🔊 Picking Brains: Episode 02

The Official Zombie Battleground Podcast

In this episode:

• What we can expect for the Overlord abilities we haven’t seen yet
• How the faction strengths and Goo Carriers are getting rebalanced
• The new kinds of zombies that are being created
• What the starter deck for new players will look like

Audio Interview (14 min.)

Transcript

We are Picking Brains: the Zombie Battleground podcast, brought to you by Loom Network.

I’m Robert guy, your Content & Community Manager. And here are your hosts: Zombie Battleground Game Director Roy Shapira and Content Creator Extranji.

Extranji: Welcome back. My name’s Extranji. We’re here again with Zombie Battleground Game Director Roy Shapira. This is where we talk about design, mechanics of the game, balancing… sort of the state of the meta. Are you ready to pick some brains with me?

Roy: Oh yeah!

Extranji: The first question we’ve got this week is about the Overlord abilities that we haven’t seen yet. Right now, there are two for each faction available in the game, and we can see that there are at least a few more planned. We think there are going to be three more just from the UI, and we want to hear a little bit about what we can expect to see from those, going forward.

Roy: That’s a pretty good assumption, there. Indeed, each one of the Overlords are going to get three more. Very shortly, we’re going to have the XP system for each one of the Overlords. You start off the game with only one ability, and every four levels or so, you are going to get another ability opened, and then you can select two abilities that best fit your personal gaming style. Each one of the Overlords has a variety of powers. Some of the weaker abilities are going to have a shorter cool down, and some of the stronger powers are going to have more cool down, and they’re going to have, sometimes, a numbers limit — you can do only one per match or you can do two per match, and so on. So it really depends on the type of Overlord and the type of ability.

A quick example: Fire faction is a great choice right now. It’s fairly simple. Fire faction is a direct damage type of faction that specializes in direct damage, very fast paced, smaller and faster units. Obviously, we know about Fire Bolt and we know about Rabies. Fire Bolt deals with one damage to target and Rabies gives one of your Fire allies Feral.

Extranji: Yeah, that’s right. Those are the two that we’ve got right now.

Roy: Right, and we’re going to get a bigger bolt. It’s like a fireball, which is going to do 2 damage to a target. It will have a longer initial cool down and longer cool down afterwards. And then we’re going to have Mass Rabies, which is going to give Feral to two random ally zombies, and we’re going to have a Meteor Shower, which is going to be his super power. Each one of the Overlords is going to get an ultimate power or a superpower. I don’t want to spoil the rest of them, but Fire is going to get a Meteor Shower, which is going to damage the entire board, and it’s going to be pretty graphically pleasing! That’s all I can say at this point.

Extranji: Nice!

Roy: Each one of the Overlords is going to have one of these, and usually it’s going to be a really powerful game-changing ability that you’ll be able to use around the end game. Kind of like a final strike… that type of deal.

Extranji: That’s super cool. And you said we’ll get those by leveling up our factions, and that happens by playing the game. Super cool. The next question we got: the starter deck that new players are going to get when they jump into the game. What can a free-to-play player expect when they start Zombie Battleground?

Roy: The idea of the starter deck basically is each player that starts the game has a basic deck they can start with, and then they can start playing the tutorial, playing a few matches against the AI to learn the game, and while playing each one of the Overlords, you level them up. Each few levels, you’re going to get basic cards from that specific faction. So for example, at the beginning, you’re going to get ten cards open to everyone who starts the game. These are basic cards, which means you can’t melt them, you can’t turn them into goo or anything like that. They are kind of like… always there.

Extranji: There’s zombies that you can’t open in packs? They are ones that we haven’t seen yet, right?

Roy: Right, exactly. You can’t get them anywhere else you can only get them when you start the game, and you can get them by leveling up your Overlord. And every few levels, you’re going to get another card for each one of the factions. So if you’re playing the Fire faction, there are five more basic cards in the Fire faction. You’re going to get over the twenty levels that you’re going to level up your Fire Overlord. Same thing with Earth, same thing with Air, all the other factions. You’re going to get five basic cards for each one of them. You can mix and match and use that as your starter pack when you’re starting.

Obviously, you can earn more cards and more packs while playing as part of the render rewards that you are going to get while playing. You have to remember this game is going to be on the blockchain, which means that cards are actual items — you can use them. So these basic cards are not tradable. They are part of the main game and you can’t trade them, you can’t exchange them, you can’t melt them. The idea here is, if someone very clever thinks that they can open a thousand accounts and get these cards and then trade them, then [they] can’t. If you open an account, this will eliminate the whole problem with bots and —

Extranji: Gotcha.

Roy: —and clever people that think they can manipulate the system, or anything like that. This is pretty standard in the card collection game genre.

Extranji: Yeah, I think everyone likes free stuff! I’m really excited to see more cards. For me, in card games, it’s always just, “What’s the new stuff?” I really like looking at new cards, so it will be fun when we get to see those.

Roy: Right now, we have about 160 cards in the game, and very shortly, we’re going to have another batch of 150 new cards. Out of them, about 40 would be basic cards.

Extranji: Oh, ok. Cool.

Roy: It’s going to be like a new season kind of thing.

Extranji: So then, next on my list: the faction strengths. We’ve had this idea proposed as far back as the Kickstarter, where the different factions have one faction that they’re strong against and one faction that they’re weak against. Right now in the game, that manifests itself as the horde building restriction, where you can’t add cards from the faction that you’re weak against, and then there are also… each faction has a 1-goo 1/1 that, when it’s attacking a zombie from the faction it’s strong against, it doesn’t actually damage. And these are the zombies like Pyromaz, Izzy, Rocky, and there are six of them. So what I’m wondering is, should we expect to see more cards like Pyromaz, Izzy, and Rocky in the game?

Roy: Well, that’s a great question. We did start at the beginning with this noble idea that we have six factions, and it’s like rock, paper, scissors, but more complex — we have this “weak against” and “strong against.” At the beginning, it was like a global system that covered the entire cards, all the cards automatically. If you were on a stronger faction and you played against the weaker faction, it would be fun. The thing is, sometimes you were the weaker faction, and that really, really blew.

Extranji: Right…

Roy: It was internal testing. It was before anything was released to the public. I started a match, I see that my faction… I’m playing with Toxic against Fire, and I just immediately closed the game and started a new one. It was not even worth trying because it was too powerful. And the difference was +1 against the faction you’re strong against, and –1 against the faction that you’re weak against. And that was way too powerful. That meant that most of the Minions were just not effective at all. Any Minion with 1 attack was not effective at all. Any Minion with 2 attack were just doing half the damage.

Extranji: Yes, that’s a huge difference.

Roy: Yeah, exactly. It was a huge difference. I decided to remove that global system and create specific Minions that are going be a bit stronger. We’re going to have a few more of these. They’re going to be isolated and just because of their ability, they’re going to be specifically stronger against that faction. I also removed the restriction when building your horde. You can actually build your horde with any cards. There is no restriction whatsoever. So you can do Fire and Toxic. You can do Earth and Air. You can do whatever you want.

Extranji: That’s good to know, then. Personally, what you were talking about — where it feels bad to play against the weak thing — that’s what I was expecting when I saw that one faction is supposed to be weaker than another. But I’m glad that you’ve dialed it back from that initial state. I think most people would be. It sounds like you made the right choice there.

Roy: Thank you. Once something is not balanced, you feel it quite immediately.

Extranji: Ok, yeah. And with regard to that, with balancing, right now in the client, there are a lot of cards that are either very similar to each other across factions, or some cards within the same faction that are very similar, and some cards are just stronger versions of other cards. And so I wanted to ask you: in the final vision of the game — I know we’re in the middle of balance right now and so anything that looks similar right now is probably going to be a lot different at the end — but in your final vision of things, do you think we’re going to have any cards that are just the same card but in a different faction?

Roy: We are going to have a few cards similar to Slab. Our famous little Slab doesn’t have any ability, and we are going to have a few of those in each faction. Some of them are going to be similar, some of them are going to be like a 1/1/1 with nothing or a 2/2/2 with nothing… different combinations of that.

After we balance everything [and] make sure that all the factions are similar, we’re going to go into another phase of balancing and make sure that each card is unique and each faction card is unique, so there’s no two cards that are totally similar. For example, right now, we have two cards that are fairly similar: Burrrnn and Shale — Burrrnn from the Fire faction and Shale from the Earth faction. Shale has already being rebalanced. It’s going to be a 2-goo-cost 2/2, and going to have the Blitz ability instead of Feral. Burrrnn is going to be a 3-goo-cost 2/3 Feral Officer. This is the next phase of rebalancing, so it might change. By the end of the week, it might be something different.

Same with Nail Bomb and Molotov. If you take these two, Nail Bomb is like the big brother of Molotov. It’s more damaging. The idea of both of these is going to be like a clearing tool for the board. If you’re swarmed by a bunch of zombies, you throw one of these and it’s super effective. Just like it would be in real life. If you have a bunch of zombies, you throw a Molotov on them, it’s super effective, or a Nail Bomb — same thing. The idea with Molotov, [it’s] going to become a 2-goo-cost, 2 damage, and 2 damage to adjacent zombies. And the Nail Bomb is going to be a 4-goo-cost, 4 damage, with 4 damage to adjacent zombies. Obviously, all of these numbers [you can take] with a grain of salt. They’re going to be changing so much. Nothing is solid right now.

Extranji: Yeah, but they’re on your radar, You guys know about them, of course. So that’s good.

Roy: Oh, yeah. Right now, I have 160 cards on my table, and out of them, I think we have about 40–45% of them approved, where I’m really happy with them. And the rest of them are changing and changing.

Extranji: So we’ve got a lot to see in the coming months with regards to balance.

Roy: Definitely. One of the biggest changes that you can expect, I hope from the next version, is the Goo Carriers — all of them are going to be giving you either the Tainted Goo or the Corrupted Goo. The Minions are going to be just that, giving you the Tainted Goo. And the Officers are going to be costing a bit more, and they’re going to give you the Corrupted Goo, and they have the faction ability. For example, Fire is going to be a Blitz card, and Air is going to be Guard, or Earth is going to be Heavy. The idea here is if you do want to use the extra goo, you’re going to have to do that either late in the game or in the next turn. It’s not going to be the same turn.

Extranji: Yeah, you have to plan in advance. That definitely changes the dynamic a lot. All right, well… cool. I think that’s it for time, so I think we’ll call it for this week. Thank you, Roy, for your time.

Roy: Thank you so much, and I hope to see you again next week.

Extranji: Yeah, see you again same time, same place. See you guys.

Thank you for checking out Picking Brains: the Zombie Battleground podcast. We’ll be bringing you hordes of content about the game’s design, gameplay mechanics, strategy, and more.

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