Game with Us
This is a peek behind the curtain, finding out what goes into creating a new card. We'll go from initial concept to implementation and fixing it after playtesting. Come find out a little bit of what goes into making a cryptid real.
My name is Matt. I’m one of the engineers working to make this game the best it can be. My main job with the team, although since we’re small we all do a bit of everything, is to be the game’s designer. That means I work on making the game’s core mechanics and everything that goes into card creation from concept, to functions, to flourish.
Starting with the lore
Any good design has to have a good foundation. To make that possible for Portentum, I made sure the cryptids we pick are sampled from around the world. A little bit from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and all around the rest of the world. That being said, it is easy to forget the other frontier, internet urban legends. The Rake is a thin humanoid with glowing eyes and razor-sharp teeth. It likes to creep into houses, watch for a moment, then suddenly attack with terrifying speed. Very creepy, very sudden, and a great concept. The only small issue is that's it. There is very little to work off. No details about where it's from, why it's there, or what it does before and after an encounter. There aren't even any details about a particular area it's confined to apart from sporadic reports in various US cities. Nevertheless, it gave me something to start with, an attack pattern and behavior that we can really focus on. The method of a strange wait followed by a sudden and unrelenting attack sounds like a fun style to use in a game.
Turning a stare into a stat
That strange wait and a sudden attack turned into the core mechanics behind the card. The key concepts were:
- Delay at the start
- Obvious indicator of approaching trigger
- Big, worthwhile payoff
To that end, we got the Rake.
To fully understand how the rake functions, you need to understand Threat. It decides which card acts first on a roll and which card gets targeted first. It's very important for this card in particular because we want to use that feature to create tension. Creating that moment for a player where they see a big inflection point that's being worked towards and having the question answered of: Is the payoff going to get here fast enough?
The Rake's second ability Unrelenting Terror is that big payoff. It gets to do a ton of damage every turn and become a huge problem for the enemy warband all on its own. Since it’s threat grows until it is the highest, it always attacks first, and due to the large amount of damage it causes, has the potential to finish off opponents before they get a chance to swing. If being a heavy-hitter was all it did, it would be very overpowered but we can gate it behind its first ability, Looming Threat.
Looming Threat is what best ties the card to the cryptid lore. It starts out with low threat and is unassuming, much like the Rake hovering in the shadows. As it waits, the anticipation builds. Everyone can see it will become unleashed soon, a delayed firecracker waiting to go off. Literally, once it's the most threatening card around, it attacks again and again until the battle is won.
The archetype it created
The Rake created a spot to pour the existing cards that manipulated the threat stat into a new home. Cards like the Grimalkin or Odd Emanating Crystal help focus on ramping the Rake up in a new way that it can uniquely benefit. Especially in this case, I love how the Rake creates new niche interactions between pairs of cards. It really clicked into place some cards that didn't have a specific archetype yet and pushed them into a better light where they can work as a core piece of a 5-card warband. The less obvious synergy is a spot for large, targeted healing cards like Quetzalcoatl. The Rake has to stay alive as long as possible and with a large health pool, this card can make the difference where otherwise it would not get its full potential.
What the game engine had to learn
It seems basic, but until this point we never needed a way to poll the stats of the other cards in a battle and find the outliers. Searches for the highest health or most injured just didn't exist. The Rake required that change and was the direct reason we were able to use the new searches for other unrelated cards. They got to target cards under new criteria such as lowest threat and have the Rake to thank for it even if the only connection is all under the hood.
For the Rake specifically, we needed to make sure its attack only worked when it was the highest threat of any card in the battle. That preserved the delayed gratification aspect which made the design its most flavorful and created one more new way to fashion a deck around a different idea.
What playtesting showed
The hardest part of this card was balancing the razor's edge. Tuned too weak and it becomes overlooked. Too strong and it demolishes opponents every time. Especially with just the in-house devs testing it every week, it quickly becomes apparent when something is too strong because you start to see it in every other warband. Starting health and threat varied a bit until it was locked in eventually, but the true constant was always its price.
In order for the Rake to be the feature card that you build a deck around, it needed to cost less gold so it would have time to build its threat level. There is no point in buying a bunch of support cards when the core engine isn't even available yet. Ideally, it should always be available in the first couple of rounds and allow players to build up support around it afterwards.
How you beat the Rake
The best cards always have a counter to them and dedicated readers of the blog deserve a small edge for getting this far. The most important part to remember about the Rake is its threat. That sounds obvious but the side effect is that once it powers up, it will always be first targeted. Therefore, any single-target lockdown effect will be immensely powerful against it. Freeze or Petrify are the best effects to use when fighting it so make sure to fill your deck with one or both!
Roll well,
Matt
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