Number Go Up Featuring Orb of Creation 1.0 | Design Club

[music] [music] Good Tuesday time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that Orb
Orb.
Orb or I am your humble ponderer of orbs will joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people Jeff.
Hi to the people of Hey everybody. I am Jeffrey Zachin the studio director of extra credits and extra history and more importantly for design club longtime game designer here to also ponder the mysteries of the orb with my friend Will.
Hello.
Say hello Will.
Hi. Hi Will. Uh hi everyone. I'm Will. I'm the voice of the people here on Twitch and YouTube. I am our live content producer. I do all of the if if it's live, if you see like actual people and not animations, chances are I had something to do with it at some level. Um, so today we're going to be talking

about a a very specific genre of games, the game of number go up. This is a very specific kind of game. We're going to be talking all about it. We're going to be using the new 1.0 release of Orb of Creation, my number goup game of choice, to help us put something on the background while we talk about it. But first, we would be remiss if we did not mention, yes, your eyes do not deceive you. This is a Tuesday. This is not a Thursday. We've been on Thursdays for a year now. More than a year.
A couple years.
Yeah. Um well, I've been on YouTube. Uh and
Oh, on on YouTube. Yes. On Twitch for a good amount of time. But with our recent decision to make breakfast a Friday recap of the week's gaming news instead of the Monday recap of last week's gaming news,
we decided that Will having backto back to backtoback day-to-day put up with both Matt and I on a Thursday Friday was

ill advised. And so we have moved design club from Thursday over to Tuesday.
Yep. to further separate Will and I or Will Matt and I from all having to coexist on the same streaming space.
Yeah.
At the same time and drive Will crazy.
No, it's not even that. It's just all it's also that the content does better when when it has time to breathe. putting we've done it before where we've put design club right up backtoback with games for breakfast and whichever one goes first suffers because so if we kept design club on Thursday then YouTube would see us do games for breakfast on Friday and stop showing anyone design club. Um and so we're trying to try new things and try things out. And speaking of trying new things out, uh, if you out there in in in internet land have suggestions for topics you'd like to see on Design Club, please do leave them in the comments below. If you're over on YouTube, if you're a rocky on Nebula, hit me up on Blue Sky or over in the Discord. If you're a patron or subscriber, you can there's a a whole um

channel for suggestions about future design clubs. Put something in there at me. I'm in there. I'm, you know, right there with the green name and all of that jazz. Uh, and I will take a look at it and we'll be planning these so hopefully you will know on Friday what next week's design club will be in the future. Um,
right. Our our goal is to have the topics up at least a couple days beforehand.
Yeah. Uh oh.
By the way, Bill, I don't know why, but every time you say Blue Sky today, there was um a musician, let's see, what was it? I think the album was Ema IMA, and he had a song named Blue Sky on it that just all I hear is every time you say Blue Sky, I hear the refrain.
Okay,
for that.
All right. Um
but
uh [laughter] I like uh this is this is good. How to create indie trash raccoon will devour. Yes, that's correct. And as our local indie trash raccoon, I will be more than

happy to to stand in for this. So, um I am keeping track of all of these chat, but again, if you have those suggestions, not here, not now, comments for later, or uh elsewhere because I'm about to ponder an orb and my brain is already orbitic. So,
that's Will's wife saying he saying he gets around.
Yeah. Um let's talk about before before we dive into Orb of Creation and and and show it off. What is a number go up game? Cuz this is a good question, right?
Cookie clicker is number go up or is Idol different?
And that's a thing that as Will and I were chatting about this pre-show um yesterday. We actually thought it was kind of both an interesting thing and important distinction because let let's start with the groundwork. M
almost every game that tracks something has a number go up aspect of it.
Yeah.
That isn't what we're talking about. In

general, games, all games have number that goes up.
Yes.
Take your Grand Theft Auto, take your Civilization, take your League of Legends, take your Clash Royale, take your Bejeweled.
Yep.
All in all of those number go up. This is how as human we know thing get better.
Since the very first video game, the point of the very first video game was to to to score points number go up, right?
Yeah. But while rating for Wow Gear to get your better stats or anything else, that is not necessarily what we mean by a number go up game,
right? Most games have number that goes up in the same way that a lot of games say have RPG progression where your character levels up or gets more powerful in some way over time,
right? But just because it has those elements.
Yeah.
Yeah. There are games that focus on that and there's games that have it.

Yes. And so what we're looking at specifically for number go up is there is a certain millu of game that designs itself entirely around can we make number go up to absurd level and make it enjoyable along the way. Yeah.
In the same way that certain games like Backpack Battle say, "Oh, inventory management. What if we made a whole game out of that?"
Right. Um, so the the the working definition that I've got for the games that we're talking about are games that are largely focused on optimizing a set of systems which have elements of puzzylishness to create ludicrously large numbers or collections of numbers.
So that's the go that's the optimization goal of the game, right? So, and and there's a there's a distinction that I want to make in like three kind of subcategories of this game um of these. Uh these are not all-encompassing. There are more number goup games than these three. And not all of these three are

number go up games, but they do show up in the same conversation. And those are idlers, clickers, and incremental games. And this conversation is really important because Orb is an incremental game. And that's actually pretty weird. So I think of games often times in terms of the primary verb, right? So what do you spend most of your time doing in a shooter game? You spend most of your time shooting.
Shooting,
right? in a
it's funny Will and I came to this separately because that was our definition at EAR for the game research studio or in for example how we could tell the difference between say an action game and a shooter game.
Yeah. [clears throat]
Like in Halo primary verb shoot
in say Tomb Raider shoot is one of the verbs but so is climb, jump, roll. Like there is swing. There's a whole bunch of verbs that get used and that's part of

what makes it an action game.
Yes. as opposed to a shooter game.
Correct. Um, and so in my mind, an idol game, the primary verb that you're going to be experiencing is wait. You set something up and then for the majority of the time that the game is running, you wait, right? A great example of this, um, Idol Champions of the Forgotten Realm.
Uh, don't look.
Played a lot.
Don't don't look. But if you or any of your loved ones have played Idol Champions of the Forgotten Realm, you will know on you will know on their Steam uh playtime list that they have played many thousands of hours. But most of that they have not done anything. They have not interacted with the game. The g the way that they are engaging with the game is waiting,
right?
I just look well I haven't played Idol Champions for four or five years now.
Yes. maybe three or four. My play time

on that is 19,968.7 hours
according to Steam.
Okay.
19,000 almost 20,000 hours.
Okay, great. Excellent. So, but most of the time you weren't interacting with it, right? It was up in the background. It was it was a thing, right? Okay. Um, okay. So, another another kind of subgenre of this is clicker games. Cookie clicker comes to mind. Cookie clicker sort of transitions from being one to the other, but the primary thing you do is you click, right? And it's not that you're clicking with intent or purpose on like a thing. You're it's not like
um it's not like moa clicking, right? You're just increasing raw actions per minute by clicking a cookie. Right. To get more
Diablo clicking or any of the games where you click the high click games.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right. So
those actually those are clicking often

with precision or strategically.
Yes. And clicker games.
Right. If if you have ever been tempted to juryrig something to your uh to your mouse or to engage an auto clicker to save your finger, it is probably a clicker game. And then the last and the last kind is incremental games, which are a little of both of those. Orb is a great synthesis of both of those. Um, and I think that that's very important to talk about. uh is that you're not really waiting and you're not really just clicking. You're performing actions that will cause things to increase incrementally over time. Um but you are actively engaged for as much or little as you want. I I am a huge fan of Orb of Creation. I've been playing it since it started out in early access. Um and I have been eagerly awaiting this 1.0 release for I'm not kidding you years.

Uh, and it's a teeny tiny solo dev project and I'm very excited.
I have not yet seen it. So, Will is excited to show I'm excited to see it. He's excited to show me. And as a quick note, um, what we said aren't exclusive. So, for example, in say Idol Champions, which is a idol game or um, sell the singularity.
Yeah,
clicking makes things go faster, but they don't expect you to sit there and click for a long time. It's a extra thing you could do while you happen to be, you know, say in Idol Champions, setting your party or arranging opening treasure chests kind of around that or other things.
It's like, oh, cool. Get some extra clicks in for the thing.
Yeah.
Or maybe for the really hard battle,
right?
Or to get your roll started.
Correct.
Mhm.
And the the three those three categories are not exclusively all of the number go up games, right? Darkwolf brings up Runescape as a MMO RPG focused on number

go up. That one's an interesting one to me. I don't neither Jeff nor I have played enough Runescape to really comment on it like significantly, but I believe that the ethos for a lot of people is to just make that number go up. I did share the 92 is half of 99 joke. Um, and that is very true and reasonable of Runescape. Um, but the other one that people often bring up, Factorio and others, is Factory Games. Um, now I'm actually going to say that Factorio isn't a number go up game. And I think the reason that I think it's not is that it is very it has a failure state like factorial.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
Right. So, one of one of the other things about number go up games is that they tend, at least in my experience, to not have a permanent failure state or to not have a significant failure state.

Um, and most of the number go up games I can think of like focus on that, right? So, a good example of a factory game that is definitely a number go up game is shapes. Shapes one and two, right? where you have unlimited numbers of incoming shapes and all you are doing is increasing the rate at which you make increasingly weird colored shapes to put in different combinations into a black hole, right? Or satisfactory where you have per node and unlimited total quantity and what you really care about is the rates, right? And those are both question.
Yeah,
there's also another category we maybe should have included which is the engine building games.
Yeah. that you most often see in board games, be it Splendor or Wingspan or like a whole bunch of those where you kind of generate a resource engine that then does more resources and allows you to the next step which then allows you to get more resources to the next step.

Yeah.
And so a lot of the factory games to me remind me more of that style of board game.
Yes. I think that's a very good comparison.
Um
Yeah.
Yeah. So, uh, all of all of that having been said, um, let's let's let's put some orb on screen and we'll, uh, we'll do this thing. Um, now orb does have sound, but it's going to be, uh, low slash off for this because it's not
hideously important to the conversation because most of what's important is the systems. So, welcome to Orb of Creation. Now, um
I'm going to rearrange a couple windows so I see this better.
Put this on ever so dark. Okay. Um so, we're going to be in slave slave slot two today. Um to give you an idea, we will show this off towards the

end to give you an idea of what the end state is. Um this is 20. I I have a save that I've been working on that's 28 [music] hours in. Uh so we'll be starting from from zero
actually. Will out of out of professional curiosity for that 28 hours in is that
how much of that is active play versus I'll come back in a bit you think
9010
probably 90%
active direction
90% active 10% come back later.
Okay. Yeah.
So it is an actively played game. which in that case removes pretty much the part of the idle definition which is weight.
So you it's interesting you can let's let's start it up and and and and we'll we'll we'll see. Okay,
so
hold on. I awoke in a dark void, but then the void ran away.

Okay, what do I see? It's blank. I see what looks like a mana bar filling up.
Yep. And we have
I see 10 a second. So I see a rate that it fills up. It's maxing at 100.
I see I seem to have there's a thing that says magic overhead, but no buttons under it. I see kind of the usual interface buttons around. But there does look like something I can actually push on in the upper right which says infuse orb with a cost.
Yep. So that symbol is the symbol for mana. And this is our first upgrade which is we're going to infuse the orb with mana. So we're going to click on that. I have mana and I have an orb.
And it's going to take a second. And now we're at 12 a second. And then we spend 50. And we do it again. And now we need to learn. We're going to learn a thing. We're going to learn insight for 100 mana. And it's we're going to learn the manifestation glyph that generates understanding. And uh as of note, we can also hit T to lock a tool tip and hover over things.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So we can see what what different things are if we're not sure, right? Um so we're going to learn insight and this takes a little bit of time to process. Uh the the count the the countdown is behind this. So now you'll see that I have a new button
spell book.
Spellbook
teaching basic grammar I assume.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, 100%. So spellcraft, actually art of spellcrafting and discover a spell. So, I will spend 100 mana to discover a spell. And the spell I have learned is gather knowledge, which for 100 mana will give me one knowledge on a 10-second cool down. So, now I have a spell, and I can, and this is one of the best things about this, it's on a hotkey, so I can press one on my gaming on my MMO mouse and just cast the spell. Um, which is great. So now we see that

we have knowledge.
So we are beginning in a resource engine game what would be called our we're constructing the resource engine.
Correct.
We have the thing that generates the mana.
Yep.
We can make that get better. But we also now have a we can spend that mana to generate a second resource
to start building kinds of things.
Correct. So in the background by the way um it is not autocasting. If you see the any of the spells get cast during this whole stream, it's because without interrupting our conversation, I'm using my uh hotkeys to continue to cast spells to advance us. So, I'm going to be doing that in the background while we talk uh about this. So, a thing to
Mhm.
I haven't played that game in a long time.
Yeah. Um so, a thing to note is that we have uh this has some characteristics which bear mentioning, right? So this is a magic mental resource. We can see our quantity, capacity, and rarity value.

Rarity value is a little weird, but the other ones are just important. We have a capacity and a uh quantity. Um
and very helpfully, anytime we're supposed to be doing something, it'll give us a little it'll give us a little exclamation point. So, now I'm going to buy um a wisdom upgrade, which is going to increase our mana capacity. And why do we need more mana capacity? Well, because we need to learn other things that cost more than the 100 mana that we have. This is sort of like a basic principle, right? It's it's that um eventually you're going to have a purpose for the number going up uh over time,
which will be to make another number go up, I assume.
Correct. I'm making choices, chat. Uh, so in this case, I'm infusing orb to give us I'm infusing the orb to give us more mana per second. [music] Um, this is so that we can cast more spells and do things.
I see we've already actually had a fairly significant jump cuz we started

the mana at 10 a second and 100 and we are up to [music] 18 a second and 358. So, we've already more than tripled our capacity, almost doubled our regeneration rate. Correct. So now we've learned a um another kind [music] of spell. So this so gather knowledge is a primary divining cantrip that gives us knowledge. This is a primary expansion charm and it says for 30 seconds our cantrips are 40% more powerful.
Buffs.
Buffs. So we can buff oursel and then cast this and then instead of 1.25 25 we gain 1.4 four, right? And this is all small number stuff, right? But as you, as Jeff mentioned, we're very quickly growing, right? We're very quickly moving uh towards having more stuff. So, we can see in our load out that we can

um that we have a certain number of spell capacity and that whirling sorcery takes two of it, but gather knowledge doesn't. So, I'm going to put a second copy of gather knowledge on the bar so that now I can uh run their cooldowns simultaneously.
Wait, wait, say that again. I I missed. So,
they have you can have an independent cool down for the same thing.
Yes, you can have multiple copies of the same thing.
And that was the capacity.
Correct. So, we have a number of spell slots and then we have a spell [music] capacity. So, the capacity is some spells have a greater capacity cost than others do. Um, and uh so for instance, [music] I can't run two copies of rolling sorcery because I only have three capacity and it costs two of those. Um, but I can run as many copies of Gather Knowledge as I

want because [music] it has a capacity cost of zero.
Gotcha. Man, I built a system like this. I called it memory instead of capacity, but um cool.
So now,
wisdom purchased.
Yeah. [music] So now we're going to start spending all of our knowledge on wisdom uh to get to be able to upgrade our orb [music] further. So now you can see that we're already
more than doubled the capacity of our orb.
Correct. And I also while we're doing this, [music] we're going to look at this. So this com um the power increase per level is multiplicative.
So this is 1.074 [music] times the level.
Is it times the level or times the previous? Uh, I believe it's
cuz if it's multiplicative, it's like the 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 as opposed

to 1 [music] * 10.
Well, let's look. It went from 132 to 142 to 152 at level 7, 8, and 9. So, I think it's multiplicative totally. The difference for people curious is that one of them scales in a line and the other scales in a bell curve.
Yeah.
That multiplicative basically gets bigger faster. It's like compound interest. It's basically compound interest.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was I was pretty sure I wasn't 100% but I was pretty sure chat is confirming that it is um it's 1.074 074 per level for each level so that each level of it becomes more useful.

Yeah.
So now actually here we go. This here's a good um
Yeah. Yeah. This is this is a slow exponential. Yes. So uh so while we've been doing stuff, we've moved our upgrades. So our upgrades are now in in in different sections. So, under magic, we have three sections. We have casting, we have our spell book, and we have wizardry upgrades.
So, we can we still have our option to infuse our mana. We still have wisdom. But now, we have two new options. Resilience and aptitude. And this is where those tags come in because wisdom very straightforward. This is how much mana you can have. And infused mana is how much mana you get per second. Okay, great. Very straightforward. resilience plus 6.4% base elemental resource rate. What
passive elemental res Oh, passive in

these kinds of games almost always means you don't have to be doing it. It just does it itself.
So in this case, we have mana is a magic elemental resource. So when I purchase a level of resilience, we'll see this 22.2 Let's go to 23.6 because this affects all elemental resources of which mana is one, right? And aptitude increases divining power. So now instead of one knowledge per cast, this is 1.05 knowledge per cast. And that sort of stacking uh is really the heart of the number go-op genre, right? Th this is this is the very straightforward thing. And it's very interesting to me because we would normally associate this with idling, right?
But I have to keep casting gather

knowledge or nothing happens.
Right. So it's an interesting mix.
It's it's a different Yeah, because usually almost always passive in this means happens without you doing a thing.
Yep. It's the automation part of these games.
Yes. Uh and we'll get to that in a second. So, I can uh in order to unlock novice spells, I have to master gather knowledge once and I do that by casting gather knowledge. And then um I will need to spend 10 knowledge to do this. And it will give experience to the three tags for this spell. primary, divining, and cantrip, right? It will give experience in those areas um for mastering that particular spell. Um and so we've got we've we've already gone from there is an orb in the

darkness to there is an orb of the darkness and you cast spells and you master the spells in order to get new things, to upgrade stuff, to do your wizardry upgrades, to do this other thing, right? And it's been hold on I can tell you uh actually is it easy to tell I I would have to go back to the main menu but when when when we get done with this file I will show you how long we've been on it. Um
right couple things of note. We've seen that the mana refill rate has gone up but it is not actually to my mind keeping pace with the capacity. Um, and we've also hit one of our first indicators of a number go up game, which is will I see 500 600, but the total is now having to be abbreviated because the number got too long. In this case, it's in the thousands and they're doing a three. They had been doing three digits.
Yeah.
Let's talk about this for a moment.

So, one of one of like the sort of the um uh one of sort of the signals of a of a number go up game is that the number gets so ludicrously large that uh you run out of space for it, right? Uh and and E E3 is like on the low end. Um and many games have different ways that you do this. In this case, we can choose scientific engineering named compact or compact number, right? So, we can we can uh if you look, we can we can change the way that it displays this. I just happen to prefer scientific. I know some of my friends prefer to play with engineering. It's all the same, but it's all just a display convenience for this number got so ludicrously big that we couldn't hope to track it on screen. And at some point, it's kind of interesting. We no longer care about small numbers. We no longer care about one.

We care about a thousand. We care about 10,000. We care about a million. Um and and the rapidity with which we begin to care about those things is quite high. So, we've just learned our second spell. Our second spell is expand magic. So, it's an expansion divine can trip that gives us 1.0 09thury when we cast it. Andy
I'm casting is a new resource.
Correct.
So let's see. We currently have mana knowledge and nowy.
That's correct. Nowy does two things. One, we can spend it on stuff. And two, and this is the one of my favorite things, it has a passive effect of giving us mana capacity permature we're holding.
So in this case, we can see that

that's capac. Okay. So having more than increases your mana capacity.
Correct. So before I could hold 1.13 e to the 3 and this is 1.14 because I'm now holding morphometric. There's a weird thing as a designer that this immediately hits in my brain, which is am I setting up situations where the player is going to have a large amount of [music] one resource, a resource A, we'll happen to call it mana, that is in some way, the capacity is tied to some other resource, in this case, resource C, we'll happen to call it. What happens if I expend all of my resource C? What does that do to the resource A that I'm holding? That's a great question, Jeff. Let's experiment. So, uh, we're currently at maximum mana. Our quantity is maxed, and I can spend twoy to learn the spell output level upgrade.
We'll see. So, when I do this,

it goes down to 1.11 and immediate, not immediately, it drains down to [music] its maximum. Oo, I I like the drain down as opposed to lose quickly cuz then if you happen to do it and you're like, "Oh, oops." You can hit a button and hopefully spend at least some of it.
That's [music] correct. In addition, um you can do this if you force a resource above its natural uh capacity. Right? So, for instance, if I were um if I were to sit here, and we're not going to do this because I respect your time and my time too much, and cast gather knowledge forever, I could get it to 50, and then I could temporarily force it above 50 briefly [music] if I really needed. Um
kind of an overcharge.
Correct. So, uh, the next mandatory task that we have before us is we need to raise the output level of our,
[music]
uh, spells. In this case, we're going to

make our spells cost more 2.75 times more, but we're going to double their power,
and we're also going to increase their cool down time, but we're also going to uh, triple the rate at which we get experience for them. Right? So, we're already deep into heavy multiplication of uh values, right? We've already exercised in in the in the fir in like the first 20 minutes, we've exercised double and triple, which mo I I play a lot of rogue likes, a lot of rogue likes. I got to tell you, as someone who plays a lot of rogue likes, double is a bigger word than you normally think that it is. Like the number of times that I see people willy-nilly throw around double and not think about it and you're like, "Oh, that's a lot."
I think we talked for a half an hour about this [music] at one point when talking about Slay the Spire.
Yeah.

Double and half.
Yes.
Vulnerable and weakness. Yeah.
And in some cases or and then with Watcher, anger.
Oh god. Yep. Yes.
Double and half are hard to tune.
Yep. Absolutely. also a hallmark of these kinds of games. I'm also will looking at um it looks like we've made
a quality of life thing that some people might not immediately recognize.
By doubling the recharge time on each spell, but increasing the value, it means we have to click less often.
Correct.
Which is at the end of the day a quality of life thing.
You're not sitting there being like, "Ah, mash mash mash." because they're slowing down the click rate but giving you more for each time significantly more for each time you do click.
Yes. Um so here here uh as we go this will also become um normal. Sometimes when we upgrade things or when we do things we'll just automatically get more upgrade or attributes I guess is the

official word for these attributes in each category. So here we've got an atunement and spellcraft. Spellcraft means we master spells faster to upgrade them to upgrade them to do the other upgrade thing, right? We're already beginning to see the upgrades upon upgrades part of this. And the other one is attunement, which bears mentioning because it is another one of those things where tags matter. This is 2.6% for all magic resources gained and everything we do right now is magic. Now, I'm also going to
kind of magic. I'm also going to mention a thing um which uh is of use and not terribly uncommon in in these uh number go-op games or incremental games or idle games is that up here in the upper right hand corner we have set action multiplier and you can choose how many of a thing you'd like to do. It doesn't work on spells but it does work on attributes. So, for instance, if I wanted to buy as many instances of aptitude as I could, I could go over

here and set five instances of aptitude or 25 or maximum
to
maximum meaning spend everything you possibly can on it.
Correct. And I've bought four of them. And it will automatically queue them up to complete one at a time down here. That queue will get longer the more we play. there are upgrades that affect it as well as the rate at which we um as as well as the rate at which those progress bars for each thing um
right and like Selda Singularity has yeah a whole range of those that again these are just quality of life
kinds of things because at a certain point you don't want to be clicking 25 times you're happy to do that let it run and go on to your next thing
yep so
so I have a question will at this level in the game.
Mhm.
Could I equivalently be mashing? Like, how much of this is strategic choice and how much of it is all of these are great

upgrades. It doesn't really matter what you hit.
Um, and the reason I say that is you take a game like Adventure Capitalist, which was something I played a while ago and really enjoyed. You could pretty I mean you could absolutely plan it to make it more efficient, but pretty much everything you mashed on at the end of the day wasn't a mistake. Like it's like cool, that one's making more now. Awesome.
Yeah. So right now we could match.
Mhm.
Later on that becomes less of a great idea.
Mhm. There are things which will increase costs and you can't undo an attribute. So there are definitely been cases where I have gotten myself into a pickle because I accidentally increase the cost of something without really understanding what I was doing because I mashed.
So right now, [music] yes. Later, no.

Also, not all resources are equally easy to get. Some resources are several steps deep down a chain of long actions that you need to take in order to get them. So you don't want to spend them as easily as you [clears throat] would mana. For instance, mana
that is often a hallmark of these games which is some games have states you can get into that are lost states or failure states. Others don't but will still to be to have a game which can optimize. You have to that means you also have to be able to make bad choices.
Yep.
And so a lot of games graduate from mash away up to okay, start making your choices if you want to win faster,
right? Because
theoretically you could have something that would pick a random one to click on every 30 seconds, walk away for a week, and come back.
Yep.
And it would probably be fine.
Yeah. Although you wouldn't necessarily advance.

Interesting.
Um, some things do require some specific choices and actions in order to get you to a point where you can advance. So, our next our next upgrade, by the way, is a glyph. We we've uh unlocked our first augment. And an augment is a modifier to a spell. So, this is quick. It's going to make a spell cost 1.15 times as much. And in return, it's going to get a 30% cool down reduction. It's going to have a 7 cooldown multiplier. So, I'm going to learn that and we're going to go over here and I'm going to put it on uh you'll note that it costs one um spell capacity. So, in this case, I'm going to put it on our expand magic because our expand magic has a cool down of forever. Uh, and it will now cool down much more quickly. Uh, without this it would be 27 seconds and with it it's 19.3. So, we're already pretty deep into

that. I need to do some upgrades real quick.
And in the same way that making something give more but you don't have to click as often is good.
Mhm.
Sure. Completely reducing click time
Yes.
also is an excellent thing. And they kind of counterbalance each other.
Yes, I need the So, this is another great example. The game's not telling me how the game says the next thing you need to do is unlock this for uh this 1,000 um 1,000 mana, right? So, in order to do that, I need to find a way to reach a capacity or 2,000 mana. I need to find a way to reach a capacity of 2,000 mana. And I have choices. I can either fill my the bar and get pretty close. Right. Um, actually, I wonder if I actually fill my Theatery bar if it'll do it or if I need one more upgrade. Curious. Yeah. Okay. So, I This is the

overfill, by the way. I'm temporarily at 2.7 or 21.7 and then it drains down because I overcast it. Um,
so it's not going to give me the how. It just tells me what I need to do. And that in this case is going to be to put one more um
cast into wisdom
uh and get some more.
So we've reached the stage where it's basically giving you goals or quests.
Yes.
Get this to do that.
Yes. And for right now they're pretty simple, right?
Um for right now they are, hey, you need to get this much mana. You need to unlock this thing. you need to do this next thing, right? Um, and that's relatively straightforward. Uh,
it's also where these games often, the well-designed ones give you multiple ways to do that. You could just keep increasing your mana, your wisdom, your mana capacity.
This is one of the disadvantages of uh

of scientific notation.
It says I need this much. It says I need 2,000 and this says I have 2,000. But somewhere in all of the small numbers that are being truncated, I don't have enough. It is one of the weaknesses of uh of the game uh on some level. I'm actually just going to get some more rather than trying to cast for another wisdom.
A a common thing for these kinds of games,
yes, is we remember when I said we don't care about one anymore, except when we really really do. Sometimes we really really care about the one. or the 33
or the whatever the smallest number is.
Yep. So, here's our next augment. We can make something
1.4 times as powerful and give it 10% additional
special.
Special. Well, let's hover over it. Improves the effect of non-scaling components typically resented by represented by an X multiplier. But in

exchange, we double the cool down and it casts slower. But
oh, I don't think I'd actually realize there's a separate casting time and cool down time. [clears throat]
Yes. And in addition, very interesting thing about heavy doesn't make it cost more. It just makes it cool down slower, which is very interesting, right? So, you can have something that's more powerful less frequently.
Mhm.
Okay, great. Uh, what's our next upgrade? I don't actually remember. Interesting.
Well, let's see. Um, can we can do some we can do some stuff in the meantime. We can upgrade our expand magic mastery. We're going to have uh bandwidth at several knowledge. We're going to Let's see what else can we do. I'm going

to upgrade my
Can I say that as somebody who's worked with a lot of different magic systems, I like their nomomenclature so far, like infuse, mana, wisdom, resilience, aptitude, attunement, spellcraft. These are all words I know.
Mhm.
One of the problems of course of these words is most of them could mean almost anything.
Yes.
Like aptitude and wisdom, you could reverse what they do in this game and most people would still be like, "Oh, that makes sense." like aptitude for your mana capacity
wouldn't sound out of place. And so that's both a pro and a con. It's familiar, but also it's a per game learning.
Yes, I agree very much with that. One of the things that I really like as well is they are very lightly colorcoded up at the top. Right. So spellcraft is a studious is a wizardry studioious casting attribute.
Mhm. And those tags end up mattering so very much later on. Um,
I'm almost surprised if I had been

building this will
I think I would have done something with the background that reflected the tags on it. So for example, say I color coded based, you know, this is magic. Magic is blue. Say another one was well, show me some tags. Let's look at tags here. So, wizardry or talent,
right? Say talent was yellow.
I might have done a um a fade. So, it would go from blue to yellow and it' have that gradient going across. So, you'd look at it. If it had three tags, I'd put a three-way gradient in or something like that. So, that kind of as you looked at that, you could be like, "Oh, my wizardry is blue. How many things have blue? How many will be affected when I upgrade blue?" or some such like that doesn't work as well with colorblind like I I would have to find a maybe a texture that goes along with each one or something. But
I wouldn't be surprised that at some

point if there's a UI update along the way, especially if this gets more complicated
that those would start getting reflected in it so you could see it at a glance.
Yeah, I I do like this is a great example. Can't believe you can't immediately tell me the difference between defense, armor, shields, and block. Yes, that is a
Oh, don't forget dodge.
Phenomenal example. This is This is one of my go-tos when explaining why tutorializing your nomenclature is so very important.
Yeah.
All right. So, let's see. We need spellcraft level five to get improved spell weight and improved whirling sorcery. We need to master whirling sorcery once. So, let's go see if I've done that. I have. So, I can confirm that mastery and now I can improve it. Uh, upgrading it with a special effect that generates more magic resources. Okay. So, now currently all it does is

make my cantrip spells more powerful. When I buy this, it now also will hold on hold on hold on. It'll give uh me a multiplier. In this case, it's 1.12 times the total amount of magic resources gained while it's active. Right.
Wait, to to make sure I understood that the first upgrade and the second upgrade did different things.
Uh the M kind of yes the in this case this was an additional upgrade to two whirling sorceries specifically.
Oh, okay. So, thing upgraded other thing to now have extra benefit.
Yes.
Okay, I'm on board with that. Things that upgrade and have different upgrades on a perlevel basis, meaning that you have to read the tool tip every time you upgrade to see if it changed the thing can get old fast if you have a large number of them
because you never feel like you have the mastery of knowing, okay, this is what

wisdom does because wisdom might change every time it upgrades.
Yes. attacking on extra thing. I also I understand that. So, just checking.
Okay, we can now do improved spell weight which will give us increased capacity. I want to I want to talk about this, right? Um Devon says, "My issue with it while it was an early release was that 40 hours in the game still didn't even allude to what it might want you to be doing or even could do." And I think that that is sort of an interesting part of this puzzle because in my mind for something without a failure state that is part of the not necessarily goal but can be part of the design intention is you can't screw this up. Go play in the sandbox. And it can absolutely be frustrating if in the sandbox you can't find the thing that feels like the next thing.
But I also think that there are there is

definitely a group of people who prefer to not be shown where the next thing is in the sandbox because what they want to do is explore for themselves, right?
That's the game for them. So basically before we even started this, Will and I had mentioned there are often puzzle-like aspects to these games.
Yeah. And so one part of puzzle is optimizing. How do I make this piece make you know work with the other pieces to do better? Another part of the puzzle is figuring out how do I arrange my pieces to get to the next stage which then unlocks other piece.
Yeah.
Make number go up to make other number go up. Cool. Now let's go on other number for other number to other number.
Right. So I'll tell you for instance that um the there is a hidden uh condition for scholarism to show up
which is what what's guiding us towards our next thing. We need to
has requirements
has requirements. Gather knowledge mastery level two and output level two.

And for some people this is fun. For other people this is where they hit a wiki.
Correct. In this case, the hidden requirement was that we fill the wizardry XP bar. And you fill this at a rate of one XP per upgrade done. So when we do 50 upgrades in the wizardry attribute section, we'll fill this bar and we'll get a magical advancement and a glyph upgrade.
But the game doesn't tell you that, which is a thing that some people won't like. Some people it won't even occur to because they'll see things that they can push and because they're playing a number go up game, they will push all the buttons. They will they will do what Jeff was talking about. They will autoclick their way through and just willy-nilly click on on stuff
and might not even realize what it was that made them get to that next stage.
Correct. This is also one of the things where experience if this is a game you [music] do multiple playthroughs on which in some cases is true in some cases is not true of these kind of

games. It's something we should chat about in a minute.
Yeah.
Um can make second play through much easier because for example if you know I'm going to need this fourle or four quests in I'm going to need to high one of these. You might prioritize it earlier on.
Yes.
To get [music] to the thing.
Yes. Absolutely. And that's actually one of the things about a lot of rogue likes is for example when you're playing Spire, you start optimizing your deck to beat certain bosses because you know they're coming up,
right?
Where if [music] for example there was a random boss each time you would just you would build to the strongest you could versus build to the strongest of the thing you knew you had to fight. [music]
Correct.
And there's a difference a subtle but a real difference in that.
Yeah. So, we've unlocked scholarism and that's given us a second top level tab.
Oh, no.
We're going to click scholar
tabs will
Oh, yes. And you'll notice the background change now.
Oh, and we're now a novice.
So, we're going to do novice study.

Oh, so hold on. So, what you're showing me is there is a tab one of upgrades that most likely are going to become somewhat irrelevant because tab 2 upgrades, this is the equivalent of restarting it at a new higher level.
Not even close, unfortunately. No, all of these will be continuously relevant. Oh,
okay. And this is where orb sort of hits the complexity ramp and just shoots through the ceiling because now we're balancing our our our um we're balancing our wizardry upgrades with our scholar upgrades, right? So, let's see. We can uh spend some to focus aura. And focus aura is interesting. It's a scholar aura that just generates space sigh per second. And sigh is a mental energetic resource. It's our psychic energy. And

it doesn't need to cast a spell. I just get it. I just get sigh over time. But while I'm getting sigh over time, I have other things I need to be doing. Right.
Right. And that's also in some cases a gate because if you if there's nothing you can do to make it go faster like clicking or other things, you kind of have to interact with sigh on its own cadence.
So now we've got some sigh going. We can go back over to magic. Um and we can continue to cast other [music] things. We'll get to five. We can learn the
way. This is the thing because this is Will's second game. Will knows he should get that going as soon as possible because it is a background passive generation.
I I am uh I will fully admit that I am I have certain things in mind that I'm going to be doing like the fact that I'm continuously casting in the background while we do this. Thanks MMO rotation practice. I can hold the full

conversation about game design without dropping a spellcast. I can do that. By the way, there are people and they sell on Amazon these little things that almost look like birds that um they're called key clickers. They're just going to go up and down. And I have definitely seen people for these games buying a couple of them and setting them to
Mhm.
hit button, etc.
Yep.
I think I on saw somebody who figured out a split keyboard thing will where they could have two keyboards feeding into their computer so they could have one set to the side with the little clickers doing the thing.
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So, now we can do research into new innovations. So, both of these are fine. Would you like for us to practice greater spell capacity
or charged spells?
Charged spells allow you to increase the spell's power by holding the cast button down
or we can have an increased spell capacity in our local. If this was me playing, I'd do capacity because holding

something down sounds like it's uh a little more thought inensive. What should I be holding? Where you've already shown me capacity lets me slot in things to have more than one at a time.
Okay, great. So, this is going to take 20 seconds to develop and it will it will take 20 knowledge, but it doesn't take it all at once. Takes it already one per second.
So, it's a burndown.
It's a burndown. That's correct. Which is very important.
What happens if you don't do it? But if you run out of a resource while it's going, like if you over spent it,
uh, it will stay at zero and after a period of time, it will stop trying to do the upgrade.
So, you need to be able to get it all to get all of the resources in at that rate.
You need things to burn to or to allow it to keep burning to burn down.
Correct. You can't just stay at it forever. You can't stay at zero for like an hour trying to do a resource that

you're not ready.
Yeah.
Oh, it does not stop trying. Just wait till you have more. I left one going in one of my earlier playthroughs and it stopped it. It cancelled it. So, I don't know why it did that, but I didn't cancel it and it did cancel. So, that's my confusion, chat.
Interesting. A lot of games have it just basically keep sucking where it tries to suck it out and eventually it can also make it look like you have zero for a while if you have multiple things all trying to
Yeah.
grab the resource they need.
Yep.
That's actually another fairly famous thing in the resource engine building games
is like take your factory games. I have eight things that need electricity and I'm only generating, you know, you have 23 demand and you have 20 capacity.
Yep.
And you're basically riding the zero line forever because more is getting drawn than is generated.
Yep.
Okay. We've just hit two major things. One, a point of excellent VCR design,

and two, a change in form. Number one, observe masteries. We can now put spell masteries in the tool tips instead of needing to go and look. You don't need to know that at the beginning. So, it's not a thing, but it is here as a trivial advancement so that now we can see where our mastery is for each spell as we're casting them. And the second one, the change in form is Scholar's Aura. Scholar's aura lets us passively generate knowledge. So I don't need to continuously be casting spells to generate knowledge. Now
so that was the cantrip that we started the game with. Correct.
Correct. Now it is very small. It is fractional. That is e to the -2 per second.
Right. It will scale quite quickly out of that. But it is worth noting that like it is something, right? And eventually this this is a style that

will um progress over time in the game is uh you will eventually unlock passive generation, but your passive generation to begin with may stink,
right? But eventually, I'm guessing the goal is that that cantrip will be taken out of the thing you're actively pressing because it becomes irrelevant to the passive that you then sec you've been powering up.
Correct. It's it's I don't need it anymore. So, here we're going to uh do another one of those things where we change an attribute. So, we have this attribute wisdom that we've been upgrading since the beginning of the game. It's at level 15. And here it's going to um say that the base version is fivey capacity, but that immediately applies to all 15 levels of wisdom. So we click this capacity is going to go from 20 to like 100

169. Nice. I like how you got the nice in next to the 69. I'm just good, Jeff. I'm just good. Um, yeah. And yeah, you you never lose access to anything that you've gotten. You just don't need it generally.
I will say, well, I have played a lot of these kinds of games. This one definitely has the comp a higher complexity threshold than I think almost anything I've seen.
Yeah.
Of this type.
Yep. Time for us to unlock our next spell. We've unlocked Psychic Blast. So, this is a 15.
That actually sounds like an attack.
It does. It's not, but it it does sound like one. Psychic Blast is a primary psionic charm, and it gives us a 15-second cool down where we can uh for 8 seconds get 244% base [music] mental resources.

So, we have two mental resources now. Sigh and knowledge. Bomatery is a spatial resource, not a mental one, so it won't be effective. I'm going to go in and add a Oh, I have to wait for the cool down to stop because I'm smart.
At a certain point, we'll find a good spot where we can chat for a little while.
Yeah, we can. Uh,
even if you're doing things in the background.
Yeah, I'm going to keep So, I'll I'll tell chat what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep doing some upgrades. Uh my big goals are [music] um to get spellcraft up to level 10 for um learning storm uh and to get expert advancements. So I'm just going to be working on mentality focus aura uh and these and just going to be continuously casting while we talk. All right, what's up?
Okay, so let's see couple things. So why are we enjoying this game? Um, like actually let me start since

you've played Morbid. Number one, if I was the one playing, I would be enjoying the discovery element. Hey, here's new thing. Here's new other thing as well as the mastery element. Even if it's brain dead, where I could just be clicking things, learning that X affects Y and Y affects Z and together, you know, double A and double B also get affected by so and so. like I feel like I'm learning and quickly mastering new things that I'm learning all while progressing. And one of the beauties of a lot of these kinds of games is that unlike life where you know if I'm going to go learn Japanese, it might take me years and I don't have a nice number saying your Japanese score is now 23. And these kinds of games, I get to see that go up. I get to see that my, you know, my infused mana has done so and so. my wisdom is now higher. I get to see that advancement.
And most real life doesn't give [music]

you the fine gradation of, hey, you're just doing better now. Good job. And in a lot of cases, it would be nice if it did. And that's actually one of I think the reasons that lit [music] RPGs um have such resonance with the modern generations is
you know you get to hear Dungeon Crawler Carl and Donut talk about how you know Donut's magic missile is now level 15 and has hit a godlike tier
right
like it's like cool I understand that number went up it's better it is a reflected thing and that's just a thing we don't get a lot of in real [music] life and I think it's a reason that a lot of people actually play the stock market is that is an actual reflection of number go up or the score that actually matters in real life. Score being money. [music]
Yes.
And so this these kinds of games hijack a whole bunch of that and give us the ability to enjoy that in a safe environment and done on a cadence that you get to actually sit down, do this

for 20 or 30 minutes and get up and say, "I had a thing that was accomplished."
Yes. 20 or 30 minutes
of and for different kinds of games.
But like you could stop this, come back tomorrow, pick it up again, have another half hour session. Most people don't have the amount of time to play per day that Will does.
True.
Especially as you have school or kids or work or a combination of all of those. Getting to sit down after all of that and be like, I know I just had a day where it felt like five things went backwards. Let's have a you know a brief let's have a small amount of time where everything moves [music] forwards I think can be very strong the mentally therapeutic.
Yeah I I will tell you for funsies uh we did this came out last week into its 1.0 release. It came out Tuesday. I had uh no was it Tuesday? came out a bit ago and uh it came out late and um I uh only

streamed a couple of hours of it and then the following day I meant to stream like 5 hours of it and then I started the game up and it blinked and it was like 5 and a half hours later. So, I am particularly susceptible to time slip in these, which is why you will occasionally see me like stop and look at a clock to make sure that we're not running over.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah, last week. Yeah. Time is a soup and uh time with orb doubly. So,
it's the dour of the day. Well, it for me I think it's quite interesting because it is so mentally it's low friction. It's like a mental treadmill, right? In a lot of ways, right? You're not running outside. You're not it's it's on a very it's in a very controlled way, but like your mind is just like moving through it in a way

that's very repetitive in the same way that running on a treadmill or walking on a treadmill can be very repetitive and just um like that that you get into that rhythm and you continue your flow state. There are certain games I call Zen games. Like, and they're not the same for everybody, but for example, I used to be able to play League of Legend, excuse me, Starcraft and Age of Empires 2 were Zen games where I could play them almost in a zen state for an hour or two, come out mentally refreshed because I'd gotten good enough that a lot of the actions were happening in a certain part of my brain and kind of calming down the rest of my brain and let it move forward.
Yes. And um again different for different people on the kinds of Zen games that you can do that with.
Yes,
absolutely.
Like Slay the Spire for very few people is a Zen game. There's too much active thinking and computing in it. Certain people have hit the zen state in that or

what
or some people have stopped caring whether they win or lose. That's me. Yeah. I I'm I'm not winning a lot in in Slay the Spire 2. I have failed to understand some core concept of the game in some way that I I don't understand what I don't understand and it's taking me a while to like get through that and that is okay. That's not a bad thing, but it is an interesting thing.
Yeah. But anyway, just kind of getting back to like part of the reason that we play these kinds of games and progression is such a big thing in almost all video games that removing the progression element can actually make people stop enjoying a game that they otherwise were enjoying.
Yes,
I know I've said this one a couple times on stream, but um it bears I'm going to say it again here. Back when I was playing Neverwinter Nights, not the MMO, but the original computer RPG, on my second or third playthrough, I

accidentally made a party that got XP faster than it should have. I won't get into the particulars about how. And because of that, I hit max level at like 2/ird of the way through the game and actually couldn't finish the game. And again, I had finished it before, but like my playthrough got boring because all my progression had stopped. I had hit my level 20 and it was just like that the part that of the game that kept me going on it wasn't enough with the then lack of progression on it.
Yep.
And so again, these kinds of elements are very interesting and they're very sticky and they're very engaging.
Yes.
And these kinds of games are almost the purest form of that in some cases. I also want to call out something real quick. Um, I neglected an upgrade. I neglected to raise my output level. And this is one of the big one of the big reasons that I say that like the game very quickly reaches a point where like you can't just randomly click stuff and hope to uh advance.
Tell me more.

The numbers and requirements eventually outstrip your ability to do them unless you know how the numbers work.
Right. So, I need to reach a certain amount of mana to learn Storm, right? I need 5,000 mana. So, I'm going to need a bunch of um I'm going to need a bunch of knowledge to do that. And it will take me a significantly longer period of time to do that unless I go and upgrade my output level, right? Because we can see uh here we go. Yeah. No, no, it's here. Sorry. Um, so if I I can actually toggle this. So I can see here that um if I cast my heavy gather knowledge, it's 6.8 knowledge per cast on a 23 second cool down. But if I increase it, it's

a little more than double on a not much longer cool down. Right? So, I am I am significantly faster overall at gaining the um gaining the resources I need to by doing this. And I could power through and just like idle the game essentially,
but that's not really what the game is asking you to do.
The game is asking you to understand, which I think is a very interesting way to approach this, right? Like yes, you could I could just walk away and go, you know, go for a walk, pet a cat, grab, you know, a beverage, uh, do my chores, and then come back and I would have enough knowledge to do the wisdom upgrades to get to Storm. But that's not the point.
It's interesting because certain other games, like let's go back to one of the classics, Adventure Capitalist, that is absolutely or a modern one, Selda Singularity, what they want you to do. you've kind of hit

your maximum generation threshold and at that point you could sit there and every couple minutes upgrade a thing or you could come back 8 hours later have a whole bunch of the generated resource to spend and do the thing that you need to.
Yeah.
And so I wonder how many people have actually thought that this game was like that the other kinds of recognizable games like that said, "Oh, this is moving really slow. Let me come back in a while." Yeah. So I think one of the reasons that it doesn't come across that way is the present is the fact that you begin doing everything manually, right? And that the initial values are so small for things like scholars aura, right? We're we're getting less than one per second. We're getting about a third of a knowledge per second. Um and we need 87, right? So, even though in the grand scheme of things, it would not actually be waiting that long to get wisdom if we

did it that way. Um, it feels like that's not right.
Yeah. Well, based on the pacing of the game
and the way that it presents it to you, that feels like a while.
Yep.
But it doesn't feel so long that you're like, I should leave this running in the background and come back in 6 hours.
Yes. Right. Especially when one of our spells gives us significantly more Did I? Okay, I did. Cuz like if I put all of my uh buffs on that gives 23 knowledge. That was what over a minute worth in one cast of passive generation.
More than half of what you needed if I remember what you'd been saying correctly.
Okay, so we're on to we're about to be on to the next thing. I'm just waiting for uh the mana to generate back up. And that is one of the things that is and then you wait is your mana regen.

That is one of the things that um occasionally people will mess up. Uh it is possible if you ignore certain things to get in a position where you can't get enough mana to do the thing that you need to do without waiting a really long time, which is obnoxious. Um it's one of the reasons that I'm very glad that you can adjust the casting output level. Anytime you upgrade a level of something, you can um for an output level, a reserve level, later on an alchemy level, or a um druidry level, you can duck it back down.
Yeah,
you're not stuck casting at the highest level if you mess up your resource allocations and have like a passive drain somewhere, whatever. It it's interesting these kinds of games to me both like this Idle Champions Cookie Clicker like um Sel Singular all of these to me are also really hard games to show off
because like if you say you hadn't come

in when Will and I started the stream say you're coming in now like this is incomprehensible.
Yep.
We have a whole bunch of tabs and menus and icons. Will is clicking on them. It could be at random. It could be very diligently. But there is no like without say the slay the spire ability to go mouse over cards and artifacts that people have built as secondary add-ons.
Mhm.
Like you don't know what's going on. You don't know if Will is playing optimally or suboptimally. And in some cases that also makes it harder to get invested in number go up because you don't have all you don't have the tie to number going up um that [music] the person actually making the decisions does.
Yeah,
absolutely. Uh and this is this is this is a common occurrence. I feel like I [music] hit a wall when I first played in early access where I needed a resource to progress that I could not generate.
Yep.

That's that is a way that the game tells you later on what it needs. So, we've just gotten spark. Spark is weird. I'm going to cast a spark spell. It's going to drain my mana per second and make some amount of spark. But spark is [music] weird. It drains. It doesn't stay there forever. It's only there while I'm actively generating it. Uh, and if I don't um if I don't use it uh while I'm casting the spell, it will eventually begin to decay and decay faster until eventually it reaches equilibrium at zero. Um, later on we will unlock the ability to uh to have more um to have some amount of spark passively generate. Uh, but for right now, unless I'm casting it, it's gone. Yeah, it drains at 4% per second until it hits

zero. Uh, let's see. Our numbers are getting bigger. It's funny, they're not getting as large as I thought they would by this point, which shows me that it is a longer paced game than certain other things. Like, we're at 5.21E 21E of mana capacity. We started at 100, but that still isn't
we're generating as much
E3. Like in some games, we'd be at like E36 by this point
because let's talk about loops for a moment.
Yeah.
This looks like a game that you play all the way through.
Mhm. Um, many many games of this sort you play for a while hit a wall and that's the game telling you, okay, it's time to restart. And by when you restart, you take some amount of the progress you've made from previous ones. And that permanently affects not just

your next replay, but all replays after that. Mhm.
And so the goal is play, get to your wall, start again with a bonus that will help you get to a further wall, start again with an extra bonus that now those two together will help you get to a further wall. And that's a whole part of the game is how far can you get before you have to restart and go back starting again with a bigger and bigger bonus to push further.
Yeah, this game takes a new game plus approach. So, um, there is an end, but there are some elements of this which are randomized. We haven't really run into them yet. The the base like level is pretty much all the same. Um, but there will come a point where things begin becoming randomized.
Uh, and the those are different every time. Uh,
hence the name random.
Yeah, hence the name random. Sorry. Uh, I was trying to think about how best to explain concepts. concepts are a fully passive idle mechanic that runs in the background.

You just have to remember to update them every once in a while. And what this one does is it it's going to steal three of my sigh per second. So, I need more sigh per second.
But every time I upgrade an attribute, one of these little clicky boxes,
I will get 46.3 mana back.
Interesting. per level. Uh, so I need to do some some upgrades here.
So upgrades are about to become their own resource. Correct. And this is this is actually one of my preferred methods of play is to have a system set up where the primary way that I generate stuff is by continuing to upgrade my attributes. Because
that seems like a strong loop.
It is. Um, there are other ways to do it. you can do it focused entirely on spellcasting. Like that is one of the other things that I like about this that I find that isn't always true of the

more idle end of things. Um and is very true of factory builders generally speaking, which is that um the game asks you to do a thing and does not really care which of several methodologies you choose to do that thing with.
It's the um linear game progression versus the deosax.
Yes. um style which is you know some games give you a way to do it. Deosex was one of the famous games for saying here's your goal. There are multiple ways to achieve your goal. Go at it. Yep. Just going to go through I'm doing some attribute upgrades while we uh while we talk. Um, and at some point, Jeff, I think we'll we'll hit a point where we'll we'll understand the the core concept and then we'll do like the so how deep does this rabbit hole go? Uh, brief look. Um, and we will warn everyone because it it will be like a mental flashbang. Um,

I mean, in some cases it will and it won't like or at least to me like I'm looking at it, I'm expecting more tabs. I'm expecting more things. Like I have a decent understanding of part of it, but without being the one clicking the buttons and reading things at my own speed, faster or slower, and understanding the interaction from the kinetic or kinesesthetic process of like pushing the button to make the thing happen.
Yeah.
Like the understanding and in some cases the satisfaction
Yeah.
is significantly lower. So if you open it and suddenly there's four more tabs and five additional spells getting cast and you know 43 other things that you've unlocked, I'm going to be like seems right.
Okay. Well, in that case, let's uh let's go back to the main menu and we'll we'll go to the one that I have prepared earlier. By the way, I do like this.
It has a it has a last played thing. You get to see how long it's been since you last played. So that was an hour.
Almost on the nose. I did a good job.
Last question. Does it continue to progress while

you're not playing?
No.
Okay.
So, uh, I booted this up, right?
That does remove a whole aspect of it is not an idle game. Yeah.
Part of I think part of the whole definition of an idol game is it plays when you're not there.
Yes. So, uh, this is a run that I'm in the middle of. I'm 28 hours in. Be prepared for endgame stuff. If you don't want to see endgame, Orb. Orb is great. You can go get it on Steam and, you know, whatever. But this is this is this is 28 hours in.
Okay, give me [snorts]
Okay,
that's a lot of attributes on the left side.
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Okay, so first things uh first, you remember we talked about E to the 36. Yeah, I have E to the 36 per second mana.
Okay,
and E to the 39 capacity. And all of these are other resources of various kinds. These are all ones that have a finite capacity. So the finite capacity I have unlocked are Arcanum, Spark,

Blaze, Knowledge, Skill, Control, Thomatery, Space, Sigh, Verdant Energy, Amber, Ceremony, and Soul. And then the ones below it are resources which are uncapped. And there are a million of those. Um
I can see that.
Yeah. Or a a solid a goodly number.
Yes. Um, and then we have the two tabs that you're familiar with. Uh, the the the scholar tab, focus is still here. It's just much bigger number.
Mhm.
Um, and magic is still here and infused mana and wisdom are still here. Again, just much bigger numbers. Um, we have several other things. world is one of the first examples of a thing that I love about this game.
Oh, okay.
Earns of holding are the only ways to

get capacity to have more space. So, you get space as a resource. Um, and you can cast a spell that will give you space at the beginning, but your capacity for space comes from waiting. You have to build urns of holding and upgrade them at least to be to begin with to get more spatial capacity over time. So it's one of the very few ones that has um an increase in capacity. You can look at you can look at it slowly tipping up. Um also worth noting
if you are going to play this as a game in the tool tips it will tell you how long uh it will take for a thing to be maxed if you don't do anything. Uh, in this case, it will take an hour and 14 minutes for my space to fill up if I don't do anything. Uh, just a note. Um, uh, and then
that's nice though cuz that's actually that is a scale people can understand.
Yes.
Where most people have no idea the

difference between, you know, 1.34 e to the 40th or to the 23rd.
Yeah. Like 40 is obviously bigger than 23 but the scope of how much bigger it is for probably 90% of the world's population maybe 95 they don't have any idea of the difference between how much bigger you know e to the 23rd is versus e to the 40th they are both large numbers
yeah correct the the the the uh Terry Patchy joke of one too many lots is very applicable here
at some point we reach All of it. It's just all of it. How much is that? It's like all of it. It's whatever. Um, here's another subsystem. We have a garden. Uh, I can plant fruit trees and harvest the fruit. I have a tree that gives me treasure. I can harvest the treasure. Um, this brings up inventory. I have fruits that give me things and scrolls that give me things and threads that do things. These are

all temporary limited resources that I get from various activities. Um,
okay. I'd kind of expected the scrolls because of wizard inscribing.
Hadn't expected garden and honestly capacity and inventory system.
Yep. Uh, I can brew my own potions. I can Where's a bunch of stuff? Where's the thing I want to hit to make sure that I have enough to do the thing in a second? I had one chat. Where's my zeal fruit? This is actually a problem. Did I already eat it? Where? Hold on. I'm skipping ahead. Okay, it's fine. Um, okay. This is, by the way, this is one of the places where you could screw up. Um, lifewever increases the amount of plants that you grow and increases the yield of one of the plant types.
Mhm. and increases the cost by the same

amount. And if you dump all of your points into this and don't know how to lower that cost, it becomes very difficult to do anything. This is one of the ca we were talking earlier about how like you can click on stuff um uh and um like just randomly click and things will happen. This is, I would say, one of the examples of a case where that has downsides. Um,
yeah,
very quickly.
That is something specific to certain kinds of games. Some games don't have downsides to this. The downside to a click is, oh, you could have invested in that other thing that was more efficient.
Yeah.
But there's no down you're not hurting yourself. You're just generating more slowly based on the time you spent.
And you're not hurting yourself here. It's just causing more annoyance because now you have to tweak your druidry level in order to do things that you wanted to do and you might not have anticipated like it's an understanding penalty sort of. Yeah. You you don't understand why

that thing isn't working,
right?
Almost all penalties at the end of the day for games are time.
Yes.
Like death is time.
Yeah.
Oh, you need to rerun from your respawn. Oh, you're out of lives. you have to restart the game.
Correct.
Like a lot of them do come down to time. Time is the penalty
in an in an abstract meta level for most things.
I agree. Um, we have crafting. We can craft objects. That's cool. Um,
so this really is like MMO RPG. I won't say light but systems integrated on top of all of the on top of the um
Yep.
Not idle. What were we calling it? Um
incremental.
Incremental. Thank you. Incremental.
Yep. So, we've got all kinds of books and tools and stuff. We have an artifact loadout that we can wear. These are

artifacts that just passively do things for me. They're just here. Um, I'm wearing a cloak that makes it so I get more spatial resources. And I'm holding a rune that makes my um alchemy better. And I'm uh wearing an amulet that increases my aura power so I generate more resources. On um there's an alchemy section. This is all about balancing things. We're consuming some resources to generate other resources. It has a whole sub thing. There are um we learn different alche uh alchemizations um as we go. I'm going to try and find what's a thing that I'm close to learning. Man, I want to see the dev's like master spreadsheet or how they treat keep track of this. Like I'm very curious on that because it feels like there's a lot of different entries and interactions and so like making sure you put them together so they balance well. But also

like I'm curious like I hope they have some sort of unit testing setup,
automated testing solution
so that every time they do a patch they don't accidentally break a thing by like tweaking one number that
Yeah. It takes 30 hours of going into the game to realize was tweaked
too much in a pitch state.
That's what I needed.
Um, yeah. No, that Yeah. Mhm. Yes. 100%. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh there there's a lot of that especially because one of the things uh sorry I am temporarily lost cuz I'm trying to talk and do a thing at once. Where's my
Where is your mind?
Need that.
Where is my mind? is mental energetic, which means I need some uh

trying to get to the point where I can show you like uh a thing about concepts that I think is really cool. Um but I forgot to prep that earlier. Uh cuz I got distracted by doing other stuff. Um cuz when we've been developing things, we've gotten an option uh and you get three and the way that it chooses to present those to you is quite intriguing. Anyway, in the meantime, so there's alchemy and then there's actually rituals. Um and rituals are combat, like actual factual combat.
So we have like combat spells. You were saying earlier there are combat spells. I have a firebolt spell that does firebolt damage two things. Um I also have an auto attack that I've upgraded because I can. Um so uh if we go into
So what things are you fighting?
Uh we're fighting um these are sort of like weird interdimensional

being looking things. They're like gribblies. It's not very well explained. The lore not terribly deep I will say. Um but uh like that is a part of the game, right? It's just all the way here like 25 hours in after you've done everything else. Now there's combat and you can automate, right? Um so you can see that I'm not touching anything. My auto attack is just destroying everything because I've invested heavily. My auto attack because that amuses me. It imu it largely amuses me um to do that. Do you take damage while doing this?
Uh, there is a Yeah, there's a stability meter. Um, if you reach zero, the ritual ends.
Uh, can I use that to do this?
Um, so yeah. So like it gets and this is one of the reasons why I think this like has such an interesting place for me in

number go up is that it's not only that the number has gone up it's that the number of numbers has gone up right it and I think that's sort of another thing that might not be necessarily the clearest uh on first blush at a lot of these numbers go up games right it's very rarely about one number which is I think why a lot of MMOs don't qualify you have like two numbers which are which is really one number, right? You reach level cap and then you maximize your gear score to maximize your DPS, but everything you're doing is to maximize your DPS because you do more DPS at higher levels and your gear score maximizes your DPS and your skill maximizes your DPS. So everything you're doing is to maximize that one number, right? Versus
set of numbers.
This where it's Yeah.
Yeah. A whole suite of numbers.
Um Yeah. And like I have concepts, by the way, uh this is this is a very interesting part of this as well. I have

concepts that are uh giving me resources back whenever I do something. And I have things that are reducing um this is level 947 about to hit 948. So for each of them I it's minus 352% cost.
Okay. which isn't against its current cost. It's counterbalancing the increase in cost that each repetition of an attribute has, but over time things will pile up and and do stuff. Yeah. No, no, this is Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And and we reach we reach proper noun soup. But this is this is a happy place for me. This is a thing that I wanted to share because for me, this is one of the really cool parts [music] of this game is just getting to play around in the numbers like it was a like like it's a little sandbox, right? That's that's really what gives me just an incredible amount of joy from this is um

is doing
this, by the way, is a perfect solo or small team game.
Yep. like this this kind of game is the complexity level like the more complex the game usually though not always the smaller the audience.
Mhm.
Um oh sorry complexity combined with learning.
Yes.
So for example one of the reasons chess has stuck around for so long is it's not that hard to learn but has a high complexity cap.
Yes. Games like this have high high learning, but for some people that's part of the fun along with the high complexity and interaction between them. But you know this, for example, if this was a 100 person team, this would be way way overdone because they're not going to this will not hit the mass market.
Yes,
this will be the kind of game that certain people love but that is [music]

made for those people. And my guess is whoever made this game loved these kinds of games. And so they're getting to build a game they love for other people who love these kinds of games, which is fantastic.
Yeah.
Like I am a big proponent of that.
Yeah, it is. It is very much um a very niche thing that it's doing, but I really think that this is one of my favorite examples. I've played a fair number of these like incremental games. I've tidle games. I've tried clicker games. I've tried other incrementals.
[music]
orb hits all of it in a way that like is deeply satisfying to me. Um, and I [music] think that's that's the reason why when we were talking about um what to do this week, I wanted to talk about these number go up games and to use Orb to do it because I think it's it's such a fascinating um window into that kind of game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I I am impressed also just with the amount that they've crammed into the UI.
Oh yeah, the UI is incredibly dense. There's stuff behind me. There's stuff

behind Jeff. Uh, at the bottom, by the way, is um orb XP. This is every time you do an attribute in any of the top levels, you're getting orb experience. Uh, and that's how you upgrade a whole other thing. Research gets incredibly complicated. There are different masteries and you can um choose what you This is one of the places where you can really choose what you want to do, which is one of my favorite parts. you you have to you have a limited number of advancements and you get to pick a path which I think is just absolutely phenomenal.
So, uh
does one of the backgrounds as you unlock the tabs is one of them like space?
Yeah, world is kind of space.
Workshop is kind of circy. Alchemy is kind of bubbly. Rituals are bricks but but world is kind of space. You can see it. I was just curious if one of them was basically orbit.

Thanks, Jeff. [laughter] Thanks. Thanks so very much. Uh I think that is a good place for us to to wrap up our little our little look at orb. Uh yeah, I I thought it was um uh I thought it was uh I I think I did a better job than I sometimes do of presenting a game. And I think orb helps that uh by being um so easy to get into and then hits the complexity like ramp and then just like flies.
Uh which
it's funny. It's not a complexity ramp, Will. It is a series like it is a ramp like you're riding a dirt bike and doing the jump,
but it's a course. It's like a skate park of them.
Yeah.
That's continually going uphill. Here's your first ramp. Oh, congratulations. You made that jump. Here's the next ramp and the next one. I'm curious actually how many people get in say an hour into

the game and like this is it for me and how many people an hour in when they see the next ramp and can guess the ones coming after that are like nope this is where I'm we have hit my happy level of complexity and this is going past it.
I think a lot of people dip out. Um, although I will say that like the game's advertising and marketing materials make it pretty clear what kind of game it is and I think that's to its benefit. Um,
oh, good.
Like show
that serves it better long term because you don't want to mislead people into it
because at the end of the day they're going to leave and be like, "Ah, this game, you know, you're going to end up with worse reviews."
Yeah. Correct.
And you want you want a high enough review score that the people you're trying to reach will find it, see it, and be like, "Ah, this is my game." Yep. Uh, absolutely true. And I think that's the goal for every game, which is why your Steam page is so important.
Absolutely.
Friends, thank you so much for joining us today on Design Club. Uh, again, this is our new schedule. We'll be here every Tuesday, 2 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m.

Pacific. Uh, and as well, Breakfast has moved. If you've been missing games for breakfast, it is now on Fridays, 11:00 a.m. Eastern, 8:00 a.m. Pacific. The listing for it is up right now. You can find it on the YouTube page if you're looking for
if you are on YouTube, you can check the upcoming on the live. Yeah,
it will already be scheduled. Our goal is to always have the next either breakfast or design club up. So if you're watching breakfast and you want to see design club, it'll already be up so you know where it is
and that will happen in a couple days and the same. Or if you're watching this, you're like, I need some breakfast news. It will be there waiting for you.
Yes.
With the Friday occurrence. So, you can see Will and Matt talk about I'm I'm guessing there's going to be a little more GTA and a couple of other things talked about this coming week.
We did GTA a bit last week. There's probably going to be a little more GTA. I haven't even begun to look, but if you've got a story that you want us to talk about on breakfast, don't forget you can always hit me up on Blue Sky or hit me up in Discord with a story and we'll be uh I'll add it to the long list of topics uh that we'll be covering. As

well, if you have something you'd like us to cover on Design Club, same deal. Let me know. I would really love to hear from all of you. what kind of topics you'd like to see us cover in the future. So, I think all that remains to us is to say bye to the people, Jeff.
Bye to the people, Jeff. Hey, everybody, have a great week. [music]