撰文：Alonso
Cover: Screenshot of the community game "Crazy Stars".
introduction
Since the success of Slay the Spire, DBG-Roguelike games have become a popular choice for small and medium-sized teams. You don't need to invest a lot of resources to create action and settings to make this kind of game, just by using the permutations and combinations of card effects, you can emerge from the extreme randomness of the experience of both reality and excitement.
However, with the proliferation of similar games, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out. The card-based framework of "playing cards, settling damage" around armor and HP is difficult to revolutionize and innovate, and bold changes are accompanied by a lot of risks. Therefore, creating a unique visual style and immersion is a safe choice for developers. OTA IMON Studios' new Zet Zillions is a breakthrough in these two areas.
The game's comic style is extremely eye-catching
The game begins with no courtesy, unsuspecting players being pinned to the throne of the "Captain", ready to take command of a chaotic and unique starship - or more precisely, a complete "wandering planet"! This planet can be said to practice the "junk punk" style to the end, and the resources that can be used are only endless oceans of garbage except for disposable "volunteers". The player's opponent is also a planet with a complete ecology.
In addition to the traditional numerical attack and defense based on life and shield, the game further creates a unique "colonial" dimension: as the (inexplicably) supreme captain, you have the right to throw the ship's inhabitants onto enemy planets at will, causing them to explode their population, and eventually fall into a fainting state due to overwhelm.
The word "chaos" alone is clearly not enough to describe the atmosphere of the game. More appropriately, "Crazy Star Indiscriminate" is a "perfect" combination of "hurry" and "patchwork". This is evident in the game's core mechanic, a real-time card fusion system. The system allows players to "knead" (almost) any card together – such as the Scrap Man (for colonization) and trash (for armor generation) into a fleshy cannonball – resulting in unexpected but reasonably magical effects.
And card fusion is just the tip of the iceberg of "Crazy Stars' bold innovations". The game is ambitious and aims to break through the market by deepening the sense of immersion for card players. This direction has been a common topic in the industry as early as the era of physical card games. In the case of Magic, for example, the challenge is often broken down by developers and the player community into two dimensions: "flavor" and "mood." If you can show a comfortable control of the two, and skillfully blend card mechanics and story background, it will provide players with a dynamic and immersive gaming experience. Crazy Star Bombardment's exploration of this area shows how the boundaries and potential of flavor and mood can be redefined in the digital age.
Flavor Modulation: Space Farce
The so-called "flavor" is a response to the two underlying questions of "why" and "why". "Why" does this card have to meet harsh conditions to destroy a creature, while another can casually sweep through the field? "Why" does this sword give the wielder the ability to resurrect, and that sword only gives followers +1/+1? The essence of these questions is to explore the inner logic and creative source of each card's design, and unearth the background ideas hidden behind the rules.
Mark Rosewate, the lead designer of Magic, has developed a brilliant theory that classifies card gamers into three categories based on their psychological tendencies: Timmy, the player who is obsessed with storytelling and emotional resonance; Johnny, a strategist with a passion for discovering complex tactical combinations; and Spiky, a competitive player who is looking for mechanic efficiency and win rates. With this in mind, the core mission of flavor building is to serve the Timmy community and meet the needs of those looking for a role-playing experience in the game. In the game's fictional layer, Flavor strives to weave a coherent narrative thread, create a sense of immersion in the battle, and ensure the internal consistency and rationality of the game's world setting.
When we look at the competition-oriented physical card games, Johnny and Spiky are the obvious dominant forces. After all, for the vast majority of players, victory is always the supreme pursuit of PVP games. However, in the world of single-player electronic card games, especially in PVE deck-building games with roguelike elements, "victory" is no longer scarce, and the Timmy spirit is becoming more and more indispensable. In this context, the flavor of the cards, as an important part of the overall experience of the game, becomes more and more attractive, and becomes the key to attracting players to explore and enjoy pure fun beyond winning and losing.
Even if you strip away the function and effect of the card, the visual form itself—the delicate carving of the borders, the creativity of the shape of the expanded edges, the choice of font style, etc.—form the cornerstone of flavor building. On top of that, Crazy Stars doesn't waste its edge as a video game medium, designing each card in a bold expansion style: card art is no longer confined to boundaries, but rather transcends borders to show a free spirit. This kind of aggressive expression, which is difficult to replicate with physical cards, is undoubtedly a wonderful vehicle for the game's theme of "chaos" and "destruction".
However, the true essence of flavor is often deeply rooted in the rich soil of the story. A great card game that goes to great lengths to shape and apply its own grand worldview. Whether it's the Three Kingdoms epic, the Pokémon world, the multiverse adventures of Planeslock, or the racial strife of Azeroth, these rich story backgrounds provide a broad space for semantic reference for the effect design of cards. The unity of function and background is the most direct source of "flavor".
On the other hand, while some of the monster cards in Yu-Gi-Oh are popular for their powerful effects or nostalgia, most of them are not as good in terms of flavor as they could be. The reason for this is that these monsters, or subordinate "entries", are often limited to a specific conceptual framework, such as zodiac, insect, constellation, occupation, etc. However, the depth of connotation of a single concept is limited, which makes it difficult for those small composition-like complex effects to correspond intuitively to the image of the monster. Animations, which are supposed to shape the semantic space, also focus more on the users of the card deck, and lack the depiction of the world in the cards. In contrast, Magic Cards and Trap Cards have a stronger flavor because they usually depict specific actions, events, or scenarios that can be more intuitively matched to the effect.
A monkey with a key tooth doesn't seem to have anything to do with "discarding the descent level" or "retrieving the term".
As a result, even card games with a strong story, such as Magic, have begun to actively seek cross-border crossovers in recent years, joining forces with a series of well-known story IPs, such as Dungeons & Dragons, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and Fallout, to increase their market presence and enhance the immersive experience for players. In these co-branded series, "flavor" instead of "strength" has become the main selling point for players, transforming each pre-formed duel into a small theater that faithfully restores the spirit of the original work.
For example, take the theme of the video game Fallout, one of which is called "V.A.T.S." 's Creature Removal Card, with its clever use of the "fleeting" keyword (meaning it can't be responded to by other cards), echoes the classic bullet time ("variable auto-target system" to be exact) in Fallout, where enemies move incredibly slowly, nearing solidification, making it easy for players to pick and choose where to hit for effective damage. Similarly, another card called "Inventory Management", which symbolizes the player opening the Pip-Boy (inventory) to adjust their equipment, also has a "teleportation" and allows the player to adjust the wearing of weapons on the field.
Many of the cards have special borders that pay homage to the Fallout interface, making them even more flavorful
Another example is "Vault 11: The Voting Dilemma", which vividly recreates the prisoner's dilemma experiment of the resident vote victims in Fallout: New Vegas. The card's first effect reflects the intricate alliances and suspicions among the Vault dwellers in the early days of the experiment, as they courted their allies in order to gain a numerical advantage in the vote. The aftermath perfectly restores the heart of the experiment: a voting mechanism to determine the fate of creatures, and even incorporates the original game's signature darkly humorous ending, which triggers a (almost impossible) happy ending if everyone chooses to sacrifice themselves and no one votes.
As the epitome of flavor design, these three cards pushed many players to discover, interpret, and educate about card effects and the original story's story during the Card Preview Season. By incorporating storytelling elements into the card design, the designers were able to preserve the complexity of the card effects while ensuring that the process of understanding the rules was intuitive and fun. Every decision and operation is no longer a monotonous mathematical calculation, but a vivid interactive experience.
Back to Crazy Star Bombing, the game, with its exaggerated comic art and nonsensical space farce setting, puts players in the role of an unconventional, vicious invader who first creates wailing scrap people, then drops them on the opposing planet, uses the humanitarian kindness of the other party to squeeze their living space, and finally ruthlessly destroys the aborigines and scrap people together. This setting is novel and nonsense, but it has become the background support for the innovative setting of the game's "two independent blood bars" (population and life). Coupled with the highly impactful comic style presentation, many players have a soft spot for the performance of this work, shouting that it pokes at their personal aesthetic habits, and the world view and story have become the core charm of this game to attract players.
At the same time, the core mechanism of the game, the "card fusion" system, in addition to being able to link multiple cards, can occasionally become the key to shaping the flavor of a single card. Specifically, some special cards (usually represented as vehicles, squads, or material piles) can be upgraded by merging over time - the "junk heap" gradually expands in size as it increases, providing more shields; The interior of the "landing module" is increasingly overcrowded, and it only takes one launch to overload the population of a huge hostile planet. This upscaling blend maps card action to embodied behavior, not only in line with the game's "evil" tone, but also deeply embedded in the player's decision-making process with a unique story.
Another ingenuity in the game's design is to design the end of turn button as a ritualistic lever. After a series of careful layout and strategic adjustments, players need to make a decisive push, like ringing the bell of the dust, announcing that the pre-order action is completely a thing of the past. Regardless of the previous command, the putter action means that the player has decided to let go of the imperfections of the past and continue on a journey into the unknown.
Overall, "Crazy Stars" transcends the traditional presentation mode of tabletop cards through carefully carved flavor details, and reaches new heights in storytelling and immersion. However, even if the story background of a single card is exquisitely designed, when the interaction between multiple cards becomes the absolute focus on the stage, can the game still maintain this refinement and coherence, and avoid other possible "substitution collapse"?
The third card from the left is the "Landing Module", and the lower right corner is the end of the round lever
Artistic conception referee: turn waste into treasure
If "flavor" is the art of subtly associating the effect of a single card with its backstory, then "mood" is a unique landscape formed by the backstory colliding with each other when multiple cards are combined. Because designers can't exhaust all possible card combinations, not every combination can be justified. As a result, there are often bizarre scenarios in card games, such as "rats driving spaceships" or "Satan dying in a bar brawl".
In response to this phenomenon, a new form of secondary creation was born in the Magic community, Mood Judge, which aims to collect and share irrational and extremely "humorous" scenarios that arise from the imbalance of card flavors in combinations. Among them, there are many mysterious passages such as "the giant beast that covers the sky and the sun is detained by the strict inspector to check it", "the two players hold the bridge and start a stick fight", "the hero abducts the suspension bridge at the city gate by virtue of his appearance" and other mysterious passages. While these kinds of scenes can bring momentary novelty and laughter, they are undoubtedly disastrous for Timmy players who want to immerse themselves.
Image: Traveling Mage Camp "Magic: The Gathering Mood Judge's Body Recorder" (8/22/22)
Original: Twitter account @flavorjudgedraw
In the face of this challenge, "Crazy Star Indiscriminate" has learned from the machine learning industry the concept of "advanced" Lida Brick Flying. Original, but effective. The developers went through nearly 1,500 meaningful card combinations to create new art for the resulting more than 100 outputs. More importantly, the fusion of card effects is not a simple and crude stitching of the original effects, but according to the flavor of the original card, the story of the card is organically integrated to build a new card with new effects.
Card fusion in the game can be roughly divided into three categories, the first is the "upgrade fusion" mentioned above. However, this fusion doesn't literally create new cards, but rather focuses on enhancing and upgrading existing cards.
Next, the massive basic fusion recipe is a well-deserved skeleton for the deck-building gameplay of this game. In addition to kneading shield-generating metal building materials and colony volunteers into "large meat bullets" to deal damage, players can also grind various waste materials through the "shredder" into an indescribable "power holy water", which can be drunk to increase action points; In addition, it is also possible to murder crew members with poisonous substances to create "corpses", which can be dropped on enemy stars to penetrate the shield and inflict real damage on them. This kind of basic fusion is not strict in terms of materials, and the product effects are relatively simple, but it covers a wide range of areas - from damage output to resource allocation, showing a "waste to treasure" mindset throughout the whole process. Players can even imagine that your chaotic ship has a giant scrap recovery device on it, leaving no stone unturned to grind and mix all kinds of waste (haphazardly).
What's more, this waste-based convergence model subtly echoes the theme of resource scarcity in the game's setting. As the new captain who took office with a blank eye, surrounded by a group of crew members with "unique skills", you will find that the infrastructure and manpower on the ship are only enough to protect yourself. If you want to practice "offense is the best defense", you must boldly break away and make difficult restructuring choices with the limited resources at hand. And this happens to be the same situation that card players face: not every card draw will lead to the desired result, and more often the best decision must be made based on the face of the dealer. "Crazy Star Bombing" captures this commonality, making the artistic conception of the card fusion "turning waste into treasure" and the narrative of space pirate "trashpunk" resonate at the same frequency, becoming another highlight of the immersive experience.
Of course, the most adrenaline-pumping part of the game is the last series of maddening "powerful fusions". They're like magic that turns two seemingly inconspicuous cards into superweapons that can turn the battlefield upside down, such as the "Vampire Cosmic Colony" and "Tidal Gravity Disaster". This kind of fusion is not only visually impactful, but also puts forward high requirements for the material of card fusion. Unlike basic recipes, which only require fuzzy matching card types, Power Fusion often requires precise combinations of specific individual cards. Considering the sheer number of cards in the game, it can be a test of strategy and luck to collect multiple powerful fusion assets in a single round of roguelikes.
However, this is precisely where the developer excels. This setting caters to both the intuitive thrill of Timmy's and the Johnny's keen to explore the potential connections between cards (while the Spiky's quest for victory can be repeated over and over again in the roguelike flow), connecting the game's entertainment and depth with artistic conception. Every time a new card is acquired, players will not only savor its effects, but also wonder if this card can collide with other cards to trigger a wonderful chain reaction? If this is the case, what kind of "unexpected and reasonable" crazy story will another fusion material and the final fusion product depict?
blemish
Indeed, Crazy Stars tries to stand out from the genre with the core selling point of card fusion mechanics. However, when it comes to mechanic guidance and numerical balance, players can easily build a deck that can be successfully completed without relying on the meld mechanic. At the same time, there are nearly 1,500 fusion recipes in the game, which requires players to invest a lot of time and effort to unlock and enter the Pokédex one by one. As a result, players are often unable to make effective fusions in the early stages of the game, let alone realize the potential of fusion systems, and as a result, the ingenuity that should have been amazing is marginalized from the beginning of the game, which is a shame.
In addition, the game's original planet "population value" system is also subject to numerical design flaws and does not achieve the expected effect. Players go to great lengths to fill the population slot, and the reward is only to stun the enemy for a short turn, and the slight frustration is unlikely to arouse the enthusiasm for building a strategy around the population value gameplay. In contrast, going straight to the offensive seems to be a more practical option, but it also weakens the synergy with the story's setting.
In the original idea of the designer, the fusion mechanics went hand in hand with the game art and world view to jointly build the competitiveness of the game, but the actual effect was a bit "lame" - relying only on visual and narrative support, leaving the first impression of "spire skin" for some players. However, the flaws in the numbers have never been able to hide the flaws of innovation, as evidenced by the current stable "special praise" of this game on Steam. As the comment section says – why should your next minaret be a minaret?
Images: Unless otherwise specified, the pictures in this article are from screenshots of the game
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