Back to collectionA New Year Begins at the Card-Game Whiteboard
As 2021 began, BTC was consolidating around $29,000 and ETH was around $730. On New Year’s Day, the small team took no break. The discussion gave the team a question it could pursue: should most player decisions happen before battle or during it?
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As 2021 began, BTC was consolidating around $29,000 and ETH was around $730. In a San Francisco studio that was half garage and half office, Tobias Batton’s Ex Populus was still working out what would make a game worth returning to.
On New Year’s Day, the small team took no break. They gathered around a whiteboard to discuss the core loop of a card-based auto-battler. Some wanted more decisions during each round; others worried that would obscure the pleasure of building a deck. They first sketched the player’s path from choosing cards to watching a battle end, then marked where interest might fade.
The discussion gave the team a question it could pursue: should most player decisions happen before battle or during it? The whiteboard flow was not settled, but it gave their next conversation specific points to examine instead of competing visions of the whole game.