have done League and we've done Deadlock and a couple of others where we also realized only one of us gets to play at a time because if we're both trying to play and talk about it, it is not as coherent a conversation. Yeah. So, the one exception, by the way, to the every item takes up a space is gemstones. Gemstones go into sockets on gear. So, as I've hovered a lump of coal, which for our purposes right now is gemstone. Um, you can see that sockets appear in uh all of the relevant gear. So, there's a there's a little socket in the sword. There's one in the frying pan. There's one in the shield. Not every item has a socket, and not every item with sockets only has one. Some have up to three. There might be one with four, but three is generally the max.

Um, so, so basically I can see lump of coal 70% chance to deal plus one damage. So immediately my designer brain looking at that says I want that on an item that gets used often. So for example, I saw the sword has a cool down of 1.4. If there was a dagger that had a cool down of.5. Yeah. 70%. And this because this is flat damage. This isn't add 10% damage. This is just add x damage. It moves our range. Yeah. Yeah. Um, do they have items that do add percent like add 20% damage or are they all flat fees or flat that you Most of them are flat. Okay. The percentage increases come in the form of speed. So they change the rate of attacks more frequently than they change the flat. Gotcha. Does that make sense? Yeah. That just tells me also that basically low cooldown is good with slottable based on the one slottable I've seen. Yep. Uh I

did want to call this out. Uh link. No, we have not. Uh we're going to we're just doing uh I I know that they do some amount of content. That was not a factor in choosing to do this game. I just think the game's neat. Will and I choose games we're interested in checking out. Um but if uh we we never pick games we're gonna crap on. Correct. Yeah. That's not fun, right? And and that's generally the way I play games, too, is if I'm not having fun with the game, I'll stop playing it because that's not the headsp space I'm live in. So, here's another interesting thing. You'll note that um so auto battler, we're going to be buying and selling things with our gold. Important to know that every item uh sells for at least one gold. Okay. Which means that because this is on sale for one gold, I should always buy it. Ah, okay. Actually, what is the resale value? Um, it varies. It's half a lot of the

time, but min one, but because you can't go lower than one, you can always trade that one back in for the amount you bought it for, and it is therefore equivalently free as soon as you find something better. Correct. Okay. It also lets us talk about the next core mechanic of backpack battles, which is combining. So, I have here this I could slot it into this, but you'll also see that there's a blue line that's tethering these two items together. Mhm. I can combine these two items and it forms a yellow line and that will form a torch. And so, uh I there are some items which can't be purchased in the shop which can only be created by combining them. Mhm. So, uh, we have a whole recipe book down here. Of all of the different things you can make. So, torch is up here. So, we can see that torch is um two to three damage for one stamina cost, 90% accuracy, 1.4 second cool down, and on

hit, it has a 25% chance to gain one damage. We can also light the torch, which gives us even better stats. So, uh you'll uh lots of the lots of auto battlers in general are about crafting builds and combining items to get the result that you want or like to move towards an ultimate form. And this is one of the early ones. Oh, that is Oh, they did. Okay, great. Um and it's also very nice even if you haven't made one. So, I've never made a thorn bloom, but I know how I can. This recipe page is always available and shows you all of the items that could show up in your run that are available for you to make, whether or not you've made them before. Does an item tell you it has it is part of a recipe, or is every item part of a recipe? It will tell you it's part of a recipe with an item that's currently available in the shop. So, uh, for instance, even though I don't own any of

these, if I hover over the shield, because the shield and the walrus tusk have a, uh, fusion, right? Have a have a recipe, they will show that they have a recipe with each other, and then I can go look them up and figure out what Oh, I see. Because there's a little blue line connecting them when you hover over. Correct. I missed that initially. Yeah. Um, there's also So, this is all telling me Oh, yeah. So broom and frying pan makes a shovel. H it they don't always make sense. Don't don't hold your breath for it to make the most sense. It is it is a fantasy game. So sometimes I mean stick plus scoopable thing for shovel is isn't the worst. The broom the broom is actually a core part of many recipes. Uh the broom forms the basis of uh every staff. So, we have the broom and the wet stone make a shepherd's crook. The broom, uh, sorry, the magic staff, which we make by combining a broom and a mana orb, makes several

things. Um, except for the spear. We don't make a spear with a broom for some reason. The spear is its own item. Don't I don't really know why. Um, does the game explain how fusion works? Uh, it does kind of. um mostly through when you put them next to each other um it'll do this it'll do this behavior um and it does show you that there's a recipe thing and you can always click the shopkeeper for you know a random tip. So I have a question. Sure. The sword. So okay you could you could put the coal into the sword to socket it but you can also can you not take it back out? Cool. But you can also combine them together to make a torch. Yes. Okay. So, there's two interactions here. Yes. There's socket thing and there's also forge thing. Yes. Okay. Um Okay. Uh let's uh I'm going to I'm

going to get us moving on the idea that we should probably go and do a do a match. What did Shield do, by the way? Shield is uh when we are attacked with a melee attack, that's what that symbol means, has a 30 three a 30% chance to prevent seven damage and remove an additional.3 stamina from the opponent. Okay, so we can block slow them down. Um, which I think is a good start. Um, we're also going to take this walrus tusk because they fuse into a spiked shield which is kind of nice. Um, and then I kind of wonder this is another.7 per second. Where was your gold? It's down here. Did that start higher? Was that going lower? It starts at 12. Uh, there we go. Thank you. We get 12 starting gold. Um, we could we could get a broom or we could lock the broom and roll, right?

So, reserving an item is free and it means that it won't reroll when I pull the roll rope and it won't roll when the shop automatically rerolls after each battle. Okay. So, I can hold. So, you can basically say a broom seems important but don't want now. Correct. Uh in this case, however, I think the pan is probably pan is much better, right? You can see that it's it's slower, but it does better average damage for slightly more stamina cost and has a synergy with food. The stars are important uh as well. Stars are if there is an item of the specified type in the specified space around this, a benefit occurs either to the item that's uh in the space or to the item that's in the middle. Either one. And to do that, you'd have to move your sword into the bottom, put your the pan on the left, which would mean that the pan there's no way to get the pan and the sword both lucky. Right now there is I could move

this here and this here cuz this is only three not four. So I can Oh, I thought that was a square. Okay. I didn't realize it was a So So we have every shape imaginable. Okay. So uh that was my assumption cuz you weren't mousing over. Yeah, I will I will mouse over and uh do that. But I think for right now, unless we can get a food, it's probably not worth it. So uh let's reroll even at half price. Um, it's worth it, and that's what I don't know from having not played. Right. It's probably worth it to buy. There's an argument that I should buy it and then roll. Um, the problem is that at 0.9 stamina plus the.7 stamina for from my uh sword, I'm at 1.6 and now I'm at a stamina deficit. And I'm going to run out of stamina and if things don't go my way, potentially lose because of that. where I might have done better just whailing away with either the sword or the pan. And if I get a food, then the pan is much more efficient at um

whailing away than the sword is. If you can sell for half of what you buy it for, should you therefore buy it for the two because you can always sell it back for two and see if the roll gives you food? That's true. Uh you can also see here, by the way, it'll warn you that the stamina use is high. Hold the cord. Okay, so we've got garlic on sale, which is a thing that I think we should get. Uh this is it's very good on its own and also synergizes with the uh with the the pan. Mhm. Um you also now have high stamina use. Does that mean you're going to get rid of your sword? Does indeed. Now storage. Yeah, there is a storage down here. There is also um another lump of coal which I could use or for right now I can put it here. Note that it won't combine into these uh it won't combine in the storage. It

has to be on the field. So if I wanted to combine these should take your coal out then well it won't combine here right? The [Music] um it has to be on the field. It can't be like this won't combine. it won't form the torch. So, if I'm not going to use the torch synergy, then this makes the pan better, right? Because now I get that 70% chance. That's what I meant is Oh, what? Had you already put it in the pan? Did I miss that? Yeah. I I thought you put it I thought you put the coal on the sword into the storage. Yeah. Uh it the order doesn't super matter. Uh and then I'm probably going to hedge my bets and push this put this on sale shortbow on reserve. Um because it we might we might pivot. So right now we have a pan with food. Do we need to get the food into the lucky part? No, it doesn't. Um you can see which

effects are affecting it during the mouseover. So I was pretty sure that they hadn't introduced this. Um only weapons can critical hit. You can't critically heal unless you have something that says otherwise. You can't, right? So like this is I can't like critically give block, right? I also like that garlic not only gives us block but could also remove vampirism from our opponent is interesting. And yeah, which is showing that they have weird effects your opponent might have. Correct. And introducing you to that early. Correct. Okay. So my guess is based on what you've shown me, there are two phases. There's the shopping phase, which is basically your deck preparation. Correct. If you were playing a CCG, your hero load out for other things, and that from this, you are now going to be going to do some sort of battle based on the gear you have been able to buy and the combinations you've made. Correct. Okay.

So, in order to do that, hence the name backpack battles. Correct. So, up here at the top, we'll click the start backpack battle and we'll look for an opponent. No, we're not actually looking for an opponent. We're looking for a ghost. So, uh, is this a real person who made a loadout that's getting saved in and randomly put against you? Correct. This is asynchronous multiplayer. So, normally we would see opponent's name. I have names turned off for stream safety. Um, but we get to see everything in our opponent's bag. We get to see all of their effects. Uh, and we have They too have garlic. They too have garlic. And we have a complete um combat log that we can go through at the end along with like what the sources of damage dealt were and like a bunch of other things. Why do they look like a little snow panda? Uh because one of the things that you get for playing a excessive amount is um those trophies that you're getting, those wins convert are also a currency that you're earning

which unlocks cosmetic rewards for each hero. Okay. And cosmetics are almost always only really useful if you think other people can see them. So, correct. Hence showing on an asynchronous battler. Gotcha. Uh, and we can um pause and do full like, you know, full control. Okay. So, we've won the round. Uh, I can hide this now and show this. So, we've got a complete They're really big into stats. So we have the complete damage dealt by all sources which in this case is uh spikes and the pan, right? Okay. So per unit time I can scroll all the way down here and show what did how much damage when um there are so the pan crit once which was very nice. It dealt 12 damage. Um, which means it high rolled. So, it high rolled its damage and the coal went off

and it crit all at the same time. Incredibly unlikely, right? Because it's 12% or sorry, 15% to crit, 70% chance for the coal, 50/50 on the coin flip. So basically they were the um they were the warlock with the sword. Yes. Um com combined with paladin who also decided to smite on the critical. Correct. Exactly. So um and so you get complete breakdowns of everything. What healed us? What caused block? What you know where we blocked? Where we I see why you thought that shield was interesting there too because removing st now that I see it. Removing some stamina too also lowers basically their next attack or delays their next attack at some point. It Yeah, it would if they weren't breaking even. They are breaking even here. So it it's un it would have to trigger multiple times to get them to if they're riding the line that could push them back. Correct. If you're um if you're going all of the way down to

close to zero and doing the one up one down thing, then it matters, right? And it's also worth noting we weren't necessarily going to go against another ranger. We could have gone against any of the other three classes, some of whom are more likely to have more um weapons or slower weapons or have higher stamina requirements and so on. Um so yeah, I I love this. I think this is one of the things that really makes Backpack Battles stand out is you can see exactly what did what where. We we high rolled twice. Yeah, I rolled twice. Okay, I feel bad for them. Um, right. So, you get the full damage graph and it will do everything. It'll do heal. It'll do all of your different um uh all your different buffs, all of the different effects everywhere for both sides. I think one of the things that this also tells you very much is they want you to learn, but also this isn't a cheap knockoff game. Like, yeah, putting in

stats with full review is both a learning thing as well as a thing to say, look, we have a well-developed game that you should take us seriously because and they add more stats all the time. In the last update, they added a stat to show I forget what it was, but the last set of patch notes had had a mention of another stat that they were adding to stat tracking. Cool. Because people had asked for it, right? And that is a great thing about development is they didn't have to go make all of those at the first part. Like their beta version might have started with one and they're like, "Cool, we know we can show it works. We'll go add more of these later." Yep. Exactly. So, okay. So, you won a round. So, I won a round. That's the first 10 wins. We get nine gold. We come back here. We've combined our um our shield and our spike into a spiked shield. So, now did you just do that or did it do it automatically? It does it automatically. So now we have when we're attacked by a melee attack, we have a 30% chance to prevent seven damage, remove three.3

stamina, and gain a spike. Now we don't get spikes at the beginning anymore, but we get the chance to create additional spikes down the road. So quick question. Did doing the battle is the result of the battle that the thing that could combine did combine? Why did they combine? They combine. They are guaranteed to combine when you perform a battle in a situ in a situation where they have that golden thread between them in your bag. Always they have that the pan and the food had a different synergy. It was just for each food pan gets stronger. Not these can Okay. Just getting used to the different kinds of mechanics. Absolutely. Um we have uh another one which is we can combine the shiny shell. um with the sword. Um this also introduces another kind. This is after 5 seconds means it heals once not every 5

seconds like Oh, so that is a single use during battle. Correct. Okay. And it will heal us versus the banana which is every 5 seconds. The banana is also a food. It's also worth noting that foods speed each other up. So there is a tight synergy package that's available, right? There's sort of an archetype of food and we'll see more of the ways that you can play into or out of that archetype. Um, or have like what what I think of as like a package of food, right? So I might have a bunch of defensive items and I might also have a pan that's most of my damage combined with a bunch of food that's speeding itself up and the pan up or and buffing the pan's damage. And so it kind of snowballs into that. Um, and the banana is also so the advantage of the other one is that it's tiny. Like it is a one slot thing that heals the 5-second thing where the like that's the reason you'd go for that is you have a little bit of space left in

your bag and you're looking to do an optimization. It also combines with the sword to form where is it? Ah, yes, the shell totem which is uh every 3.6 6 seconds. It costs two stamina to give us one empower uh if we are um above 70%. Yeah. Otherwise, he Okay. Otherwise, heal. Um it's a kind of a steep stamina cost. Um but it's a powerful effect. And at the same time, we have to play around with a wooden sword and a shiny shell in our backpack together in order to get that fusion. Right. Right. So, there's a bunch of uh thinking about how you set up for a round that you're relatively confident you can win with a sword going off that's draining your stamina and not necessarily contributing the most towards your victory plan. Um, oh, interesting. So

based it's the sufferer for it's um actually Monster Train makes use of a couple of those kinds of things where they're like suffer through this for a little while to get a better reward for later rounds. Yes. Like the um there's an white ember is a good example. Yeah. There's an event that gives you a card and if you use it, it's gone forever. And if you don't use it, if you just sandbag it, act like it's a curse, don't play it. Then you get an upgraded version, which is much better and sticks around. Well, they give you an artifact called hope for peace, which is a flower that says cards that would be purged. purges removed from deck permanently are instead the effect that basically removes it just for that match as opposed to forever exhausted or whatever their whatever their equivalent of exhaust is. Um, oh, and by the way, it's also worth noting that right from the very beginning, we're not I promise we're not going to look too much at this. Okay, I'm going to I'm going to

I'm going to dial this down so we don't get some uh we don't get too much. Okay, so these are the ranger class items. Ah, these are items class specific items and recipes. Correct. These will only show up if I'm a ranger. These are all the neutral items. Good. Quite a bit more of them. And if I remove all of it, there are 345 different items spread across four classes and several subclasses. And it gets a little hectic. So, generally speaking, we're going to we're going to pair down. This is kind of like the CCG thing like a slay the spire where every character has specific cards as well as that one makes use of mostly class specific with a small pool of universals. Correct. This one has a much larger pool of universals with some class specific ones. And we can also see like if you're wondering like what are the melee weapons that could attack me that I'm worried about with the shield, right? They got a buster sword. There is in fact a buster sword. It's called the Impractically Large Great Sword, and it

can be very good, but it takes 5 seconds to spin up, and there are definitely cases where you're just dead before that. So, um, uh, yes. Yeah, there CIF is correct. There are badges, um, which we'll find a badge real quick. Actually, it's interesting in a game like this. I can see why they'd want to do the larger universal pot because if you're having to start remember remember and recognize recipes and play towards them. Mhm. You don't want to every single time a new class comes out have to go memorize 80 new things. Yep. Now, or even just Yeah. Yeah. So, you can get badges. There's one badge for each class um that give you the ability to find items crossass. There is also the rainbow badge, which is everything shows up in the shop. This is kind of like Chaos and Isaac. Like, it can be cool and it can be great, but

also you might never find the thing you're looking for ever because now all of the items show up in the shop. And that means all of them, right? Are these things you toggle off or on or if you have them? They're items. So, if you have them Okay. Oh, gotcha. Uh, and then there's the So, it's the prismatic shard from Slay the Spire where once you pick up that artifact for the rest of the run thing is unlocked. It is an item. You could sell it. Okay. But, um, and then there's the stone badge, which turns off your starting classes items um, and gives you uh, a free item worth of gold from the neutral pool and for block every 3 seconds. Um, so it is like not to get too complicated, there there's a bunch of stuff going on. Um, so let's get back to our build. Okay. I think for right now what I like is this banana. Like this banana because it gives us Oh, the lucky doesn't have to

be in the main part of the bat. Wait, it's just for each lucky you have, this just gives you a lucky at the beginning of the um at the beginning of the fight. And wait. And as long as lucky is anywhere in the bag, anything with the lucky property. For some reason, I thought it had to be in the central part of the bag to get that. Luck is a buff that goes on you, the player. And then the effect of the ranger bag is it has a 12% chance to crit, plus 3% for each lucky that you, the player, have at that time when the weapon goes off. Um, and the ranger bag is the central six slot. Correct. It's um Right. So, what just happened there? Oh, we can rearrange everything. Oh. Uhhuh. So, I could do that. Interesting. If I wanted to, and indeed I will need to at some point because Oh, you can buy a bigger bag. Uh

you you don't buy a bigger bag, Jeff. You buy all of the different little components to make a hodge podge patchwork nightmare bag. Great. We're going to need So this isn't We're going to need a bigger boat. This is We're going to need a bigger bag. That's correct. Um I think I'm going to take a rroll here. I might take a short bow if I can find a second clover. Um Oh, speaking of which, not a clover. I see more bag parts. Oh yes, bag parts. So we've got a lot of um we've got a lot of stuff going on here. So, we have a rock. Like all one gold items. If we have one gold left at the end of the round, we're gonna buy it and use it because it's one gold and it doesn't cost us stamina and it's like two to four damage and destroys four block. Why would we not just huck a free rock at them? Like, um, we have an additional bag, which we're going to need. We have a wet stone which gives adjacent uh weapons one damage and also fuses with

the wooden sword to form a hero sword. And we also have healing herbs which give us two regeneration which heals us for one every two seconds. We have some healing. We also have some healing in the form of the banana. So I'm a little less inclined to worry about the healing herbs. But I could. The healing herbs importantly aren't food, are they? They are not. and you're already checking for tags, which is the major which is like one of the major things here is how do the all of these items synergize, right? And one of the things that I think it's really good at is letting you take your time to figure it out. Like, okay, I love the idea the idea of Hearthstone Battlegrounds and Team Fight Tactics. In practice, I find that the timer makes me hate both of those games with a burning passion to play because the timer makes me feel like I'm making bad decisions because I'm on the clock. I play them I would play them about as

fast as I play this, but the lack of a timer here means that I feel like I have the freedom to take my time and make choices. So even if I make the choices faster or at the same speed, I'm not under a time crunch mentally and that feels like I get to explore and make better choices. Like as a result, it also almost by definition turns it into a more casual game because it means you could be stopping to go answer a work Discord or reply to an email. And if this was tablet version, you could be playing it while you're brewing a coffee and then stop and go do five things and 3 hours later turn it back on and pick up where you were. Yeah. And I think that that is a huge benefit of asynchronous auto battlers as opposed to synchronous auto battlers like Team Fight Tactics and Battlegrounds. That's not to say that there isn't a place for those. There definitely are. Team Fight Tactics Battlegrounds are much more esports, right? There's much more high octane like edge of your seat watch

people buy sell all day this now is the time right like that right but yeah and honestly like that's one of the things I like about the monster train daily challenge is I have 24 hours to complete it I can play it on my tablet and if I'm feeling like that for the day I can do what would normally be a 45minut run spread over 12 hours and get it done amongst other parts. Mhm. So, there's definitely a So, going back to this, it looks like you have enough gold if you wanted to buy the backpack extension and the bow. That's true. Um, I kind of think that's likely the play. I like the bow. Um, we're also going to be combining. Does a bow have a crit? Uh, it does. It could. I need to reorg here to make that happen. Um, I also need to reorg out of this corner to make the this happen.

Um, I want to do this. Oh, I can do [Music] this. And eventually this will be here. Um, so now both foods are adjacent to each other and to the pan and the bow's in the bag. Yep. Right. So, how much stamina does the bow use? How are you? The bow uses point4 per second. So, I'm using on average 1.3 per second, but I'm gaining back 1.2 because this regenerates one stamina every 5 seconds. So, on average, you get 02 back, and that's not So, you can go for a while before you start basically missing a thing. Yep, that's correct. Um, wait, did your shield give you some stamina back? It does not. It merely takes stamina from my opponent. It doesn't steal it. Okay, good question, though. What's the gain up to? Oh, the gain, the spike. Okay. Yeah. Gain one spike up to five total. So if we get attacked

15 times and the game and the battle hasn't ended, right? Then the then on odds we probably got it slightly more than 15, like 16 17 times. Yeah. Um cool. Uh actually Yeah. Oh, I was say jumping in real quick. Yeah. Since this is a thing where the first time on YouTube, um, if you're joining us a little late for it, a welcome in. That's Will. I'm Jeff. Uh, Will is our full-time streamer. I am a professional g game designer and have been for more than two decades now. Yeah. Yeah. Every every time he says that, by the way, I need you all to understand that I can see like the dread and the wistful nostalgia like in Jeff like all at the same time at war and then I see one gray hair. Just like one somewhere in that perfectly like done hairdo. Just one gray hair. Just one. Oh, I appreciate the perfectly done hairdo. Thank you. Yeah, it's good. But um and every once

in a while Will will pick a game that I have never seen or you know I may have seen a trailer but I've never played that he is familiar with and we will pop on and I will come in blind and Will will show off the game for an hour or two, walk through it and I'll basically do a live design look blind, ask some questions, make some observations, happy to be right or wrong but basically call out what my designer brain sees and Will will also have fun talking about a game that he enjoys in some Yep. Uh so let's hit round two and see whether or not we win. All right. Um it's also worth noting, by the way, that we can speed this up. We can slow it down. We can get more stats later. All of these are options. So I'm assuming this is a pyromancer since I see some flame. That is correct. This is a pyromancer. Wow. Our shield uh won us the match. So that's cool. All right. So this is a pyromancer. Uh I'll explain. Are they cooking a pig in their backpack? No. Yes. But no, I'll explain what each

class does as we run into it. So, the pyromancer's Why are you like this? The pyromancer um has a fire pit as their starting bag. So, that's uh nine uh backpack slots to R six, and they automatically spend one of their gold every time they go back to the shop to generate a flame, and they get five maximum health for each fire item inside um when the battle starts. So, they have 52 max health to R35. Um, and fire gives them a heat, and this is what we were talking about, percentage increases. Heat for each stack of heat that they have, and they have four because of their um load out gives all of their items 2% haste. So when we're talking about percentage increases to effectiveness or to other things, it's generally in the form of speed, not in the form of a flat increase or a percentage increase to damage. Sometimes I think there are a

couple, but not terribly many. Um, and then they have a burning coal. This is the upgraded version of coal. Um, and they have a hero sword. Um, which gives them additional damage. Uh, and they've got gloves speeding up the hero sword. So, they're kind of all in on making this hero sword work. Unfortunately for them, they have two melee weapons and we have a spike shield. So, if we look at the log, uh, we blocked 14 of their damage with spike shield. Uh, and we gained four spikes. So, they were increasingly doing damage to themselves as they were attacking us uh because all they had were melee weapons and that ended up being their downfall. Right. You were both um we used to call that a damage shield where they were taking damage and you were taking less. Correct. They were taking

damage as the damage shield. You were taking less is just the blocking. Yeah. the shield or um so your build was well suited to combating this build, correct? Exactly. So, uh Okay. And then we'll we'll show this and we're two of 10 done and we'll we'll keep going. Back to the shop. You got some gold. Okay. Yeah, you can unh you do have undo and redo with control Z and control Y. Um if you uh I think I'm definitely going to buy another lump of coal uh because it's real good on every weapon. Um it's als it's also worth noting that it has different effects. So, if I put it on a weapon, it's got a 70% chance to deal one extra damage. If I put it on an armor or a shield or another socket of some kind, it'll give eight block at the start of the fight and will resist the first debuff that comes at us. Um, and then if we put it in the backpack itself, if we let it take up a spot as opposed to putting it on a socket, we'll get a random um buff and we'll inflict a debuff. Um, and that debuff can be

anything. Uh, which is really funny because sometimes it's poison and your opponent doesn't have a way to and then they just die to poison which is kind of funny. Um, that coal is poison. Uh, so we have um so some things change rules, right? So the bag of stones is a three gold item that says uh stones above can be thrown repeatedly. This is worth noting that this is one of the items that is rotationally sensitive. If we turn it on its side, because it says above, it'll only be the one spot directly above. It won't be the two spots that are now to the side. Right. Because which only matters based on where your stones are. Correct. Um and then and let's see. The stone was it's two to four damage. No stamina. Uh 1.2 damage a second. Uh correct. Uh and normally can only be thrown once per battle. But if we combine these that we could just huck rocks all day, which is not a terrible idea, right?

Mhm. Um, so I think for right now that gives us a the theme music. We can play the for those about to rock. Yeah, we we we salute you. Okay. And then I'm going to roll here. Rewarded. Discounted bag. Never punished. Never once punished. Always rewarded. I will of course buy the discounted bag. And now put my Oh, I need to change some things. Um, how am I going to do this? So, what do you need to change? What are we looking to do? So, what I'm looking to do is get the rock into this bag. Ah, okay. So, if I do this, we only have one rock. So, now the rock can crit. So now all of my damaging effects are inside, right? And this, because I turned it sideways, I only need to get one rock to throw more than once. I can throw the rock. Uh, yeah. All right, cool. If your sword sold for two, would it be worth trying to get the another garlic to get in there or That's a very good question.

And the answer is probably yes. Um, because it's going to increase the damage of our pan. We haven't found anything that like really makes me want to keep using the sword. So, we can get rid of it. Let's Let's do that. And we'll go all in on food. So, we're going to move this and then And I'm starting to see the adjacency thing. So food adjacent to each other gives food the buff where the food adjacent to the pan gives the pan the buff. That's correct. It's also worth noting that it's for each food of a different type. So aka not garlic. So if I put these right here, nothing happens. They don't and they show by not showing the star that nothing happens there. Mhm. Um So it's not as important is probably a way to do this better. And there like this is one of the interesting things, right? Is that at some point you kind of have to accept that you could analysis paralysis

yourself for forever trying to optimize each round. Mhm. Or you could just say that it's good enough and move on. Um and like that's a uh that's always a tension, right? But but again, because it's asynchronous, you have the freedom to decide, right? You can spend forever. And in later rounds, it's much more likely that we will um when we start scaling up and get our subclass, our badges, other things. It's about to get more complicated. Um so I think this is probably Do you want a quick thing to try or should we just Actually, you could probably just go in. Yeah. Um I'm down to accept uh thoughts on reorg, but let's do it after this one. There is, by the way, we're facing a berserker. Uh, so worth noting that the Berserker is uh one of those classes that uses a bunch of melee. Um, they also have a unique mechanic which is now on display. They're that glowing yellow

is their battle rage. When they reach 50% HP, they enter a battle rage for several seconds. Um, and they take less damage and other things happen during battle rage. Um I saw your rocks really going off there. It looked like rocks free damage is free. So um we enter battle rage for they enter battle rage for 5 seconds and during battle rage all of the items inside the bag trigger 30% faster and we take 22% reduced damage. Now, I will say my opponent didn't optimize their bag terribly well because this uh garlic is not in this bag. And these two could have there are many ways they could have moved this to put the banana such that only the tail end of the banana was in here and the garlic took up these two spots so that all of these items benefited. Um the pig, by the way, uh gives us an extra gold every time we enter the shop. And we gain they gain some extra health for every um item

either above or below it. Above or below relative to the pig. Um that triggers at the start of um battle. Uh so I imagine if if we look at the log, we'll once again see that Yeah, we blocked a bunch of damage from the shield. Yeah, the shield blocked a bunch of damage. Oh, we also made it to fatigue. If the battle goes on long enough, we'll enter fatigue, which does escalating damage to both players until one of them an ending mechanic to keep things from going forever. Correct. There are fatigue builds, by the way, because of course there are. Um, that's it. So, that's the Magic the Gathering Millstone deck in a weird kind of way. It Yes, it's it's kind of like Millstone. It's weirdly in a lot of ways more like lantern control because what you end up doing is trying to stop your opponent from doing anything. Not milling them out, just like you can't do anything to hurt me and I'm going to sit here. There are items that give invulnerability temporarily. Is that

frozen or winter orb? Uh that's stacks. Yes. Um so yeah. Oh, we'll keep going for a sec while you go back to the shop. I will be right back. Excellent. Excellent. Chat, how we doing? Uh how we feeling? How are you all enjoying this? I know this is a little different than the other design club episodes. Um, we will be uh we only do this once every couple months. Um, when Jeff and I have an itch to like just dive into a game because I I find that and I don't know how many how true this is um for you and your fields of work and study, it can be really easy to get caught up in theory and lose sight of the practical. Right? So, for me, the thing that I really like doing is returning to the to the practical sort of like, okay, great. We've talked a lot about the idea of action economy, whatever. Roll up your sleeves, get into a game that uses action economy, and let's talk about it, right? Um, and I think that that's uh a really great um way to uh to like spend some time talking about game design.

Um, and I really like when we get to do these because Jeff is um really good at picking out picking out these individual like weird facets or like particularly interesting mechanics or uh interesting systems dynamics and calling them out. And I think that that is really good. What do we got in the shop? In the shop, we've got a different thing. So, here we have a skill. So, at the uh this a skill at the end of um round three, aka the beginning of round four, we will always be offered a skill. We're given five extra gold to buy it. Um we could spend one of that gold to pass on it by r-rolling away these skills. We don't have to buy one. We probably should. Um, so we have some, uh, we'll go through them. Uh, number one, just stats. We gain 10% additional

maximum health and 10% stamina regeneration. This one always shows up. This is an all class skill. It always shows up. You can always just have more stats. Um, super spacious. Bags appear more often and have an additional chance to be on sale. It also has this very interesting mechanic. Items uh to items in the corners right diagonal from the center square trigger faster for each orthogonally adjacent square that's empty. So there are reasons that you might not want to fill the whole bag. There's sort of this tension in this one. Um, smithing for dummies, uh, gives us a free wet stone. And at the start of our battle, um, any weapon which is crafted, so that's any weapon that we've made by combining two other weapons, um, or two other items, uh, gains an additional damage for the fight and uses less stamina. And we have

Googlings. Um, I'm I'm not even gonna I'm not even going to try and remember what Googlings do. I'm going to be totally honest. uh googling. It looks like they're made of goo. They are. Uh so every time adjacent items activate a total of three times, the heal for four. And then there's a big version called Gooert who has two adjacent uh has four adjacencies and every time those activate for a total of five times, you heal for nine. And you have also now seen the various incundary subspecies of gooert. We have carrot gooert. Uh, poison goobert. Chili goobert. Steel gooert. Blood gooert. Light gooert. Wait, wait. What does blood gooert do? A blood goobert gives you vampirism. Okay. Um, cheese gooert. Cheese goobert. Um, and then there are different rainbow versions of Goober that give you additional effects, but my

favorite is obviously King Goobert. King Goobert. Um, who is Gubert but wearing a crown. You have to make the crown and then you put the crown on Gert and then you get King Goo Gert. Um and he uh Wow, there's a lot. Yeah, he heals you for 35, protects some of your buffs and uses mana to become invulnerable for 1.5 seconds up to three times. So, it's a total of 4.5 seconds of invulnerability. And all gemstones that are socketed um are 50% again as effective. Uh King Goobert's great. I love him. Uh, so plus you could say goobert. That's correct. So this is um this is kind of a an example. Don't really care what activates near Gubert as long as things activate near Gert. So there's sort of an idea that we might take items that go more quickly um that don't necessarily do the most just to power Uber. Right. Right. as an

example, he becomes his own little engine or it becomes it own little engine game. So, this by the way is one of the things I love when games do that isn't immediately apparent. So, if you were playing World of Warcraft and they're like, "Hey, there's a whole miniame for gather we've added in gathering components in the wilderness." They didn't need to do that. that, you know, you could have bought all your crafting components in a shop or got them all from monster drops or something, right? But they decided that was a part of the game they wanted to introduce and it introduces a new mode of gameplay and new things you're looking for. It's not the best one to watch. Goos are they could have left them out and it would have been a perfectly fine game. By adding them in, they're adding in a new kind of miniame within the game of here is a thing that changes how you do builds andor the kinds of things you want. It's a

subsystem. It is the goo subsystem. Yeah. In this case, a linked version of things. Yes. That can evolve in different ways. It looks like the same with their crafting in other words. And the more of these you put in a game, the more complex it gets. So you have to ride the line as a designer or design team between looking at who your audience is, looking at the complexity and looking at how much you're expecting people to learn before they can play the game within some degree of mastery. And I think one of the things that's really important to note is that um oh uh is that um this recipe tab is always available. So we can see which gooerts are available to us and how we would make them and what they do, right? And so because of that, it feels like again they're leveraging the asynchronicity to allow players to make informed choices that are more complicated, right? Because it's not a spur-of-the-

moment decision, right? You don't need to know that you have to like Yu-Gi-Oh would be very different if you had to like do a dexterity miniame to slam all p five pieces of Exodia versus just drawing all five pieces of Exodia, right? Um and I think that that's that's an important part. Um so after all of that, how can I not take goolings? You don't have to. Oh no, I'm definitely taking goolings. Okay. Okay. So, uh wait, were there two slimes? Uh so this is the bad this is the skill and this is the gobling. Ah okay. Oh so it okay so you have to have slime skill before you are allowed to buy slime. Uh yes before they will appear in the shop. Correct. Gotcha. Can you now put slime skill into your storage and still have slime? I believe so. I mean like here yes because it's already in the shop. I don't remember whether or not it's continually active. We also do want it because it I know I was just curious on Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. systems. Um Okay. I think for right now what's probably going to happen is we're going to buy this Googling. We're going to buy a second lucky clover for reasons we'll discuss momentarily. And I think that's it for now. So I'm going to re reroll this and hope for a bag. A bag. We got a bag. Oh, and goobert's on sale. All right. Well, we'll just hold that for next time. Um, oh yo, they just turn into a gooert. That's dangerous. Um, I got to think about that. Do I want to just turn them into a gooert? I don't don't know that I do. Don't know that I don't. I also don't know that I do. Um, so here we've got this gooert wedge between these two, by the way. Interesting. It doesn't um it only cares when the item activates, which means I can have a gooert or a Googling trigger

off the shield because it activates when it goes off. That's an item activation. So there is I've definitely seen builds in the past where people have just built like this is part of that that idea of a fatigue build, right? where your opponent like hits you with a bunch of stuff and you just block with a bunch of shields and all the shields power gooerts which heal all the damage that the shields didn't block and then you're right back where you started and your opponent's just tired. It's great. I love it. So, mouse over again. What does goobert do right now? So, this Googling Mhm. heals for Okay. Every three activations heals for four. And it's important to note that the skill itself will advance all Gooberts and Goolings by one activation every 1.9 seconds. Okay. And then you have the other one next to the rock. So it's basically every time the rock and the bow goes off. Every time the rock and the um this goes off. Uh actually I can do this which is probably better because this goes off

every 4 seconds and this goes off every 1.7. Math. Math is hard. Make it stop. So this is a total of two activations every four three activations every four seconds. If I did it this way, it would be less. So this is correct. Wait, well I'm missing something on the facing as you're rotating the gooert. Oh. Uh cuz it can it's it's to the sides relative to gooert, not relative to the so I can turn it so it's either east, west, or north, south. Okay. Couldn't you could turn it one more so it's um east west and then you could rotate your garlic up to be standing correct. The difference is that this goes off more quickly than this. So this is every 1.7 and this is every 2.5. In an ideal world, actually, hold on, hold on, hold on. In an ideal world,

there you go. We do something like this. where now it's getting it's going off on the rock and the bow and the bow is still turning into Fortuna's hope and now all of our food is adjacent to it. So the reason you bought the second um lucky is that is a recipe for the bow to turn into a better bow. That's correct. Okay. Turns into Fortuna's hope which on hit gives us a 75% chance to gain an additional luck and is 100% accurate. But now Rock doesn't crit. That's true. You're correct, Richard. Now Rock does not crit and that's a sacrifice that we kind of have to make. There's a lot of um you kind of have to pick where you want to fight your battles on those, right? Like it it are rock crits in this one fight likely to matter? Not as much as the healing from Gubert and getting the short bow set up, right? So like it it it depends what matters the most to

you um at any given time. Once the bow transforms, does it count as a food for the frying pan? No. Really? No. The I would think with a name like O for tuna that it would count as Okay. I'm gonna fish. If you're new here, Jeff is a master of puns. Unfortunate for everyone. All right. So, our opponent has poison. Uh, poison builds up and does damage every second, and it's uh a rather oppressive win condition. Um, you, on the other hand, have stamina that's bouncing around and correct. I also have gooberts that are helping u meate, right? Yeah, cuz poison's great, but I heal for a bunch, right? And again, we can I'm uh I'm going to just go to the end here and look at healing. Yeah, we healed for a total of 17 out of

our 61 health. What was she doing damage with? Just the pan. Uh the pan and the poison. The fly guard gives and it gives a poison and then the back the um the storage coffin. Every time an item inside of it activates, there is a 25% chance to inflict one poison. She also has spikes from the walrus tusk. with my first necromancer. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um necromancers focus a lot on poison. Uh okay. Um let's keep moving because we are as as also tradition for this running a little long. Okay. So, I just saw your bow transform. So, correct your you now have the better bow and correspondently more inventory slots because bow has transformed. That is correct. Um, I kind of want a second rock. I want a second rock. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, now I got two

rocks. All right. Uh, and here we have our first different bag. This is a fanny pack. Everything inside is 10% faster. Just flat. It's just faster. So, um, I have a question. If you put that say for the moment for easy math above the frying pan to and one to the right. Oh, sorry. Keep the frying pan there. I'm just This is a theoretical. So, right there. And if you move the rocks up the moment, both of them to the top, they would still be above your bag of rocks. Directly above is different. Oh, directly. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious how far the above the thing went. Yeah. Um, okay. So, your frying pan because it has one thing in is now 10% faster. Correct. It note, it would not be 20% faster if there were two in. It's It checks whether or not it's in the bag. Yeah. And you But you have to now rotate your banana. Correct. To keep it adjacent.

I'm going to do this and this. And then we're going to do this because that can be anywhere. That actually this over here and this over here and this right here and this right here. There is by the way a yeet everything out of your um and start over. Yeah, there's a yeet command um which you can use. Um, don't know where I want. Oh, I can put this anywhere. [Music] Haha. Put that there. And then I can make it. So, you're hypercharging your bow, correct? My bow is going Excuse me. You're making your bow, which goes quickly, proc all of the the It's not the most efficient, um, but it'll do for now. Um,

This is one of those ones where we're getting complex enough that on my first play through, I am able to provide less and less help on optimization. Yep. Oh, what's the knife do? Uh, is a free attack. It's a zero stamina cost two to five damage attack every 3.5 seconds. And if we stun them somehow, and there's a bunch of ways we can stun, get an extra attack. So, for the moment, you're picking it up because we don't have stun just to add a little bit of DPS. It's free. It's free damage, right? Uh, free damage. Good. Free damage. Good. You heard it here. You actually have a lot of free damage right now. Yeah, you heard it here first, folks. Free damage. Good. Controversial, but true. Uh, actually, hold on. How's Yeah. Okay. And we're going to go Oh, does unspent gold carry over? Yes. Great question. All right. So, our opponent is doing gems. Uh they were lucky enough to find a box of riches which gives uh in the same way that our our slime offers us uh

Googlings. Um their uh box of riches gives them gems. Um uh so that was a quick battle. Like you have a pretty good system set up of blocking, healing, actually a lot of healing. It looks like healing, blocking. Yes. All of that. Mhm. Um actually how much Yeah. killed the fair. I overhealed a bunch. I healed a bunch, I think. O Oh, yeah. I healed for 40. So, that seems like it did well. Um, okay. Continue on. Um, bigger bag if you want it. Bigger bag if I want it. And what's the juice in the bottom right? The juice in the bottom right is a health potion. Oh, when our It's a triggered item. When our health drops below 50%, we consume it and heal for 12 and cleanse for poison. So, it's anti poison consume. So, is it gone then forever or once per battle? Once per battle. Okay. Um, it's also worth noting that potions work best when stacked

vertically because it when it consumes itself, it applies the effect of the potion above it without consuming it. So, we could have a potion that says, um, do 200 damage, and then we could wait until, uh, do 200 damage activates when you are at one HP, and we could instead put the health potion directly below it and wait to be at 50% HP, and then it would apply the effect of the do 200 damage potion as well. So you can sort of change the triggers around and it's one it's another subsystem of you don't have to use potions at all but if you do here's a package of ideas and you need to know how to manipulate it. There's also a bag that affects potions a whole bunch of stuff. Um I am going to take the oil lamp however um for it says at the start of the battle gain what is that two haste. So everything will be 4% faster and every 3.4 4 seconds. The weapon directly next to it gains one

damage and five accur 5% accuracy. Importantly, is that for the rest of the fight? So, it's cumulative. Okay. Importantly, as well, it's a fire item. So, now it will light this coal on fire. Note that this is a green tether instead of a gold tether. I wish it was something besides just color, but it it is what it is. And what does green mean? The green means it will light the coal, but will not consume the lamp. So, it will transform the coal into the burning coal without consuming the lamp in the process. Um, yeah. Uh, oh yeah, we're going to have to look at tarot builds. Yeah. Um, I think we're probably going to I think this might be our last round. Chat, what round are we getting subasses on? I genuinely don't remember. I just kind of roll with it until uh You seem to have a very good build at this point. I do. I do. I have a very synergistic build. Um, and the shield is keeping me safe and I've got a lot of healing. Lots

of people have melee right now. Um, also it helps that this is unranked and my opponents don't necessarily have the best builds. So, for instance, this is their skill. It's currently not actually doing anything because the pan doesn't have an attack effect um really. Uh, so the enchanted weapon skill isn't doing anything for them and my skill is doing something for me, right? Right. Um, so yeah. Uh, okay. So now I've lit the coal and now this coal will light that coal without me needing to move anything. And it's gotten much better on hit. It's a 12% chance to deal plus six damage and gain an additional haste. Wow. Yeah. Much more powerful. Um, six is a lot. Six is a lot when your weapons do four to five base or two to three base. Yeah. Yes, it's quite a lot. Um, I think I'm going to roll. I'm going

to grab a stamina bag, which adds three backpack slots and gives us one additional maximum stamina. Oh, maximum, not per turn. Okay. This is not an adjacent. Yeah, it's not adjacent. Um, what's the little box in the bottom right? This is the box of riches. It grants us access to gemstones. So, we'll we'll just go with that for now. So, another subsystem of Correct. This is all the gems. So, that's a thing I'm actually not used to on a lot of games is subsystem unlocked by buying item that can then show up in future Mhm. Future shop encounters. Correct. Um, what opens that box? Oh, yeah, the mani neco. All right. Well, that's not going to happen this stream. Um, all right. I'm just going to send it because like we could, but I'm

just going to send it because we are running a little short on time and I wanted to look at one last thing and then call it good. Our opponent here might win. They have a very strong setup. This is a very fast molten spear. Um, which is doing a lot of damage. And the whip is doing a lot of damage. Uh, and really Oh, close one. Very close. What happened? Oh, they ran out of stamina. I blocked them too many times. Haha. Um, cuz they are well over stamina, right? They don't have a banana. So, they're not a phrase I thought I was going to hear someone say today. They don't have a banana. Look, it's just they don't have the banana. Look, look, look, chat, tell me I'm wrong. If they had a banana, this would be way scarier because the banana could go like right here or right here and be adjacent to three items and would be giving them stamina back, but they don't have a banana. So, I block them a couple of times and they're using 1.7 per second and they're out of stamina and they can't attack me anymore. And then I beat them to death with my rocks. Boom. Banana. Uh, and

this is this sort of one of the things that I really love about this is there's so many different ways to build and things to take advantage of. You can build a fast you can have a fast build that tries to kill quickly. You can have a slow build that grinds people out to fatigue. You can have a build that does poison or melee damage or range damage or crits or animal companions or on and on and on out of those 345 items, right? Um, A cause of death. Missing banana. Correct. Correct. If they had a banana, I'm pretty sure we would have lost. Okay, great. I can really see the appeal of this game, Will. Okay. All right. And here we get to the last system. So, we'll talk about this and then we'll we'll do some uh we'll answer any more questions from you or chat and then we'll call it uh there. This is the last one. So, everything I've shown you so far has been ranger base. Mhm. There are five subasses for each class. Oh my

goodness. And they are radically different from one another. So for instance, the beast master lets you have friends of the forest in the shop, which is little woodland critters, squirrels, rats, hedgehogs, each of which can be combined with other items to form special versions of them. And so wait, so basically you've told the shopkeeper it's okay to trap and sell you animals. Mhm. Okay, we're not Don't look too Don't look into it. Don't look too closely. Don't look too closely. Um, so this is all of your pets have a 20% chance to go twice. You gain two random buffs and make the food trigger faster um if you use this, right? Or the hunter, which is a unique accessory that buffs adjacent weapons. or the Pathfinder, which does um resists debuffs uh and lets you poison your opponent when

you gain spikes. And so when your opponent reaches enough poison, they just permanently take more damage. Um you have the lifebinder, which is healing. Uh gives you a bunch of upfront mana and healing and um every time you use mana, you get additional benefits. So this is like you want to be Nature Wizard. Yep. And there's a star pattern. Uh Yep. There's a there's a sideways star pattern for Pathfinder. Um and then Grovekeeper is the lucky the lucky build, right? So you have a greater chance for things to be on sale. You have more chance to find unique items. You get extra lucky clovers. When you get to 15 luck, you get 25 random other buffs. Good luck. Have fun. Roll the dice. 25 seems like a lot. It is a great many, right? Because it's each of them is one stack of a different buff and you can roll through all the buffs. Um, and so sorry, Demon Works, you're trying.

You're trying, buddy. Um, and so it's really it's really great that there is this much variety, right? Once you get through the beginning, right, once you get to round eight, whether or not, by the way, it's not seven wins, it's round eight. So, as long as you've made it to round eight, you'll get this. And again, we're given four classes, five classes, four classes, five subasses each. Yes. Okay. So, there are basically 20 variants. Uhhuh. Currently in the game. Do subasses introduce their own unique items as well? Not all of them, but some of them. Okay. So, for instance, um Oh, it's okay. We don't have to go look. I was just That was just a curiosity design question. Yeah. So, for instance, we've got like all of the different puppies and stuff. This, by the way, there it is complex enough that the devs have kind of put a self imposed thing on themselves that if they ever

want to add a fifth class. They've set the scope of work, which is new class concept, new class, new class recipes, and five new subasses that fit class and in some way interact with the class's mechanic. Correct. To set up the experience. Yes. And and that is probably why we're not going to I don't think we're getting a fifth class when we hit 1.0. It is worth noting that when it launched, there were two classes and no subasses. And all of this has been added over the course of doing consistent testing and feedback. And there are balance updates like every week. Things get up uh minus one damage, plus one damage, minus half a stamina, plus half a stamina, like all over the place to buff and nerf and try and keep things in line. They're very attentive to this and it's very interesting. Oh yeah. I was just like having set up in my early days MMOs and in later days other complex systems. It's kind of fun watching this because occasionally you

walk yourself into a trap where you look at the thing you were thinking you were going to add and you suddenly realize the scope of work based on all this other stuff you've done. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. It's uh why Final Fantasy 14 stopped doing individual job classes for each expansion because it was fine when there were nine classes and then 13 classes and then now we're at over 20 combat classes and they can't write that many job stories for each expansion. So they condensed it down and said every role gets one. Figure out which class you're going to do it on. Seems fine, right? it they actually work really well because they're all um the advantage to that is that they can all be written together. They're all they're all part of one cohesive story and it's very hard to do that with 20 disparate job classes and at a certain point my guess is not every player plays every subclass. So you are introducing you're not making people slog through things that they don't actually want to do just to see story. I

forgot Cubert existed. Anyway, um it's a cubic gooert, Jeff. It's your best friend, Cubert. Uh final thoughts on backpack battles, Jeff? Um I have not seen anything quite like this before. Like I've seen a lot of elements of this. And one of the most interesting parts of game design to me is that people get inspired. Yes. Like inspiration is what led to Slay the Spire. It wasn't that any unique mechanic, any thing in there was horribly unique. It was the combination of them when they put together that made a new and unique thing. Mhm. For it. And that's some of the best. Actually, Portal was another game somewhat like that where they looked at a couple of mechanics, mush them together, were like, "Hey, check this out." and it led to an entirely new experience. Even something like um the original Dota

which then became excuse me Defense of the Ancients which became Dota and League were same kind of things. So some of the mashups are my favorites where you look at the inspiration that came from things that were before and resulted in a whole unique new fun ecosystem. Yeah. Uh thank you. And so yeah, this is beyond hilarious to me. They had a crossover with a Japanese gacha game and it made people ignore the gacha game to play backpack battles. Love that. I love that so much as just like a I I think Backpack Battles is one of the things that flies under the radar a lot especially because it's not flashy, right? There's plenty of other games in this like it's not as flashy as any of the other auto battlers. It looks quite plain, right? And actually part of that I think comes back to the art style. Yeah. This isn't cute little chibi art with bright animated icons and a whole bunch of other things. I think there's a lot of people who would enjoy this

game who because it's a small dev team doing the art. The art is amazing, but the art is also in some cases both an advantage and a disadvantage. Yep. My guess is this same game with a different art treatment might have a broader audience appeal to it, but it also wouldn't have the feel of this game. Yeah, I I very much agree. And that that is not dissing the art style. I think the art style is good, but there are just from a marketing perspective, there are certain things that are easier to get people to click on. Uh here's my favorite here. One of my favorite things. This is Jimbo crossover from Bellatro. Oh yeah. That depends on you making poker hands out of a playing card. And there's only one way to get playing cards and it's in the necromancer. There's like a whole there's a whole poker mechanic that if you don't play the necromancer and you don't get this item, you'll never see.

Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I am. So, what you're telling me is 5 years from now, this is going to be the dwarf fortress of um this kind of game and that it will be so deep with so many weird interactions maybe. But all of them are in the game. I also want to point that out as like a big deal, right? That one of the things they've done is you don't need to go anywhere else. It's all in the game. All the items are there. All the recipes are there. You just look around in the game. Doesn't require a third party lookup site. And that's one of the reasons I love it. There's a lot. We could talk for a really long time about wiki games, but I personally love when a game that has this many interactions and this many items goes out of its way to do this. I think that's really great. Um, but yeah, that's that's going to do it for our episode today. Thank you all so much for joining us for this game ride along. Jeff, thank you so much for indulging my uh my my love and admiration of Backpack Battles. Well, real quick, um, is Backpack Battles one of the games that we can throw in the shop? I will look into it. I will I look if so there is a

way um what's the name of that system we use sometimes nexus.gg I'll uh I'll put it down in Nexus.gg lets people who stream throw up to 10 games that they have streamed into that and if you buy it through them it's the same price a little bit of money goes to the streamer to support the stream and so if indeed that game can go into that we'll throw a link in the description. Yep. Um absolutely and if not you can find it on Steam. Yep, you can find it on Steam. Uh, thank you all so very much for joining us. Jeff, thank you for joining me for this. Uh, we will see you all next week for We're not sure yet. We're working on that. Stay tuned. We had a thing. We're changing the thing around. We have changed the thing. Pray we do not change the thing further. Um, until then, I've been Will. That's been Jeff. We'll see you all next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music]

Okay. Cool, cool, cool. And we could all use a little change. All right. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. I don't know if that was a song reference. Um Yeah. Team Worm, but if it was, I appreciate it. Yeah. Um Oh, like I haven't seen that one before. or it's been I've heard of it. I just haven't seen it. I just I just real quick I just left. I also wanted to um do one more thing. I think what we're doing when you suspend your run and come back. Mhm. It shows you your build. Oh, cool. That's just a cool thing. And you can cons continue or concede. Anyway, uh Chad, thank you so much for joining us. Sorry again for the late start. We had a fight with a camera. I hope you all have enjoyed this stream. Um, we'll be back tomorrow with South of Midnight. If you haven't been uh paying attention, South of Midnight

is currently all over the place. I absolutely love it. I think for me, uh, it's got potential in like the this should get awards territory. Um, it's got a great story. It's got great visuals. Uh, the writing is immaculate. The structure of the game is fantastic. Please join me tomorrow, 11:00 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific, as I continue my playthrough of South of Midnight. We'll also be playing it all next week. Um, you can come over here to the Twitch channel and find uh that. I'm just checking. So, no Matt stream today. No Matt stream today. Matt is otherwise uh unavoidably detained by events of the world. Um, and uh yeah, it happens. It It does indeed. Uh, everybody say bye, Janet.