One of the things I wanted to accomplish with We Slay Monsters was make the mechanics easy to understand. One way to accomplish this is to expose enough information in the UI to allow the player to comprehend what’s going on, but at the same time, not overwhelm them with too much information. It’s a tricky balance.

Combat in We Slay Monsters is almost 100% deterministic. Instead of an attack doing some random amount of damage, there is a simple formula that determines how much damage a particular attack will do. As a reminder, WSM is a card-based game. Let’s look at a particular card as an example:

This is the Four of Bowling Balls (Bowling Balls are a “suit”, like hearts or spades in a regular playing card deck). Right clicking on the card in the game reveals further information about the card:

The card does physical damage, which means it is strength based. So, the formula for damage is simple:

4 (card face value) + strength = base damage

If the character had 3 strength, the card would do a base damage of 4. Base damage is then potentially modified by two factors. First, the monster’s defense value is subtracted. Then, a monster might have a vulnerability or resistance to particular forms of attack. Let’s look at our friend the Ghoul Snail:

He has a defense value of 1, and is resistant to physical attacks, which reduces their effect by 25% (hard shell and all). So, played on the Ghoul Snail, our Four of Bowling Balls card would do:

4 (base) + 3 (strength) = 7 - 1 (defense) - 2 (25% rounded) = 4 damage.

The only random element is that every player has a chance to do a critical attack (based on luck), which does an extra 50% damage.

In the current version of the game (Update 17), when you select a card, it gives you a preview of how much damage it would do to a particular monster:

But the player really needs more information to make an informed decision. Should I attack the Ghoul Snail for 7 points? Or would that same attack be better used on that Zombie Chicken that’s coming from behind?

With Update 18 “Elusive Elf”, I have added a new damage display:

At the bottom of the screen, the player is shown the base damage for any attack, in this case, eight damage for the Three of Lightning card. You can see how much damage this would do to either the Ghoul Snail or the Dancing Goat. If an attack would kill a monster, that would be indicated with a skull rather than the damage display:

Let’s take a closer look at the new damage display:

It’s a lot of information to pack into a very small display, but it gives the player what they need in order to make a strategic decision about how they play the cards they are dealt. Before this change, all of this information was available, it was just hidden several clicks away.

These changes were the result of feedback from players of our early access release, which is available on itch.io and Desura. As we continue our development, I hope to add more UI improvements like this to help make the game as easy to understand as possible.