GDC Plays IGF Nominee Slay the Spire with Casey Yano

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Bryant Francis I am here again back after I guess we've been away for at least a month sorry about that we are here today playing slay the spire you probably know about this game it's so lonely a couple million copies and it stopped the steam charts consistently it's been around for the last couple years if you get released in early access in 2017 but this year we are streaming it's a you know it's a good game we like streaming good games really talking to the deaths behind those games but also we are streaming it because this game has been nominated at the 2020 IGF Awards which will take place at this year's Game Developers Conference the date will be March 18th 2020 you can see in the upper left-hand corner this year's GDC dates in the lower left hand corner of the screen I am joined by Casey Yano how you doing yeah I'm doing great thanks yeah and I should mention before before I get to my questions for you Casey uh slate the spire has been

nominated for two awards the Seamus McNally grand prize which is the big the big you know the Danka Danka I don't know it's I always thought it was a sumus as for as far as I was pronounced Seamus but it's written like sumus if I get in trouble for that oh well that's not that's on me but every year I've been you know going to these awards the last few years and as I hear it pronounced Seamus and and you've also been nominated for the igf award for excellence in design which as far as that design goes we are seeing it on screen right now for those of you who don't know slay the spire is a roguelike deck building game where you take this hero and I broke like adventure using cards that you acquire through your adventure to build your deck and create unique strategies that change on every run just looking over a chat real quick I can give a quick shout Evie vs PA who says yo Casey so I think that's the friend of yours I hope it's a friend of yours oh yeah definitely I know them very well yeah for the folks in chat we

want to hear from you as we talk with Casey today we are taking your questions we are gonna be chatting about how slay of the spire got made and you will have the opportunity just put him in chat I'll grab them and we will talk to Casey about what you want to know Casey like I said slay the spire has been out for a little bit and this is the first year you all were nominated for an IG F award I guess how does it feel how does it feel to be nominated by you know your fellow developers or I guess you submit yourself I guess developer occipital how does it feel how does it feel to be chosen for this nomination oh I mean it's very exciting I mean I think IGF was like maybe one of the first award shows that I was like kind of like aware of that's kinda how I discovered a bunch of indie games because of you know indie game centric right and so in that same vein that's kind of like like wow like it's like it's like the independent one I guess because I'm making an indie game they mean to me that it's like a nomination for an indie game versus like

just games in general the spires been out I was going through Steam early access since 2017 but it was nominated this year because you all like officially released the game right yeah I think we also just forgot to submit it the year before yeah I do remember reading the guidelines saying that you are able to submit a game even if it's not like complete complete but like play all the way from start to finish but I just I guess we just missed the deadline I think early access is free hectic I think at least for our schedule yeah we can dive into early access um I guess uh like I said this is kind of a interesting situation because you all have been out for a while um but I guess let's go back to Stevie the days of Steam early access why did you go with early access and not kind of just decide hey we're gonna release lay that we're gonna work on this until it's done and then release it mm-hmm um I would say that there was like a very large potential amount of features that could we could have added to the game but it's

also like how much however is it worth it to add all of these extra features and so we were like maybe we can get you know we can gauge how popular the game is ah and if it does well who I just wanna use extra features and more content and if not maybe you can cut it a bit short and then normal call it a day the project so I guess that's kind of why we released the game with two of the characters complete out of three that we were actually planning on and that way we could have been able to be like oh like this is working on two and then we're gonna finish the third one and then once we're caught incomplete you know it's like then we'll just say like this is it like this is good like like people will need to be happy that we make another game instead of like adding more on a game that maybe you know wasn't really popular but different well it's actually interesting you talk about the game being popular because if I go back to your GDC talk about a quote unquote about the game success through marketability you

mentioned in the talk description that when the game launched its shorted it you know if I think I would slay the spy right now I think about sort of this runaway success that every one of my feet is obsessed with but it wasn't you know your launch wasn't explosive it took a lot of work to so build an audience build a community and ship updates for the community what was that process like um that process was oh it was a lot of work mostly it was a huge scramble in the beginning mainly because we had what was what was it we were missing localization I guess it depends on how really we're talking about mm-hmm in the very very beginning we were just kind of like making hot fixes and then we were like playing around balance very quietly and then we were like what do we what are we supposed to do once were out of early access and so we looked at a bunch of other games and then we were looking at our pace based on how much players we had which I think in the first week or so we had about maybe like

two thousand two thousand five thousand players which is which I don't know if it was a lot or not but our discord we had a discourse server and we had like like five active people mm-hmm and so we were like hey we're gonna update the game like we're just gonna update it whenever whatever and that was gonna be great because it's like it's just a very casual like exchange between like updating the game and then people like telling us what they think like like a very small handful of people telling us what they think about it and then we're like oh maybe work on those things and that's actually what we did before early access as well like just like we had a private channel we had our friends and then they give us feedback and if you just make those changes and so we would update almost every day when I was private and so when we hit early access we're like oh just what is update once a week and so we hadn't we just decided that it would be like this one week update release cadence mm-hmm and then it got bigger and then the bigger it got the harder hit got to do there one week

release if there was just so much more bugs to filter through so much more feedback to filter through and I guess that's kind of like the strange momentum that we rode throughout almost all of early access mm-hmm that's so interesting I'm guessing it sounds like that was the case because with more people giving feedback you just found more things that you want needed to work on and that just stretched out the time between updates we actually kept up with the weekly updates yeah for for a very very long time there's a lot of it was too much but but now it's now it's kind of done kind of I'm going to server my question pile how do you think I'm gonna ask one more question early exit or move on um how do you think early exit like it's up you know early access is sort of an interesting feature because it helps developers like like I said build that audience start getting feedback on their game early and sort of solve problems in a different way that they couldn't solve if they were just trying to release a finished product but how do you think

that going through Steam early access influenced your creative vision in your design for the game because slate inspire is really cool like the deck building approach the the cost the way these mechanics were to look together obviously there's these some of these ideas the ones you had at the start but like what do you think came out of your community focused design approach that comes with early access hmm I see that's a good question I think definitely is shaped our content design mm-hmm I think we shift not with 75 cards but like 70 or so and we were like adding a few or we working a bunch and you kind of start to get a feel for what kind of things are popular or not popular I mean to this to this day I think some of the cards may not be the most popular mm-hmm but at least like you'll be able to know what is and is not over time and then of course at least we collect data not like I think we have like check box but we have gameplay data that's upload it and then we can make balanced changes very

quickly and we can kind of test out a bunch of other like strange things like I think when we started working on the game it was it was kind of more on the serious side and then I started adding kind of like strange jokes and like very bizarre creatures mhm those were like very positive but we also didn't want to like go overboard mm-hmm like it's like a very jokey game I mean depending on who you asked it is or is not like super jokey but so we kind of have like this very serious facade but like there's also some weird stuff that happens in the game because I don't know it's just that's just kind of what we figured out works for us in our game um and maybe has to do with the art style may be asked to do with my strange writing in the game mm-hmm maybe we should have hired a writer hmm but so I guess those kind of things are heavily influenced is that didn't feel meaningful you know we kind of try to update and I guess yeah we uploaded and updated a bunch of

things yeah and we just have more and more questions when people play and questions people have the more we even change up like what kind of metrics we gather so we can make meaningful changes mm-hmm a very good example is like when people pick a card we know so we get information about cards people chose over what other cards they chose that way we can gauge like like a preference of what card to choose and this is sorted on like difficulty and like we're in the game you are and so we have that kind of information on top of like the win rate and so every card kind of has like like a how fun is it value and like good is it value and we try to I think we realized that a perfectly balanced game may not actually be like the funnest of games to play mm-hmm and so I guess that's like one one thing out of all of it yeah what's a good example of a card inside the spire that is really

good but not really fun or really fun but not really good I guess I'm curious like what kind of examples you encountered I see we have a lot of straightforward defense cards mm-hmm and I think there are definitely personalities where people just want to like just like increase your numbers exponentially so there are parts that would like double like your strengths which is a very basic example of like a card that's like that link looks like has a lot of potential but if you don't understand the game fully a card for instance that will double or slowly ramp up your strengths throughout a whole combat is actually two balanced us they have very high costs and I think a lot of new players choose them without consequence and the end up dying pretty frequently yeah but those are like high potential cards that people love whereas more simple cards like game block drop Oh like we just thought I think you just chose it in like the stream here this is shrug it off like you gain block you draw card and it's very hard to see why that's useful um if you haven't played

too many jet building games mom like it's like pretty boring but also like very like core like if everything is wacky nothing really comes together so like the cards that are a base mm-hmm they're generally not popular at first but I think people start to understand how to play the game pretty well and then they see the value and seeing that value is so fun and they're like like learning the game oh my god actually shrug it off funny you mention it we're gonna see in this run that we're doing sugar off became one of my favorite cards because I would mix rug it off with a body slam I upgrade it Bobby spice Liam to be zero cost zero and the combo would be shrug it off body slam which would just cycle through it would both get my armor up and you know let me kill really quickly which I was so I just was playing this yesterday and I was like oh I'm in trouble like I'm sucked in let's see moving on to a another design question I have I'm really fascinated by how this

game uses punishment and curses because I hit a point yesterday where whenever the game would present me like think we just saw the golden idol opportunity you know take this get a relic get a curse there was a brief moment where I you know was trying to wait cost-benefit and then midway through the run I began to realize curses may make it harder to do like you know you can see the injury that just pops up right now curses make those moments harder but overall engaging with them makes a run more fun that was sort of a decision I realized today and basically said yes to every curse that came my way because whatever positive thing came with it invariably helped me out what was kind of your I thought that was a little bit different than how roguelikes handle this sort of thing because you explained your design thought um those kind of negative negative trade-offs mm-hmm like negative trade offs or games young rogue links I guess yeah yeah I think we

mostly want decisions to be based on like what is your current situation mm-hmm versus like something that is good and you get something bad when I say that is because you can make a deck that is very resilient curses there's like an obvious example where if there's a relic that gives you strength if you have curses they're not gonna use that example but because the deck building game if you're making a very very large deck like you're just getting a lot of a lot of cards if you think a lot about it the strikes and defends are kind of like curses you know themselves because they're kind of low value cards and that's on purpose because we want to encourage people to try out new cards so they can discover you know more interest like more than intricate mechanics of the game and curses are kind of like in that same vein in that like you're like oh this curse gives you vulnerable but there's a relic that can make you you know maybe not vulnerable mm-hm or there's a curse you know like the Christa's matter too much if you're drawing a lot of cards and in the end

you know if you draw five cards but if you draw up two of them as curses that's like your opportunity in that one turn is so terrible right like you pretty much since the average cost of a card is generally like one or one point you know so I'd be higher than one like you're just you're chosen to just plate three of those cards that you drew and that's like really bad and so I guess in that way we noticed that most of the curses at first we had some other negative traits like losing max HP or losing goal or some other random stuff but I think in general we discovered that negative things that you can interact with and have control over especially cards so I guess Chris is in that way are a good example some people still don't like them that's fine you know maybe there will be another better swoosh moving on to another part of the game is design this fight was really interesting because the way the the attack swapped

up you know the attack curse swap off here worked I sort of felt in these days that slipping in my deck that was so fascinated by how like the two one alternate here you know two cursors one attacker and then two attackers one curse or something about that just like made this fight really hard to think through wrist but especially does it add in more of those exhausts in my deck going to kind of a broader level about design in the medicham with the map I was your interview I've got the interview up that a friend of GDC friend of Gamasutra Joel Couture did with your partner Anthony Giovannetti cool right we got it we got his interview with Anthony here and he talks about how the map that the player uses to navigate the quote unquote spire was inspired by FTL and how it was valuable to have layered decision-making to add an element of it risk reward could you talk about the map process from your end and what you sort

of thought worked really well about it hmm the map process that I'm making the map I'm sorry also making the map yeah let's see um I think we well we wanted breaks from like combat and then we also wanted kind of like in like tense ups and downs right because we didn't want you to always we didn't why you feel too comfortable mm-hmm but we also wanted reprieve so it's kind of like you're going you get minor heals you get stronger you get minor heals and then so there's like a composition that we want to aim for like and there are some explicit decisions to like the very first room is always a monster room and each act and then you know the very last one right before the boss is a campsite and in the center there's always I don't member exactly which row like maybe like row seven or so of each act is always a treasure room so and those used to be more random like it used to be kind of

like a mixed bag mm-hmm there's more exploratory but is actually the closer each path was with slight differences the more meaningful like there's actually harder decisions when I was purely random not like completely random but much more random it was very clear what like the best path was because generally people would weigh an event over and elite and things like that mm-hmm so I guess uh I guess the lessons learned was rent if you everything is really random you actually have less choice when creating the map we used to have like more rows not rows more columns mm-hmm though we had more and more paths but we actually reduced those numbers and reduce the height of the entire level a bit but that's mostly probably because of game lengths I think we felt like the game was kind of like going on too long or like the deck was becoming too like perfect right at the end yeah so we were like trimming it shorter and shorter until we were

getting it perfect in which like you felt overpowered just before the boss or like you were when you're when you say like oh I was almost like invincible like that's like a good feeling or like perfectly become invincible based on the difficulty that you're playing mhm mhm and so I guess that's like the balancing act of creating a map that we discovered and that was I was a lot of testing like we changed the map I need many many Titans yeah how did you feel when you sort of hit that point you know you in your original design scheme called for a very random map and then as you got further along you realize oh no we need to actually tighten this map and take more control over it randomization actually these two less choice-making I guess is but but authorship means more choice taking it's a very inverse relationship between those two things and here we go here's bodyslam my favorite car let's see um that's a good question we our design document is not very big

but it's simply like um I don't know why but Anthony I are very very on the same page of design mm-hmm I guess because whenever we like see like an interesting game design wise we just like play it together and we'd I don't know our like design brains we kind of like meld together in like a strange way and so when you're making the map we were like oh like what are we gonna fight next like are we gonna have a monster or an event and then one day I would just be like I don't member if as Anthony or myself like that's how vague it is with like design us now this is like like we need a map right we're like we used to have these like doors that showed up in the background after you defeat an enemy mm-hmm and one of them was like another monster another one was an event and there was no like map view and you just choose different options until you reach a boss which is at a predetermined number like after you fight ten enemies you're gonna fight a boss but once you saw a map you could see ahead and kind

of plan it out yeah and I remember one of our testers not liking that because if they saw all the way ahead they felt like the game was like analyzing the map rather than going through it and so that's kind of like that's like a previous thing we just talked about which is about balancing it up but yeah I don't know design-wise we just can't try things um almost nothing was set in stone at beginning right on actually kind of one thing I'll say about the map that I appreciate is when you're choosing when you're looking ahead and choosing a path it sort of affects like look you sort of look ahead to affect what you do right now but then once you get sucked up in the combat or once I go I'll say I hear to be more clear once I get sucked up in the combat I found a lot of that planning got thrown out of my head not out of a need to improvise or anything but just out of like oh I forgot whatever active thing I was thinking about five minutes ago you know simply walk through a room you forget we were thinking about in the other room and then I would make different micro changes you know on the pet you know you

were left right branching right there but when it came to but I still think it matter that way back at the beginning you know I decided to go up this route instead of that route because it uh it affected what long-term choices I had something I appreciate about the other mapped existence like I was aiming for this treasure chest right here cuz I hit a point where I was like I like justice so I'm gonna make sure I chart that way no matter what happens along the way let's see here just giving a quick look around just folks in chat reminder I always worry I sound a bit desperate when I'm asking for questions from chat but genuinely we like your questions folks we love hearing from you and sharing your questions with our guests so if you've got them jerem and if you don't that's fine I've got plenty to ask Casey I'm going to step away from design for a moment and talk about this game's wonderful animation like look at that word cackling and floating in there look at the way next funny if that reminds me

of tyranny which does is the only other game I think the only other major commercial game because twine developers actually do this time and I just don't play enough of those games but um sorry oh I was just shocked I felt like wobbly text was like a huge deal and like indie games oh yeah wobbly text is but like the key outs are some word on specific words Oh like say Celeste Celeste is a game that has a lot of wobbly text but you tyranny and a few other games will actually like call out specific words and and tyranny they do a mouse highlight thing where you can highlight over and get some extra text and they do some really cool meta design stuff in that game but even here like they're you know that's just text animation the card animation there's all these little little animations that make this game like I again I was sitting here playing this game I went oh no I'm in trouble I'm gonna get sucked into this thing and there was one half because the design logic and the other half because everything just felt good to do with the animation would you be able to talk

about your team's process for for doing that and how you were able to do it with such a small team oh the little animations and like all these extra little help you hopeful UX do that is that what we're talking about yeah huh um I guess those are like things we just think about all the time we didn't have like a design document for them at all yeah maybe you know both Anthony and I professionally worked as a like a quality assurance person like we just find issues and like fix them or like if something was confusing we would bring it up and so we I think around the time there were a lot of roguelike games that had a lot of wiki knowledge as I think I was called is pretty much means that something is is not revealed enough that we have to look it up and so we tried to incorporate as much as like the information because we don't want people like getting frustrated about you know what is mysterious about the game while

we're playing and have to like leave or like look it up because then it feels like research more than playing it video game and so I guess that's kind of like reason for it the colors actually was heavily influenced by I would say ocarina of time especially in the events and that was because I generally don't when I see a large block of text I generally don't read it um not because I don't like story as I feel like what it's kind of like forced then I don't like to read it yeah and so naturally I would kind of get into the story and sometimes I'd replay a game and be like oh like like I'm kind of interested in the story because I just skipped everything instead of me it is like now I'm a dragon or something I don't know and so those are the only times and so I didn't since I didn't want to read the text I just wanted to highlight like the words you have to kind of be like bubbling take damage like you're going to die if you choose this option or if you're you're going to get a good thing but also there's other bad thing and

then the image is just kind of like it for the events just help out massively because you kind of like has a theme of like what's going on in the event and I don't know it's it's kind of hard to explain I guess especially for thanks but I thought I thought there was a lot of useful information especially color bleed script color yeah over time the colors became more like purposeful but some of the older events they would have they would just have colors just for flavor it might be a bit confusing as they are not as consistent as the other ones I'd say gotcha thank you for sharing that I'm going to shuffle long question board here something that also got mentioned in the Eponine chat with with our gamasutra cohort was the idea of kind of the Rube Goldberg machine of design where by the end you know by the end of a run you're

you're stringing individual cards together to create these wacky combos as I mentioned in this for this run shrug it off in body slam became the dominant dominant force for my run how how did you go about looking at your game and saying okay we have these individual card ideas and these ones string together those Rube Goldberg and these puddings don't or these ones show up and testing we didn't even know they string together could you talk about that process of kind of the the combo system that's part of why it what makes this game sing so much oh I see well the short answer is you just have to play your own game a lot but I guess the longer answer is we try to evaluate cards so we make a bunch of cards that we think are interesting mechanically at first and we just kind of toss them into like the deck right you have like intro card pool and then we play it a bit and

then we're like this works this is doesn't work like this UX for this kind of mechanic might be fun as like a physical game but it's not as fun you know in a digital game so that happens pretty frequently so we kind of like try to figure out what feels good in a game in like our game and after we determined that we try to think of edge cases for those mechanics right like like drawing cards is very straight forward in our game and so we have a lot of that and so we have mechanics around drawing cards sometimes or dealing damage and then we're like strength is pretty simple like we have this power system we gain a bonus and then we make other cards around strength just like a bunch of strength based cards like one of them skills infinitely one then cost a lot and you get like one strength and it just wraps very slowly and you just I guess you just feel it all out and then the rude goldberg happens when you try to combine two mechanics at once but not in a way that it's so it's there are some cards that are very exclusive like we're on the

topic of strength and so like the car that doubles your strength is it's like completely worthless for a non strength deck yeah that's actually a card that is um not good for making like very strong synergies but it also has different purpose which is if you are in that specific type of mechanic it makes it very very good like you go all in so that's like an all end card or all the cards are more flexible shrug it off games block and draws cards so it's like a high utility just easygoing card yeah then you start and then we choose like one card which is like for each character that highlights one mechanic and for the ironclad that's like apply is vulnerable to the enemy and so we have another card called dropkick and that is um if the enemy is vulnerable you deal damage and you draw card and you gain energy and that's good because I mean it's a dropkick by itself if you don't have any vulnerable plant cards it's not like applying debuffs in most video games is not like enticing I think

at least in my head and but but since they're starting card gives you the opportunity to apply vulnerable every single game having Dropkick as part of the pool that's only good with vulnerable is fine but generally we just have to identify you know what works and what doesn't the ironclad is the easiest just because it plays off of the core mechanics I guess there is a we added exhaust for this character we wanted a kind exhaust fiend but we did explore other themes as well like them self damage mmm-hmm ended up not being very fun or very very difficult to gauge how useful it was because I think the healing in our game is very very restrictive and also it was hard to balance like HP loss and like healing but that also somehow scales with other characters and so that's why I like the main relic is kinda like a healing relic mm-hm

so it's kind of just I don't know it's a very easygoing we also tried different relics in the beginning too and even a different character I think we called them loadouts where we had different versions of the ironclad which started with different relics and a different set of starter cards but I was eventually replaced by I guess it's just called now we call it the gotcha phone system in the very beginning yeah which stands for own I didn't what are the worthy these machines in Japan yeah you just got your phone systems were you support you get a random capsule as a random prize exactly so instead we have our gospel system whenever you start a new game you kind of randomized what you start with mm-hmm that was that was more like there's no potential for wackiness then a saying like hey like this is a character that thrives on HP loss or hey this is a character that drives on strength we're like this is a character that draws fewer cards but is much stronger so um just trying a lot of

things and then I guess highlighting what is fun and then taking away what is what is not fun I'm going to shuffle what we're talking about cards and fun cards and stuff one of the things that drew me to that helped me hit the game like help slay the spire draw my attention was I was reading a blog post from game designer Tom Francis uh who made gun points and heat signatures when their cool games and some really interesting thoughts about the card tools of the trade toast the trade yeah tolls the trade um and he said it's an interesting card because it's a card that lets you draw 6 cards instead of 5 which you can see how I drew 5 but then you discard one in his feedback it says you you know you always get you're still getting 5 cars at the end but you have a slight amount of choice over what card you get and he compared it to a guard card in another game we streamed calls know where profit that ok I'm blanking

on the studio name for that but go check out our tree with the know where profit dips that's Martin oh I'm forgetting his last name Martin's a great guy check out that game really fit yes I think we I think they announced their game before we announced our game whoa some else is making yeah yeah he made a comparison that the power to choose a card from your hand to this card and then draw another to replace it and tools of the trade are really very similar they're almost the same thing because you are gaining you know your fix hand of cards and then just having slight agency over what one of those cards is but he said tools of the trade is interestingly a quote bad feeling card because you're looking at a hand of six and getting rid of one as opposed to selectively changing one cards a blog post in front of me right now if all dominant foot shadow people want to read it but um I was curious if how like good feelings about drawing cards like how you were sort of navigating that decision path about you know bad choices good choices for that kind of thing mm-hmm I didn't think too much about

your choices or bad choices honestly that's better I guess um I don't know we generally think about the overall value of cards you know rather than like feelings of outcomes I guess sometimes maybe we do it consciously I don't think we actively design upon it I think we made tools at rate because we wanted something that gives you because we had a discard synergy in the in the second character and so there was a card that gave it to you once a turn and I was interesting about it yeah more so than a good feeling bad feeling hmm I have to read I have to read the article I'm not not entirely sure why I would feel bad to play tools of the trade uh-huh because you know it just gives you more opportunity but I'm not I'm not sure I don't I don't think I share the same emotions maybe you don't I mean these are very subjective factors we're dealing with and that's why that's why we GDC and got materials talking about it because it's sometimes it's sometimes

it's math and sometimes you can say objectively something is a certain way in games and sometimes it's very subjective and that's what makes it such an interesting work for my part oh man I had a follow-up question on that I'm blanking on it why am i blanking on it oh yeah sis you said you talked about the value of cards I have a I play a game called x-wing miniatures which I talk about way too much and in that game it used to me until very recently there was kind of the equivalent of you know like one gram in the game like one thing was costed in such a way that you could kind of gauge her everything was costed around that one thing in that game it was one unit and that was recently changed that the cost that was less clear and I'm curious like what in your power measurement toolkit did you use to sort of say this is equivalent this is equivocally this thing is equivalent one point and

it does X results and everything orbits around that weight you know measurement did you have any tools like that or did you use something else to figure out your power that's an interesting question we didn't have like a baseline I would say yeah I guess the baseline was the previous characters yeah because we just we try to keep the same like win rate uh-huh and so we just have to look at the overall composition we like to we like to joke that Bash is the perfect card yeah but it's actually I think probably slightly weaker than most of the cards we want it to be at this point just because of the maybe because the natural power creep mm-hmm I kind of blame kind of a community feedback maybe I think yeah I think um it's it's it's interesting to make new cards or modified cards and somebody would be like it's almost similar to this card but it's slightly like weaker it's just a worst card and so and so maybe we took that as valid criticism but am I not

mine it's not always the case so some of our cards are probably some of the newer cards are a bit too strong maybe yeah Oh should have followed maybe I should have use units you know but I mean it's impossible to gauge within different characters how good or bad a cart is even if they're about even if it does the exact same thing as another card just the character being different having a different relic having a different card pool having different synergies it just makes a very large difference and I think there's also a ton of anecdotal evidence that a character might feel better than another character just because you've played more runs as the newer character after having so much more experience in the game and so I mean we have to we just have to re-evaluate things over and over again I think yeah that's fair it's it's um it's interesting how often you know we we try to grasp refer questions about design and design decisions game feel all these things and sometimes the answer really does just come back to it

you just gotta test it over and over again I do wish there was a formula I would speed up the process very quickly yeah alright let's see let's talk about I don't know you know it's great to spend 40 minutes talking about game design it's one of the coolest things you can do in this profession um let's talk about I don't know production quality of life you and your collaborator you and Anthony you work remotely you and I discussed that before the call started and you don't work out of an office which means you guys are too indie Gibbs you know if you get to do this on your own time and for some people that's the dream and for some people that's a nightmare cuz it means their home office is now their work office and they don't have a place to you know compartmentalize um how have you felt in your indie development life and how have you managed you know to keep your space productive I guess and if and and feeling good so doesn't feel like your house is a place you need to escape from I see um so currently actually don't fully work full time from my like house slash office yeah actually when I did work

just from my house office I worked too much it was kind of the apogee I had the opposite problem yeah probably have some kind of compulsive disorder but the point is I you would generally just start I would wake up and I would drink coffee and I would just work until my wife would come home from work and then I would realize I had not had breakfast lunch and so I guess that was kind of like the general way that I worked not exactly sure I was for Anthony I didn't really ask him quality of life questions to quality I'm not saying that it's good to work a lot um just that that's just how I guess my personality and my and my brain is wired to deal with I don't really plan things I just kind of wake up and then that day I write a to-do list of what I want to work on and then I just do that and I guess we we generally worked I think six six days a week or pretty long time and

you know obviously there are times when things are slower maybe we're waiting we have to get a build ready for like an event and then after it's ready we're just kind of like what do we work on we're not gonna like update the build so I mean let me changes in other branches and stuff but yeah there's ups and downs as always like release time building on that question the question if you are watching this and you've been following GDC this year you know we put up the state of the industry survey where we try to pull developers for questions ranging from market base to quality of life based now I'm in a big big topic we keep coming back to every year there's a lot of quality of life questions that have to do with you know work hours crunch does your company make you crunch to use self-imposed crunch how do you feel you and your collaborators handled that particular challenge of you know you mentioned you work a lot but when

you set your own schedule you're the only responsible for that there's no producer saying they're going like all right we gotta meet get ready for you three it's it's 20 hour workweek boys girls and people who do not identify with either of those genders um yeah like I'm curious how you and you know how'd you deal with that sounds like you enjoy working so that's a plus oh yeah I do like are you like working well I mean this is it's very different for indie games I think compared to like triple-a I think that if you if you have employees and they are full-time or salary you know like if they're coming to your office and working like they should dishes work how much they expect to work and shouldn't force people to work because there will be their long term ramifications I mean it's not it's not much for me to say which I just don't like I've just never been in that position I got never really managed people in that way you like sure we've had contractors but those we have in those dates for the contracts we know when things are going to be finished and so we never really forced anybody to

work overtime like we worked overtime we don't really talk about it being overtime we're not when we were like in four packs which is like oh we need we want to finish this by this date and then kind of shift focus from working on other things to just because we have a lot of hats and we just have to neglect other thing if I guess they've got yeah or some form of deadline type thing but we also just don't have much deadlines just because um I don't know there's no like marketing thing our game was relatively unknown so there wasn't any there was no pressure to like release sooner or later you know when I when a game has no hype on release it doesn't really it doesn't really matter too much whether or not you know you meet expectations yeah Wow how does it feel then to transition from a game having no - release - I don't know we won't you know exaggerate slay the spire success and say you guys are a Minecraft or fortnight levels but you guys have a

dedicated community you sold a couple million copies and game you know big streamers will just regularly pop on your game and interest or attract new audiences sometimes uh how was how's that how's that felt going from sort of A to B there it's just it's kind of surreal yeah cuz I'm I don't know it's just something about I think interacting with digital mediums it's very difficult to kind of parse like the crazy changes that happen yeah one day we'd be like oh like like kripparrian is like streaming a game and we're like what and so we feel like hop on the stream then we'd be like like like oh like we're like we love we love the game that you streamed like Diablo 3 back in the day and stuff yeah and then he and then Kirk would just be like oh hey developers or be like oh but I think it's very relatively unknown that our studio is like two people yes so maybe and I thought it was like a weird corporate like thing haha that is you know it's

very friendly I don't know it's kind of hard to answer the question because I haven't really parsed it too much it's it's just a strange feeling yeah yeah that's fair god I don't think I think it was only one thing I'd become convinced is that no individual human being can deal with the concept of Fame and that's why people who are famous have teams of people who manage for them if you don't they don't then terrible things happen that's a personal opinion that's not a universal truth um anyway um moving on we've got another 15 minutes left in the chat in the stream here for our folks in chat if you've got any questions drop them in we will take them before we get out of here from my part oh let's see I guess uh looking ahead for you and Anthony what guy I guess what's next for slate aspire you know you've got an award show next month so I guess you guys will probably have to I don't know about a soup we all

will be picking out some collared shirts for that fat ceremony um or you can show up in t-shirts it's fine it's a game developer ceremony oh I will I will not be there with a t-shirt that's messed up that's very anyway yeah about a teacher what we extend out for the future um well my alarm is going on does it take care of that alarm that's what you're saying oh you think I can't hear it fun fact so oh if someone else is alarm huh um anyway sorry what are we excited about um that's a good question I think we're we're still working on I don't know we don't really planned too far ahead in the future we're finishing you up um for helping out with some porting work and there's some localization work and some other like a lot of work or later around slight aspire yeah we

generally kind of like talked about it each time afterwards we don't like constantly ask like how do we feel about you know working on this next if we're both feeling good about it I'll probably push forward I'm not sure I think we're also kind of like into like maybe like pursuing different projects as well um but nothing is completely set in stone it really depends on like mmm I'm not really sure but I think that I mean I think if there is a good idea for slate aspire you want to work on that gets us excited to work on it even it's because we're also really into like content design and so maybe maybe mm not too sure if we'll be like expanding off to think about it it's not it I guess I guess it's not sure that's that's the answer that's a good I don't so that's a good answer it's you know hey no one knows no one knows no one knows but they got to be ready for so being

ready for that is the same being ready for what you're not ready for it's a good way to do things I think anyway um after that ramble I guess I will I guess my last question because coming up with questions is genuinely challenging and sometimes you just run through your list y'all were here we're streaming this because y'all are nominated for the IGF Awards there might be other developers watching this now or later who are also hoping to one day you know participate in those Awards oh man these little guys weirded me out so much I was like they come from what's going on thank you yeah what's this compute what's this guy with the confusion thing on his head um anyway my question would be I guess if for developers who are interested in participating at the awards what would you say to them you know like they're an indie dev just like you were when you start developing this they want to make something at IGF ready for the IGF what's what are your what's your thoughts for them hmm like to make oh you make like a video game you mean I

don't know make a video game market a video game I don't know like like it's basically like the the quote that I'll play this for you as it's a developer they're working on something Indian cool and it's needs and they're looking at your IGF nomination and going man like I'd love to be there one day too I guess what would you say to that person I see um I would say that if you try new things and it's clear that you were trying new things then people will be very receptive to that and they'll support you but I think if you're trying to make like a knockoff like I think some people think that they have figured it out by working on some kind of genre or some kind of like aesthetic that they think works then people will catch on to that I don't know it just has to be genuine I think and and if you are I think it's very obvious so so work on what you think you know you think you want to make you want to play and not what you think other people want to play but what you

genuinely think the world is missing I guess so that's that's my advice it's a good answer you and if you fail that's fine because like if you fail it doesn't mean you fail it means that you were learning stuff you were becoming a better developer so right on I know I said before that we have 15 minutes left in this dream but like I said sometimes you just run out of questions you make a nice list you do some research and you go through the list and then you look over and there's ten minutes left thankfully because I run the show and not a network ABC not Netflix not hooli because I'm in charge I could say when the show hits with that in mind thank you everyone for watching our conversation with Casey on or today the game has been slayed the spire you can check it out on Steam I know it's on Nintendo switch what other platforms is on case you should have explicit I should have got my much sooner I think it's currently on Xbox one ps4 switch and PC Mac Linux suite I know be they'll be coming out on more

stuff so even though there was more stuff to put it out on but yeah it's a good way to kill three hours of your three plus hours of your day and just not even realize they passed that screen is really distracting well what the the game itself yeah oh yeah yeah oh my god watching my own because I know more about the game for hours after playing for four hours and I did it too you know one or two I get to look back and watch my own mistakes when we record footage like this yeah four four four folks at home if you'd like to see the spire at the IGF awards you can join us at Game Developers Conference in person March 16th through 20th the awards themselves will be on the 18th on that Wednesday and that'll be in the evening and you can everyone with the GDC pass can attend if you are going to be at home wherever you are in the world you can watch this twitch channel if you hit that subscribe button let's subscribe follow follow subscribe

it's a different thing on Twitch um if you hit that follow button you will be able to watch the award ceremony live which will include the IGF for Wars where the spire is nominated and the game developers Choice Awards where a whole bunch of other games are nominated for the rest of February into March we're gonna be doing our best to talk to a bunch of the nominees we've actually already it's funny when I was booking people for this month and next I was like wow we streamed a lot of these games already before they were nominated that big and small that was something really special EC 94 this guy is talking with moving his mouth because the guy you were looking at is Casey and I am Bryant I am invisible because that's some of the trade-offs we have to do to run this stream but I appreciate you joining us DC 94 anyway with that yeah we'd love it if you follow the channel if you're interested in other information about this year's IGF nominees got masucci calm is running the road to the IGF a series of articles

interviewing a bunch of IGF developers so if you Casey I will drop the one with Anthony into chat so you can read what he had to say about this really cool game with that I think that covers it um Casey if they've got more questions about the development of slave aspire where can they ask them oh I'm always kind of hang out at discord but if there any questions post another like social media things even our Twitter even our support email addresses we pretty much always answer them yeah I would say I don't know we're very transparent I think compared to I don't really say compared to anything because I've never asked other developers questions but I don't know we're always around so right on you know as we close today I'll just note that when I saw that this little slime had a bowler hat on I I paused I laughed a little and I moved on yeah you see ninety-four case use it there for this game KC is one of two developers plus some contractors for

slate aspire okay I would say we have two and a half developers yeah two hundred that makes sense in fact if you it you go into it in the f3 oh man uh yeah what EC 94 is a comic go through it before I close the stream uh they say thank you for the amazing game they love it so you're welcome thank you for thank you for playing right now with that now I will officially click the the closing button EC 94 if you or anyone else want to check out the full stream it's gonna be archived in our channel so you can watch the full thing in our highlights and then I'll also kick it over to YouTube so you all can watch it there as well with that have a good day everyone have a good Wednesday and enjoy the rest of your weekend enjoy your time and slay the spire bye