Sirlin designed video games such as Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, and Kongai. He's designed tabletop games such as Yomi, Puzzle Strike, Pandante, and Flash Duel. He discusses the craft of game design with his lead playtester.
Yomi was, as far as I know, the first “fighting card game.” It was pretty popular, had a ton of tournaments, online versions on Steam and iOS. Now, 15 years later, I have a sequel: Yomi 2. Yomi 2 is not “a new edition” but rather an entirely new game. Now there are high and low attacks, high and low blocks, projectiles, bursts, and many other changes. Despite all those new things, the game is…
I have a YouTube channel about design. Game design mostly, but sometimes design topics in general. It also includes a new video podcast series. Please do the usual “likes and subscribes” if you like my content. Sirlin's YouTube
For the last four and a half years, I've been working on a sequel to Yomi. Yomi was "a fighting game in card form" that I made before making the actual fighting game Fantasy Strike. Now, Yomi 2 is a re-imagining of that fighting-card-game concept. I've also been working on a high production values, rules enforced digital version of Yomi 2. It's very expensive to develop, and I've really gone far…
Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. The fourth of these bank decks is Puzzle Pets. The creatures are the star of the show in Puzzle Pets. In Puzzle Strike 2, creatures give you access to ongoing effects, meaning they stay on the table indefinitely (giving you a bonus) until they are destroyed. Most decks have a few…
Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. The third of these bank decks is Steam Crank. Steam Crank introduces a new mechanic: the chain combo. Many cards have a strip at the bottom with a “chain” ability. The chain ability happens if the card you played immediately before it that turn is the same color. For example, if…
Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. Each character has three cards and you start with those in your deck. Each character has different strengths, so they push you in different directions when building the rest of your deck. To give you a taste of these characters, here’s just one card from each of them. Quince,…
Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. The second of these bank decks is Dinosize. Dinosize is home to big effects. Ridiculously big effects. Let’s start off with a BANG: Holy moley! A quadruple crash is absurdly powerful. The cost looks prohibitive though. You only get 3 actions per turn by default, though some cards…
Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. The first of these bank decks is Haunted House. Discarding cards is generally bad to do, but Haunted House turns that on its head. It’s full of cards that do things when you discard them, like these: All four of these cards are reasonably powerful on their own, without any special…
Puzzle Strike 2’s base set comes with 10 characters to choose from. Each character has three cards and you start with those in your deck. Each character has different strengths, so they push you in different directions when building the rest of your deck. To give you a taste of these characters, here’s just one card from each of them. Grave, Wind Warrior We’ll start with a “small” effect. This is…
The second community bank deck in Puzzle Strike 2 is Birthday Bash (the first is Grand Melee). Presents The main mechanic of this deck is opening birthday presents. It gets pretty crazy, but let’s start with the basics. Here are some cards that give “presents”: As you can see from the help text at the bottom of the cards, getting a present means you draw a card and play it for free. The first…
Puzzle Strike 2’s base set includes 10 characters and two different community banks decks. Each bank deck changes the feel of the game. Those decks are Grand Melee and Birthday Bash: In this article, I’ll explain the thinking behind the Grand Melee deck. Think of Birthday Bash as a steak with a distinctive steak sauce, while Grand Melee doesn’t need the sauce; it allows the natural flavor of the…
I wrote an article about the design of Puzzle Strike 2, which you can find here . I’ll post several more articles about the game’s design, which will all appear on this handy index page that’s just for Puzzle Strike 2. Puzzle Strike 2’s Kickstarter page is here . Join in!
The Fantasy Strike fighting game is now free to play. I’ll explain why this is a landmark for the genre. First, this is something we’ve been working on for years. The original vision of the game was always to capture the essence of the genre along with all its strategic depth and difficulty, but to make it radically easier to understand and control than most of the rest of genre. And then really…
For the last few years, I’ve thought about my tabletop games Puzzle Strike and Yomi. I have not been thinking about new editions of those games, but rather entirely new games that are inspired by those games. I’ve done a whole lot of work on that, but I really need your help at this point. The status right now is that my patrons on Patreon have access to all of the new Puzzle Strike-inspired…
Edit: It turns out that a once-in-hundred-years pandemic rocked the world so hard, and Trump fumbled it so badly, that that one factor lead to Biden winning by the narrowest of margins. If just 42,000 people in key states had voted the other way, Biden would have lost. But he didn’t. So the most garbage candidate on the democratic side is now the president of the United States. —- Original post:…
I’m crowdfunding several projects all at once right now and asking for your help. Join Now Here are things I’d like to do: Add more characters and features to Fantasy Strike Create new tabletop games, and possibly more content for Codex Create digital versions of those tabletop games with good production values. I’ve already started on these things, but finishing them is another matter. It costs…
Fantasy Strike is an interesting case study in game balance for an asymmetric game. I did the entire balancing process without any data at all, and now, after it’s all done, we have the data. Meaning, we were collecting data, I just didn’t have a way to actually look at it until now, after the whole balancing process is basically complete. Relying on Experts I find it much easier to balance a…
Evo is considering new rules for which controllers are allowed in their tournaments. Their call for feedback on rules is here . Their actual rule document is here . In my opinion, Hit Box controllers should be banned. I find discussions of this topic often muddled by bad arguments which makes it difficult to get to the substantive part. I will explain the forces at work. The Baseline To be clear,…
I’ve been working on things behind the scenes for quite some time, as has our team behind Fantasy Strike. Starting in October, I’ll begin showing this content to our patrons at patreon.com/sirlin . I plan to show something new about every two weeks for at least the next year . There’s that much in store. It’s really a lot of stuff and it will take a long time to roll all of it out, so come along…
Fantasy Strike is available now on Nintendo Switch , PlayStation 4 , and Steam (Windows / Mac / Linux). There are several notable features and innovative things about the game, so I’ll summarize them here. Innovation can come in many different flavors. Sometimes it’s pushing forward design in a new way, or usability, or technology, or even in introducing features or ways of doing things from one…
SPOILERS (This post is full of lots of spoilers for Game of Thrones.) The internet seems generally disappointed with the final season of Game of Thrones. Yeah, me too, and it’s all about the writing. I’ll get right to the point of what I think went wrong: Daenerys, the Night King, and Arya. The short version: 1) Daenerys had an 8 year arc, a great one actually, but one misstep ruined it. It was so…
Edit: It turns out that the last four episodes disappointed pretty much everyone. My predictions below relied on the premise that good writing would basically force some events to happen, and I was thrown by a loop by the, well, not good writing. I leave this prediction post up for reference anyway —- I’m going to give my predictions for how Game of Thrones ends up. These predictions are a team…
Almost two and a half years ago, Soren Johnson did a long, in-depth interview with me and he just released the second part of it (both parts linked below). Part 2 covers the beginnings of Fantasy Strike, Yomi strategy including what to do on the first turn, a little about Pandante’s updated version, Puzzle Strike’s emphasis on player interaction, Puzzle Strike and Codex’s solution to free-for-all…
We just put a new feature in Fantasy Strike that’s notable because it’s never been done before. There are now visual effects on every hit that show if you recover first, or if your opponent does. The bigger the magnitude of the effects, the longer you (or your opponent) has to act before the other player. The concept of who recovers first after a move hits or is blocked is called “frame advantage”…
Almost two and a half years ago, Soren Johnson did a long, in-depth interview with me and he just released the first part of it. It covers most of my career, including work on Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter, almost Street Fighter 4, Yomi, Codex, and FantasyStrike. We talk a lot about game design too, such as the difference between a player's perspective and a designer's, as well as what…
Shoryuken.com asked me about loot boxes and published this article . For anyone wanting more context, here is the complete set of questions they had about loot boxes in Fantasy Strike and beyond, and the answers I provided: SRK Questions Any idea when this feature will be implemented? What can players expect to find? Costumes and cosmetics, right? Will there be more rare ones than others? Will…
I was thinking about how we'll handle cross-platform play in Fantasy Strike. The plan is that you'll add a friend to your in-game friends list, even if they are on another platform, then you can click on them there to directly challenge them. I was looking into how Street Fighter 5 handles your in-game friends list. They went a different way with it. Below is a log of my experience. Sirlin: I'd…
Fantasy Strike is our new fighting game. We've just announced it and begun crowdfunding for it on Patreon. This podcast explains what Fantasy Strike is all about. We cover the high concept about making a fighting game more accessible from top to bottom than anything else we've seen, the specific game mechanics we chose to accomplish that, and the resulting dynamics of how it plays. Because it's…
My team and I have been working on Fantasy Strike for almost a year and half now. It's a fighting game featuring the same characters as my Yomi card game and it's unusually easy to play. Here's a diagram of the simple controls: It started out as an experiment to see if we stripped away massive amounts of stuff from the genre, would it still be fun? Even in its early prototype state, it was.…
Kickstarters projects are notoriously late. I give advice on how to ship your Kickstarter project on time. I've shipped 5 out of 5 Kickstarters on time, so it's time to share the best practices of how you can do that too. Learn about how complete your board game should be before you take it to Kickstarter, about the "magic word," and about shipping shipping shipping! While most of the episode is…
Thank you to all our patrons for supporting the Fantasy Strike fighting game. Although we're not ready to show the game publicly yet, we give our $25+ patrons new builds every month, the latest one is here . We rely on your support, and we'll need even more of it to finish the game. If a really accessible, easy-to-play fighting game that's still tournament-quality appeals to you, please support us…
Overwatch team: great job and all. If you want to listen to an hour of me saying great job, here's a podcast about that. You should probably re-think the current system of gaining/losing rank points though. Specifically, adjusting the ranking based on individual performance rather than just win/loss is pretty dangerous. Elo for Team Games Elo is a standard ranking system. You gain points for…
We discuss Overwatch, Blizzard's first-person shooter. It far exceeded our expectations and we attempt to explain how it manages to do that. This isn't a "review," but rather us analyzing the design decisions involved, trying to define the secret sauce of Overwatch's success. Hosts: David Sirlin and Matt "Aphotix" DeMasi
Dear Jeff Kaplan and the Overwatch team, I think your game is great and it's not lightly that I rate it a 10 out of 10. Respectfully though, I think you're a bit lost in the woods on how the competitive mode should work. That's understandable because it's a complicated problem that's nearly unsolvable given your constraints. While this post by Kaplan is excellent about sharing thoughts from the…
Announcement! The fourth Fantasy Strike Expo will take place June 3rd-5th 2016 near the San Francisco airport. It's a tournament series and casual play event showcasing the Fantasy Strike video game and tabletop games. Come compete, watch, and make new friends with other Fantasy Strikers. Last year's event was really fun so don't miss out. Registration link: www.fantasystrike.com/fsx Location:…
We discuss the design of Heroes of the Storm. It's a bold entry in the MOBA genre and impresses us greatly. We cover the many things is does differently than the rest of the genre that we view as improvements. No last hits, no deny, shared XP, talent system, 20 minute game length, map variety, and more. Sirlin then complains about a couple annoying things about controlling your character.
While the mystic historians of the purple faction look to the past, another part of the Vortoss culture is about looking to the future. The prospect of building newer and better technology drives engineers like Vir Garbarean, purple’s Future hero. Vir can see a little bit into the future by knowing the next card that you’ll draw. For just 1 gold, he can realize that future by putting the card in…
Through his temporal research, Max Geiger made contact with the Vortoss race and is now their emissary. Ever since he was a boy, Geiger loved fiddling with watches and other timepieces, so it was a natural field of study for him as he grew as a scientist. While the Vortoss race has become unstuck in time and is both in our future and our past, Geiger is in the here and now. He is the Present hero…
There’s a myth about an ancient race that had powerful magic as well as advanced technology beyond even our own, but then they disappeared from the realm. They are called the Vortoss. While some thought it was just a story, we now know that the story is true. The Vortoss culture is fixated on time, what it means, how it flows, and how we are at its mercy. They sought to harness time and bend it to…
Garus Rook, the stone golem, is a long-time friend of the lawyer Jefferson DeGrey. A VERY long-time friend, in fact, because both of them are unnaturally long-lived. They lived through an earlier history where a totalitarian government ruled, and they see the seeds of it growing again. This time around, DeGrey urged Rook to help unite the people by inspiring them through an Olympic-style…
Setsuki is a fast learner and she’s fast in general. She’s the hero of the Whitestar Order’s Ninjutsu spec: Her first ability reflects how nimble she is. She can jump out of the way of an attack unless the attacker is extra careful. Her middle ability can make up for her low stats. She’s fast enough to strike an enemy before it strikes her, letting her avoid taking damage. But it’s her max level…
Many of the strongest, most disciplined warriors of the realm have banded together to form the Whitestar Order, based at Morningstar and led by stone golem Garus Rook. Their training grounds are home to enlightened monks, mighty barbarians, and agile ninjas with their cute animal friends. Their strength comes from both their teamwork and skill in combat. The Whitestar Order holds a series of…
Garth Torken’s tinkering with anatomy led him to discover some disturbingly dark powers. He is now the Necromancy hero of the Blackhand Scourge. Torken’s experiments with human cadavers are where a lot of his skill comes from. Although he later moved on to raise the dead of other species, he’s most at home with an army of human skeletons. Here is his hero card: Without even spending a card, he can…
The Disease spec of the Blackhand Scourge faction belongs to Orpal Gloor. He’s surrounded by a creeping death, and even being near him makes most beings uneasy. The Shadow Plague in the Dreadlands is his invention. The power of Disease is to wear down your enemies. Battles against the Disease spec often involve fewer units than usual, because it’s hard to even keep things alive around the Plague…
North of the realm, a shadowy presence has festered and spread across the Dreadlands. The Blackhand Scourge proliferates plague and death wherever they go. They raise the bones of the dead to serve them. Their power has increased tenfold since their leader Vandy Anadrose—now known as The Queen of Demons—made a pact with nefarious, otherworldly beings who seem to serve her for the moment. These…
I have a free podcast series on game design, here . I also have a second podcast that's just for my Patreon supporters. I just wanted to mention the latest episode of that is up for patrons at the $10+ tier. (All previous episodes of the series are there too.) In this latest Raw Game Design episode, I discuss how we might use advanced AIs in the Fantasy Strike fighting game, if we had access to…
Sirus Quince is the Chief Magistrate of Flagstone. They say he speaks the truth and is loved by all. He’s a popular and successful politician, though all of his power is actually from lies and illusion. In his younger years, he was a lawyer who faced DeGrey in court. Now the court is in his pocket and he's taken the highest office in the land. Here is the Truth hero: Quince has a lot going on. He…
The Peace spec of the Flagstone Dominion is headed up by General Onimaru. Onimaru is a Sun Tzu-like figure—a master of military strategy. Overwhelming military might is the key to Peace, after all. Here’s General Onimaru’s hero card: Onimaru is one of the best heroes in combat. Even at level 1, he attacks as a 3/3 because of his frenzy ability. Once he reaches level 5, he can attack and STILL…
The Flagstone Dominion (blue) faction is part of the Codex Deluxe set. Flagstone is the realm’s capital city, and a paragon of morality, due process, and family values. It’s also a bit of a totalitarian dystopia, but let’s not get bogged down in the details. You might recognize Quince and Onimaru from my other games, but the Law hero, Bigby Hayes, is new in Codex. Bigby is an iron-fisted judge in…
River Montoya is the Finesse hero in Codex. She sees sword fighting as an elaborate dance. She loves the performing arts such as dancing, singing, and acting, and considers her fencing yet another kind of dramatic performance. Here is her hero card: When she reaches level 3, she can clear out any single early game defender from the patrol zone. That’s especially handy against specs that want to…