Welcome or Welcome Back!

In today's devlog I'll talk a little about how the design of the bosses came to be, what I was doing early in the project, an eventual change of path and what the bosses are at least supposed to be going forward.

Early Project - When Bosses Weren't Random

It may come as a surprise, but the bosses in Final Notice weren't always going to be random, the original concept of the game was that you'd essentially just run a boss rush with a given deck against tailored fights, back to back, and you'd start from the beginning if you lost. The idea was to test your deckbuilding ability to be able to take on a random selection of 10 tailored fights out of a possible 50, and see if you could build a deck flexible and powerful enough to last the full 10 fights. Initially a lot of work was done with this - remnants of that design still exist in the game! There's still an obj file in there called obj_boss_boreas, who was supposed to be the easy peasy tutorial boss you'd fight at the beginning to show you how the game works or as an easy pass through to the next fight.

I'd thought of this concept due to Hearthstone no longer offering that kind of experience in a random setting as, after a long hiatus, I came back to find that specific mode removed - true shame, I really enjoyed it, so I wanted to get back to playing it. As far as I know, that kind of thing doesn't really exist in any other setting, and I'd been wanting to make a game for a while, however...

Final Notice Was Initially A Fighting Game

Now that might be a really, really weird thing to read. But it's true, Final Notice was actually going to be a fighting game, but I - as I'm sure is evident by the manually edited AI generated bases that exists in some card art - am genuinely terrible at making art from nothing. I can use photoshop, that much I can do, but I completely can not draw, and not for a lack of trying! I've spent quite some time trying to get better at it, but dyspraxia makes that whole thing really, really difficult to get my hand to do what I want it to do. I'm sure it's not impossible for me, but the amount of effort I've already poured into it to only get less-than-passable ability sure does make me not want to draw the art myself from scratch.

Anyway, I digress, I'd actually tried to make a fighting game initially, but found without sprites, even placeholders, it was hard to really know what was going on, and using a bunch of sprites off the internet was A) time consuming to find and B) didn't really help with being able to visually understand what was happening in playtests. So, I figured I'd make a card game. At the time I thought in my head "they're basically the same, a deck is basically just a fighter, the cards are basically just moves, it's just certain button combinations force the move (or card) to play it's effect." - and I don't think I was super wrong about that, but there's a lot more mechanical expectations in a card game than a fighter, you've got to make a lot more variety in terms of what happens with cards, combos, recursion, stuns, statuses, so on and so forth.

Changing From Tailored Fights To Randomised

While creating the initial fight, Boreas, I had realised that this is going to be a lot to expect of people to do - to just open the game up, throw a deck together or use a preset and beat 10 increasingly difficult boss fights, so I thought I'd make a mode first that allows a player to experience the game without any real repercussions for losing or winning, one that allows repeated plays very quickly just to get players used to how the game functions, what you're expected to do, how to play around certain mechanics that would feature and such. 

And so, randomised bosses were born. Initially they were just domains - Fire, Earth, Seas, so on, but it felt a bit bland and lacked replay value, something I think was going to be necessary if anyone was going to play more than a couple games. I added adjectives as a method of expanding what a boss was able to do, and tried, and still try, to make adjectives notably less specific and much more widely applicable to gameplans - it's why adjectives tend to very rarely impart any status effects. Adding this meant you could play into, let's say, Hateful Earth, a combination that leads to a lot of resource denial and a grindy matchup, or Roaring Earth, a matchup that instead has the boss playing a lot of cards at a time and lending itself more to a midrange, what with the compound effect of Roarings Aggro specification and Earth's Control.

What About Tailored Fights?

As they were the actual intention of the game, I'm sure it's no surprise that the bounty system is the one that's being worked on right now - which is actually what Final Notice initially was going to be based around! Obviously deckbuilding had to come first so you could actually go into these fights with a genuine deck, like they were puzzles you had to solve, but in 0.4.0 the actual gameplay behind Final Notice makes it's grand entrance, and later to be included is the challenge run mode, where you face several bosses back to back and possibly even a roguelike mode, very much akin to Hearthstone's version, with of course the normal Final Notice twist in terms of gameplay.

If you've stuck around this far to read, I appreciate it - a new version of the game has become available today, it's nothing too big, give it a download and read the changelog, it's mostly just fixes... except for two new features!

New Preset Deck and New Homage Bosses Mechanic!

As a way to thank two of my playtesters who've provided invaluable help and feedback - especially Boxy! - I've added a preset deck created by Boxy called Shady Shredder, give it a try, it's based in burning through itself to deal high amounts of damage with a lot of banishing and recursion.

Also, to thank Vix, I've added a very, very rare chance for you to encounter them as a boss! They've no special cards, but they do get a special background for the fight - as of right now they're using Hateful Fire as their archetype and the normal fire boss portrait set, but when 0.3.5 hits that'll be updated to include a custom sprite and the new adjective/domain combo, Empty Dreams!.

All this said, thank you, of course, to all of you who have played the game, I hope you're having a good time with it and, as always -

Till next time!