Hello!

It’s Decay week! The week when scrolldiers celebrate the arrival of our fourth faction.

To celebrate, I trapped Måns and Jakob into a room and talked to them for ten minutes.

Here’s the resulting interview. Hope you enjoy it!

Owen – @bopogamel

Owen Hill (Chief Word Officer): It’s Decay week! But first, let’s have a quick rundown of the other three factions.

Jakob Porser (Lead Designer): OK. Energy is quite life heavy. It’s got a lot of toughness and heavy hitters. It’s effective at clearing the board quickly.

Måns Olson (Programmer and designer): Order is all about positioning. Placing units next to each other on the same board, controlling movements and using manipulation spells.

JP: Growth is about trying to create early dominance and building up from that. There are a lot of creatures that either grow over time or have strength in numbers. They’re very aggressive dudes.

OH: Nice job. Now let’s talk about the newest kids on the block: Decay. Why are they fun to play?

JP: I like the way you can gain by sacrificing your own units. Given the right circumstances, their deaths can make your board stronger. You have some sacrificial lambs. When your enemy attacks you with a full-blown attack, you can defend cunningly and come back more powerful.

MO: Decay is all about profiting from death.

OH: Can you give me some specific examples?

JP: The Illmire Witch Doctor is an interesting one. He’s a large unit with plenty of attack and health. When a human creature dies next to him, the unit turns into a Husk – one of our zombie-like creatures. It’s not a very strong unit, but they’re great to defend with, and they hardly cost anything.

MO: Then there’s the Totem of Suffering, which damages your opponent’s idols when your units die. By killing your units, your opponent slowly kills him- or herself.

JP: Ooo, the Harvester. His countdown only gets reduced when units die. He’s a big fellow, so by letting your small dudes go down, you can trigger a massive attack on your opponent.

OH: Do you think people will play mostly mono Decay decks, or maybe splash some of the more exotic units into multi-resource creations?

MO: We’re hoping for both. I think Decay has synergies that will combine with the other factions. There are no Memorials into, or out of, Decay. However, there are other Decay scrolls that increase resources. The on-death effects also work nicely in most decks.

JP: There are also some obvious synergies, such as the new Gravelock, providing synergy with Energy. But it also has links with Growth’s rats, for example. It’s going to be very interesting to see how it all works out.

OH: Have you guys cooked up any saucy decks during testing?

MO: I’ve got a “Necromantician” deck. You take all the low cost units, and all the units that have effects that trigger when they die. Next, put those together with the cheap Order units; one of the cheap Decay units gives you Order. Then run the Necrogeddon scroll that sacrifices all your units and gives you Husks that immediately attack. Combine it with Totem of Suffering to make that sacrifice damage idols.

OH: Nice! Got anything like that, Jakob? Eh?

JP: I don’t have anything quite as technical, but I love using poison buffed by Miasma Well. I just love poisoning things. There’s something about damage over time effects that really speak to me.

OH: Decay has come come to the game post-beta. How hard was it to test before release?

JP: Having the test servers and getting great feedback from the community helps a lot. We get the chance to test out everything in different situations which we can’t do while designing the game.

MO: It’s a learning process. The complexity of testing goes up as we see more combinations. But our methods and use of the test server get better over time.

OH: If you were a Decay unit, which unit would you be?

JP: Ummm.

MO: I’m the Mire Shambler.

OH: Why?

MO: …because his legs are very useful for walking about the Mires?

OH: And so are yours?

MO: Why, thank you. I also love the ability of the scroll.

JP: Umm… I can be any unit?

OH: Yes. You’re probably… a husk.

MO: I think you’d be puppet soldier.

JP: Oh, I don’t know. Make something up, Owen.

OH: No, I’m not making it up, and that’s going in, you lazy, lazy man.

JP: I would be…

MO: How about the Slayer unit?

JP: Because everything I touch dies? I don’t know…

MO: The Rot Eater? No, you’d be the Viscera Sage.

OH: You could be one of the brain lice…

MO: Or Infectious Blight…

OH: You remind me a bit of Draining Mist. You want to be Draining Mist?

MO: How about Oblivion Seeker, old man?

OH: God, Mattis and Måns handled this question without too many issues.

MO: Who did Mattis choose?

OH: The Mire Shambler.

MO: No! That’s what I am.

JP: OK, I’m going to be the Mire Shambler as well.

OH: OK, why?

JP: No. I’m not the Mire Shambler. Actually, I can imagine being the Harvester. He’s kind-of lazy, and doesn’t want to really pitch in and help out, but sometimes he gets forced to by circumstance.

OH: This is over.