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Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate

Created by Greater Than Games

The next expansion of the award winning settler destruction game, Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate brings the fight to the Invaders with new spirits, mechanics, and more.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Spirit Reveal: Dances Up Earthquakes
over 1 year ago – Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 07:39:17 AM

Hello to all 9234 of you! We celebrate every morning with the number of you who keep wanting to back our campaign. Really, we can’t thank you enough. Anyone who’s ever felt the need to move and shake from joy will understand this spirit. R. Eric Reuss and Nick Reale tell us all about the story, design, and development of Dances Up Earthquakes! Of course, there is also a bonus card reveal at the end. Here are Eric and Nick with more!

Story

Dances Up Earthquakes is a Spirit of rhythm, inexorable crescendo, and the earthquake - a sudden unleashing of ground-shaking energy. It is patient, but nearly always in motion; it exults in movement, movement grounded in the earth, but so powerful that eventually the earth itself also moves to the dance, becomes a dancer partnered with Dances Up Earthquakes.


The earth is hardly the only thing it dances with: it will dance with the swaying trees, with the pounding ebb and flow of the surf, with the flickering flames of a wildfire, with humans who shuffle and stomp leap to the beat of drums and hands. It may leap atop a cliff's edge as gulls cry overhead, or pound across sand dunes under starlight. But the living earth and stone beneath seem to be the partner it circles back to, time and again.

It is rarely not dancing.

The Dahan observed long ago that where it went, earthquakes tended to follow - but that if it was dancing with things upon the earth that its devastation rarely touched the area. (It would be a poor dancer that harmed its partner or bowled them over, and Dances Up Earthquakes does not dance poorly.) So if it approaches one of their villages it is made welcome; if it is observed nearby then fires are lit and a dance started in hopes of attracting it - and if that does not work, preparations are made equally swiftly for the quake which will quite likely follow.

Dancing with it is exhilarating, wild, and exhausting; a physical meditation of motion where nature is experienced-but-not-contemplated as movement drives out conscious thought. Its presence may allow humans dancing with it to surpass their usual limits of endurance and grace, though even so, no flesh-and-blood being can hope to match it for sheer indefatigability.

It does not (or will not) command others to the dance, only inspire them. It has tried to dance with the Invaders, multiple times, and has found that as more of them gather together, the less they heed the call to motion. After being fired upon by guns as it approached an Invader City, it has decided that they no longer belong in the dance here.

It has a much more nuanced view of what may be meant by "dancing" than many Spirits (or Dahan) might realize. Even though most of its dancing is the direct, individual, physical sort, it sees greater dances in all aspects of life. There's a story among the Dahan about a time it was found standing perfectly still, limbs outstretched, speaking, and making a dance of its words and its stillness, with the same sense of timing and grace and rhythm and crescendo that it usually has for the physical. The story may or may not have actually happened, but it rings true to the Spirit’s nature.

Design

Dances Up Earthquakes was a later Jagged Earth design - by that point we didn’t really need more designs, but sometimes I’d be in a headspace where doing initial-design work let my brain take a break and recharge. And that timing was a good thing, because this Spirit’s core mechanical conceit needed loads of iteration: it never made it into Jagged Earth testing at all.

That initial mechanical conceit was the idea of Impending power cards.

Earthquakes have massive, incredible power, which builds up slowly over time and is released in an instant. Dancing involves deliberate movement/stillness, very often with considerations of timing or coordination (dancing with others; dancing to music; internal rhythms; orderings of motion determined by choreography, tradition, or the instinct of the moment).

Time, timing, crescendos, building power, sudden release.

Instead of playing a Power Card normally, Dances Up Earthquakes can set it aside (optionally putting some of its Energy on it) to dance it into happening on a later turn. Every turn, each such Impending card accumulates Energy from the supply - and all Impending cards which have Energy meeting their cost are automatically played.

So it might have only one or two Power Cards in play for this turn, but also have accumulated three or four or more Impending Power Cards off to the side that it’s in the middle of dancing up power for, which come into play in future turns. And if it has enough cards in play on a single turn, it can make a really big earthquake.

(This mechanic also means that Dances Up Earthquakes can play Majors of arbitrarily high cost without any Energy, it’ll just have to wait a long time for them to take effect.)

A lot of the early iteration was about “can this even work at all?”, followed by “...and can it be fun?” / “...and how does it impact other considerations in the design?”

Before talking more about some of those initial factors, let’s look at its panel for context:



(This panel references a new icon:

This icon is for Quake tokens, a Spirit-specific token. The dev team came up with these to solve some mechanical issues while simultaneously supporting the Spirit’s main theme, at which they work beautifully - they represent that same “build up potential then unleash it” dynamic as the Impending mechanic, but in a board-focused way rather than a Power Card-focused way. I’ll let the devs talk about the mechanical problem that the tokens solved.) 

Low threshold, High thresholds: One thing that became clear early on was that the Spirit wanted some low, easy-to-hit innate thresholds (for turns where most of its plays were being used to make cards Impending) and some high, hard-to-hit thresholds (to reward timing everything well to a coordinated crescendo-turn), ideally with the lower thresholds helping stall and survive until the big thresholds could be hit could go off. Having really useful middling thresholds encouraged players to mostly ignore the Impending mechanic and just play it like any other Spirit.

The two innates serve these two purposes, and the devs have crafted them so there’s this really lovely dynamic for how the first (Land Creaks With Tension) flows into the second (Earth Shudders, Buildings Fall), both in theme and in multiple mechanical ways: Land Creaks checks Impending cards, leading to Earth Shudders checking cards-in-play; Land Creaks adds Quake tokens, that are used by Earth Shudders; and Land Creaks provides Defend, to stall until Earth Shudders can go off. 

Impending Energy: Another early design question was “how much Energy per turn should get put onto Impending cards, and how strong is this ability?” My first stabs were informed by thought-experiments around concrete examples: I’d specify Effect X and Effect Y, with Y worth 1 or 2 or 3 more Energy more than X, then ask myself (and others), “generally speaking, would you rather have X now or Y next turn? How about if Y was in 2 turns?” This methodology isn’t perfect - humans have a cognitive bias to prefer rewards now over better rewards in the future - but it got me in the ballpark, indicating that +1 Energy/turn was roughly balanced but added little strength, +2 Energy/turn was roughly balanced and added notable strength, and +3/turn was almost certainly too much but might be needed to make Impending cards worthwhile towards endgame (when the value of “do stuff in the future” starts falling off precipitously).


I experimented with both +1 and +2; either seemed plausible, but the latter felt more awesome and better incentivized Impending cards, so I went with that as a starting-point, trusting the playtesters to figure out if it was too strong (which it was) and, if so, the devs to fix it (which they did). You start at +1/turn - but the Spirit now also gets other benefits from having Impending cards, so the value/awesomeness of doing so is higher than my design testing for +1/turn indicated. And you can get to +2/turn as a Presence track reward, which helps with that future-value falloff towards endgame.

Dancing: As discussed above, some very deep fundamentals of this Spirit’s design were informed by thematic truths about both Earthquakes and Dancing. However, it’s also good to try and convey themes closer to the surface, in a more direct/obvious/representational way. “Earthquakes” was the easy part here: damage, perhaps done over a wide area, perhaps to buildings only. “Dancing” is trickier: there are a limited number of ways to represent that in-game. Unsurprisingly, they nearly all involve piece movement.

The two you can see here are the first space on each Presence track: easy access to both “Move your Presence 1” and “Gather 1 Dahan”. The first has always been a part of the design; the Spirit dances across the land. (Not in a singular spatially-limited form, though - it’s not an Incarna Spirit.) I can’t honestly remember if the second was or not - I know its relationship with the Dahan was originally the focus of one of its Innate Powers, but there have been so many iterations I forget exactly what happened when.

4 of its 6 Unique Powers also involve Gathering or Pushing in some way - in two cases as the card’s only effect, in two cases as an addition to some other effect. (One of them lets you Push Quake tokens, which can be important when you’ve wiped out everything in a Quake-riddled land.)

Some of this was part of the initial design; other parts of it came mid-development when tester feedback indicated that ‘dances’ wasn’t coming across strongly enough, whereupon the dev team looped me in and we figured out options.

Timing Adjustment: Growth 3 lets you add or remove 1 Energy from up to two Impending cards, which gives you some ability to adjust timing on the fly. From the earliest days of the Spirit’s design, it was deeply clear that such a thing might be needed, and deeply unclear how much it was needed - if you give too much ability to adjust timing, it undercuts the entire timing game, but if you don’t give any (it turns out), it can be frustrating.

This may be a good place to mention that while the Spirit is Very High complexity, at lower Difficulties the timing game is somewhat forgiving: you can play a bunch of stuff and then figure out how to use it when it comes into play. Even at higher difficulties there’s some of this dynamic: it’s quite rare that you’ll know exactly how you’ll use a Power 4 turns down the road, but it’ll be more worthwhile to set up combos between Powers coming out together on a single turn, and to think about the overall timing of big turns vs down turns. (Plus it’s a trickier balance between short-term survival and long-term impact.) Its Complexity rating is primarily because many players find the additional dimension of “tempo” to be really brain-burning - it can explode the decision-space - and even outside of that, the Spirit has a fair bit going on.

All right - time for some developer notes!

Dev Notes, by Nick Reale

Dances Up Earthquakes was one of the trickiest Spirits to develop, since it had all of the development problems of a normal Spirit on top of having a completely different value for Power Cards, Energy, Plays, and Elements. Rather than attempting to cover the breadth of challenges that we faced, I’m just going to examine the most persistent one: stopping a particular dominant strategy that isn’t fun to play.

The strategy: On each of Turns 1-3, use all of your Plays for making cards Impending, starting with your most expensive Unique Powers, then on Turn 4 resolve 7+ Powers for a monstrously strong single turn. Though the exact details of the strategy changed as we tweaked the Spirit (e.g., there was a while where the most expensive Unique was usually played on Turn 2), the core idea remained remarkably resilient.

There were three reasons we wanted to stop this strategy from being the strongest one (and thus the one that a lot of players would feel compelled to use):
  • It’s basically impossible to balance around. If it’s just strong enough to be viable at high Difficulties, the difference between a blowout victory and losing to Blight is just 1 or 2 Towns in inconvenient locations when Turn 4 rolls around. Also, the strategy would then trivialize lower Difficulties.
  • It bores everyone in the game. The Dances player can write their entire Turns 1-3 on a notecard before wandering off to play video games for half an hour, and then everyone else takes a snack break when that player comes back on Turn 4 to take a turn almost as long as the prior 3 combined.
  • It isn’t fun to play Dances multiple times with this strategy, since it can be played by rote rather than responding to the Invader, Fear, Event, and Power Card decks.

Weakening this strategy by nerfing the Spirit’s Powers directly would hurt other strategies just as much, if not more. And so came the biggest question in this Spirit’s development: how could we incentivize players to have cards in play before Turn 4? It took all of the following changes (listed in roughly the order we started working on them) to get players to get cards into play early.

Make Impending cards arrive more slowly. Impending cards getting +2 Energy/turn made it trivial to get high-value Power Cards into play for an incredibly strong burst turn. We both cut this down to +1 Energy/turn and decreased how many cards the third Growth option could affect. With expensive cards taking longer to arrive, there was more incentive to resolve cheaper cards in the meantime.

Reduce the cost and board impact of Unique Powers. The first version of this Spirit released to playtesters had 6 Unique Powers with an average cost of 3.5 Energy. Getting all of those effects on a single turn was simply too much value, so we steadily cut the costs of the Uniques down to an average of just over 1.5 Energy. We also changed the effects of those Power Cards so that they were all individually useful, but collectively didn’t add up to much progress towards winning the game outright. Playing some of them early for board control would then be stronger than saving them up for a single big turn.

Require playing cards to get Defend via the first Innate Power. Early versions of this Spirit had early on-track Elements that let it Defend with Land Creaks with Tension as early as Turn 2 without playing a single card. Changing Element positions and thresholds encouraged players to get at least one Power Card with Earth into play on both Turn 2 and Turn 3. However, high-experience players would still make the calculated risk of taking extra Blight on those turns to line up their perfect Turn 4, so we needed a more drastic change.

Add Quake Tokens. With the Turn 4 earthquake still having too much value all on its own, even with less game-ending strength in Power Cards and fewer early Dahan counterattacks, we finally took on Earth Shudders, Buildings Fall directly. We needed a way to make its Damage low if rushed without playing cards, but high if used later after playing several cards on prior turns. Adding Quake tokens to Dances Up Earthquakes worked perfectly, since we could use them as an incentive to keep a balance in the early game between cards in play and cards impending. They also made early-game positioning matter quite a bit, since all but one Power that Adds or Moves Quakes does so at Range 0 – even if early turns are simpler than for other Spirits, the player still needs to pay attention to the island.

And that’s how a single degenerate strategy defined the development of Dances Up Earthquakes more than any other single factor.

Major Card: Rumbling Earthquakes

Players have wanted an earthquake Major Power for a while, and Nature Incarnate includes one that Dances Up Earthquakes loves.


Not only can this Power Destroy multiple Cities spread across several lands, but it also gets around the pesky English and Habsburg Health bonuses. Though it’s expensive enough to get played only once or twice a game, even a single use can be decisive, clearing out Cities from multiple lands to win the game outright.

—

Thank you both again for the updates! And thank you to our backers for supporting us all throughout this campaign. Wednesday brings us our next update to cover the rest of the aspects featured in Nature Incarnate! We’ll see you then, so we hope you’re ready!

Unique Power Card Reveal for Relentless Gaze of the Sun
over 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 04, 2022 at 02:00:25 PM

Happy Friday, everyone!

What a week it's been! We keep hitting Achievements and revealing information all week! Here, at the tail end of the week, I'm about to leave the office, but we're only 4 backers away from hitting the achievement, so I'm launching it early!

Let's look at a power card from a spirit we just revealed a few days ago! Here's one of the useful tools of Relentless Gaze of the Sun!



With Focus the Sun's Rays, you do some damage, (hopefully the Dahan are not in that land already), and you can bring your presence directly to where you need it. Also, Relentless Gaze can make the most of the Badlands tokens they've been placing, getting one into a useful spot. There's a lot of utility in this card, not just damage!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Spirit Reveal: Towering Roots of the Jungle
over 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 04, 2022 at 08:01:20 AM

Welcome welcome to all 8955 of you! Thank you all for both backing and joining in on the fun! We’re climbing higher and higher on those numbers and achievements, which is fitting given the very botanical nature of this Incarna spirit! R. Eric Reuss, creator, and Emilia Katari, developer, write once again on this long-standing spirit that can be difficult to move. (Hey, it is rooted down.) Please take it away Eric and Emilia before any more puns are attempted.

Story

When the First Reckoning between the Dahan and the Spirits concluded, the Spirits wanted to keep track of the Dahan and what they were doing…

(…an important digression: I say “the Spirits” as if they were some sort of monolithic, united block.That’s completely untrue: they were (and are) an ecosystem, both figuratively and literally. There were plenty of disagreements among them, plenty of Spirits who took unilateral action according to their natures, plenty of other Spirits who acted to check those Spirits according to their natures, and so on. Many local Spirits never got involved in the first place, not even counting the vast numbers of Spirits who weren’t even close enough to be involved, as initial settlement by the ancestors of the Dahan was mostly confined to one part of the island. Much of this was behind the scenes and not super-evident to the humans involved, and time + the nature of stories have altered the tale enough that most such details wouldn’t have survived anyway.)

With that simplification understood - the Spirits had a variety of desires: to keep track of the Dahan and what they were doing, to understand them better, to support them living on the island, to enforce the terms of the First Reckoning, and more. A number of Spirits got involved in this, and one of the more obvious and prominent ones was Towering Roots of the Jungle.


Towering Roots of the Jungle was, at the time, simply the Spirit of a particularly immense tree. “Sheltering” was somewhat in its nature, as it shaded plants and animals beneath it from the full force of the tropical sun; it agreed to be a place where the Dahan could settle as they adapted to the demands of the island. It helped protect the land from damage the Dahan didn’t realize they were doing, helped protect the Dahan from dangerous Spirits and animals, and generally kept watch on things… when it had the attention to spare, which it often didn’t, in those early days.

As has been discussed before, Spirits may change for many reasons, some of which are related to the Dahan: being influenced by their existence on the island, bargains with them or oaths sworn to them, living among them, or reaching for change in order to better understand or interact with them in some way. It was not inevitable that Towering Roots of the Jungle would change due to these factors, but neither is it surprising that it did, particularly given that it was already a bit tangled by nature.

So it grew greater, taller, broader, more complex, and better able to do those things that it focused on: shelter, guard, protect. Until the start of the current conflict, it was not at all clear to the Dahan - perhaps even to most Spirits - that it was an Incarna: it existed entirely as a single (immense) tree already, with no real Presence elsewhere. As it extends itself to fight the Invaders, however, it becomes clear that there is a qualitative difference between its primary area of focus and its other offshoots.

Design

This qualitative difference - Towering Roots of the Jungle having special dominion over a particular area - is represented by what its Incarna can do:


First and foremost, humans and beasts cannot be hurt at its Incarna: it is a Spirit of sanctuary and protection, and does not allow harm to come to those under its branches.

(At the same time, it is a Spirit of and with authority, capable of casting Invaders out of its sanctuary. When it does so, those Invaders generally leave the island altogether, as it has been made viscerally clear to them - in a way they cannot rationally explain, they just know - that they are no longer safe here. This is represented by its right Innate Power, Revoke Sanctuary and Cast Out.)

It gets +1 Range when targeting from its Incarna - it is rooted and spread so strongly in the land with its Incarna that it can more readily affect nearby lands.

Its second Growth option lets it add a Vitality token at its Incarna. Vitality tokens are one-shot “cancel 1 Blight that would be added”, but only work if the land isn’t already Blighted. They’re one of a few Spirit-specific tokens in Nature Incarnate, though they’re also found on the thematic playmat (in lands 1, 5, and 6 of the Northwest board).

Finally, if Towering Roots is able to Empower its Incarna, it can suppress all Build actions where it is.

Towering Roots of the Jungle has the least mobile Incarna of all: it’s a very rooted Spirit, and changing where its Incarna is takes effort. Unlike most Spirits with Incarna, it doesn’t roam across the land; instead, it outright Replaces one of its existing Presence with its Incarna: the tree-system of its Presence in the chosen land grows even vaster and more tall as the locus of Tower Roots’ power twines its way over. Where its Incarna previously stood is still a vast tree, but it loses the almost supernatural dominion it had over that land - and possibly its connection to that land altogether, if it didn’t have other Presence there!

While Towering Roots is somewhat geographically constrained, it’s more generally very good at growing and changing (due to long practice, and being a growing, Plant-oriented tree-Spirit): it gains a new Power Card every turn except when Reclaiming. At the same time, it’s steadfast and constant - like many Earth and Sun-oriented Spirits, it can place Presence even when Reclaiming.

Dev Notes, by Emilia Katari

Towering Roots started out as one of the potential spirits for Horizons of Spirit Island, with a Gathering innate power, and a Heart-Tree that wasn’t an Incarna, but instead could be “placed” at one of your Sacred Sites each turn. There was nothing wrong with it, but we thought that it would work well thematically with an Incarna, and that it might benefit from a little more complexity than was ideal for the Horizons spirits. Also, we were really happy with all the Spirits that ended up in Horizons right out the gate, so it ended up being moved to Nature Incarnate for a little extra dev time, and access to having an Incarna, which would contribute to the massive, stationary feel of the Tree. 

The Incarna has gone through a lot of changes over the course of time. At one point, it prevented all damage and Blight where it was, and at one point it doubled all Invader removal and Gathering at its location. These effects ended up being somewhat overcentralizingly powerful, so it changed to its current form, where it’s always useful to extend the range of powers, but also doesn’t totally lock down the land it’s in. In compensation, moving the Tree is a little easier than it used to be - some versions even had it trade off against placing Presence!

The other notable change to Roots is the introduction to Vitality tokens. We’ve been trying to get Vitality to work as a mechanic for a while, given that it’s printed on the thematic board, but in Jagged Earth the mechanics hadn’t solidified enough that it could be reasonably costed in Minor Powers, and at this point, adding extra Minor Powers while preserving the density of various effects, maintaining the elemental balance, and still allowing the deck to be easily shuffled is very difficult. However, while we were working on Towering Roots, we thought we needed something to allow the Spirit to feel like it was making forward progress on the board, even if it was thematically a very defensive Spirit, and the physicality of adding tokens on the board fit the bill, alongside Vitality being very thematically appropriate for Towering Roots. So we introduced Vitality as a Towering Roots-specific token, both to help with its play feel, and to finally answer the question of what those funny-looking tokens on the thematic map are. 

Fear Card: Distracted by Local Troubles

Today’s bonus card is a defensive Fear Card with a twist! 


Distracted By Local Troubles rewards players for having damaged Invaders around, making it a particular favorite of Shroud of Silent Mist!
—

Thank you both once again for your wonderful insight on this protective spirit. Definitely one of my favorites both thematically and in terms of gameplay. Let us know below what your favorite is so far! 

We’ll see you all again next week with yet another spirit reveal! See you soon!

Game Development Team Interview
over 1 year ago – Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 08:05:10 AM

Greetings to all 8787 of you! (Seriously, it blows me away how many of you there are and how fast you’re getting through those achievements.) For today’s update, I was able to have a lovely interview with the development team for Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate. They brought some excellent insights on how game development, some excitement, and some teasers for later revealing… Find out more in our interview with Ted, Emilia, Nick, and Christopher below!

Hello, everyone! Please introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, and role on the dev team.

Ted: I’m Ted! Pronouns are he/him. I’m lead dev for the team. I kind of view a lead as having a couple of roles. One of them is building a consensus — making sure whatever we’re doing, we’re doing as a team. Another important aspect is making sure when there’s a problem that the right person is working towards it. The third thing is bit of a “the buck stops here” thing. We’re making sure Eric’s vision is being met, and that we’re making a game that’s balanced, fun, and approachable by players.

Emilia: I’m Emilia. I use she/her pronouns. It’s sort of hard to say what particular role I play. Everyone is sort of involved in every part of the process. One thing I’ll say that I do more than others is the broader, more conceptual reworks. Sometimes Spirits need changes that are tweeks, and sometimes Spirits need changes where it’s completely different. I like doing that a lot.

Nick: Nick! Pronouns: he/him. In terms of what I do, like Emilia said, we all kind of touch on a lot of things. But what’s kind of distinctive to me? I prepare the test files for the playtesters. I’m also the one who has to tell everyone, “No, we can’t do that. The rules can’t handle it.” 

Christopher: Hi, I’m Christopher. My pronouns are he/him. I’m just a simple member of the dev team. I have less encyclopedic knowledge of the rules than Nick does, and less complete/overall of the mechanics than Emilia does, and less concrete idea of Eric’s vision than Ted does. I’m the caboose! But, what I do have is direct communication with Rae (lead graphic designer for Greater Than Games). I have some good ideas for naming things! I’m here for the product design side of Spirit Island, which has been my role with Spirit Island since the beginning.

What drew you all to Spirit Island in the first place?

Ted: I obviously first heard about it when it was a prototype when it was at one of Eric’s game nights. Spirit Island had a lot of the things I like. And I told him, “Y’know what I want more from this game? More powers, and cool effects, and stuff that you can get that other people might not have.” It was just fascinating and kept giving him more feedback.

Emilia: I actually got into Spirit Island indirectly through Sentinels of the Multiverse. After about y’know, two-thousand hours of Sentinels of the Multiverse, I thought, “This is great! What other games do Greater Than Games make?” I found Spirit Island and really loved it. A lot of the same thoughts as Ted, but obviously I came way later. Branch & Claw had already been released for a little bit. But, I liked the diversity of gameplay experiences. Games of Spirit Island are very different from each other in a way that a lot of other board games aren’t. And I thought it was great that there was a board game that was anti-colonialist! 

Nick: I suppose that puts me in the middle of the timeline. I randomly stumbled upon the original Kickstarter. Completely at random! I don’t even remember why I was on Kickstarter that day. I saw one of the Spirit panels. I had no idea what it was doing… but I wanted it. There were a lot of co-op games at the time, but they were all played from a generic player standpoint where later in development there might be one special ability the rest of the table doesn’t have. That’s great and easy for players to switch it up, but I had been kinda getting over it. But these two panels are wildly different from each other! Then I backed it and forgot about it for two years until I received it.

Can you explain the process of developing a Spirit in general? 

Ted: I would say the very first thing I do when I look at a Spirit is say, “could this even work in the first place?” Sometimes you have this initial idea of what the Spirit is trying to be, but the actual attempted implementation just doesn’t work at all. At that point I have to go back to Eric and ask what the vibe is he’s going for. Assuming it’s functional, there’s a three step process.

Step one is to make sure that there’s a good and engaging mechanical hook that people are excited about. A good example of this would be like if you’re playing as Ocean’s Hungry Deeps? You want to start drowning invaders. That’s the schtick of the game plan and you want to do that. You want to make sure that’s good and enjoyable for players regardless of whatever else is going on.

Step two of design is taking all the pieces that make sure they can contribute to the overall gameplay experience.

The third step is about making sure all of the numbers match. How strong and weak it is at different points of the game are going to provide a good arc throughout the game. And that there’s going to be different kinds of play experience.

Christopher: That’s so interesting to me because I come at a Spirit completely differently. I look at it and say, “Okay, what is the thing that is going to entice people? What’s the initial ‘ooh! This is what I’m excited about’?” That thing that Nick first ran into when he saw that Spirit panel. That’s the structure we’re going to build the whole scaffolding around.

Emilia: To go into more specific detail, sometimes we get handed off a Spirit with everything already figured out and sometimes it’s “Here’s a Spirit that does these things! This one does fear… somehow.” The exact details are always different. We take it, fill it out, test it among the four of us, and reiterate it to a point where we think we can get playtesting feedback. And then we iterate it again, and so on and so on. The first step - and maybe even first two steps that Ted mentioned - will all be internal to the devs. Sometimes the playtesters find things and we have to go back.

Does that process look different for aspects, major/minor powers, events, etc.?

Christopher: It really only looks differently in that you have to approach things completely differently. You have to approach a Spirit differently than an event, but all of them have the same thousand yard thing of Ted’s three steps. Sometimes playtesters break things. Sometimes playtesters find a thing and they say, “here’s a thing! We think this is great!”

Ted: There is one important caveat here. Aspects and Spirits need a hook, whereas most things don’t. Major and minor powers can have a hook, but not all of them do. Event cards are role players, but don't have to be as exciting. There’s a little more flexibility there.

Emilia: Compared to Spirits, parts of the game that are a little smaller are more likely to change radically. It’s hard to sort of express that idea in a way that resonates with players. With things like event cards and fear cards, they can just be totally different if they’re not working out.

Nick: One of those things with the smaller items is that sometimes the right answer is to just cut them. Whereas with a Spirit we probably have enough that we can make the balance and the polish work. Sometimes the answer is just to cut them.

Ted: I’ll also say that Eric gave us about 40 aspects for this expansion. To which I said to most of them, “Very cool, not for this expansion.”

Christopher: Yeah, but I’m surprised and satisfied with how much we didn’t cut.

Are you all working together at once?

Ted: We have weekly meetings. The vibe that ended up working best though was us working in pairs! We’d split up all the different issues and every week we choose a different pairing of two devs. You two take a look at these three Spirits and these aspects and so on. We have a list of what we’re trying to get done. It was super helpful to be able to mix and match and change perspectives. Someone could be running with an idea for a while. Nick, I know you worked on the adversary for a while, but when you got burnt out you were able to take a break. 

Christopher: It was fun to break into the duos, not just for the utility but also for the different strengths. Like Ted was saying, Nick would be working with Emilia but then next week working on the same thing with Ted. The dynamic is so different. Any two of us are a very different creative thing. Someone’s feeling burnt out on this thing? Swap it out. There are certain things other people have paid more attention to, but overall it’s great.

How long does the development question process generally take?

Ted: How long can Paul give us? It takes that much time.
(That’s Paul Bender - President of Greater Than Games)

Christopher: We’ll take as much time as we have, but some things we work on and it’s like: boom! We’re done! Okay great! Some things… are not…

Ted: The trade off is that we want this to be balanced and complete and well rounded, but we also want people to have it. If you gave us a year, there are probably things that we could do to make Nature Incarnate better. But better enough for people to go another year without playing it? What I can say if you’re looking for rough estimates! Adversaries take approximately 12 months. A very high complexity Spirit is also 9-12 months. High difficulty is probably 6 or so.

Christopher: That’s obviously not 6-12 months of us doing only this thing, of course.

Ted: And also sometimes you need to have an idea rest in the back of your head for a couple of months or weeks.

What item (Spirit, Aspect, etc.) gave you the most trouble in terms of development? Why? And by contract, the least resistant!

Christopher: Well there was that one power where we changed nothing.

Nick: There was a tie where we considered changing something about an aspect, didn’t, and put it in.

Ted: I’ll put this to a vote, but I definitely think that the adversary and one of the Incarna Spirits.

(Vigorous nodding from everyone.)

Emilia: One of the Spirits took a while but when it was good, it was good. There was a gradual iterative process. It took ages to get it right just because of the amount of things, but by and large there was gradual progress over time. My vote is for most trouble in terms of development is a different Spirit. The story with that Spirit is basically we had an iteration that was fairly different from the current iteration. Innate powers were the same, but the tracks were different. The rules were different. One of their special rules worked in a totally different way. It was good enough where it was fairly balanced, but it was a little more complicated than we wanted. We thought we could go back to the drawing board and get a little more into this.

Ted: More precisely, Eric said, “Please rework this.” He was right!

Emilia: This was a couple of months ago, though, so this was pretty close to the end of the process. It was a very rapid process. That said, I’m really happy with where it ended up!

Nick: That last sprint was definitely the most stressful. In terms of effort overall? Only just barely that Spirit over the adversary. We completely rebuilt that Spirit three times. Where we had a week at the end!

Can you give examples of what it’s like feeling out something? Do you have any examples of knowing when something is too hard or not hard enough or things like that? Are there any hard metrics used?

Nick: The most effective objective metric you have is: did you win? One of the problems we have when people do testing is when people are playing something too hard or too easy for them, they want to compare the Spirits. “Oh with this Spirit I added two blight, but not this one!” Yeah, but you easily won with both of them. Those Spirits might both be equally good at a good challenge. That’s the most objective thing we have, I think.

Ted: I feel one of the games needs to have to be fun is a moment of tension. You feel like there’s a chance you could win or lose. If you win, it feels fair. If you lose, you’re good with that and ah well, maybe you got some bad luck. You should always feel like it could go either way. Does it feel like I credibly could have lost? If not, then there’s a chance it’s probably too easy.

Christopher: Most people play a game because of how it makes them feel when they play that game. So how a Spirit feels is probably the most important thing. If you have a strong character who feels passive and a passive character who hits hard, it doesn’t work.

Were there any unique challenges to Incarna that came about in game development, if any?

Nick: Oh yeah. A really, really big one was figuring out how much mobility to give the Incarna. The entire point of the piece is that it’s special in what it can do. If that piece can be anywhere at any point, then it shouldn’t exist. Just have it be tied to a power or something like that. The fact that it’s one piece, it’s constrained. How mobile should these Incarna be? Some of them you’re supposed to be running them all over the board. The other half… are deliberately difficult to move. Moving them is supposed to require distinct effort. There were constant conversations with playtesters about “can we just move this just a little bit more?”

Christopher: And we tested it! What if there is 1.1% more movement, is that okay? Nooo. 

Ted: I love how we have the same mechanic for both ends of the spectrum of hypermobility and being stationary! 

Nick: The second one on my list was empowering for all the Spirits. What do they get for the power, how do they get power, how often do they want to empower? The Spirits have a pretty big range for how much we think they ought to be empowered. On the one hand you have Behemoth where empowering is easily available and we expect everyone to do it by about the middle of the game. The Spirit is balanced around that. But then we have other Spirits where only a particular strategy empowers because powers are gated behind certain other things beforehand. There were several where the empowering and benefits changed several times. Let’s make sure we power it enough and often enough and it doesn’t feel mandatory.

Ted: I think that was the overall goal. We wanted it to feel like it was a tactical option that you could take but you were not obligated to take it. The one exception was Behemoth because it’s fun and easy. And if it’s something that’s fun, people are going to want to do it.

What aspects are you most excited about for the previous Spirits and why?

Ted: I’m personally really excited about Deeps, the very first bit of content that I tested. When I saw Deeps, I could see players saying, “I want this expansion for Deeps.” It’s rare in a game to see an aspect that’s that enticing to play. We needed to get this in this expansion.

Emilia: One of the things that I really like in Spirit Island is the support effects. Because of that I’m really excited for one of the expansion aspects.

Nick: Weirdly enough that I’m most excited about are two that I’m never going to play once they exist. These are both of what I think of as accessibility aspects. They take spirits that are really hard to get into and make it a little bit easier to get to as a Spirit. I think they’ll give people a chance at these Spirits if they bounced off it the first time. I play both those Spirits normally!

Christopher: People said all the good ones! Thunderspeaker’s Warrior, too, though. I like going on the warpath with that Aspect, and I also like being a cult leader with another Incarna Aspect.

What makes expansion stand out for you?

Christopher: We worked on it! But seriously, Incarna. I think when people start understanding how it changes how Spirits play, it’s pretty notable. It’s like the difference between tactics and strategy. People who really like positional games or Thunderspeaker from the core game are gonna like some of that. People that don’t like that? Don’t worry, there’s Spirits in there for you!

Emilia: I think there’s a wide variety of stuff in it! Incarna as a mechanic is something new. There’s a bunch of Incarna Spirits that interact with it in a bunch of different ways. All of the non-Incarna Spirits are also really distinctive in how they’re played. There are a bunch of major powers that do a lot of really cool things. Lots of stuff, very different!

Ted: I really want to echo the major powers. We’ve gotten a lot better at balancing these things. Every one of these major powers I’m excited about. I think we’ve done a really good job of finding just the right point where it’s not overpowered but it’s really exciting and compelling. And I want to give a shoutout to blight cards! There are so many interesting blight cards. I’ve set aside the base game blight cards and only use these because they’re so fun. I think players are going to be really excited to see these in a way they were not anticipating.

Nick: I’m actually going to give a shout out to the event deck! I’m a little biased, I worked on the events a lot. I really like what we did with the more complicated events. I think we have a few choice events where people are seriously torn between the choice they take. 

— 

Thank you so much everyone for both the fun interview and the excellent insight!

You may have noticed a few names have been italicized, indicating redaction, or conveniently avoided. Will we reveal them at the end of the campaign?! Who can say… It’s me. I can say, and the answer is yes. In our last update, we’ll have a little reveal as a reward for everyone who’s read everything all the way through.

But, you obviously want things revealed now. Here is the revealed card for this update.

Major Power: Fragments of Yesteryear

This Major Power lets the Spirits rewind time in one land:


Return the land to the way it originally was. Or with the help of the Moon threshold, the way the Spirits wish it originally was! And yes, this Power can remove an unlimited number of Invaders and Blight.

—

That’s all for now! We’ll see you all on Friday with a brand new Spirit reveal!

Spirit Reveal: Relentless Gaze of the Sun
over 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 07:13:37 AM

Hello again to the many thousands of you and welcome to our new 337 since our last update! You all are making our day every day by how much you’re exceeding our expectations. But now we are moving on from the bright and cheerful to the far too bright and not terrible cheerful Relentless Gaze of the Sun. Creator R. Eric Reuss and dev team member Nick Reale talk about the story, design, and some of the development notes behind this burning spirit. Oh, and of course, we have our bonus card at the end. Gentlemen, take it away!

Story

There are many Spirits of the sun and sun's light - some are gently beautiful, some are nourishing, some are aloof and barely touch the island at all. Relentless Gaze of the Sun is none of these things: it is a blazingly imperious Spirit that blasts the land with relentless heat. The tropical sun is something to respect and even fear.

The Spirit was not always like this - long ago, something happened that swelled its pride, turning its satisfaction at shining with bright and brilliant constancy into more and more of an obsession. It came to see the wilting of the land beneath as evidence of how amazing and powerful and important it was, rather than a sign of growing excess. It required rest between these bouts of intense activity, but the number of decades - and, eventually, years - between scorching bouts grew shorter and shorter, and the duration of the scorching-times grew longer and longer.

Some seaside Dahan villages figured a way to distract it, buying respite: every year before and during the dry season, they would send well-crewed boats out with shards of obsidian or reflective shell to flash the sun's brilliance back upwards, pulling the Spirit's attention slightly offshore with the apparent signs of an upstart contender for its brilliance. This held off disaster for a couple hundred years - and even after the growing hunger of the Ocean made such trips more dangerous, several Spirits of sky and heavens managed to keep the Sun's attention elsewhere... for a time.

But when its attention did return to the island, it was full of the wrath and built-up power of centuries. So began the Years of the Relentless Sun, when the Sun shone such power down on the island that it came near to devastating immense swaths of it. Several Spirits of moon and night tried to oppose it, but withered beneath the uncompromising assault; it was not until Shadows Flicker Like Flame took an interest that the Sun was effectively checked. Both Spirits came out of that confrontation somewhat the worse for wear, and are not nearly so powerful now as they were then - though perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. If they were as great in might and scale as they used to be, they would likely not be fast and nimble enough now to fight the Invaders effectively.

While it is still destructive, Relentless Gaze of the Sun has been at least somewhat tempered, and its motivations seem to be in the midst of a change. It used to act out of a sort of impersonal contemptuous fury, scourging low all who came under its gaze as an affirmation and manifestation of its power - not in an insecure way, or out of hatred, as a human might, but simply because that was its nature: to strike down those who dared raise themselves before it. But even Spirits with the constancy of Sun or Earth can change, over time, and grappling with a Spirit as shifting and protean as Shadows Flicker Like Flame may have accelerated that process. It is still a destructive Spirit, breaking down and burning up those upon whom it focuses its gaze, but it seems to be exploring the idea that 'those outside of itself' are not some homogenous mass, and that perhaps it ought to focus its contempt and fury on those actively opposing it? It is once again willing to communicate with other Spirits, and given that it's not actually trying to rule anything or boss anyone around, most Spirits are content to shrug and speak to it respectfully (if they speak to it at all), or just work around it - it is not a Spirit of great subtlety or connivance.



Design

The general concept for Relentless Gaze of the Sun has existed for a long time - during my initial reading for the game, I saw multiple references to how harsh the tropical sun can be. It was a candidate Spirit for Jagged Earth, but it never quite came together: it had a few different iterations, most of which revolved around “concentrating your Presence makes you more powerful but also adds Blight”. This could be an interesting minigame, but ran into some real trouble scaling between different island sizes: it was much easier to stay spread out in a 3-4 player game than it is in solo. Fixing this would have layered even more complexity onto a Spirit that was already both complex and fraught (any Spirit which adds Blight can be a bit nerve wracking for some players), so instead it got postponed for later work, with a bunch of brainstormed notes.

Portions of that handoff version were very different from what you’ll see below - Gaze was hyper focused in a way that proved to not actually work so well, requiring a mid-development redesign - but I’ll let the developers talk more about that journey.

One important part of Relentless Gaze’s story is that it is considering change; it has a choice to make about whether to continue being an overbearing, catastrophically antisocial force or whether to temper itself and sacrifice some offense in exchange for the good of others.

This ended up represented by an innate that makes use of elements that Gaze doesn’t have on its Unique Powers - something I’ve had in multiple Spirits before (it’s an interesting way of representing a path along which a Spirit could shift its nature) but aside from Starlight Seeks Its Form, it’s always been cut for complexity reasons. Here, however, it fulfills a core thematic need.


Sun is an element of constancy, so it can always place Presence. Unlike other Blight-using Spirits, it’s not immune to Presence destruction (even from its own Powers), nor does it gain benefit for doing so - but it can add its Destroyed presence back to the board without too much trouble. It’s the Sun, it always rises again (and if it couldn’t it would have scorched its own connection to the Island out of existence long ago).

Many other areas of the design reflect its nature of focus and concentration - its Special Rule requires having lands with 3 Presence, more than a normal Sacred Site; its opening Plays track isn’t great (it’s better at dealing with single big problems than lots of little ones), and its rightmost Growth option rewards it for focusing on Energy. (Which also solved the problem of “the Sun should be awesome at gaining Energy, but putting a huge absolute Energy boost in Growth gives it too much during the opening game” - particularly important because Gaze’s special rule means it can make use of huge amounts of Energy even if using Minor Powers.)

Dev Notes, by Nick Reale

Relentless Gaze of the Sun was one of the original candidate Spirits for Nature Incarnate, and a high-priority one at that. Not only was the game’s Spirit roster a little light on the Sun Element in general, but there had long been player desire for a Spirit of the sun itself. The main challenge of development was finding good ways to represent the themes of relentlessness, focus, and constancy. Across the early versions of this Spirit, we tried three mechanics; while none of them worked out as originally presented, fixed versions of all three found their way into the final version.

The first mechanic was reusing Power Cards on back-to-back turns. This turned out to be terrible for gameplay; players would reuse their favorite defensive card to stall out the first 4-ish Turns, only getting to the earth-scorching in the second half of the game. The improved version of this is Repeating Power Cards instead of re-playing them. With Repeats, players feel focused within a turn, but still have a lot of variety from turn to turn.

The second mechanic was adding about 1 Badlands per turn. This … was totally busted. Oh, Gaze could be balanced by itself, but if another Spirit came along with lots of ways to do 1 Damage, like A Spread of Rampant Green or a yet-to-be-previewed Spirit from this set, they’d trivialize the game. This swing in strength was so dramatic that it caused us to reevaluate the relative value of Badlands vs 1 Damage in general! The correction here was giving Gaze only one Unique Power that Adds Badlands and one Unique Power that repositions them once they’ve served their original purpose.

The final mechanic was Powers that scaled with Gaze’s Presence in origin or target land. This turned out to be a bit more skill-testing than we liked. While experienced players realized that only 3-4 Presence were needed in a land to get most of the useful bonuses, newer players would make one giant Presence stack and get frustrated by their targeting difficulties. Since 3 Presence in one land was distinctive compared to other Spirits and usually good enough to get relevant bonuses, we just made 3 Presence the amount that represents Gaze’s focus. This 3 Presence theme rippled throughout the design, becoming a “3” theme in general. See how many 3’s you can find on the panel -- and don’t forget to check the Spirit art!

Blight Card: Slow Dissolution of Will

The final preview today is a Blight Card that causes Spirits to lose Presence every turn, yet only has 3 Blight per player on it!



Even though the Spirits get weaker, what they shed helps the island itself repel the Invaders. This is one of the few Blight Cards to put pressure on both Presence and Blight, challenging the Spirits to hold themselves and the island’s ecosystem together, even as the island gets dangerous to a degree rarely seen in Spirit Island.

—

Thank you to both Eric and Nick for telling us all about this burning spirit and Slow Dissolution of Will. A unique take on a sun spirit and yet familiar sentiment for anyone who’s suffered through a tough summer!  We’ll be back on Wednesday, November 2nd for a special interview with the whole development team on the development and playtesting process, what they’re looking forward to in Nature Incarnate, and more! Stick around and we’ll see you then!