I love playing games with people. I have ended up mostly making singleplayer games because they're easier to sell. Here's a game with a construction phase inspired by TCGs; a common way to play those card games is draft, which adds an initial phase of play to distribute cards. Could we draft Imbroglio? I can't make the main game multiplayer, but we could add a multiplayer phase where we pick weapons for our board, and then play them out to see who did better. At the time I was playing async card games like Ascension online: we'd typically start a game and take several turns quickly while our play times overlapped, and then it would slow down and finish over a few days; this could work like that - a synchronous phase of drafting and then do the solo part in our own time. I implemented this pass-and-play on one device and never got as far as networking because it wasn't great for a bunch of reasons. I think the draft mechanism was: you're offered four cards / take turns picking one each / alternate who starts each hand. Some iterations had the last card being thrown away, or like "pick one to draw and one to throw away" but that just got more complicated.
A problem is that Imbroglio runs often fail to get off the ground because of bad luck in the early game. It feels bad to do this whole big draft with someone and then flop. On the other hand maybe this is good because it encourages you to build a board that can reliably survive the early game! It had been an ongoing weakness in the game's design that, while it seems like there should be a trade-off between early and late strength in a board design, because you can always just restart and try again the winning boards are always going to be ones that focus on late strength. It's true that you don't want a board with literally no early strength because you need to be able to get it to that later point, but as long as it's above 0% it's just a matter of how long you want to spend retrying. When I added the Izu (weekly) mode I'd hoped that this might be what it needed to make the early-game matter, but I ended up not having it one-time-only because you sensibly want to test your board. So Draft Mode was my last stab at this: a mode where the multiplayer setup makes you care about Clubs and Braziers because your goal isn't to ascend, it's to play once and get more than the other person. This makes it a very high-skill game: in normal play most people are taking a few attempts to get going - yes that's partly because they're not having to build their boards for that condition but it's also just kinda normal not to expect perfect play. So who's even going to be playing this multiplayer-only mode that requires you to already be an Imbroglio fiend to even get started? A multiplayer game needs a player base to survive. I tried making it "best of two" or "best of four" but then it takes a very long time to play out. These problems seemed potentially solvable (e.g. if you replay you have to keep the new score) but the mode never reached a point of actually being fun so I abandoned it.
I eventually returned with the insight that it should just be another singleplayer mode. Yes it's for the experts - it's in the third expansion! - but if you only need one expert then at least it will actually get played. I came up with this lovely single-player draft mechanism: you're offered four cards / picking a card discards any to the left, then draw up to four. The idea was to simulate how some cards might pass you by in a multiplayer draft, but since it's just you you get that bit of extra control. You can take from the left to keep every card, take from the right to dig deep and maximise the number of new cards you see, or somewhere in the middle. I really like this system and I wouldn't be surprised to see more games building on it one day; I certainly might use it again.
It still felt bad to do the whole draft and then lose early, but this was easier to fix with just one player. Rather than some general rule like "best of two" I could get really explicit and just say "if you score less than 16 it doesn't count". I ended up with a streak system: that number starts low but goes up each round you beat it; if you ever miss the target then you get a replay but the number resets. A neat thing here is that if you're doing well it flips around to become a challenge: you have to get above the target or else you'll lose your streak and have to replay that round - always neat when a single rule can both give support at the bottom and challenge at the top.
Some draft games would let you choose your hero after the draft depending on what cards you got; that doesn't really work here since several heroes have these restrictions like "red weapons only" that would be awkward if the draft pool isn't set up to fit them. So we choose a hero before the draft. Also since the heroes have very different power levels, I'd like some way to mix it up so you're not just encouraged to pick the strongest, but I also don't want to just make it random because then your score depends too much on that chance. I came up with this neat format - seriously check it out if you haven't - where each round you pick the hero from two random options, and your total Draft score is the sum of your score with each hero. This is a bit like the rolling average I used in P1 SELECT except that instead of your previous 16 games you're always choosing which score to replace. If you do really well sometime, you can keep that score on the board by always picking the other hero when it comes up (until eventually you're made to choose between your two best). Again: a spicy format that more games could stand to build on, hidden away here in the third expansion.
You might be noticing that between four new heroes - each breaking something fundamental about the game and so requiring substantial reprogramming, plus an elaborate new game mode, and the most complex set of weapons yet, this is actually an enormous expansion! Hopefully it made a whole lot of money to pay me for all that work. Unfortunately in typical fashion, each expansion sells fewer copies. Ossuary sold 2.73K, Phlogiston 1.27K, and Mizzenmast just 779 copies. Uh-oh. Well, maybe writing now will give it a little extra juice?
This was the last thing I released before the plague got me. Maybe if I'd been around to promote it better it could have reached more people back then! You can see the timeline right here on my blog: expansion released => updated a crash bug but I'm sick => nothing for almost two years => oops still sick. Sounds like I worked quite hard finishing off this game - I'm not sure if my overwork contributed to the illness becoming chronic, or if I felt like I'd done too much because I was already getting sick, or what.
Now for the individual weapons:
Animate Figurehead
At some point I added hybrid heroes to the Izu (weekly) mode. My notes don't tell me exactly when - maybe it was in this expansion too? - maybe the previous one, anyway I'm pretty sure it was a later addition. Having gone to that effort I wanted to get more use out of the concept. I didn't want to just add all the combinations to normal play - that's 256 different pairings and most of them honestly aren't great; I'd worked hard to design good combinations and I want to keep those canonical. So how about a weapon that temporarily mixes them? The main question here was whether it should be red or blue - you'd expect blue because that's where I mostly put more complex effects. Since Susannah is red-only and Ixxthl is blue-only, there's going to be one of them that can't use it and therefore 16 combinations that it can't produce. Spending a while playing those pairings I felt there was the most joy red.
Lightkeeper's Candle
Duplicate your hero's power: always love a good echo. Neat to have an item whose valuation is completely different for each hero.
Whirlpool Trident
We were enjoying the Hourglass telefrags and wanted more, here's a red version.
Bludgeon Catapult
Makes weapons next to it ranged. Since I'd programmed the game in a way that made rewriting weapon effects really simple, I kept trying to make that a thing even though it never fit that well. Whetstone went through so many versions and I'm still not sure it's really there, now there's this and I'm also uncertain. The game would be cleaner without, but hey with 80 weapons there's space for an awkward thing. I gave it lots of damage to compensate for the power not being great.
Unicorn Tusk
Shopkeeper's "enemies use weapons" obviously caused a ton of problems because it wasn't designed in from the start. Effects like cursing were completely undefined when applied to the player. Jonah suggested "skip a heal" for a cursed player - it doesn't have a strong connection to the usual curse effect but it happens at gem o'clock and it feels like a curse so there you go. I wanted to make sure players knew what to expect when they're cursed, so here I made a self-cursing weapon which can elegantly fit that explanation into its rule text. Named for Unicorn to match Ossuary's Dragon Skull. I reworded Witchpact Blade to "+1 for each curse" instead of "+1 for each cursed enemy" to allow a combo here.
Void Cutlass, Smuggler's Chest
A little theme of "red weapons with scaling damage" to go with Witchpact Blade (curses) and Esoteric Prism (charges).
Most of these start at 1 and add bonus damage on top, but for Cutlass (♡ missing) that was too strong so it starts at 0 - that's cute because if you use it at 0 you get hit and now it's online. Except if it's a blue snake hitting you. Well that sucks. Let's throw in a ♡-spend on miss to power it back up.
The Chest also has this "additional copy" rule I'd been wanting in there to mix up the board construction rules, especially in Izu and Draft.
Portal Porthole
Tried this as a IV upgrade for Skeleton Key. It was strong enough to stand alone.
The new weapons needed to keep a sufficient density of curses to make sure there were still interactions for the earlier one so I periodically went through and just tried forcing a curse effect into anything. This one maybe feels a little arbitrary but it played well enough.
Distant Telescope, Shimmering Cloak
I was running out of ideas to fit the "spend ♢ when attacking" format: it had to get weird.
Telescope is Rimeclaws with a twist - instead of paying for extra damage you get another weapon's hit. Trying to increase interactions between different weapons to make it feel combo-ier. The "choose one for level" tech makes this useful enough.
Cloak could have just been "spend ♢ to block any hit" but that got too strong with Rings; "spend ♢ to block ♡ hits" was okay but weak; adding "spend ♡ to block ♢ hits" seemed fine. It's neat how it almost feels like it situationally doubles your hp: once you run out of one colour to spend on blocks you can still take the hits the normal way. Maybe it helps you survive without really moving towards winning: ok let's have another curse effect.
Treasure Map
Wracking my brains for more ways to do alternate scoring: manipulating gem spawn positions? It's not a full alternate win condition but it changes the flow of scoring enough to point in that direction. It's also another ♢ spend, great! And to fit the expansion theme, following the Map to reach the Chest is a good combo. It needed a little extra so of course I'll throw on a curse effect - wait - a charge effect feels less on-theme but plays much better, I guess I just go with it.
Blunderbuss
I wrote earlier in this series that I don't make weapons level up to become ranged because it can be a disadvantage. Well, here's the closest thing I found that I was okay with: it becomes ranged when it's charged. This could have fit fine in Phlogiston but I had another ranged weapon there and it basically fit the pirate theme here.
Galvanic Sail
Another charge weapon that could just have fit in Phlogiston, but complex enough to save for later. I spent a lot of development time on fancy effects that could trigger automatic attacks, because making a combo that plays itself always seems like a cool idea until you try it. This and Venom are the survivors, sufficiently nerfed that the combo centering them isn't totally overwhelming, which probably makes them barely playable if you're not doing that specific build. I will learn!
Starshine's Pearls
We've spent ♢, ♡, ©, of course I'm going to try to make one that spends ★. It has to be pretty strong because you don't want to do that: let's kill two enemies. I enjoyed connecting a few weapon names with the characters: high damage in a power is a good counter for Starshine's lowered base damage.
Anchor, Tentacle Appendage
Fleshing out a last couple of combo possibilities with specific triggers. Basically you just go over the whole set of items repeatedly looking at different ways you can carve out a distinguished subset, and imagine what power could mesh with that subset. Anchor rewards attacking at a distance (which means not just basic ranged weapons, but things like Harp or Rodney that send a hit somewhere else, and Telescope that brings a hit from a distant weapon here). Tentacle rewards spending ♢ in a different style to how Ring does.
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