- [upbeat music] ["Exordium" by Clark Aboud]

- We started off with a very simple character first called hat man and he was a realistic figure with a hat drawn on a white square. He was our main character. I wanted to animate him so he would actually bob up and down. It was very beautiful.

- Hi, I'm Anthony.

- And I'm Casey.

- We set out to combine the Roguelike and deckbuilding genres into one game, but it was revealing the enemy's intents that finally made Slay the Spire come together. ["The City" by Clark Aboud] So Slay the Spire at its core is a combination of Roguelike games and deckbuilding games. What the player does is they're climbing up an evil dungeon and every time they defeat an enemy, they get to choose one of three cards to add to their deck. They actually use these cards to fight other enemies and in this way, every time you play the game, you're building a new deck of cards.

- I think one thing that we wanted to do was differentiate it from like more like a western RPG. I did a lot of the character concept arts. I just read a lot of Japanese manga. Dorohedoro, or like Ajin, things like that, and I didn't quite want a standard knights or warrior, mage and archer so I made a slightly different warrior, which is the Ironclad, a slightly different rogue, which was the Silent. It's easier to talk about a monster if it's a different monster, right? Instead of saying it's a cyclops, where you'd be like what game is that from? We'd be like any RPG. It's like oh look, how about the six-sided ghost guy? It's like oh, that's from Slay the Spire. That's kind of what I wanted.

- [Anthony] When you start any run of Slay the Spire, the first thing you see is this giant whale called Neow.

- I came up with the name, by the way, I take credit.

- Neow is what we call an ancient of rebirth and she has the power to resurrect things and is actually the cause of why the character keeps getting reborn in this endless cycle. One of the things that I find really interesting about high level play, they actually need to take riskier strategies to win. When you're first starting out, you might be avoiding elites, going to question mark rooms a lot to try to get their bonuses and you think oh yes, this is what I need to do to win and as you actually get better at the game, you find out that if I'm going to beat the toughest challenges, I need to be riskier early on. I have to go fight those elites and that's exactly what I want is the sense of risk and reward for Slay the Spire.

- There's definitely a quirk amongst players who don't want to take the game seriously and that is getting a very specific card and relic combo and they should be ashamed of themselves. They know what it is. It requires a branch and a specific card for Ironclad. ["Meet the Merchant" by Clark Aboud]

- In 2015, Casey reached out to me and said hey let's work on a game together. At the time, I had been playing a lot of deckbuilding games like Dominion, Ascension, Puzzle Strike and also a lot of Roguelikes so things like Binding of Isaac, FTL. I was always a big fan of Netrunner and in fact, created a fansite for the game. I got so deep into it. In a lot of different card games, you'll have, okay I have five resources, I'm gonna play my card that costs five. I didn't want players to feel like okay, you need to just settle in and always play, for example, a poison deck or always play a strength deck. You have to adapt to the cards you see, have to adapt to the relics you see and as a result, the best strategy is to be flexible.

- Probably the first event in which we showcased the game, a local Seattle Indies group, nobody understood what was going on. It was pretty exciting.

- We initially had only about 20 cards in the game and just a handful of enemies. The player couldn't even choose what direction they would go up the spire at this point. They would just go through an enemy at a time with really no choice. Everything was very basic just so that we could test out the basic layout of the game and if the deck building mechanics were working and if the player was understanding what was happening.

- And we had a lot of I would say generic monsters. We had a zombie, we had a wraith and then a slime. The slime I redrew like four times. The game was very static and not animated. Animation seemed like a really daunting task. A lot of information was like very muddled and hard to understand. I think there was a big UX design problem.

- We decided early on that we wanted to really have close engagement with our fan base and try to make the barrier between us and them as low as possible.

- It just seemed like a no-brainer for us. Indie games in general have always, especially strategy games, have kind of like an accessibility problem. We have played many early access games and then the developer would go silent for several months at a time. We decided to be very transparent. We had a Discord server, Steam discussions. And we asked questions and answered them. Originally in our early access announcement, we said that we would be patching every two weeks and somehow between writing that announcement and all of the mess of launch, we ended up patching every single week instead and we found out about it months later.

- So much work.

- To fix our announcement and we said I can't believe that we did every week instead. It was way way more work, but I think our players ended up really appreciating it. ["Exordium" by Clark Aboud] The original formulation of Slay the Spire, the enemies were very simple. The enemies would have a list of moves and they would just select a move at random. Players didn't know what to do. Do I need to block an incoming attack? How safe am I to do damage? They didn't feel like they had the information to actually make an informed decision on how to play the cards in their hand.

- We had a next move system and this would tell players what this monster would do.

- We found out that the next move system had several problems. One, it wasn't good for streaming. We would be Skyping with each other and we would have to tell each other, hey click on that enemy so I can see what it's doing so that wasn't gonna work. If you can imagine in a multi-enemy fight, every single time you wanted to know what an enemy was doing, you'd have to click on that enemy.

- [Casey] If you're playing while relaxed, you would forget what the enemy is going to do. Players weren't aware of what was going to happen as a whole.

- Number two, it just had too much information.

- Some of these would be pretty long where you get like paragraphs of what the enemy's going to do and there could be like jokes interspersed.

- It's just overload and it's unnecessary. And three, it was just very inconvenient in multiple enemy fights to constantly be selecting new characters.

- We wanted to indicate how much damage they were going to do so we added these indicators like a bobbing ball or like a bobbing diamond shape.

- So unfortunately, we couldn't do the next move system as we had it implemented. ["The Guardian Emerges" by Clark Aboud] The solution that we ended up with was something that we call the intent system. Basically above every enemy, there's a little icon indicating what they're gonna do.

- The gist of information that the player wants to receive each turn is basically whether they want to be offensive or defensive in the current turn and we didn't want to put too many numbers on the screen to confuse players and so instead, we had these sword icons that would progressively become more menacing-looking swords and then I think it kind of clicked. Like we understood that these monsters were attacking and these monsters were blocking so that was like a big moment 'cause this is gonna be way better and it also has that like effect of making the attacks more menacing-looking. I believe zero to five is like a little dagger and then it upgrades to like kind of like a normal-looking bronze sword. There's like a kitchen cleaver-looking one. It might be a larger ax and then maybe a battle ax. Wait hold on, how many axes are there? What if I get the order wrong?

- You don't have to.

- People will make fun of me. Around the end, when it's like 30 or 35 plus, there's a scythe and that's like the scariest one. Those are the attack intents. The ones after that are the blocking intent. If the enemy intends to gain block, it will be a shield. If the enemy does a hybrid of attacking and blocking, there will be a sword and shield behind it. There's the debuff icons which is a green swirly. Mega debuff which is a giant purple swirly. The buff icon is like a blue flaming with little flame particles coming out. There's also an unknown intent. So it just means something they're doing that doesn't hurt you such as spawning monsters or changing state, things of that nature.

- There are two main ways that enemies choose what intent they're gonna do next. One is that we have enemies that have a very set pattern. You'll see this in a lot of bosses where for example, with the Hexaghost boss, it goes through a very exact rotation through each of its moves. On the other hand, we have enemies that have a more randomized move set. However, we have code that actually makes it so they won't do the same move too many times. Additionally, some enemies can change their intent based on what the player's done in combat. Some enemies that summon will actually only summon if the player has killed some of their spawns already. If you know the enemy is going to be buffing themselves up on their turn, you can spend an entire turn playing nothing but attack cards on them and going all out. Alternatively, if you see that they're doing a huge attack that might kill you, you can mitigate the damage they're gonna deal, armor yourself up and protect yourself from dying. Being able to do either of those strategies matters a lot to the player and that's what the intent system fixes. ["After Image" by Clark Aboud] We had two main takeaways when developing Slay the Spire. One was to have a low barrier between yourself and your players and two was to not be afraid to break things. Changing our next move system to the intent system was like a total departure for our play testers and us but we weren't afraid of breaking it because we were on this fast iteration cycle, we could try it. If it was no good, we could go back and that let us really experiment during our development process. We found players really like the intent system as it gave them complete control and even though it's a card game, it's important that players feel like they can help mitigate any of the randomness. Having a low barrier between yourself and your player base is incredibly invaluable. Being able to be on Reddit, see somebody post a bug and then pop in and say oh hey that'll be fixed in today's update, seeing them respond and say hey you're the best developers ever, you're replying to us, that is so great for your image and it's great for your community and we're always gonna do that going forward. We've had a lot of great mod support from people on our Discord who just really love the game and go and create interesting mods for other people to play. We're actually very excited to have Slay the Spire on consoles like the Switch and mobile in the future. We actually designed Slay the Spire early on to eventually go to these other platforms because we tried to make our interface as simple as possible so that you could do things like control it with touch or with a controller and that's very rare for card games. Usually card games are pretty much mouse/keyboard only, but we thought with a little bit of extra work, we can make it work on other platforms and that's been received well already.

- I would say in terms of sequels, we're not really planning for Slay the Spire 2 at this time.

- Certainly one of the things that's been requested is some kind of multiplayer feature. That could be interesting to look at.

- Well we're currently focused on just like adding more content to the current game.

- In particular, we're interested in adding new characters to the game as even adding one new character adds up a whole plethora of new play experiences. One possible option for a sequel would be something that we jokingly call Spire Slays You where you play a monster. The players are actually playing cards against you and you have a move set.

- Our game is a bit different than most other games. Our game visually is not as like outstanding as other games. We added a ton of content to the game and that's very hard to glean from like a trailer. So you have to kind of get it to get it. We started off really slow in terms of like sales. We were very worried for a very long time. It's like a very big hurdle to get to acquire more players. Like we had to build a community and it's like seriously, just word of mouth. Everyone's just telling each other like this game is awesome, you have to play it. A lot of people were like, you know, my friends keep pestering me to buy this game so I bought this game and now I'm addicted. I have a problem and that's like what we want, awesome. ["After Image" by Clark Aboud]