Overview

In this post, I want to gather together some miscellaneous thoughts I've had about the design vision of the game and the long-term view about what I want to do moving forward. Writing my thoughts out not only helps me solidify my reasoning behind making certain decisions, but also provides an outlet for longer-form discussion than Discord or Twitter can reasonably facilitate.

Expect to see posts like these every other month or so as I gather more playtest data and set things in stone for the hypothetical full public release, which should include a full set of six characters and their starter decks.

Why no stack?

As an achievement of game design, I personally adore the stack and what it brings to Magic. I also firmly do not think it has any place in Raze as it stands.

There are a few reasons for it. The first—and ultimately the most deciding one—is that it is a fuckton of work to implement. Yes, you can learn to play Magic without learning about the nitty-gritty behind mechanics like priority. But good luck writing Magic without having to create all the additional rules infrastructure that comes with it. I am nothing if not comically overambitious, but I think this might end up a job best left to the professionals, i.e. people who work in team sizes bigger than one.

The second reason is that I don't think the stack's conception of time and commitment fits with a fighting game. When you make a move in a fighting game, you're forced to ride it out until its recovery is over, meaning you can never do two things at once. On the other hand, the stack is there specifically so you can do things like that!

Reactable attacks are also an exception, not a rule. Even setting aside things like instant overheads and left-right setups, most normals come out too fast for you to react to their startup. (If you could, doing things like reversing out of every frametrap would be trivial.) Most counterplay is a pre-emptive gamble in ways that aren't modelled well by the stack. You can't just wait for your opponent to cast a spell and then throw out the counter, you have to guess on a throw reset and mash.

Rewriting responses

This last point is something I want to hammer home, because it's been at the forefront of my latest round of redesigns for the cardpool. Lately I've been thinking about how plays can be telegraphed in this system, as it's lacking many of the forms of indirect information I've seen in other games. Magic has the infamous two untapped Islands as the cue for a counterspell. eXceed uses ranges to limit what strikes make sense to play. BattleCON takes this to the logical extreme as a perfect information game.

Raze doesn't really have any of these things. Some individual plays might give you a hint as to what your opponent's doing—Conditioning naming strike, for example—but you're otherwise basically in the dark about what your opponent's up to. There's never really the sense that you're playing around stuff, more just taking shots in the dark and hoping they pay off. I'm not totally against this when modelling some situations, like a nasty mixup on oki, but I also don't think it should make up the bulk of interactions.

My current approach to this issue sprung from a couple of sources. The first one was a discussion about how to overhaul the buffer system, which both felt extraneous and led to some occasional engine explosions. In my last playtest I entirely skipped teaching the buffer mechanic, and the game did not feel any less complete for it.

Gwen's suggestion was to replace the current buffer mechanic with something more akin to Roman Cancel, letting you take an additional action before passing priority. Combined with my meter revamp, I figured this would be a great chance to give players even more ways to engage with meter beyond just supers. It also made me take a step back and think about how breaking the standard one action-pass system of priority could influence the game.

What I came up with was chainblocking. For those of you not familiar with YGO, many negates are templated such that they only negate if they're the very next link on the chain. Certain decks can chainblock these cards by activating the effect they want to resolve, then immediately triggering another effect, leaving no window for the negate to occur.

Now, negates don't really work in Raze for the same reasons the stack doesn't work. Caring about the last card played, though? That seemed like the perfect way to encourage the kinds of mindgames you get up to in fighters, with players trying to condition each other to respond in certain ways. A card like Stagger Pressure, for example, make a hell of a lot more sense if you give it an effect that depends on your opponent not taking actions. It models the concept of respecting your opponent in this really beautiful way that dovetails with Raze's defining back-and-forth.

This is probably going to be the biggest new gimmick you see thrown around in the cardpool, but there are also a couple of other miscellaneous changes I'm including with the latest update. For one, I'm making Charlie's scorch counters into a universal chip mechanic, which gives me another lever I can use to tweak the efficacy of strikes and damage output across the board. As for Charlie's new passive...

Well, who can say. Excited to get the next version of the game out soon!