🔊 Picking Brains: Episode 01

The Official Zombie Battleground Podcast

In this episode:

• How the Distract talent works, especially on Heavy zombies
• How the Reanimate talent works and when it activates
• How much math is involved in card design and balancing

Note: The “next patch” mentioned in this interview has already been released (ver 0.1.6.319).

Audio Interview (13 min.)

Transcript

We are Picking Brains: the Zombie Battleground podcast, brought to you by Loom Network. This is episode one, guaranteed not to have any Jar Jar Binks.

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

Extranji: Hey there, Zombie Battleground fans. Welcome back to the first official episode of the Picking Braaains podcast. The guys over at Loom got back in touch with me and said they wanted to do this recurring interview series with questions from the community, questions about game interactions, mechanics, design… So welcome back, Roy.

Roy: Oh, hello. How you doing?

Extranji: Doing all right. Are you doing okay today?

Roy: Fantastic! As always, everyday is an opportunity to make awesome things.

Extranji: Definitely. So I’ve got my new list of questions here. We can just jump right in here. In the last interview, I discussed Distract with you, and my question that time was specifically about how it interacts with types, which actually left a few people confused about how Distract works because in the Alpha right now, we don’t actually have any cards that use it, so we can’t test it out and see how it works for ourselves. We had some people wondering if Distract only operates on types. So to be clear will Distract clear thing like death effects, persistent abilities… ?

Roy: Yes. Distract will basically know the ability of a zombie, so anything in the ability window, in the text window of a zombie will become void. Everything it had until then is gone, including the type ability. So for example, if you have a Heavy zombie, part of its ability is Heavy, so it will stay a Heavy zombie sure, but it’s —

Extranji: Yeah, Robert was talking a little in the Discord, how types have abilities associated with them, but they are their own thing separate from the type. So if you Distract a Heavy zombie, it’s still Heavy, which is interesting to me — that wasn’t what I was expecting. And so as a follow up there, we’ve got this card Earthshaker in the client with an entry ability that Destroys a Heavy zombie. So if you Distract an enemy Heavy zombie will you still be able to Destroy it with Earthshaker after it’s been Distracted?

Roy: Yes. The Earthshaker’s ability acts on the type, not on the ability. So even though the Heavy ability is gone, it’s still a Heavy zombie… It’s still like a large zombie. Try to picture it in your head, just a Heavy zombie, and you whack it with a Distract and it’s like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” It’s like he’s not defending actively anyone, but he’s still a big Heavy zombie.

Extranji: Yeah. That makes sense flavor-wise. Cool. So then next, there has been some active discussion in the Horde Assembly channel about card balance, card design. We talked about design in the first part of the interview before, but I wanted to ask specifically how much math is involved in card design? Do you have stuff like numerical values assigned to different abilities like Feral and Freeze, so it’s like, “Oh, if I give this zombie Heavy, I have to take away this specific number of stats to make it balanced?”

Roy: That’s a pretty good question. And actually very close to what I’m doing. If I give a zombie Heavy, I will remove at least 1 attack, if not 1 attack and 1 defense. But usually it will be in exchange for 1 attack. If I give a zombie Feral, it will be in exchange of 1 defense because Ferals are more fragile and they would have less defense. If I give someone Freeze, they will take probably 1 or 2 attack. If I give someone Destroy, it will be 1 attack and 2 defense. And so it’s very varied, but this is only up to a point. At a certain point when they see the cards, it goes into a creative gut feeling thing. So this feels too powerful. This feels too weak, so I kind of change it according to some sort of a gut feeling.

And then of course, all of that process is still a guesstimate. It’s like an educated guess. Only when we start playing in the game itself and start feeling the card how it really behaves, then we can give the final balance round. Then we can change it a little bit. Maybe it’s too powerful. Maybe it’s too weak. Maybe we need to tweak it a little bit.

Extranji: Yeah. In my experience with other card games, it’s definitely hard to evaluate a card just by looking at it. It definitely takes some play testing for sure.

Roy: Yeah, exactly. After a certain point… So in the beginning, yes, it’s math, and then there’s a gut feeling phase, and then there is obviously testing it out in the game itself.

Extranji: Okay, cool. Thanks. Next. I’ve been playing a little bit with the Life horde in the Alpha and I’ve noticed one thing that’s happening right now. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or not — which I wanted to clarify — can you give Reanimate to a zombie that has already died once?

Roy: First of all, yeah. It’s not an on off you can stack as many as you want. It’s like, either you have Reanimate or you don’t, but when you do Reanimate, it’s a fresh zombie, so you could definitely bestow Reanimate again, that’s not a problem at all. It’s a new zombie, you can give it Reanimate. Reanimate is the ability to get it to respawn after it dies. So if it respawns, it’s a new zombie, give it again. It will again respawn after it dies.

Extranji: Yeah, cool. So I’m imagining some interesting Life decks that just focus on Reanimating one zombie over and over — never leaves the field. That could be funny to see.

Roy: That is exactly the idea of the Life faction. And that’s the basic idea of the synergies between it. It will be very pesky. It’s going to get really hard to get rid of them. But that’s kind of why they’re a bit weaker than the other zombies. Same with the Air faction. They have Guard, so they’re a bit weaker stat ways.

Extranji: Yeah, that makes sense. In a similar vein with this Life faction, Reanimate stuff, when do zombies enter the graveyard? And I’m asking you specifically from the perspective of the Life General Yggdrazil, which says it Reanimates zombies that have died this game. And so I’m wondering if a zombie is go to the graveyard when they’re played or if they go to the graveyard when they’ve died? So if say you play one Life zombie and you’ve only played this one Life zombie, and it’s still on the board when you play Yggdrazil, will it be Reanimated if it hasn’t died?

Roy: That’s a pretty good question and going into a very, very specific corner, but props to you for getting this question. Yeah, so there are two checks. First of all, the graveyard, every card that goes above the arena drops a battleframe and continues into the graveyard. The graveyard is for cards, not for the battleframes. So basically, once he drops the battleframe he continues into the graveyard. Right? But Yggdrazil will not Reanimate anyone who has not left the arena itself. So if you have just the far out scenario that you’re talking about… right, if you only had one Life zombie before Yggdrazil, then it will only Reanimate it if it left the arena. So Yggdrazil, it summons back the zombies that actually died. So the battleframe needs to be removed from play for it to be considered for the Reanimate.

Extranji: I see. What can you tell us about what’s coming in the next patch? Are we going to see some new cards? Are we going to see some changes? People are really excited to get their hands on some of the new cards that we’ve seen.

Roy: That is a great question. So basically, right now, we are actually in the midst of a feature freeze. That’s when we stop development in favor of polishing and feedback. We make sure the gameplay is smooth, everything works appropriately, there’s no crashes, there’s no anything outstanding, everything works according to the design and all that. And in the end of the week we are going to get the new version, the new patch. And it’s going to have 147 cards working in game, and it’s going to be pretty awesome.

We’re going to have lots and lots of rebalanced cards. The Fire fraction has, how you say, dropped from grace, so it’s not as powerful as it was before. Fire faction has become crazy strong with all the Feral and the Goo Carriers and all that. Goo Carriers — if we’re talking about that — have changed a little bit now. All of them from all the factions give you either Tainted Goo or Corrupted Goo, which means you can actually use it only on the next turn. And part of the reason is to have all the factions sort of get the same amount of power. Some became a bit more powerful, some became a bit less powerful. But the idea is to have in the end balancing the factions to be about equal strengths and weaknesses, to not have the one specific deck that everyone will play, and we’ll have a variety of cards, each one with their own, each player with his own deck, and obviously we’ll have a bunch of meta decks that will be featured. But it will be from all the factions rather than just one faction.

I mean, it will be kind of boring. I remember a time long ago in a galaxy far, far away when I played Hearthstone, and everyone was playing Zoo Shaman. It’s like, every time you go in it’s like Zoo Shaman, that’s it. That’s the only game you play: Zoo Shaman, Zoo Shaman, Zoo Shaman. And it became so repetitive that I just at one point said, “Ah, forget it.” And just that took like a week or so break from the game —

Extranji: Yeah, the Tunnel Trogg, Totem Golem, Flamewreathed Faceless meta.

Roy: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It was like everyone had just one deck and that’s it. And I’m trying to avoid that. And the way to do that is to rebalance all the factions to have same kind of power in general.

Extranji: That sounds good.

Roy: Obviously, each faction has their own unique angle to things, like we talked about the Life faction, its power is coming from the Reanimate. It’s gonna be very pesky. It’s gonna be very difficult to actually remove a card from play. It’s going to be Reanimated again and again and again. And the Fire factions are going to be really Blitzing forward, trying to charge in with a bit lower health but more zombies running at you at the same time.

But the most interesting things that I see are kind of like two-faction hybrids… so a combination of toxic and earth together or fire and air together, kind of synchronizing their strength and weaknesses. Half of the deck is kind of like aggressive attack and half of the deck is defense, and you have a synergy going there. These are the most dominating or interesting decks that I’m seeing.

Extranji: Yeah, cool. I think that’s going to be really neat. I’m super excited to play with all the new cars and see the balance updates, and I’m sure a lot of us in the Discord are. But I think that’s about it we’ve got for time, so thank you again Roy for all the insights, all the answers. Appreciate that.

Roy: Thank you, and we’re going to be very exciting. Lots of changes in the next patch. Expect it by the end of the week, and obviously open beta is looming very, very soon.

Extranji: Very nice. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. We’ll see you next time.

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.

You can download Zombie Battleground from our website at http://loom.games.

And then shuffle over the official Discord for some great conversation around the game.

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Until next time… zombie on-aaahaahahhhhhhh!

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