Dev Diary #2: Talking Toxins
Greetings cowpokes,
Welcome to Dev Diary #2! Butt Game HQ has been charting new waters and making new friends over the past couple of weeks and we couldn’t be more thankful! Right now, I’m taking some time to digest all of our growth and talk about our next mechanic: Toxins!
As a refresher from the last Dev Diary, I had divulged the making of the Poops mechanic in the game. Their main contribution to the game was adding an element of risk/reward that was still balanced with randomness. It was clear to me, however, that poops in general would be a positive attribute during gameplay. Even though their distribution was contingent on the shuffling of the deck, players would likely want to keep poops for themselves and prevent other players from acquiring them if possible. Poops needed an evil twin brother.
Ready to destroy your stomach… and have so much fun!
Lo and behold the Toxin was born! Toxins fundamentally do the opposite of what poops do. When a poop exits the nearest open stomach, it becomes an extra card. When a toxin exits the nearest open stomach, it discards the stomach it came out of. It’s madness! But woefully fun madness! If poops were the Super Mushroom power-ups of the game, toxins would be the Poison Mushroom weapons that you can use to handily sabotage your enemies.
Toxin and poop tokens! They’ll take over!
I actually think that toxins are much more exciting than poops. Poops are exciting to receive, but they don’t by themselves encourage a player to change their strategy to win. They will more often stay the course of connecting to the Butt and just receive added benefit from the poop. But when there’s a toxin present in the body, the player may panic a little bit and reprioritize their strategy to either get rid of the toxin before it does damage, or mitigate its overall damage by either ensuring it deletes a negligible stomach or outpace it with less viable stomachs needed to reach their ultimate goal.
Toxins introduced the concept of “floating stomachs” in the game-- situations in which a multi-branching path would be discarded by a toxin, leaving stomachs on the board abandoned until someone connected to it again. Many times a player will be able to easily reconnect to their missing parts, but sometimes they wouldn’t have the right card at the moment and would be forced to leave their stomachs derelict. Sometimes another player in close proximity would be able to “adopt” these “floating stomachs” into their body and use them to their advantage.
Poops and toxins are mirror elements in the game as buffs and debuffs. They provide a sub-level of strategy to consider how you can influence other player’s plans even if you are nowhere near them on the board. They keep the game political as well since players are targeting each other as allies and threats that may turn at any moment as the game progresses. Should I give a poop to the player in dead last? Should I stun someone with more poops than me? Should I give toxins to everyone including myself?
King Poop!
The Switch!
Antacids!
Toxin Boom!
An entire new genre of cards were created with poops and toxins in mind. The Switch! turns poops on the board into toxins and vice versa. King Poop and Queen Cold give every player their respective underlings. Antacids turns all toxins in your stomach into new cards for you to play. Toxin Boom literally blows up any stomachs occupied by toxins, creating utter chaos.
Use poops and toxins to build and destroy!
At a certain point with these mechanics established, we were wondering if poops and toxins were too complicated of a feature in the game. Heck, we still think about and discuss this feature every other night. Would people be able to keep track of all of them? Would people remember to move the artifacts in their stomach? Would be people be straight up lost about their effects? Do these mechanics miss the point of the game?
We think that these questions are valid. At the end of the day, the only question that needs to be answered is “Is the game fun?” Our ultimate design decision is to keep poops and toxins in the game. There are just too many interesting and exciting scenarios that we’ve experienced and anticipated from their inclusion. Some games are defined completely by poops and toxins, whereas in others they are hardly ever utilized.
One of the greatest aspects of our game is its customizability. We have base set rules that dictate the way we see MAXIMUM FUN HAVE happening, but you can freely incorporate your own house rules and game modes! Try the game without poops and toxins! Try the game with just toxins! Make up your own effects for them! In later Dev Diaries and during our Kickstarter campaign, we’ll talk more about the customizable modular aspects of the game.
We’re creeping ever so closely to our launch month and thank you for joining us on the ride!
Until the next thing!
P.S. Definitely say hello if you’ll be at Giant Robot tomorrow night! <3
Justin