T3K #8: Turbo Turn - Steam Next Fest

Heya! Trying a new post format for this entry! With event prep for GDC having me real busy, I haven't had time for deep dives into a tactics game. But I did have time to try a couple Steam Next Fest demos!

As someone who played tons of PSP demos, I've missed the ability to have a low investment try at a game. Tactics demos are especially interesting challenge as a design prompt. Tactics games can be long! Or they develop mechanics in a gradual way over hours, which is difficult to capture in a demo.

But lots of developers made the effort, and I wanted to give them a shoutout! So let's do a Turbo Turn of Steam Next Fest tactics/strategy demos. I had to hone in on this blog's focus cause I played too many! Oops.

Games Covered:

• Cardboard Town
• Two Point Campus
• Dungeon Drafters
• Dungeons of Aether
• Inkbound

Non-T3K Genre Demos I Really Liked:​​

• Protodroid DeLTA
• Gestalt: Steam & Cinder
• Gravity Circuit
• Radio the Universe
• Rusted Moss

• The Ramsey
• Shumi Come Home
• Glitch Busters
• Bleak Sword DX
• Townseek

Cardboard Town

It's a town! Made out of cardboard board game pieces!

Cardboard Town is a city-building card game where you manage resources and build a tiny little board game town. The player must balance managing the deck and managing the resources of the town against random disasters. The demo focuses on 100 or so days of gameplay.

There are 4 resources to manage with a goal to prevent 3 of the resources hitting negative values or below -20. Every few days, the town is hit with a incident that can drain one of the resources providing a constant time pressure. You can't simply wait for the most efficient card to be drawn.

The card types really define how towns will tend to look. These types include: road cards required for new buildings, building cards with some effect on resources, and deck modifier cards.

City simulators are fun to think about how the developers abstract how a town grows and thrives. With Cardboard Town, the time pressure and need to immediately solve resource issues creates a quirky suburban sprawl of buildings and roads. A road might just abruptly end cause you needed to throw down a water tower to deal with a drought incident.

More money to play cards each turn is tied directly to population, so you're incentivized to build more housing even if it will decrease resources. Certain housing is more efficient in stats, but time pressure often forces building crummier tiles jus to deal with incoming problems.

I'm hoping there's future ways to build on top of prior buildings and more deck manipulation in the full game. I tended to have turns of stalling out with hands full of expensive cards, but had a great time once I passed initial humps.

Building population buildings gets you more Money per turn & a choice of Upgrade

​Two Point Campus

Amidst the silly college antics lies some brain squeezing queue management systems

Two Point Campus sits on the other side of building planning as a satirical college management simulation game.
​(Note: this is just the actual full game with a weekend grace period to play for free and I played too much to not talk about)

You take on the role of a wandering college Dean given multiple campuses to shape into successful universities. It incorporates building out a campus, managing college employees, and improving the campus to better student success (so they continue paying tuition).

A big part of managing student success is, essentially, traffic management. Can a tired student reach the dormitory to sleep then visit the library to finish an assignment in a fast enough time? Can sprinkling vending machines around the campus reduce the amount of people trying to rush the courtyard of hot dog stands all at once?

The satire of Two Point Campus helps it stand out on its own terms. Having 4 beds for a whole campus is fine, it's just a extra hellish co-ed dorm. It's fine! I, as the dean, may show favoritism for a club cause it gives an important stat boost of 'running across campus fast'. There's a clown degree department in the west building.

Two Point Campus seems laxer in how efficient you need to be compared to its prequel, Two Point Hospital. Where patients would previously die and becomes ghosts for a base inefficiency, students instead struggle to reach their full A+ grades. Student failure/ego death is still on the table but I have yet to have a student fail for a similar time count to Hospital.

For someone like me who doesn't really like minmaxing city strategy planning, the time I put in with Two Point Campus did feel pretty smooth. I'll try picking it up when I'm hungry for making Clown College more powerful. 

You have lots of rooms to build and manage. You can even create templates!

​Dungeon Drafters

Tile-tactics and deckbuilding, my beloved

Dungeon Drafters is a deckbuilder tactics game pulling upon the roguelike ideas of mystery dungeon games. You play as one of six adventurers who goes into dungeons to collect treasure and get stronger with finding new cards. The demo focuses on a core loop of a single dungeon dive.

Each turn you refresh your Action Points (AP) to move, melee attack, or play cards. From the demo, cards are high impact for particular situations (helped by always having a basic melee attack). The rabbit adventurer had a deck focusing on intentionally being surrounded to hit multiple adjacent tiles or heal per enemy near you.

Enemy turns are handled with an interesting mix of clear list of skills an enemy can have and which skill they might choose in a turn. If an enemy is going to use a ranged attack, the exact tiles they're going to strike is marked on the map. Otherwise, the enemy will display their available skills they might use (movement counts as a 'skill' to use).

It's a fun choice! You can often guess what order of skills an enemy will use (Move -> Melee Range Attack for say basic slime 1 tile away), but sometimes they'll throw a curveball and you have to improvise. And clearly marking ranged attacks gives leeway for enemy skill design. It's fine to have a big cross AOE attack for an enemy if I know I just need to shimmy 1 tile down.

Deckbuilding and the specifics of the RPG layer are not quite present in the demo, but the current basic adventurer decks provide good optimism on how deckbuilding will feel. When cards hit their combos, player turns hit a clean sweep through enemies. I look forward to Dungeon Drafters' ​launch!

Enemy turns resolve all at once with a displayed order of enemies

​Dungeons of Aether

Platform fighter, card game, and now tactics game! What a pivot!

Dungeons of Aether is a turn-based dungeon crawler set in the universe of platformer fighter, Rivals of Aether. You play as four different heroes, dungeon diving into the caverns to help the town and get stronger. The demo focuses on a single dungeon dive with Fleet, the baseline hero of the four.

Combat has an initial simple core. Each turn both sides choose a skill to use in combat, first to go decided by 'speed' stat. If an attack was chosen, it must beat the opponents defense to do damage. Accuracy increases options of skills in a turn. Skills have a wide array of effects like increasing defense this turn, or increasing stats next turn.

Layered on top is dice drafting! Six 6-sided dice are rolled each turn, each assigned a color tied to the 4 stats or as a wild card color. Player and enemy draft 3 die to improve their stats, starting with the player and rotating. If a dice matches color with a stat or is a wild card, the stat is directly increased. Otherwise, the stat is only increased by 1.

Dice drafting is a fun spin on RPG turns. This system naturally causes damage to be hard won, so health is very small for all units (Fleet and the demo enemies were 3 health or lower). There may be future issues where it might be a little too hard to damage enemies, which depends on how the long-term balancing is handled.

Fleet represents the baseline idea of the gameloop and she's very fun as a plucky and clumsy thief, boding well for the other three heroes. While the town side of RPG systems was not present in the demo, gradual skill unlocking and equipment management are and those feel very ripe for cool synergy planning.

Similar health values will have me pausing on continued dungeon dives

​Inkbound

Battlefield is a beautiful mess of lots of AOE markers and range indicators

Inkbound is.. a lot.. and a favorite of demos I tried. It's an MMO, turn-based, run-based, tactics, roguelite game with seasonal structure of ARPGs like Diablo. You play as a Needless, primordial goo type humanoids, tasked with helping stop the decay of the worlds of living stories. The demo focuses on showcasing the roguelite loop with the 3 available classes.

Each turn you refresh your action points to either move or use one of your skills (called Bindings). Movement is radius based and important for moving out of range of marked AOEs or out of range of enemy melee attacks. After your turn, all enemy turns resolve at once and the arena tightens with a damaging circular wall.

Outside of battles during a run, Bindings can be upgraded to strengthen synergy with other skills and unique items can be obtained with unique passive. These rewards and battles are handled by a room by room basis, displaying the difficulty and rewards of each room. 

Upgrades are really high impact that feels great for a heavy run-based game like this

I gravitated towards the Weaver mage class for seeing the potential of the synergy building. Weaver has a low cost, low damage skill that applies a debuff (Entangled) that allows their other skills to function and do big damage.

You could choose to make the low-cost skill the core of the build and add ailment effects that do dramatically more damage the more they're applied. You could also choose to make the skill that splits damage across Entagled targets hit like a truck and crit more often! 

I'm very excited for Inkbound. Much like the developer's prior game, Monster Train, their inspirations are readily apparent but transformed into a unique and ambitious vision. I'm not sure how the MMO layer will play out since I fully played single player, but I had a blast with solo play.

Lots of classes and lots of player customizability!

Closing Thoughts

Video games! Lots of them! I have a lot of deep respect for developers who put in what must be a tremendous amount of work for public facing builds like these. And this was a fun writeup to do to try to tighten thoughts to cover the many hours of Steam Next Fest I played.

Until next time!