The Making Of...
How a lifetime playing card games and a broadcast mentality created an indie smash hit
How a lifetime playing card games and a broadcast mentality created indie hit Slay The Spire
Format PC
Developer Mega Crit Games
Publisher Humble Bundle
Origin US
Release 2017
Graphical capabilities may have soared over the years, the scope of what games can represent opening up ever further, yet it’s increasingly common to find ourselves back at a virtually recreated tabletop, shuffling digital simulacra of cards, in titles such as Gwent, Artifact and, of course, Hearthstone. But none of these games were in Anthony Giovannetti’s head when he first started thinking about his own digital card game, Slay The Spire. He was much more interested in their analogue predecessors.
“At a really young age, I got into Magic: The Gathering, and it became an increasingly large part of my life, just playing card games,” Giovannetti tells us. “At some point, I jumped from Magic into Netrunner pretty deeply. I got really involved in the scene and created Stimhack, the largest Netrunner fan site at the time.” He’s since drifted away from both games, but his experiences – and occasional frustrations – with them fed directly into the creation of what would become Slay The Spire.
Nevertheless, Giovannetti says that, some early physical prototyping aside, he never seriously considered making Slay The Spire as anything other than a digital game. After all, he was a computer-science major, as was his co-founder and fellow lead developer Casey Yano. And half of the team – that is, Yano – didn’t even play physical card games. As far as Yano is concerned, Slay The Spire’s presentation – with cards, laid out in roughly the format established by Magic, moving from a deck to a hand to a discard pile – is just convenient shorthand. “There’s a strong familiarity there, and it sets expectations,” he says. “If we make cards fly around and borrow elements from existing physical games, this let players understand [the game] in a more intuitive way.”
Physical or digital, collectible card games aren’t the only lineage on which Slay The Spire draws. Early on, Giovannetti looked at the competition, and realised that “I just couldn’t, especially as an indie, make a big multiplayer Hearthstone or Magic killer. That doesn’t really work.” Instead, he thought about the way he played those games himself, and tried to design a game that wouldn’t have to compete directly. “I know from experience that usually, if you’re a Magic player, you don’t play every other card game,” he says. “You get deep into Magic, and that becomes your game of choice. It’s really hard to have multiple of those ‘lifestyle’ games. But it seemed like you could have a singleplayer card game with a much lower time profile that could act as a complement instead.”
To make something complementary rather than competitive, he turned to two other styles of game – one analogue, one digital – with which he had spent a lot of time. Giovannetti was the manager of a small boardgame store at the time, and spent quiet hours fiddling with the stock, in particular deck-building games such as Dominion and Ascension, where you gradually assemble a custom deck as you play. He decided to fuse those mechanics with the randomise-and-repeat structure of Roguelikes such as FTL, reckoning that the combination would “give you the mechanical excuse to be playing with different cards every time you play”.
It’s a strand of connective tissue between two disparate gaming traditions that seems obvious in retrospect. And Giovannetti’s main fixation as a player and designer sits similarly in the overlap between collectible card games and competitive ‘living’ games like MOBAs. “Balance is something I’ve always been really concerned about as a player. As a game designer, I want to try to design the kind of games that appeal to people like me, and solve the problems I have with other games. One of the frustrations of a physical product is you can’t modify it once it’s out there. In Magic, they can’t tweak the cards – if a card’s too good, they can ban it, and that’s it,” he says. “Whereas in a digital game, you can. I like it when developers play to that strength, that their games are mutable products that can change and adapt and improve.” This, essentially, is the philosophy that defined Slay The Spire’s entire creation.
Early in the game’s development, Giovannetti reached out to some friends from the Netrunner community – top-level competitive players who, as he puts it, “are really good at finding optimal strategies and breaking games”. They tested the first iteration of the game and found the flaws in its design: the cards they’d always overlook when building their deck, the combinations so powerful they eliminated any sense of challenge. Their qualitative feedback was combined with “aggressive metrics-based design”, thanks to a homemade analytics tool – built on the Heroku cloud platform – which recorded the details of every game the testers played. “It would gather that data and we would create charts and graphs of everything so I could see: players are picking this card this percentage of the time, here’s what players are winning with, these are the enemies that are doing the most damage – every little thing that we thought we could track. And I use that to try to give some sense of objectivity to our balancing.”
From there, Giovannetti and Yano would tweak the game and its cards based on what they were seeing, with playtesters receiving new builds on a daily basis. This set the pace for how Slay The Spire evolved when it launched on Steam Early Access. This was in November 2017, two-and-a-half years after the start of development. “It was a complete game – certainly farther along than most games are when they launch in early access,” Giovannetti says. The core mechanics were firmly locked down, and players could complete a full three-act run as one of two characters.
This fully featured offering didn’t help the game make a big splash at first. “Usually, how games launch… it’s described as like a Stegosaurus tail. So you have a big spike in that initial two weeks, then it peters out and you’ll have smaller spikes later. But for us, it wasn’t like that all. We launched and it was basically
“AS A GAME DESIGNER I WANT TO TRY TO DESIGN THE KIND OF GAMES THAT APPEAL TO PEOPLE LIKE ME”
totally dead.” On its first day, the game sold a couple of hundred copies. At the end of that allimportant first fortnight, not much had changed. But we all know that’s not where this story ends. So how did Slay The Spire manage to go from that inauspicious beginning to over a million sales by the time it left Early Access in January 2019?
In a single word: streamers. After a few weeks, the game was picked up by a popular Chinese player, leading to a huge explosion in players – initially, the majority of Slay The Spire’s userbase was in China – and a growing presence on streams the world over. According to Giovannetti, this wasn’t entirely a happy accident. He and Yano, aware of their no-name indie status and with no marketing budget to speak of, had spotted an opportunity to target the existing Hearthstone community, where they could be confident viewers would be interested in a digital card game, especially one that had been designed as a complement to their main hobby.
“We had kind of designed the game to appeal to streamers,” he says. “We did a lot of little things with our UI and UX to make it very streamer-friendly. We try to display all of the information on the screen that’s relevant, so that people just coming in can, at a glance, tell what’s going on. We wanted to not hide too much behind rows and rows of screens – it’s the easiest thing to do in a game like ours. So you can always see all the Relics up at the top and figure out what the player has going on at the time.
“And because of the nature of our game, it’s very easy to see when a streamer screws something up. You can see them make a misplay, and you think, ‘Oh, I can do better than that.’ And you want to go try it yourself.”
As the game’s player count exploded, Mega Crit stuck with the processes it had used for those initial playtesters – using its analytics-led approach to design and redesign cards. “You’re getting orders of magnitude more data, so outliers are going to have much less of an effect, just naturally,” Giovannetti says. “But also, one of the nice properties is you get a lot of data from less skilled and less familiar players. It was really interesting comparing the win rates on our internal playtesters versus the public at large. It was a huge difference.”
This didn’t have much impact on what they were measuring, though; the numbers just got much bigger. Where things really changed was
on the qualitative side. Giovannetti and Yano now had a wealth of discussions, on Steam and the game’s subreddit, to pick through every day – as well as those all-important streamers. “While I’m coding, I’ll just have another monitor up where I’ll be watching a streamer just play the game,” Giovannetti says. “You can see Twitch chat replying to things, hear the streamer saying their thoughts out loud, and you can use that, combined with the metrics, to get a good holistic view of how people are feeling about the game.”
Of course, as anyone who has ever been on the Internet will know, not every piece of online feedback is helpful or informed. “Part of being a good designer is being able to sift through the noise and find the signal. And that’s where the metrics can help a lot, because we can see things like, ‘Okay, if people are complaining about a card, is that backed up by the data or not? And if it’s not, why could they be complaining about it?’” This was Mega Crit’s guiding light throughout Early Access, as new cards, enemies, items and modes were added to the game and the balance of existing elements was tweaked, on a weekly and sometimes even daily basis. The biggest addition came in the form of a third character, the Defect, introduced in April 2018. “Our main goal was to create something that felt very different and really explored some new design space. We wanted to surprise people,” he says. “So we tested a bunch of different weird ideas. Originally it was going to be more like a gunner character that loaded ammo and then fired it off, but it was a little too wonky, so we scrapped that.”
Eventually the pair landed on the Defect’s unique mechanic: orbs which can be slotted into a queue, persisting between turns and firing off passive effects, until they’re ‘evoked’ for a onetime boost and discarded. Once again, they designed a set of cards, passed them to the internal playtesters – those high-level players from the Netrunner days – then put it out on the game’s beta branch. Keeping, of course, an eye on the analytics every step of the way. “It was such a different process than designing the other two characters – things just went fast,” Giovannetti says. “We moved at a breakneck pace with it. But it was a lot of fun, because we had no issue just drastically changing things one day to the next. We would test out cards for a day or two, and then modify or rework them or remove the card entirely the next day.”
This pace of updates was a boon for streamers, because it provided them with a constant churn of fresh updates to explore, but it meant a lot of work for Giovannetti and Yano. Work that has slowed but not stopped since Slay The Spire passed v1.0 and left Early Access. It’s still very much a living game, with tweaks and updates rolling in – there’s even a fourth character on the way – but at a more sustainable pace. “We’re still doing updates, just not on the weekly schedule any more,” Giovannetti says. “It was super-good for the game, great for the community, but man was it vicious on us. And so now we’re happy to take a step back, slow down, and get some breathing room.”