Welcome, Dear Reader, to my interview with Pengonauts about the studio’s new and absurdly fresh deckbuilder, StarVaders.
I’ve been playing a lot of this one in recent weeks, and there’s a review right here if you’d like to know more about my thoughts on the game.
If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to find out about it directly from one of the chief people who made it, then you’re in luck. That’s because Lead Designer Eddie Cai (Axolotl), was kind enough to answer the following questions that were put to him. Starting with…
Congratulations on the launch of StarVaders! You must be very pleased with the reaction that the game has received so far?!
EC: Thank you so much, we’re ecstatic! Really enjoying the passion from all of our players, it’s been a crazy few weeks.
For the uninitiated, what is StarVaders, in your own words?
It’s a strategy roguelike about discovering and creating massive synergies and combos to destroy swarms of alien invaders in grid-based tactical card combat.
When coming up with the idea, can you describe that first flash of inspiration?
It really did feel like it came out of nowhere – I had played quite a lot of board games and so I had a lot of different mechanics brewing in my head for a long time, but when I did figure out the core mechanics of the game (that Space Invaders style combat with card-based actions), everything else just snapped into place. I like to say that it felt like I didn’t design the game, the rest of the game designed itself after the initial concept was formed.
There are several mechanics working together; what was the hardest thing to balance during development?
On top of all of the different systems working together, balance is particularly difficult for our game because we also barely have numbers – we don’t have damage or HP values. Usually if something is too strong or too weak you can tweak the numbers a little bit, but I had to actually rework an entire card.
I believe this was a blessing in disguise, though. It forced the game to have every card do a unique ability or mechanic instead of just changing the numbers, which I think makes the card pool much more interesting to play with.
I’d agree with that. What is your favourite thing about the game you’ve made?
It’s a bit of an advanced system that only matters to hardcore players haha, but I really love the Pack System in the game, which was initially inspired by a Slay the Spire mod called the Packmaster.
The idea is that every time you play the game, the card pool is modified by 3 random “Packs” of cards. This means that each time you play, not only are the encounters, cards you get, bosses, etc different, but the card pool itself is different too – it substantially increases the variety and identity of every run, but without diluting the card pool at all.
Can you talk about some of your influences? And not just video game influences, I’d love to know a bit about the inspiration behind the game’s art style, too!
Board games and anime! A lot of the mechanics of the game were inspired by board games. One of the biggest influences is a board game called Bullet<3, a pattern-matching puzzle-battle game – that game has such a banger soundtrack we got the same composer for StarVaders!
Our lead artist is a very big fan of anime, so the artstyle is heavily influenced by various anime, channelling a lot of that colorful bombastic energy.
What are your future plans for the game? Are you planning on any additional content down the line, either as DLC or free updates?
We have plans for free content updates to the game! I can’t spoil too much but I am excited for players to see what we have in store. StarVaders played like a dream on my Steam Deck, and so it feels like it would be a great fit for the Nintendo Switch (maybe also the Switch 2, too).
Do you have any plans to bring the game to new platforms?
We also have plans for that as well, but nothing confirmed at this moment. We may or may not announce something soon.
For now, though, StarVaders is available on Steam PC (Mac, Win).
