Unstoppable

Unstoppable is designed by John D. Clair and published by Renegade Games. In this solo or co-operative deck-building game, you'll need to use card crafting and deck building wisely in the face of unlimited threats, maintaining action and card-draw momentum to become unstoppable!

Cards are placed in plastic sleeves, where the front shows a power for you, and the back is a threat you must defeat. You can also buy upgrades, which will show through the punchouts in the cards.

Project Overview:

Our work on Unstoppable was fairly comprehensive, and included designing character powers, designing two additional bosses for the game, and streamlining and balancing across game systems. The game came in with a medieval fantasy theme, and working from worldbuilding from our writer Banana Chan, we rethemed all of the draft cards to bring out a cohesive world that players can explore.


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Development Diary

Hello, my name is Jordan, and I am one of the Brieger Creative developers on Unstoppable. I'm going to talk about the development of the bosses in Unstoppable and how they went from initial design to the final product that you see today.

Bosses are near and dear to my heart. When I was tasked with helping to redesign and develop the bosses for Unstoppable, I leaped at the chance to synthesize my deep love of video games and board game knowledge.

In John D. Clair's earlier drafts of Unstoppable, you won by getting to level 5. Early bosses drafts reflected this, serving more as time limits to keep players from stalling for too long. They succeeded in that goal, but there were two problems with them:

So we knew fairly early on in development that we wanted to really amp up this area of the core design. The first boss we tackled was a tutorial boss, meant to establish basic expectations and rules for bosses in Unstoppable. This boss used John D. Clair's core boss design.

However, this meant that above problem #1 would still be true for this boss. To address this, we dressed it up in a theme to make it make sense why you didn't interact with the boss directly. Why would this boss just be sort of biding its time until either it won or you won? Simple: An evil cult summoning a creature of great power! A trope, for sure, but one hammered the core point that you need to deal with bosses before time runs out. We landed on this theme quite quickly and it didn't change throughout development.

Breaking New Paths

For the next two bosses, my co-developer John Brieger and I tasked ourselves with really stretching and testing the limits of the game systems.

We had a brainstorm and came to an idea of a giant monster with multiple appendages that you had to destroy before you could defeat it. Our narrative designer, Banana Chan, wrote up a crime ring that had multiple branches that we adapted to fit the gameplay.

You have to deal damage to the Triumvirate directly to defeat it, but only after defeating at least two branches. Additionally, defeating a branch of the Triumvirate gives you some bonus for the rest of the fight, giving players multiple paths to try to take through the boss fight.

Last but not least is Duomo's Menace: a boss with a decision tree of branching paths. We wanted to really push the "choices" aspect of this third boss. Like with the Triumvirate, we discussed possible theming with our narrative designer. After some back and forth and revisions, this boss became known as the gang of android space pirates called Duomo's Menace!

Duomo's Menace was heavily inspired by the many different choice-driven genres I enjoy. CRPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2; immersive sims like Dishonored; narrative games like Firewatch. The connection I saw was that Unstoppable, like many deckbuilders, has two distinct currencies, damage and credits. These currencies could be used to represent different approaches to the same problem and have the story respond to how you play. If you take a more violent approach, the world may be more hostile to you over time. If you tend to talk your way out of problems, then the story takes a wholly different direction.

This is shown in the different paths down the decision tree (the above picture is just one of those trees). Committing to one path locks you out of certain endings, too. This massively increases the replayability of this boss in particular. The idea was liked so much by the designer that he floated the idea of this kind of boss being the core campaign of the game, with the other bosses serving as intro bosses. While we didn't go down that path, we do like that this boss boss has 8 different endings! Which one is the "good" ending and "bad" ending, is up for you to decide.

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain to see what the creative process is like. I'd like to thank designer John D. Clair for being so open to trying out fresh ideas and being so receptive of the changes that we suggested to help make Unstoppable the best it can be. Not every designer is like that (myself included at times), so it was a joy to collaborate with him, Banana Chan, John Brieger, and Dan Bojanowski throughout this process!

— Jordan M.A. Johnson, Lead Developer

See more on the Unstoppable Kickstarter page.

Brieger Creative Team