In this week’s article, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the designs and inspirations behind a few of the cards in the REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat Core Set. After all, every card has a story and as you’ll see, the finished product isn’t always what was originally intended.
Camilla Brand
Camilla was one probably of the first cards ever designed for REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat and as such, the very first General card as well. Though the basic concept behind her card never changed much, (a General who could manipulate mission cards) she kept being tweaked as we worked to hammer out exactly how REDLINE would work. Because of this her card kept evolving as the game did.
Originally, General cards represented the REDLINE player themselves and so were always in play and came with static abilities but variable life totals. The goal of the game at first was to attack your opponent and bring the life total of their General down to zero. It was planned some more powerful Generals would be offset with lower starting life as a way to make things interesting and as a different way to provide balance. However this conflicted with the other win condition in the game, which was gaining control of the missions on the redline. So we removed the life total and gave the cards a deploy cost instead as they would no longer start automatically in play. They also gained a life total so they can take damage just like efreets do. When a General is destroyed, they flip back into the bunker where they remain out of play until redeployed with an extra cost of two for every time they flip back to their HQ zone.
If Brand’s final card looks familiar to Magic: The Gathering players, it should. Commander is a hugely popular Magic format where players build decks around the colors of and abilities of special legendary creatures. As huge fans, we always intended for the REDLINE General cards to have a look and feel similar to the Commanders in Magic as we wanted decks built around a General from the start. We thought it would be cool though if every General in REDLINE had their own special named mechanic as a way to give even more identity to our characters. And so starting with General Brand, we decided to name their special abilities if for no other reason than to add more personality to each card. Funny enough, despite all the other adjustments, the only change Brand’s Prepared Ground received during testing was an increase in recon cost from five to six.
PEW-2 Riotgun
The idea behind the Personal Efreet Weapon was simple. Make an efreet sized shotgun!
The problem was the original design took after the attributes of a shotgun a bit too much. The original card improved accuracy with a plus two attack modifier to simulate the spread of a shotgun blast, but it also came with a negative effect that reduce the damage of the equipped efreet by one. Quite a severe drawback as it turned out.
The card as designed ended up as hot garbage. Quite often during playtesting you never even wanted to equip it because the reduction in damage was too great to justify the small increase in chance that you would actually hit your opponent. And on efreets that only delt one damage, the card was practically useless and ended up stuck in the hand as unplayable. Dead cards are never fun to draw and in a close game holding onto a PEW-2 could cost you the match easily. No bueno.
The card was fixed and the PEW-2 is much better now than it was. But it taught us a valuable lesson during design. Though it’s ok to have drawbacks on cards, we had to be very careful they weren’t too punishing and we had to get more creative in what they could be. Looking back, a simple reduction in damage was a bit lazy and uninspired design wise. There had to be ways we could do better.
Overclocked Laser is the design that did just that.
In many ways, it’s a reverse of the original PEW-2 because it gives a damage bonus while reducing accuracy. But the risk/reward is much greater on both ends. The laser is a cheap upgrade that can make any efreet incredibly dangerous. Two extra damage for one deploy cost is nothing to sneeze at! But the reduction in accuracy is also steep and means more often than not, your shot may go wide as the stressed laser strays off target. In addition, there is a fifty-fifty chance the laser may discharge and backfire on you causing just as much damage as it dishes out. Have you ever had your efreet explode itself from simply pulling the trigger? Hilarious maybe, but also not a sound tactical maneuver.
No doubt, the Overclocked Laser is a powerful piece of equipment. But you better think twice before you disengage your laser safety governors and charge into battle. Some lighter efreets just can’t handle the feedback and if you aren’t careful the Overclocked Laser may end up doing more damage to you than your opponent. Dying when rolling to capture a mission is never advised either.
Is it worth it?
Hidden Outpost
In the beginning, creating the mission cards for REDLINE was a bit trickier than we realized. We had a lot of great ideas on how cool they could end up being, but finding a way to work them into the structure of a card game was difficult. You can actually read about some of the fits the mission cards gave us during design here.
Though it may seem simple now, Hidden Outpost was problematic for a long time. Why? Because the original card did absolutely nothing! At first, and for a long time, Hidden Outpost was meant to be a vanilla mission card with no bonuses or abilities beyond the basic one point of recon gained when captured that all missions provide when controlled. We felt a “boring” mission card would make the others feel more special by association. But during play the Outpost was often ignored as players gravitated towards attacking missions that granted better bonuses.
In the end we realized that since there would only be five missions cards in play at a time, it was important they all added something to the tactical outlook of the battlefield. So Hidden Outpost was given an ability that generates recon when attacked so at least there is some incentive to go after it. Once changed, it actually became one of the more engaging mission cards as it often became a kind of “watering hole” where players would cross paths early game for to build their recon pool.
Lost Pod
Originally our first idea for the missions on the redline between players would be they constantly changed during play. Capturing one mission let a player add it to their baseline and it would be replaced with a new one to fight over. While it was fun to battle over real estate you could own, it made all the mission cards as a whole feel less important since there was always a never ending supply of new ones to fight over.
However, we really liked the idea of rotating out missions during play. Having a bit of mystery and anticipation is always fun and so we looked at other ways to work the idea of interchangeable missions into the game. Which eventually led us to design what would become Lost Pod.
The inspiration for this mission was that of a loot crate. What if we could design a card that came with a hidden goodie desirable to both players? I mean, drawing extra cards is always fun. But what’s more desirable than that? Drawing a card from your opponents deck, that’s what! Flavor wise it made perfect REDLINE sense to stick those cards in a lost supply drop as a one time bonus that players would have to race to secure before the other. So far, so good. The problem was that once the Lost Pod was taken and looted, players wouldn’t want to secure it anymore once it was empty. It basically ended up like the early version of Hidden Outpost mentioned above, and that wasn’t fun to play with.
So we simply had Lost Pod disappear from the redline once captured and replaced it with a new card off the top of the mission deck. Which, was almost exactly the same kind of mechanic we envisioned for all the mission cards at the beginning of game design. What goes around comes around, right? Problem fixed and Lost Pod ended up as one of the more exciting missions in the game.
As a side note, Lost Pod almost didn’t make it into the Core Set. It was one of the very last cards designed for REDLINE and if I remember right, it was a last minute inclusion added after the Kickstarter had already funded. We had really wanted to include some kind of mission manipulation in the Core Set to give a hint of the play possibilities the mission cards provided in the game. But we had no good ideas to implement this and decided it was a concept we’d revisit later on. But as soon as the idea for Lost Pod was worked out, we rushed it into the Core Set as it was incredibly fun to play with and a mission we knew players would love to see in battle.
EF-34 Claymore
As much as all the other cards may have changed in this list, the ability of the EF-34 Claymore never did.
It’s wonderfully brutal.
To Be Continued…
With so many cards crammed into the REDLINE Core Set, (over 150) there’s many more design stories worth sharing, including the one card that gave us the most headaches out of them all.
Come back next week when I’ll share more insight into the designs of specific cards and how they all came together to make REDLINE a game greater than the sum of its parts.
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