When We Made… Wildfrost

Developers Will Lewis and Gaz tell card game aficionado Vince Pavey about their roguelike Wildfrost before it kills them in one turn and makes them start over with a new deck.

Wildfrost is an often adorable but challenging roguelike that involves building unique decks of cards and recruiting companions to help you fight back against an eternal winter. With each trip out into the cold tundra to face off against boss monsters, you also improve and restore the town of Snowdwell.

When described like that, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the developers had the entire game mapped out when they started development, but in truth the creative process was more experimental and creative than that. In fact, Wildfrost’s creators weren’t locked into the idea of creating a card game or even a roguelike at all.

“The very first iteration of Wildfrost did not work out too well at all! We had been creating various prototypes, experimenting with different mechanics and genres, and had set aside Wildfrost for a few months. However, we kept returning to the idea of a dynamic counter system, where each action counts as a turn, and the player and enemy attack on a turn timer,” explains Wildfrost’s artist and co-designer, Gaz.

“A couple months later, Will restructured the first prototype to allow battles to occur side-by-side, and reintegrated a more polished counter system which felt more unique and satisfying to play. That’s when we both knew that we had to keep working on this game.”

“We had actually attempted to make Wildfrost into a physical card game for mechanics and testing reasons first. This helped us iron-out some of the counter system in our concepting stage,” adds Will Lewis, the game’s programmer and co-designer.

BUILDING A DECK-BUILDER

While Lewis and Gaz did look at the other giants of the deck-building space while designing, they also leaned on their knowledge and experience of the best action-roguelike video games for motivation as they worked, being sure to think about what they could swipe (ahem, borrow) and where they could go instead that had yet to be explored.

“Slay the Spire and Monster Train come to mind as games that inspired us, but surprisingly enough, I had never played a deck-building game before starting to work on Wildfrost. Both Will and I are big roguelike fans, so we always knew we wanted to make a game in this genre. For me, The Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain, Spelunky, and Will’s previous game, Caveblazers, all of which I’ve spent hundreds of hours in, were big inspirations,” says Gaz.

“I’d say Monster Train was a pretty big inspiration. The idea of placing companions on different rows, and building a ‘team’ rather than just a deck of item and ability cards came from Monster Train, I think,” adds Lewis. “In a lot of ways, Wildfrost ended up being much more like a traditional roguelike than a ‘normal’ deck builder – but I can’t really point to exactly which roguelikes inspired the game.”

Of course, the team also got a fair share of its artistic inspiration from the look and feel of the inhabitants and landscape of the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, which you may be familiar with if you’ve tuned into Cartoon Network at just about any point since it first aired Pendleton Ward and Frederator Studios’ most popular show back in April 2010.

“Adventure Time is my favourite animated show, so it was definitely also one of our influences during development,” continues Gaz. “I love the rich worldbuilding that can be accomplished in animated shows, cartoons and anime, and wanted to bring the same feeling of fantasy and otherworldliness to Wildfrost too! It’s a style I don’t see too often done in games these days, and I also felt it would help Wildfrost stand out in the genre.”

GOING ROGUE AGAIN

Despite also being a roguelike, Wildfrost was really quite a design departure for Lewis, who had previously worked on the action-packed Caveblazers. It required an entirely different thought process, and required much more iterating before it felt just right.

“In some ways, designing a card game is a lot simpler than designing an action game. Designing a new enemy for Wildfrost is as simple as writing a bit of text in the enemy’s text box, whereas in a platformer like Caveblazers, an enemy needs to have a whole host of interesting moves and abilities,” explains Lewis.

“In other ways, it’s a whole lot more complicated. Wildfrost is quite a unique game, and we didn’t really have much of a foundation to build on. It was a huge challenge designing how everything should interact, like how battles should be structured and sequenced and how everything should interact with things like the counter system.

“We went through years of iterations for all these things before we were finally happy with how the ‘base mechanics’ of the game worked. In contrast, when you’re designing a platformer, the foundation is already there – you already sort of know how the player is going to move around and interact with the world.”

This iteration even ultimately led to complete change in game engine, as the team felt it needed to give cards more tangibility, and react to attacks with more impact. “Interestingly, the early versions of Wildfrost were 2D and built in GameMaker Studio, which I was very familiar with having made Caveblazers in the same engine,” says Lewis. “We decided to make the jump to 3D and Unity because we wanted cards to be able to wobble around. The 3D wobble makes a huge difference to the game feel! Going back to the old 2D prototype now, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as nice to play. We did the art and animations in Clip Studio Paint.”

Away from the wobble, the card game itself needed to make sure its rules were straight-forward and easy to follow. This meant that base level design rules had to be established that all card interactions would abide by. “I would say the two major things are simplicity and consistency. Wildfrost has a lot of complicated interactions in its battles, each card you play can interact in hundreds of different ways depending on how and when you play it. So it was important to keep everything else around it as simple as possible. For example, some players have asked for a “skip turn button”. This is a ‘nice to have’ feature, but we realised it was something that would just clutter the UI, while not actually providing a meaningful addition,” explains Gaz.

“As for consistency, this is a very important aspect for a strategy game, and one that players wouldn’t normally notice unless it’s done wrong. For example, what counts as a “hit” in the game? When a card says “increase attack when hit” does hitting it with no damage still count? Do status effects like poison (called shroom in Wildfrost) still count? These are things we had to decide on and make sure that all cards had consistent terminology.”

ANOTHER MURDEROUS PENGUIN

Making sure that the player keeps hold of their ‘okay, just one more run…’ mentality when playing a roguelike is key, and a lot of work has gone into making sure that the player will rarely feel like they have seen everything to see, and basically never feel that so much has been lost that they won’t want to keep going.

“Wildfrost was very much designed to be difficult for players!” says Gaz, gleefully. “Keeping the player engaged came down to the game’s presentation, run length, and providing players with enough variety.

“The art, music and quick-pacing were designed to be light-hearted and slightly silly, to contrast with the difficulty, to show players that it’s really not that serious, and there’s always another adorable, murderous penguin to take on.

“Even if you get frustrated with a loss, it’s very easy to jump back in and feel like you’re making progress. Keeping the runs short was also very important. Losing due to a small mistake after two hours of gameplay would feel frustrating for players, but Wildfrost runs range between thirty mins to an hour, so losing doesn’t feel like the end of the world.

“Finally, making sure the variety of cards and their iterations are unique enough between each run. Variety is crucial for a good roguelike, as you’ll be replaying the same battles over and over again. Of course, it’s not perfect! Some players expressed their concern with the accessibility of the difficulty, and it’s something we are already actively working on for the game’s future updates.”

Wildfrost can be a brutal opponent for those just learning its systems, and its variable and sometimes rather punishing difficulty has proven to be something of a hurdle for the game and its players alike. That’s something that the developers behind Wildfrost are absolutely looking to change in the near future, and easing its players in is something they wish they had factored in from the start.

“If we were to start over, we’d create a smoother difficulty curve and have the game be more forgiving of mistakes early on, then ramp up to the difficulty we have right now,” explains Gaz. “There’s a lot to take into consideration for each game battle, and if players are expecting something similar to Slay the Spire, they’ll be presented with a much greater challenge early on. In hindsight, something like an ascension system other roguelikes have would most likely work well for this game too, and that’s something we want to add as a future update for the game.”

“When we launched, press reception was largely positive, but the initial launch reaction from players was quite mixed – it felt like the marmite of deck builders!” laughs Lewin. “Since then the reception has been overwhelmingly positive, even people who were initially frustrated but have since clicked with the game,” adds Gaz. “We’re currently doing our best to address accessibility, as it would be great to convert more gamers into card game fans!

“We won’t lie, it was quite hard seeing players react so negatively on launch, but we understand where the critiques were coming from and have used it as fuel to help make the game ever better, for even more players,” Gaz continues.

“Our goal from the very beginning was to create a fun experience for card game fans and casual gamers, but it’s a tough challenge to take on – balancing the barrier to entry whilst providing a real challenge to players familiar with the genre. Though it’s been great watching people really ‘get it’ and have a great time climbing towards their first win.”

MAKING SOMETHING AWESOME

So what advice does the pair have for those that are aspiring game developers, or perhaps even starting out on the design and iteration process themselves for the first time? Well, let yourselves fail, but make sure you’re not putting a huge amount of time into making a huge failure. “Make something small first, and leave your big project for later! This is something that I believe is true for almost any big project, and not just for game development,” says Gaz.

“It’s hard to accept, but your first few games probably won’t be great. Adventure Time’s Jake the Dog says that ‘sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something!’, and I absolutely agree with him. There’s no better way to learn than by doing, so … let your first few projects suck! Make them small so you don’t spend too much time on them and then learn from them. Before you know it, you’ll be making something awesome.”

After the upcoming accessibility updates to Wildfrost, the plan seems to be for the team to just get its latest work of art into the hands of as many people as possible. That means ports are coming, some of which involve new design challenges, and even, potentially, a revisit to that physical card game from near the very start of development.

“Ideally we’d put the game everywhere we can and give players the chance to check it out on their preferred platform,” explains Gaz. “Interestingly, the community has been asking for a mobile port in particular. We both agree, and think our game would be perfect for on-the-go gaming, but there are a lot of UI/UX problems that come with porting to such small devices. We hope to announce future plans fairly soon, though!”

“The community has been begging for a physical release, and we’ve had some interest from physical game specialists,” adds Lewis. “We’re also really excited to see if we can make this happen! Ideally we’d like to get a bigger content update done first so that collectors can feel like they have the most complete version of the game. We already have some ideas about what to include in the box, so watch this space!”