Hello everyone, as you all know we are releasing Across the Obelisk in Early Access next week and we wanted to talk to you a bit about deckbuilding in the game. Also we can now announce that the game will cost 14.99 (17.99$) with a 15% discount for the early access release, during the early access and when the game is more finished and about to be released, we will raise the price. Across the Obelisk is a complex game, more than other games of this type, first of all the game has 9 damage types and 9 resistances, each damage card has its own damage type associated and each enemy has its own resistances, so there are enemies that are more resistant to physical damage that tend to be in the front lines of combat and others with more magic resistances that are behind, there are also enemies that are clearly resistant to a type of damage as could be a lava elemental, which is very resistant to fire.
In addition to the various types of damage, the game also has an important amount of positive and negative effects on which the whole base of the game is built, such as"Block"(which stops the damage received), "Burn"(which does fire damage every turn), or "Fast"/"Slow" (which gives/takes speed of movement so that your heroes move faster) these two effects are self-excluding and only one of them can exist. Although the first impression may seem overwhelming, once you are playing and getting used to the icons we think it is quite manageable and understandable. This complexity allows the game to have a lot of variety of builds and card combinations for the player to experiment with. Then we have the Heroes, each hero belongs to a Warriors/Scouts/Mages/Healers class and each of them has its own cards (right now more than 90 per class). Each hero starts with their own starting deck which you can modify and also each hero has their own leveling talents which favour specific builds for them and to top it all off the heroes rank up at the end of a game, which gives them small permanent bonuses.
It should be noted that each hero card has 4 different versions, first we have the basic card -white- each basic card can be upgraded to two versions -blue- and -yellow- that modify a little the original card, and also each card has a corrupted version -purple- that comes out in the corruptions and has a small chance to come out in normal rewards, these corrupted cards are much more powerful versions than the others but can not be crafted.
So the player right now has available more than 90 cards x 4 classes x 4 versions = 1440 cards to make builds. Finally we have the items, each hero has four slots for items, these slots are divided into Weapon, Armour, Jewellery and Accessory. Right now we have over 240 items in the game, these range from simple items that give you a small bonus to resistences or health, to items that add effects when you attack, draw cards when you launch certain types of attacks, give you additional cards or items that do rare effects under certain conditions.
Best of all, the items, level up talents and perks interact with each other. The possibilities of deckbuilding, creating teams of heroes based on one or more damage types and synergising them with each other or trying weird combinations thanks to certain items is huge! It's one of the things we are most proud of, apart from the fact that the game is cooperative multiplayer ;) See you next week!