I’ve spent the last few weeks of weekly design articles on the website to highlight all the design wins that make REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat a unique and incredibly fun card game to play. From the design of the Core Set mechanics and the development of the efreets, I’ve spent a lot of time describing everything that went right when making the game. But often, it’s what goes wrong during game design that often has the biggest impact on the end result. And though I’ve touched on some of those difficulties in the past, I never had the space to really go into detail on each problem we faced, what was learned and how it was overcome when creating REDLINE. But that is exactly what I wanted to do today with a dive into the deep end on all the major REDLINE fails.
After all, failure is the best teacher.
REDLINE Mobile Combat
It’s hard to believe because it was so long ago, but REDLINE actually began life as an idea for a mobile tactics game. If you wanted to know more about that story and how it came to be, I wrote more about the mobile development here.
Ultimately, the mobile game was one giant failure that came as a result of many smaller ones. The first being the idea was waaaay too ambitious in every single way. I’m still not sure what I was thinking at the time, but the idea behind it was to make what effectively was something similar to a turn based multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) similar to League of Legends or DOTA2. But with mechs. And deep customization. And 3d graphics. And loot crates. And with absolutely zero video game experience. And you get the idea.
The fact we got as far as we did speaks more to dogged perseverance and ignorance than any grand plan. But despite all the challenges, REDLINE mobile did exist as a playable alpha. You could order your small squad of Rabbit efreets around a 3d map and make them shoot missiles at each other which won’t lie, looked really awesome in demos.
But an alpha does not a game make. And though we had the bones of a mobile game, how we ever planned on adding multiplayer, networking, and online transactions was beyond us. Looking back, though we had come what seemed like a long way, at the time the project still had a very long road ahead of it that we’d likely never complete had we stayed the course. The task we had created for ourselves was just too ambitious.
Lesson Learned: Create within your means. One of the big reasons REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat worked was because a card game, as complex as it, is still magnitudes less complex than a functioning mobile game. When the mobile game failed it was apparent that if REDLINE was to ever make a return, it would need to be in a much simpler and more achievable form. Setting high goals for yourself is commendable but there also needs to be a lot of honesty in your ability to reach the goals you set for yourself otherwise they end up nothing more than a wish.
Kickstarter Blues
Let the history books show that REDLINEs Fall 2020 Kickstarter was the second one for the game. Our very first Kickstarter launched in June 2016 and was pretty much dead on arrival. So sad.
Chalk this up again to massive inexperience. So much time on REDLINE mobile was spent figuring out to make a video game that little was left learning the ins and outs of what it takes to launch a successful Kickstarter, which is its own massive project in itself. The team behind the mobile game had come a long way but was also reaching a wall of what could be achieved unless we took development to another level. And that next level required funding. Kickstarter was practically calling our name.
However, this failure fell solely on my shoulders. Due to lack of time (I felt) and inexperience combined with a full plate of game design I decided to adopt a stealth launch for REDLINE mobile with absolutely zero marketing. If that isn’t a recipe for success I don’t know what is.
So it as with little fanfare we proudly launched our little Kickstarter that couldn’t and quickly canceled it within the week. It didn’t help we were asking for a hefty $50,000 for what would essentially be a freemium mobile game if ever finished at the time. Or the laughable backer rewards we offered. Or the lack of gameplay footage on hand. We had mechs and it looked cool! Surely that would be enough to carry the day right? And if nothing else, hey, we had music from Vince DiCola of 80s Transformers the Movie (the BEST Transformers movie) and Rocky IV fame onboard so that had to make up the difference right?
Lesson Learned: A Kickstarter is a LOT of work. Long gone are the days of an independent group of designers launching and funding a campaign with little more than a pitch and wild ambition. The platform has grown massively since then and the game has changed as a result. Today Kickstarter favors heavily polished near finished games from known design teams and is more about preordering complete product than launching fanciful ideas. (To be fair, this crowdfunding game had already changed in 2016 but we were too late to get the memo.)
Any successful launch these days requires a massive amount of marketing, which takes time and money. When we came back to Kickstarter for round 2 we made sure to do it right. We did so by running ads, building a following of mech and card gamer enthusiasts and reaching out through as many channels as possible like podcasts, social media, online forums and anywhere else we could to share our awesome little card game with players.
In addition we worked hard to make our second Kickstarter stronger with better infographics, a trailer, and much better backer rewards like our 3d efreet miniatures. (Which were VERY popular by the way.) Even with all that work, we didn’t fully fund until the last 24 hours so we just barely made it. However, running a failed and successful Kickstarter have both been tremendous learning experiences and like the old saying goes, you need to crawl before you can walk right? Some of us just do a bit more crawling than others!
Failed Missions
While testing the early prototypes of REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat, one of the biggest design hurdles centered around the games mission cards.
We knew early on our game would be different than most other card games in that we wanted an actual map of sorts for players to fight on and the mission cards gave us a way to build just that. However getting them just right required constant trial and error.
The initial idea behind the mission cards had them arranged in a two by two square. Once players would capture them, they’d remove them from the square and add them and their bonus effects to their base while the empty spot in the square was replaced by a new card from the mission deck. I really liked the idea players could build their bases up by adding onto them with captured missions and still do. To win, all players had to do was amass a certain number of missions and they’d win on the spot.
The problem was no matter how hard we tried, the square system didn’t play right. A big problem came down to simple economics. Supply and demand. Because there was an almost infinite number of missions to fight over, remember capturing one just replaced it with another in this incarnation, they had no value. You never cared much when missions were captured because another opportunity to grab something better was a card flip away. And with just two players, the optimal strategy was to avoid combat by land grabbing empty missions as fast as you could. Not a great play pattern for a game subtitled “Tactical Card Combat.”
Tried as I might, there just seemed no good way to make this system work and the more it was tested, the more the built in flaws of it became apparent. The supply of missions was just too great for the demand of a two player game and it failed.
Lesson Learned: Begrudgingly this original mission structure was abandoned in favor of one where the number of missions for players to fight over was permanently set. This eliminated the endless supply right away and made every mission card on the redline between players valuable no matter what crazy bonuses it gave. Or didn’t.
It took some more fine tuning of course to get the correct number of missions in play for a game before we settled on five. Seven again created too much supply and made every game a giant match of hide and seek. The lowest we tried was four but an even number was not favorable as it was prone to stalemates too many times as mission control could be evenly split.
In the end what was learned in regards to game design was that no matter how hard you tried or how much you wanted a mechanic to work, sometimes it was inheritably flawed beyond saving. But, finding those flaws could help you fix them in later attempts. And actually, playtesting that focuses on what doesn’t work can sometimes be more effective than looking for what does. An idea we would come back to again when fine tuning the REDLINE combat system.
War Is Hell
The last really major fail we encountered during the design of REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat revolved around its combat system. Quite frankly, in the beginning it was a hot mess.
The key issue here revolved around the three major stats that every efreet in the game has. Damage. Armor. And speed
REDLINE is quite unique when it comes to card games because its combat system was built around simultaneous combat. Both players plan and execute moves at the same time and once efreets are engaged with one another, battle continues round after round until only one side is left standing.
The glue that holds this persistent combat system together is the efreet speed stat. Faster efreets shoot first and a higher speed value in turn makes them harder to hit since you need to roll their speed or above to land damage in a fight. Speed effectively gives every battle direction and provides order to the chaos of combat. Speed worked well from the start and so was never really a headache.
Instead, it was the efreet damage and armor values that kept giving us fits. We just didn’t know where the baseline was for balanced stats.
For example, look at the early card concept for the Crimson Pact Moose when compared to the final version.
There is no doubt which is the flashier card. An efreet that does a whopping seven damage per hit is quite powerful indeed! And with an armor value of sixteen points, not only can the EF-78 version of the Moose dish out punishment, but it can take just as much in return.
Almost all the early versions of the efreets have heavily skewed damage and armor values like this. Combat felt exciting and dangerous when you were trading big numbers back and forth. But it was also incredibly unbalanced. Playtesting showed the combat effectiveness of efreets heavily favored larger units as they could one shot almost any unit smaller than it. And that was before upgrades and equipment which had little use as they were just overkill at that point.
Instead of making combat exciting, it felt cheap. Heavier units were almost unbeatable and made anything smaller than them obsolete as soon as they hit the board. You can see our answer to the problem back then was to simply jack up the armor values of every efreet but this too created its own problems. Nevermind all the damage counters on a heavily damaged Moose looked like a stack of poker chips, but was there really much difference when doubling a units armor from three to six if it still got killed by taking seven to the face?
High stat values ended up being extremely limiting when it came to card design and was a large hurdle in REDLINE game design. For a time we tried making damage dependent on dice rolling to add some variance for the sake of finding balance that way, but this ended up being even worse for an efreet that rolled 2d6 could do as little as two damage (frustrating) or twelve damage (OP) in a single attack. No bueno.
The end result was we had a combat seemed that looked and sounded good at first glance, but was a total failure in practice.
Lesson Learned: Bigger is not always best.
It wasn’t until we took a hard look at scaling everything down that combat finally felt balanced. Instead of giving every efreet stat values along a wide range of numbers we put caps on them. The EF-38 version of the Moose is still one of the most damaging efreets in the game, but has a more conservative damage output of four. Most efreets average between two and three.
While this may not seem as flashy as before and does limit all the wild values we can assign to efreets in design, it adds balance to the game by making combat more even for all units. A lighter efreet, with some luck, could engage an EF-38 Moose and emerge victorious every now and then currently where before it would have no chance in hell. Almost all efreets on average require two to three hits before being destroyed so survivability is higher. And though it takes some work, a player could still outfit their Moose to a damage level of seven, though it would require putting a lot of equipment cards in one risky basket if lost.
A big part of game design is moderation and in the beginning of combat design we were guilty of going too crazy with impressive stats. Big stats that broke the game and made combat dreadful instead of exciting and something you actually wanted to engage in.
Fail Your Way To Success
As you can see, the design of REDLINE was not all happy accidents and divine inspiration. Truthfully it was more like a collection of problems that had to be overcome in turn. The key to solving every one really comes down to the same thing, practice. Had the experience with the REDLINE mobile game never happened it’s likely Tactical Card Combat wouldn’t be here today as a fully completed and successfully funded card game. And what is playtesting itself if not a form of practice? Practice that helped us to expose some severe design flaws in the earliest versions of REDLINE that would have killed it had they survived to the final build.
Failure isn’t something to be avoided but rather an experience that should honestly be sought out. Nothing teaches quicker. And few forms of feedback are as honest.
REDLINE is better for its failures. And no doubt there will be plenty more forthcoming in the future of the game. We look forward to them.
Fail early. Fail often. Fail forward.