Slay the Spire 2 Announced – Using Godot | Hacker News Reader

Slay the Spire 2 Announced – Using Godot

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124 pointsericcholis30 comments

Nice to see godot getting more traction. I only just learned from discussion topics on steam that STS1 already runs on a free software engine/framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibGDX

I entirely misremembered their press release about them migrating away from unity for an upcoming game.

It's too bad they didn't stick with LibGDX, but not surprisingly the console situation makes that difficult:

https://libgdx.com/wiki/articles/console-support

I am actually surprised libGDX is still getting updates. I used it around 2015 for some game jams, but already the community activity was waning. Seems like development activity picked up post pandemic.

I’ll buy on day one, despite this sort of game tending to be terrible at release, and the first game being an impossible act to follow.

The creators of Slay the Spire have talked about how they gathered statistics on player runs and used that to balance the game. Does anyone know other games that have done this? (Especially single player games.)

It's probably not as rigorous as what you're thinking of but the devs of DCSS have cited online win rates of certain combinations as the impetus for balance changes before.

https://crawl.develz.org

Similar in concept, the designers of subnautica talked about mapping player feedback within the game world and using that to make changes: https://youtu.be/fkjY_R7zQsM Unfortunately I don't have a timestamp because I watched this a long time ago.

I believe that’s very common. I worked at a larger casual game studio and we had Google analytics at the time in the game client. You could easily see where people got stuck based on those and theyd often inform what we did

Evan Debenham, creator of Shattered Pixel Dungeon [1], gave a talk about how he makes balance and other changes to the game based on analytics gathered from the game’s players [2]. This is used to determine the relative strength of different aspects of the game by seeing how a player’s engagement with a particular aspect correlates with win rate.

This, of course, needs to be checked by community feedback on changes to the game because perfect balance doesn’t always equal fun!

[1] https://shatteredpixel.com/

[2] https://youtu.be/NMWQIdfCgQg

> perfect balance doesn’t always equal fun

The Fireball spell in D&D is a third-level spell, which means a spellcaster can get access to it at level 5. Compared to other third-level spells, and the power curve as a whole, fireball is overpowered since it does a large amount of damage over a large area, but it exists in the space it does because it's such an iconic and evocative spell/ability that feels so fun to use when it really hits that the designers want people to take it and use it.

That is to say, the spell is so fun to use (which I can confirm) that it's worth being unbalanced if it means more players get to experience it.

Spying on users without explicit consent is sadly extremely common these days in all types of software.

Achievements were just the earliest iteration in games.

When working at https://curvefever.pro we tracked a lot of stats like win rate with specific weapons, hit rate, usage rate, etc.

If one specific weapon or weapon combo became too popular with a too high win-rate, it usually got nerfed or the others were buffed.

You can see all the changelogs in the game.

Sometimes the changes were very simple and minor % buffs/debuffs: https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.snag.gy/etLjaJ.jpg

Sometimes the ability was changed to make it harder or easier to use, or to remove some OP side-effects (e.g. shooting laser would slow you down too much, which in this game it's also an advantage, as you can brake and avoid collision using the laser).

I don't know how they can improve the game. Better art and music, but mechanically its already as close to perfect as you can get. I don't think a better balanced and mechanically rich deck builder exists.

I would disagree that it is balanced.

I stopped playing it long ago because it is just too random. They added too much stuff which is often a problem in rouguelites.

There is a ton of better balanced deck builders out there. Personal opinion but monster train is much better balanced.

It may be pretty random but the top players are able to amass winstreaks on A20 and have a lot of decks go infinite. Monster train may be a more fun casual game but the really serious players figured it out and abandoned it rather quickly for being too easy.

Glad to see Godot steadily gaining share in the indie game development space!

I wonder if Godot would help making the mobile ports easier. It took them several years to release an iOS version and a few more for android.

Probably. The first game ran on libGDX which had a checkered history of cross platform capabilities. Also I don’t think there’s much active development on it.

I absolutely adored the first game so I'm highly interested in this

There is also a big, free, fan expansion pack with its own Steam page called Downfall.

2025 early access

Balatro has definitely given Slay the Spire a lot of press, it's nice how they've gotten credit for their influence on that game

im assuming this is satire?

Why should it be satire? There's certainly more than a passing resemblance in the gameplay loop and general UI sensibilities between the two.

The idea that Balatro gave Slay the Spire press would be like saying that the release of Halo 1 really gave Doom a lot of press.

Slay the Spire invented the entire genre.

Slay the spire was not the first ever deck building rogue like. It was maybe the first one that hit the recent zeitgeist and it was one of the first to be widely streamed on twitch.

Doom was not the first ever first person shooter, but nobody called the genre "Wolfenstein clones" after Doom came out. Dark Souls wasn't the first punishing action RPG with limited save/load functionality, but nobody calls them "King's Field-likes"

There's something to be said for genre-codifying releases, even if they didn't straight up invent the genre.

Black Sabbath wasn't the first ever Metal band.

There's something to be said for genre-codifying releases, even if they didn't straight up invent the genre.

The issue is that the GP of your reply used the words "Slay the Spire invented the entire genre" which is simply not true. If they said "Slay the Spire popularized the genre" there wouldn't be a problem.

I think we as a society have this problem in general: giving too much credit to famous people/things and burying/diminishing that which influenced those people/their creators. Doubly relevant in this case because this entire discussion thread started with someone not properly giving credit to StS for influencing Balatro.

Slay the Spire is pretty clearly influenced by Dream Quest [1], a rather obscure game which does not even have its own website, just a fandom wiki page.

Edit: here's a fun Reddit post where a Dream Quest fan talks about the release of Slay the Spire [2].

[1] https://dream-quest.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Quest_Wiki

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamQuestIOS/comments/81snvy/slay_...

You phrased it like a particularly difficult Winograd schema sentence.

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