Hey all, we've been working on getting all the files prepped, and I wanted to share a bunch of that work with you.
Relics, and the Vault, will represent the release of One Deck Dungeon 2.0. We're not making any massive mechanical upheavals or other disruptions to the core of the game, but we are making small revisions for QOL and some long-pending art fixes.
Edit: To be clear, this is purely a visual/QOL update (the last printing was v1.9). There are no balance or content changes that make earlier copies of the game incompatible.
Icons Upgrade
As part of the new visuals, we've vectorized all of the basic icons so that they print more consistently and cleanly. Over the past decade we'd accumulated a lot of little variations, and this cleans that all up. In print, they will be slightly less fuzzy in some places.
Layout / Templates Cleanup
With the updated icons, we've made some changes to the card template. All of the elements are about 10% larger, including fonts. This should give dice a tiny bit more breathing room, and gave us some space to expand the scroll where skills/potions go at the bottom.
This has also allowed us to address a presentation issue that's been around since v1.0 - the way skills and items line up under a Hero card. Below on the left is the old, to the right the new:
As part of the rearranging process, we've been able to make the items and skills line up much more accurately with the hero card template. You can see as well that the stone backgrounds for the four stats is a little more colorful!
Pardon the text fuzziness, the PNG exports are going through photoshop and then BackerKit's image compression - the real cards will have good crisp text!
Compatibility
If you are plaing with a mix of old and new cards, the scrolls and item icons won't line up perfectly, but the game is otherwise fully playable, you shouldn't have any issues.
Rulebook
A big part of this is integrating the new rules for Relics of the Forge into the core rulebook. The rulebook, which will be included in every print copy of One Deck Dungeon and its stand-alone expansions, Forest of Shadows and Relics of the Forge, will include all the rules for those three core sets. Mini-expansions, such as Abyssal Depths and the extra game modes provided in the Trove, will have their own small rules documents. All of these will also be available as PDFs available for download from OneDeckDungeon.com.
These rules are presented within the rulebook with color-coded boxes indicating the expansion they refer to:
We've also got a separate spread each for Forest and Relics to summarize all their core rules together:
If you'd like to see the whole PDF of the current draft (95% complete, but missing all diagram updates with the newer cards and some other graphics polish) - you can download it at https://onedeckdungeon.com/RuleBook_2_0_DRAFT.pdf
We're wrapping up work on all of the stuff in this update in the next week or so. We have a few other tasks to complete for layouts, but aim to be done and ready to print soon. Release should be this Fall, pending factory/freight/The World.
My work right now has been laying out the unified One Deck Dungeon v2.0 rulebook. Relics, Forest, and Base One Deck Dungeon will all come with the same rulebook, which will contain all of the rules for the major expansions. Expansion rules will have iconography noting which expansion they refer to - the v1.5 and above rulebook does this for base and Forest already.
In addition, while I'm not changing the way the game is played, we are taking this opportunity to clean up a lot of parts of the rules that've been confusing, some terminology clashes, and trying to make the game as easy to learn as possible from the rulebook, whichever version someone starts with.
I had hoped to have the whole book laid out by Friday, I didn't quite make it. I'm working on it today and we'll post an update with the rulebook as soon as it's ready to show. There aren't any rules crises, just some things that have been tougher to organize clearly/coherently than I thought. Thanks all for your patience, and sorry again for the quiet period. We're trying to get all the things done!
Right now, the game is expected to be submitted to the factory for production this Spring. We don't have a precise delivery/release date, that is in the hands of the factory + freight world. Summer/Fall is our goal.
Today we have everyone's favorite sort of update, one with pretty pictures! Up until now, all of the images we've shown of relics and the forge itself are my own very professional photoshop chop jobs. But perhaps you'd like to see a couple Relics laid out by professional artists:
The Ancient Tome (1P)
Bloodstone (1P)
We're still tweaking a few things, but this is close to the final presentation. As you can see, this is an entirely new template - we've added a little icon to visually distinguish each relic, and different backgrounds for the Relic abilities. No more scrolls, but with the colors matching skills and feats. Each relic has 3 abilities, always in the same order. The top one can be used during an encounter like a skill, the second before an encounter like a feat, and the third is the flare effect that happens when the forge is full.
The Relic card is designed to sit atop the Forge, which is also much shinier than before:
The two artworks are connected to show the flow of fiery lava fuel from the Relic to the Forge. The nine slots for fuel are now along the bottom edge of the card, much like the Fiends from Abyssal Depths. The text layout on the Forge card is still going through some revisions, we'll be tailoring the embers and sparks in the background so that they don't interfere with the words once that part is finalized.
What's up next? The rulebook! We'll be working on that over the next couple weeks now that things are finalized, rules-wise. We've been using the alpha implementation of Relics in the digital version of One Deck Dungeon to do lots of bonus rapid playtesting and that's allowed us to make some of the gameplay and balance tweaks with more confidence. That's our last major piece of layout work to be done before being ready to hit the factory.
Overall progress in March was slower than hoped, I was sick for most of the month but we managed to get as much as we could done, and fingers crossed that's the end of the illness for the season. Let the spring and warmth begin!
We're finishing up some cool art things to show off alongside our progress, and our plan is to do a big update on Friday. Sorry for the quiet - I was sick for most of the month of March, it's been a very frustrating time!
All 12 Relics! PnP update, Balance tweaks, and SNOW
It has been a wild few weeks up here in the northeast. Can I see the ground outside yet? No, haha. 17" of snow here last week (36" in some spots near us!), but amidst that all, progress!
We initially planned for 8 Relics to be included with Relics of the Forge. Stretch goals unlocked another 3, and due to me forgetting that 8+3 = 11 shocking generosity, we've completed design work on 12 Relics! I'm really excited about how differently the game plays with each of these, ranging from the comfy defensive Safety Pin to the wildly aggressive Emerald Blade. Let's take a look at two of the new ones:
The Luminous Chime (seen before in a different, early concept) gives you an interesting mix of rerolling capabilities and bonus heroic dice - but fuel can stack up in a hurry!
The Emerald Blade absorbs loot opportunities to give you powerful blasts of dice! It's power won't last forever though, so use it sparingly...
All 12 relics, along with some other balance, wording, and clarity changes are available in the PnP PDF.
As you may have noticed, the Relic cards and the Forge are functional but a little messy. That's because they're still on my (not artist) template while we figured out the quantity of text and iconography each would need. The iterations over the last 3 months have reduced the wordiness significantly, and pulled away some from some over-complexity issues. Now that these are locked in aside from small balance tweaks, our next task is to create the Actual Print Files. It will look nicer :) We're also making a unique icon for each of the relics, so they have a little more visual separation from one another!
Schedule
We have two games in the print queue with our factory right now (Mystic Curling Club & Chess Joker), and our aim is to have Relics + the Vault ready to follow once those are complete.
Next tasks are laying out the Relics changes to the rulebook, finishing the card layouts as mentioned above, and tackling production plans with the factory about the precise shape + size of the Vault box, so as best to house the games.
I will be at PAX East at the end of March, hope to see some of you there if you're around!
Hey all, we've been working on getting all the files prepped, and I wanted to share a bunch of that work with you.
Relics, and the Vault, will represent the release of One Deck Dungeon 2.0. We're not making any massive mechanical upheavals or other disruptions to the core of the game, but we are making small revisions for QOL and some long-pending art fixes.
Edit: To be clear, this is purely a visual/QOL update (the last printing was v1.9). There are no balance or content changes that make earlier copies of the game incompatible.
Icons Upgrade
As part of the new visuals, we've vectorized all of the basic icons so that they print more consistently and cleanly. Over the past decade we'd accumulated a lot of little variations, and this cleans that all up. In print, they will be slightly less fuzzy in some places.
Layout / Templates Cleanup
With the updated icons, we've made some changes to the card template. All of the elements are about 10% larger, including fonts. This should give dice a tiny bit more breathing room, and gave us some space to expand the scroll where skills/potions go at the bottom.
This has also allowed us to address a presentation issue that's been around since v1.0 - the way skills and items line up under a Hero card. Below on the left is the old, to the right the new:
As part of the rearranging process, we've been able to make the items and skills line up much more accurately with the hero card template. You can see as well that the stone backgrounds for the four stats is a little more colorful!
Pardon the text fuzziness, the PNG exports are going through photoshop and then BackerKit's image compression - the real cards will have good crisp text!
Compatibility
If you are plaing with a mix of old and new cards, the scrolls and item icons won't line up perfectly, but the game is otherwise fully playable, you shouldn't have any issues.
Rulebook
A big part of this is integrating the new rules for Relics of the Forge into the core rulebook. The rulebook, which will be included in every print copy of One Deck Dungeon and its stand-alone expansions, Forest of Shadows and Relics of the Forge, will include all the rules for those three core sets. Mini-expansions, such as Abyssal Depths and the extra game modes provided in the Trove, will have their own small rules documents. All of these will also be available as PDFs available for download from OneDeckDungeon.com.
These rules are presented within the rulebook with color-coded boxes indicating the expansion they refer to:
We've also got a separate spread each for Forest and Relics to summarize all their core rules together:
If you'd like to see the whole PDF of the current draft (95% complete, but missing all diagram updates with the newer cards and some other graphics polish) - you can download it at https://onedeckdungeon.com/RuleBook_2_0_DRAFT.pdf
We're wrapping up work on all of the stuff in this update in the next week or so. We have a few other tasks to complete for layouts, but aim to be done and ready to print soon. Release should be this Fall, pending factory/freight/The World.
My work right now has been laying out the unified One Deck Dungeon v2.0 rulebook. Relics, Forest, and Base One Deck Dungeon will all come with the same rulebook, which will contain all of the rules for the major expansions. Expansion rules will have iconography noting which expansion they refer to - the v1.5 and above rulebook does this for base and Forest already.
In addition, while I'm not changing the way the game is played, we are taking this opportunity to clean up a lot of parts of the rules that've been confusing, some terminology clashes, and trying to make the game as easy to learn as possible from the rulebook, whichever version someone starts with.
I had hoped to have the whole book laid out by Friday, I didn't quite make it. I'm working on it today and we'll post an update with the rulebook as soon as it's ready to show. There aren't any rules crises, just some things that have been tougher to organize clearly/coherently than I thought. Thanks all for your patience, and sorry again for the quiet period. We're trying to get all the things done!
I really love this game, but all this silence kills the enthusiasm for me :(( . Can't wait to have it! And I do not want things rushed, just wish we had more content and updates to fill the void. I deeply respect all of you and thank you for your good work!
About 2 months since the last update. Wish someone would actually inform us what is going on, if we are still on time or have to wait till next year to get it.
