00:00On a
00:29It's incredibly humbling and awesome that we're number one. I remember a distinct moment when I was walking down the street with my wife when we first started working on Slay the Spire and I was saying how great it would be if we sold enough copies that quitting my software job wasn't just the worst financial decision in the world and now here we are and it's it's just like mind-blowing.
00:48I've definitely thought about what makes Slay the Spire so compelling to people and how I can make it better into Slay the Spire 2. The thing that makes games in a particular card game so engaging is that they're a series of discrete meaningful choices.
01:07Usually they're pretty comprehensible like you're not overwhelmed with just this infinite array of things and you can say okay if I do this it's going to have this impact and if I do this it's going to have this impact and distilling down on that strong distinct choice that the player can look back on and be like oh I messed up here. That's like the key of deck builders and why they work so well.
01:27Every choice you make is like hard. That's kind of like the essence I think of deck builders is having every single choice be quite difficult. You choose a card generally about three cards per turn and so each of those choices if they're not difficult you're going to just feel like you're just pushing buttons.
01:41If you're new to deck builders we tend to put a lot of tutorials in that detect when you're confused so we really try to gently guide people into playing the game but you know it's okay.
01:50I think if the game launches pretty popular you should be able to have some friends that help you too.
01:55One of the big differences between Slay the Spire 1 and 2 is that we have grown our team up and actually scale up so we can make kind of just a bigger game overall.
02:05The art is way more polished, there's more animations, more visual effects, there's more characters, more events, more relics, more cards, returning characters have totally different card pools with new cards as well.
02:16In addition we've tried to expand out some of the play space for what you can do with cards and other things in this game.
02:23So you can apply enchantments to your cards to modify them and make them more powerful.
02:27Enemies can also mess with your cards in ways they couldn't before.
02:30You also have new quest events where you can engage with the event system in a different way than you could in Slay the Spire 1.
02:37So lots of little things that I think add up to a much bigger whole.
02:42In addition to writing significantly more lore, with Slay the Spire 2 we have a whole new mechanic based around the lore and I don't want to say how it works or anything but we call it the timeline and it's going to give the players just way more information about the game world, the actors in it and just everything about it.
03:00Just everything is kind of bigger than it was in Slay the Spire 1.
03:05I think in a given week Anthony will give us maybe like 20 to 30 different changes.
03:11Again, ranging from tweaking numbers or even just cutting cards altogether, adding new ones.
03:17I think over the course of the game, let's say every character has 60 cards.
03:20I think they've gone through at least 100, 200 versions, like actually design cards that have been cut or remade over the course of the last say three, four years.
03:30The analogy that I always use for game design and in particular card game design is that it's kind of like you're a butcher.
03:36You generate like thousands, tens of thousands of different ideas and then you look at them all and then you go, these are bad and you just cut them all away.
03:44And there's this constant culling process and then the ones you do keep, then you're usually changing all of those and refining them.
03:50Very rarely is there just this golden idea you keep from start to finish.
03:54Those are incredibly rare and most of it is like this incredibly destructive process.
03:59And that's what I think makes game development so interesting and different than other creative mediums.
04:06The Necrominder is the newest character we've revealed information on for Slay the Spire 2.
04:11And she's got several different archetypes she can go into.
04:14One is built around summoning.
04:16She has a minion she can summon called Osti and she can have him attack and build up defenses on him so that he can take hits for her.
04:22So Necrominder is supposed to be a more complex character compared to the Ironclad in Silent.
04:28She has a pet, she has a pet hand named Osti.
04:31It's a big hand.
04:32Osti gets bigger and bigger the more HP it has, which is very funny.
04:36So I highly recommend making Osti huge.
04:39Another is she can doom enemies, which has kind of a risk reward nature to it because the enemies will still get to attack you on the turn that they're going to die.
04:46She has a souls based mechanic where she's drawing tons and tons of cards, but it's kind of hard and slow to get going.
04:52And she's got also lots of other little archetypes that she can kind of blend into the other ones.
04:57And I think she's our most complicated character to play so far.
05:00And I think Slay the Spire 1 players will really enjoy her.
05:08When we're describing sort of the aesthetic of Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2, it really is, I don't know a better way to describe it except grimdark with whimsy in it.
05:17Like you will kind of meet these really horrifying monsters or like, you know, eldritch horrors in a way.
05:25And then you'll also do an event where there's like a goblin there wearing a suit that wants to spin a wheel with you.
05:30So I think it's a very unique balance of aesthetics in there that you're trying to, you know, make a serious fantasy world, but have some fun with it and have some weirdness injected into it.
05:41I'm not sure why, but I feel like our artists really enjoy making cute things or gross things.
05:48So there's a lot of oozy things and a lot of, a lot of cute enemies and that's okay.
05:53You know, I don't think Slay the Spire has to be Gothic blood flying everywhere, ripping hearts out.
05:59We are working on a sequel to a game that kind of has an established visual style that people I think really attach to.
06:06I think players attach to it because this is a game that some people, you know, play for hundreds of hours and they remember it so fondly.
06:13And we want to be able to provide them like a recognizable space, but also upgrade it in a way that it does look new.
06:21It does look fresh. It does look like a sequel.
06:25I definitely had some hesitation with working on a sequel because oftentimes they don't hit as hard or you're kind of like, why was a sequel made?
06:32To me, actually that made it kind of interesting because trying to figure out new twists that you can do while still keeping kind of the same core formula or keeping the fans happy.
06:40It was actually an interesting question that I was kind of interested to dive into.
06:43I'm happy we're launching into early access. For Slay the Spire 1, early access was a huge boon.
06:48Like we constantly pushed out updates. Our players loved it.
06:51That kind of direct feedback allows us to improve the game at an incredible speed.
06:55There are a lot of bosses already. There are a lot of enemies. There are a lot of events. Probably more than the first game just on early access launch.
07:03Yeah, voted number one is an honor and a surprise. I feel like Slay the Spire is the chicken noodle soup of video games. Like it's not exciting, but I hope people like our soup.
07:13Slay the Spire 2 launches March 2026. Wishlisted now on Steam.
07:19Slay the Spire 2 launches March 2026. Wishlisted now on Steam.
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