Gametrodon

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  • Card City Critters – March Update

    Card City Critters – March Update

    It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!

    Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.

    Now for the longer version.

    After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.

    We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.

    These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.

    A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.

    We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!

    While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.

    Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.

    Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.

    These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)

    Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….

    So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!

    As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.

    We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!

    As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.

  • Quick PAX Writeup

    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.

    Cheers, post more tomorrow.

  • PAX Unplugged – 2025 – Day 1

    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.

    Image of the Brightcast card box.

    Re;Match

    Image of ReMatch components and new marble dropper.

    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.

    If you want to learn more and aren’t at PAX East, I suggest joining Brother Ming’s Discord server.

    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.

    Standstill MTG card.
    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.
    Secret Tunnel MTG Card
    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.

  • Honkai – Nexus Amina

    I spent a decent part of this week playing the beta for Nexus Amina, the newest game from Mihoyo. If you haven’t heard of Mihoyo before, they’re mostly known for making a god-scrillion dollars off Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero.

    That’s a real number. Don’t look it up.

    Nexus Amina is a monster collector autochess game, with a reasonably sized open world city to explore, quests, and a lot of autochess battles. Since this was a beta, I don’t think there’s much purpose in talking about the game as a whole yet. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of content, just that it was in a state that I’d call unpolished for Mihoyo.

    I love my clockwork turtle.

    Instead I want to talk about the two parts of the game that stood out to me: the quests and the combat.

    Quests

    If I was smart, I would have taken some screenshots of the quests, but I did not. Anyway, the thing that makes them interesting is that compared to most mobile game quests, they actually have a ridiculous number of branching paths.

    I’m not actually sure if this is a good thing, but it’s definitely interesting. It was a bit of a shock to have to pay attention to what was happening at all.

    Now, the reason I don’t want to pass judgement on if this was good or bad is mostly because while the branching paths are present, the current quests are in a rough state, and I often found myself more frustrated than anything else. One notable moment was a quest where I had “solved” the mystery, but there was no option to resolve it based on the info I’d discovered.

    I’ve seen what Mihoyo’s polish looks like from their other games, and I can’t see them releasing a game that feels the way this currently does.

    Combat

    Anyway, let’s talk about the combat!

    Nexus Amina is an autochess, more in the vein of Dota 2 Autochess/Underlords and Team Fight Tactics than Storybook Brawl or Super Auto Pets.

    This means that it’s mostly about placing units on a board, and then having them slug it out. Unlike most other autochess games, however, its primary game mode is not an escalating PvP experience, and I don’t believe there currently is a PvP mode at all.

    This turns it into a bit more of a puzzle game than anything else, where you can redeploy and shuffle units around after a loss with no penalty in most modes.

    Generally speaking it’s fun enough, but I do have one big “observation” about the nature of the game. I found it very hard to develop an intuition about how unit aggro worked, and this had some interesting effects on how I played.

    See, in other Autochess games I’ve played, I’ve been familiar with the units that are being used. This meant I had an intuitive sense of how units would move around the board, and choose targets, and when units would be defeated. But because I didn’t have that in Nexus Amina, I found I couldn’t really do much in terms of positioning based strategies, and instead just focused on synergies, and building up super units.

    It’s an interesting little problem.

    Anyway, that’s all from me for the moment. More actual games in the next few weeks, and hopefully an announcement of a cool project?

  • Deltarune – Chapter 3 & 4

    Toggle blocks contain spoilers. You have been warned.

    I wrote about Deltarune back in 2022, but here we are in 2025 with 2 more chapters that I finished in about 10 hours straight last night.

    It’s always hard to know what to say about Deltarune, and by some extension Undertale. As far as games go, I feel like you either enjoy things from a surface level, or go full Pepe Silvia. There is no in-between.

    In that sense, then, the points I made three years ago still stand. The music slaps, the writing is great, and the actual mechanics and gameplay have continued to evolve in interesting ways, pushing the mini-game and bullet hell formula even further than before, as has the out of combat traversal.

    Absurdity and Sincerity

    I’ve been struggling to put my finger on why I feel like other games that imitated Mother and Undertale haven’t quite succeeded. The premier example of this is Knuckle Sandwich, but Athenian Rhapsody runs into some of the same issues.

    All of these games trade on absurdity and weirdness as defining aesthetic traits. This can be strange characters, stories, items, or whatever. But at the same time, they’re trying to be heartfelt, sincere, and meaningful. This is a difficult balance to strike. And often the other games fail because in order to do this sort of thing, you need to commit to the bit.

    Chapter 3 of Undertale follows the story of a television consumed by fear that it will be thrown away because no one watches it anymore, uses it, or plays games on it. Fear that it’s old and unloved.

    Its goal seems to be preventing the player from ever leaving or giving up: from escaping. But it’s a real, human fear given to an inanimate object. Now, in the big picture, it’s complicated why no one is watching the television anymore. But this chapter’s absolutely gonzo section of puzzles, games, and just general weirdness (including fighting a water cooler) is driven by this sincere emotional beat.

    And again, we’re talking about a television here.

    And I think this is why Deltarune works. Even when its characters aren’t human, their feelings are. The problem with absurdity is that so often it’s used to ignore consequences and responsibility. “LOL random” humor is at some level as disposable as a dream, as transient as a breeze. And that disposability is the opposite of meaning.

    For an action to mean something, it must have a consequence. It must have weight. I think this is what Mother and Undertale understand, but that their imitators only grasp for brief moments.

    All that said, the other comment I do have is that I think a friend of mine who decided to wait until the full game is out might have made the right choice. Apparently 50% of the game is currently available, and while it’s incredible, it’s also deeply unsatisfying to know I’m going to have to wait at least 6-8 months minimum for more story.

    I’m also really hoping the chapter based design of the game doesn’t lead to the final project feeling disconnected and incomplete. Chapter 3 is a massive bit of tonal whiplash, at least in the moment. It’s not a bad thing, I just wouldn’t want 5 more chapters just doing that.

    Anyway. Deltarune. Incredible game. Love it. Really hope it finishes development before 2030, the death of democracy, and/or the end of the world.