ScrollFans

Every color that we introduce to the GUI and battlefield graphics in scrolls right now starts having an identity. We already have, for example, the four colors of the resources, the yellow/orange of energy, blue of order, purple of decay and green of growth - whenever an effect on the battlefield has the same color, it will be associated with this, subconsciously.

Despite that I've decided that, for example, healing is allowed to be a green effect, since it feels resonant and good.

But say if we decide that 'one enchantment' is shown by a green glow, it will also signal that there may be a connection between '1 enchantment', healing and growth - even if there is none. I don't feel confident about color-coding everything too recklessly, since I'm afraid that we solve certain problems by adding new ones.

The same type of issue exists in the whole 'enchanted tile' idea as well - of course when you prototype it up like this there's no problems with clarity at all, but what if a character stands on top of the lit tile, and what if that character has its countdown set to 0, lighting up the tile, and what if you're targeting it with a spell - then there will be the summoning animation + the glow + a faint green color underneath - not conveying strongly enough that the tile is also enchanted.

I hope I don't sound like I'm coming up with excuses not to implement an idea - I'm just trying to give you an insight in the levels of complication that arise when you have limited graphical real estate and want to cram in as much info as possible while still making sense of things.

One day, maybe, there'll be enchantable tiles! That day, we'll definitely come up with something that looks good and is functional.

<3

Forum activity is generally so low that this has stayed on page 1, it's not like I dug through the pages just to revive it.

I sure didn't check the date, though

Eye of Eagle is a very useful card, perhaps not in the current meta-game but it might just be in the future.

If you have a single creature that you are building your game plan around, this card lets you virtually have 6 copies in the deck (although you can still just have 3 out on the board, of course)

I've actually lately constructed a deck where I had one structure that was integral to my success and then splashed a little bit of Order in there in .. order (goddamn) .. to make sure I'd draw the one structure twice as much.

I can imagine eye of eagle could have great use in a deck that plays mainly structures and then one or two real beater creatures. Say if you're doing a structure strategy (not saying it's viable in the current meta, but we're planning for the future, here) and you want to be sure you can draw an Iron Ogre - put in an eye of eagle and your chance of drawing him will double. Sometimes there's no other creature you want.

I will say, though, that if there's something we should take away from this, it's that we might've designed a bit too many scrolls without much afterthought and marginal usefulness just because we can and because we want more scrolls - since creatures are expensive to make, we've just thrown down a whole bunch of ideas - any that we could think of - into spell cards, just to increase the number of scrolls we have

I don't think we've made the wrong decision doing that, but it's clear that we need to start caring more about what ideas we use and what ideas we don't use, lest we accidentally add 6 ideas in a row that aren't obviously usable or even worse, will only help a strategy that is not yet viable in Scrolls.

edit: if anyone wanted proof that I have an egocentric personality, just look at how many paragraphs begun with 'I' in this post D:

Haha, that's the weirdest idea ever. Does it have hidden rats living in its fur?

To be fair - the woves look a little rat-like

Well, our hope is that the life length of Scrolls will be long and prosperous (at least long) and, well, quake felt a bit unfun, and introducing some structure-hate seemed to resonate well with Growth and its sensibilities. We're adding puzzle piece after puzzle piece trying to paint a bigger picture.

Perhaps one day a scroll that works exactly like Quake will return because we feel the game is ready for it, maybe not.

I think everything will feel nicer when we have a steadier influx of new content so that the meta-game is allowed to shift a bit more fluidly, right now a lot of emphasis is put on individual scrolls and their effect, and it'd be nice if we could shift that to small tweaks in decklists would have a larger impact on play.

... now, having said that quake felt a bit un-fun I'm a little worried about a certain coming scroll. Eheheheh. We'll see how the player response will be regarding that scroll.

We all love the idea of global enchantments or something like it, so sure thing, I say.

I love that spiky would trigger Leeching Ring (I've had an opponent spearman devour 1 sister of the fox, 1 kinfolk brave and 1 ragged wolf on the same turn, heh)

Blast strike, though, should only hurt enemy units, the depth offered by having spiky units be negatively affected by being enchanted by Blast Strike doesn't .. eh .. strike .. me as very meaningful. So let's not have it like that.

I'm on a mission to give 'Dev Response' so I'll just add that personally, yeah, it'd be hella rad to experiment with non-blocking abilities, or, say, abilities that don't get you blocked (last idea we threw around would be a wall-dodger - doesn't get blocked by walls. A real creature-killer, then)

etc etc etc.

The scope of what we can do in scrolls is huge, but also limited. I think this is an area we will definitely explore sometime.

We've really gone for the minimal approach with these challenges - just change a bunch of parameters and then have the game more or less be the same.

Of course, as with everything, in the future we'd be really interested in adding more varied visuals and gameplay concepts! But, eh, later D:

Thanks for the nice suggestion, the game feels much more rich and easier to understand this way! Even though I disliked making it (I hate drawing tile graphics, it's so monotonous and somehow manages to take a whole bunch of time!)

eheh