Slay the Spire adding more characters ‘almost certainly’

The roguelike card game Slay the Spire has marched into RPS and conducted a coup. Now a slug with a pocketwatch is forcing us all to write articles about how great it is. For example, I’ve just done an interview with the game’s creators, which you can read later. For now, let me sneak out this bit of info, while the slug isn’t looking: They plan to add new playable characters after the game’s full release. “We will almost certainly have more than three characters,” said Anthony Giovannetti of Mega Crit Games. OK, it’s no huge surprise, but at least you know they don’t plan to dust it off when it drops out of early access in the summer.

There’s currently two characters in the game – the Ironclad and the Silent - with a third under construction. When asked about adding more cards to the game, and the possible bloat that might add, Giovannetti told us there was a more elegant solution.

“We definitely don’t want to put too many cards into one colour...” he said. “So right now we have about 75 cards for the Ironclad. If we just bloated that out to 200 cards for the Ironclad, then you would have no ability to make any planning at all. And we think that would be a much worse experience.

“We are much more likely to make more characters and just give them all unique card pools, or do things that let you change your card pool around.

“There is a ‘sweet point’ number, and we’re either at it or very close to it for the Ironclad and the Silent. So we’re much more likely to make more characters. We will almost certainly have more than three characters, but we just want three characters initially, during early access.”

I spoke to him alongside Casey Yano, the other designer and artist of the game’s horrible mushroom rats and abstract murderthings, who says future plans also include some more inventive potions (although the examples he gives here are just off-the-cuff ideas for now).

“Potions are definitely getting a huge bump,” he said. “We could have a potion that’ll let you upgrade stuff, or transform stuff, or let you escape... I think currently the concept of what the potions do are very vanilla, so there’s a lot of leeway for that.”

“We also want to add a lot more events to the game,” added Giovannetti. “Especially ones that are kind of like the vampire event, where they’re very transformative to the play experience when you get them. That’s a good example of the kind of event we want more of...”

They also spoke about how the game was tested on expert Netrunner players, plus what happens at their design meetings. Don’t worry, we’ll put the full interview up soon. Lord knows, it’s what the slug wants.

Slay the Spire is on Steam now, and is planned to leave early access in the summertime, according to the game's roadmap.