PAX Unplugged has been great. I’ve been too busy doing a variety of things (Indie Game Night Market! Learning new CCGs! Losing all of my rare cards that I collected over the weekend, and just barely managing to get them back!) to really do too much writing.
For now, I’ll just say that it was a blast, and assuming I manage to get home, and not end up in a plane crash, I’ll try to talk about it a bit more tomorrow. But right now I need to pack for a way too early flight, and get some sleep.
Another year, another PAX! I say that like it’s a bad thing, but to be honest, this has been a pretty chill year so far. As always, I’ll be recounting my day, but first I want to draw attention to a few cool things I think folks should check out.
Brightcast
Brightcast is great. If you want to know why, you can read my writeup, but if you want to just try it out, the designers have a booth this year, and are selling copies. If you find yourself walking past, I highly suggest trying it out. They’re in the PAX Rising showcase, at Booth #3143.
Re;Match
I’ve been following Brother Ming’s Re;Match since… well, before it was named Re;Match! It’s a fantastic fighting puzzle game, and if you get a chance to swing by and try it you absolutely should. They’re down at Booth 4009, and there’s also a Pinny Arcade Pin you can get doing a demo.
Anyway, Re;Match is rad, and I can’t wait for it to release.
Anyway, let’s talk about my day.
This was a pretty slow start for me. Most of my morning, and a bit of the afternoon was spent playing Magic, mostly the new Avatar the Last Airbender set. I might have some more thoughts on it later, but for now I’ll just say that we played some two-headed giant games, and won all three of them by the skin of our teeth. Honorable mentions to incredibly good cards go to Standstill, and Secret Tunnel.
This is very good if you drop it turn 2, and you’re the only ones with creatures. 6 cards is nothing to sneeze at.
MVP creature of the decks, and it doesn’t even start as a creature. Won us at least 2 games.
After all that Magic, it was already about 3:00, so after a quick break for some chicken and waffles from Reading Terminal, I took a moment to quickly browse the expo hall, and play some Re:Match.
The non-MTG games
Having spent the day playing a collectible card game, I decided that what I needed was to spend some more time playing a collectible card game, and went over to try out the Cookie Run TCG. I have no idea why this exists, and I’ll probably do a more full review of it after PAX Unplugged, but for now I’ll summarize my opinion as “Doing some interesting things, but not necessarily inspiring”.
After that, I met up with a few friends, and we tried out the demo version of the LoTR trick taker. It’s a co-op trick taker, and generally a pretty good time. I bought the first version last year, and never played it. So I’m going to crack it open when I get home instead of just buying another game I haven’t played. If you want an complete opinion, just read Dan Thurot’s review instead.
I rounded out the day by playing Magical Athlete, and I’m just going to link to another Dan Thurot’s review instead of trying to summarize it. Despite winning, I never had any of the truly exciting moments he experience, and while I’d play Magical Athlete with a specific group of friends, it’s mostly to see them lose it.
We ended the day with Stem & Branch. I’m gonna be honest, I’ve been up for 12 hours, and I don’t quite know how to describe this one. Maybe as a light-medium weight sort of points collection game? Honestly most games you collect points, so that’s probably not the best way to describe it.
Dishonorable Mention: Jungo. A friend played it, thought it had an interesting design, but didn’t think it was very good. A bit of a bummer, given that Trio has been one of our favorites, and Combo is also pretty good, but not everything can be a winner. (No, that’s not a bad link, Combo really did used to be called Surfosaurus MAX.)
Oh, and I got like 3 boxes worth of One Piece chaff for free, so that was neat.
Tomorrow I’ll be trying out Riftbound, and maybe finally browsing the Expo hall? Who can say.
Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.
Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.
If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.
A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.
Q-Side
The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.
But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.
Oh The Stuff You Can Get
Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.
After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.
This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.
Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.
This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.
It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.
It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.
Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.
They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.
Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.
And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.
So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.
Narrative
From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.
Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.
This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.
The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.
I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.
After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.
This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.
Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.
This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.
Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.
Then things get odd.
I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.
Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.
This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.
It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.
It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.
It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.
Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment
Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.
Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.
But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.
It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.
Hat is off, back to final thoughts
I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.
It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.
Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.
I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.
P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.
Probably shouldn’t have abbreviated that quite so much, but GMG stands for Game Makers Guild! If you haven’t heard of the Game Makers Guild, they’re a group down in Boston that provides a bunch of services for indie designers, including design help, curation, and also runs playtesting events.
I’ve written a fair amount about various playtesting events I go to, but this one was different because for once, I brought a game!(Okay, it’s not just me, it’s a game I’ve done at most 30% of the work for.)
Before I talk about my own game though, I want to talk about another game I saw there, called Rule the School.
Rule the School
Rule the School is an area control game by Alfred Septembre. Players are competing candidates in a school council election, and are trying to win by having their supporters most effectively placed to influence the outcome.
In this sense, it looks pretty straightforward, but the real fun bit is the action selection system. On each turn, one player draws 3 supporter cards, chooses 1 to keep, 1 to give to their opponent, and 1 to throw away. Then, they slot that supporter card into one of their actions, and the supporter they chose adds its effect to the selected action. Alfred described it to me as “slotting the key into an ignition switch,” and I really enjoyed it.
I don’t really have anything to say on Rule the School, other then to note that by the time I was playing it, I’d had 4 hours of sleep, been awake playtesting games for 8 hours straight, and Rule the School knocked me back awake. It’s just a very fun game, and I hope I get to play more of it in the future, whether that’s at PAX East Unpub, another GMG event, or somewhere else.
If you want to learn more about it, Alfred talks about the game a bit on his blog here, or on his instagram! Its really fun, and I hope I get to see more of it.
Anyway, now let’s talk about my game!
Welcome to Card City
I’ve been working on a game called Card City Critters for a few months now, co-designing it with Max Seidman. It’s something we’re calling a “live action collectible card game.” Let me explain how we got here.
I love collectible card games, of all sorts and sizes. Whether I’m talking about what I’m seeing at PAX Unplugged, playing One Piece for the first time, or throwing myself into tournaments for games I’ve only played twice, I love CCG’s.
But CCG’s also have a lot of a problems. From a player standpoint, they’re incredibly expensive in terms of both time and money. If you don’t have a local community for a specific game, it can be hard to find folks to actually play with.
From a design standpoint, there are a lot of problems, but they’re almost all outweighed by the billion pound elephant in the room: if you choose to make a collectible card game or trading card game, your product is competing with Magic: The Gathering. This is something that I view as a pretty bad idea, even if I respect those who choose to do it.
Still, I love trading card games. I love learning a system, seeing strategies I would never have thought of myself, opening booster packs for the first time, and just generally getting to experience all the weirdness and excitement of a new CCG.
So my question for myself was “How can I create an experience that lets players have all of those fun moments, but is also far cheaper, doesn’t require a long term commitment, and also doesn’t compete with big players already existing in the space?”
And while it’s a work in progress, Card City Critters is my and Max’s attempt to design that system.
Ball X Pit is Breakout X Vampire Survivors. There are a lot of things it does that I like, and it executes well on a most of its mechanics. Despite all that, I’m not sure that I want to recommend it, because I don’t really feel like I’m having fun with it. More on that later.
The Basics
Ball X Pit is easiest to describe in terms of just listing off all the games it’s cribbing features from. We’ve got the standard roguelike formula of incremental runs, complete with a 3-pick-1 system. The items in question are a set of brick breaker balls with special powers, and some side items. Balls can poison enemies, shock them in an AoE, split into more balls, etc. These get bounced off enemies to deal damage, enemies drop EXP when the die, and the pressure is killing enemies before they meander their way to the bottom of the screen, at which point they punch you in the face.
Where Ball X Pit innovates is its fusion system, letting you take two balls and combine them. Grab an Earthquake Ball, fuse it with Ghost, and suddenly you have a ball that pierces enemies while hitting them all with a massive AOE. There are also evolutions, combining specific balls to fuse into new, stronger balls, but these are a bit less novel, as both Vampire Survivors and Holocure had similar systems.
At the end of a run, you’ll be kicked back to the hub screen: a small city builder with a twist that’s actually quite novel. Instead of being your standard Farmville setup, you harvest resources by playing more brick breaker, launching your inhabitants into the village, bouncing off buildings to finish their construction, and across wheat fields to harvest them. These resources can be used to construct new buildings, and generally engage in meta-progression.
Then you’ll jump back into a run, perhaps with a new set of characters, better equipped for the given challenge. Rinse, repeat. Clear a level with enough different characters, and you’ll unlock another level.
It’s probably worth spending at least a bit of time talking about characters. At the start of a run, you’ll pick a character to bring into the run. They bring a starting ball, some stats, and some sort of twist modifier (later, you’ll unlock the ability to bring a second to set up interesting synergies!). These are interesting, running the gauntlet from “shooting faster, but less accurately” to the one I’m using while I’m doing this writeup, that auto-plays the game completely on their on own.
That character brings me to my main problems with the game: it’s really compelling, but around hour 5, I found that I wasn’t really having much fun anymore. I’m mostly ripping off a friend here when I say this, but the game feels kinda like looking at TikTok: there’s a point where you’re just a bit zoned out, but still present enough to keep going. After you stop though, you start finding yourself wondering what you just did for the last several hours.
It’s a shame because all the little things in Ball X Pit are pretty great. I love the low-poly aesthetic, the sound and music are good, and if you don’t like them, they’re easy enough to turn off. Because unlike some things I’ve played over the last few weeks, the game has a proper options menu.
It just keeps going
I had a different friend ask why I’d play 20+ hours of this if I’m not having fun, and I think I have two answers. The first is that early on, as the game is unfolding, showing off new systems, new characters, and new ideas, there’s this hope that it’s going to turn into something more than it currently is. I kept hoping that I’d unlock some subsystem that would crack the whole thing open. It’s also during the first few hours that you’re constantly unlocking things, finding new balls, new evolution and fusions with them, and just generally being entertained.
But this whole process slows down later on. Progression tapers off. There are no more twists, and the enemies, while having variety, don’t really require you to play any differently. The game turns into a chore.
The second reason I played that much was to make sure that before I did this writeup, I’d really given the game a chance. Seen all it had to offer. And I feel fairly confident of that at this point.
I haven’t even beaten the last boss myself. Instead, I plugged in that character I mentioned above who plays on their own, and just let them do it. I bet there’s some sort of secret if I beat the final level with all 21 characters, maybe a bonus level, or secret 21st character, but at this point I’m just so bored, and frankly, don’t really want to.
Ball X Pit is $15. It’s not the worst $15 I’ve spent this week, but it’s not the best either. It’s an absorbing experience with clever ideas, but ultimately a slightly empty one.
