The Long Road to Demeo Battles

A Pre-Launch Post-Mortem

When we first envisioned Demeo – long before its 2021 release –  it was more than just a game. Demeo was conceived as a whole world filled with stories and adventures. But even more than that, it was conceived of as a system. A toybox where we could take the pieces everyone would come to know and love and find new ways to play with them, delivering more excitement than could ever be contained to just one release.

In late 2021 – mere months after the game’s initial launch – we saw there was enough of an appetite to realize that vision and began ideating on the next project in the Demeo Action Role Playing System. As we sit on the precipice of that next game’s November 9 launch, the time seems right to look back at how we got here – and what players can look forward to when they finally get their hands on Demeo Battles early next month.

THE FIRST STEPS TOWARDS BATTLES

Like a lot of the best mechanics and ideas that players see from Resolution Games, everything started from a simple question: “how fun would it be to play Demeo against other players?” A small team assembled and started experimenting to find out – and even from the very first prototype that resulted, we knew we had found something special. 

There were countless iterations over the months and years that followed (some of which we’ll revisit in this post), but even from day one, there were elements that survived all the way to launch. You might be surprised to learn, for example, that teams of heroes (rather than solo champions competing) have been part of the plan from the beginning. After all, a big part of what makes Demeo work is the emergent gameplay that occurs when heroes work together – and if we wanted to make sure Demeo Battles lived up to the Demeo name, there was no way we could launch without retaining that element of cooperation. Synergies between heroes matter!

That first prototype and the first iterations that followed had us excited. Maybe a little too excited, leading to an honest error on our part. We included mention of what was then called “Demeo PvP” in our 2022 roadmap video. It was too early to talk about, and in retrospect, we should have kept this under wraps a little longer. We also called it a “mode” in that video, but in all honesty, we didn’t fully know what Battles was going to become at that time. That phrasing was premature, and we certainly didn’t want to create the confusion that resulted for our community.

While we may not have known how we would release Demeo Battles at this early stage, we definitely knew what we wanted: a new way to play that was faster, still familiar, and mixed what players already loved about Demeo with a sense of edge-of-your-seat competition.

As we entered into 2022, we realized just how big of an undertaking this would be.

EARLY ATTEMPTS

Scope grew quickly, and we realized early on that the logistics of keeping two complete games with their own update cycles in one distributable SKU would be a Sisyphean task. As time went on, we discovered we’d made the right decision for other reasons too. The broad appeal of quick-playing competitive strategy could make Demeo Battles a great entry point into the franchise for new players – but if we’d bundled it as DLC in Demeo, we’d be creating unnecessary roadblocks for those same new players to join in the fun.

But I suppose we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves in the development story. :) 

Building on the bones of that first prototype, there were experiments that greatly changed the familiar core mechanics in an effort to optimize speed of play – but we recognized we were moving further and further away from what made Demeo work, and that was contrary to what we were trying to accomplish: delivering Demeo’s proven tactical fun in a new way. 

To keep that Demeo spirit, we couldn’t move too far from what made Demeo work. This gave us important guardrails to work within – and significant challenges to overcome. Our design team had to walk an incredibly thin tightrope: change the game substantially enough to meet all our goals and deliver a completely fresh experience while hewing as close as possible to the proven gameplay that we know our players want. And as with any game in development, it took a lot of trial-and-error to get things right.

Our earliest direction saw large maps where huge battles between monsters could play out, which on paper sounds amazing – but in practice felt terrible. While a team’s minions headed to the middle of the map to fight each other, heroes would race around the outer edges of the map opening treasure chests until every last one was empty, every card was played, and every minion was defeated. Games would devolve into heroes chasing each other in circles, with melee classes endlessly trying to find cover to avoid taking damage from ranged competitors. Matches were taking upwards of 40 minutes, and worst of all, they weren’t exciting or fun. 

We had something of a “eureka!” moment following this that led to the invention of The Burn – a flood of lava that comes in from all sides of the map to push players closer together. In its first iteration, it would randomly come in from one side. After some testing (both internally and in closed betas with players) we discovered a better way to handle it – but more on that in a moment.

Another attempt (and the first that was in closed beta back in 2022) saw two additions that were aimed at keeping matches playing fast: limiting the number of rounds and awarding points based on damage dealt. This, too, lacked the fun we were going for and felt more like a blunt tool rather than a clean, simple, elegant solution that would keep matches fast and frenzied. This version could also feel quite unbalanced, as players who opted to bring in a bigger team of minions were at a disadvantage. Their opponent would have more targets to damage, letting them earn more points.

In the end, we have our players to thank for the version of Demeo Battles that finally found the fun. It took three rounds of closed beta playtesting for a player to deliver another big eureka moment: have The Burn come in from all sides to push the players together, forcing a last-team standing scenario. With that we could abandon the rounds, the points system, and deliver an experience that ramps up the tension round-after-round until one side walks away as the victor.

But while we’d found a winning formula, there was still a long way to go before Demeo Battles would be ready for release – and it was already late 2022. For the first time in company history, we were going to have to delay a planned launch. 

FINDING THE BALANCE

Fairness is important in any game – and when it comes to competitive games, it’s essential. 

Yet Demeo was never designed for a PvP experience. In the first game, heroes weren’t designed to directly fight each other; they were designed to give players a sense of power. Doing incredible damage to a Giant Slime and its surrounding slimelings makes you feel invincible! But dealing that same damage to a competing player, wiping them off the board before they’ve even taken their first move? That’s not going to be fun for anyone. 

We’ve spent much of the last year carefully balancing heroes, cards, and maps to ensure a level playing field for everyone, while also trying to keep things as close to the source material as we could. Veteran players will find that some heroes don’t play exactly as they’ve come to expect – and that’s entirely by design. Through playtesting, we discovered that negative dominant strategies could emerge from all sorts of combinations. A team of two wizards, for example, could zap the opposing team endlessly to leave them stunned and unplayable until their untimely demise. To eliminate this scenario, heroes are now immune to stun. A wizard’s Fireball card in Demeo can deliver 10 damage if centered on a minion – but centering it on an opposing player in Demeo Battles would sap every bit of health in a single move. Instead, we’ve replaced that card with the similar but slightly nerfed Firebolt. And with cards and minions purchasable before every match, finding the right balance of cost and rarity for every option was paramount.

Map design was equally important for delivering a great experience, and it took some time before we hit on the right approach to size and layout. We realized we’d hit on it when, during testing, there was one map we all kept coming back to time and again. It eventually became the map we’d use to test all our tweaks, and led us to understanding how Demeo’s different environments could be rethought to optimize for competitive play while still retaining what makes each unique. This inspirational map has actually survived to the final release – see if you can guess which one while you’re playing! (For more on maps, check out our earlier post). 

And some of the cards that experienced adventurers know all too well from Demeo? They hit different in Demeo Battles, even when completely unchanged. A barricade might seem like a low-value card in Demeo, but what about when you’re trying to prevent an opposing player from escaping The Burn? And cards that do minimal damage but cost 0 action points are a huge advantage now. Maybe a bone is all you need to do the remaining 1HP of damage to take an opponent out. Or you can throw that bottle of lye to ignite an oil lamp and catch both opposing teammates in the resulting explosion. 

Health mechanics were another serious consideration. We didn’t want them to feel drastically different, but we also couldn’t leave them as they were. In Demeo, a downed player can crawl around for a few turns before succumbing to the inevitable (or choose to drink a health potion if they have one). Demeo Battles' quick playing nature, by contrast, means everything benefits from a stronger sense of urgency – and a well coordinated team could exploit Demeo’s original approach to health to be relatively invulnerable for most of a match. So now players will either automatically drink a health potion (if they have one) when they’re downed, or die at the start of their next turn. And if they die? They’ll leave behind a tombstone that, if destroyed, will give their teammate an incredibly powerful luck potion that will guarantee critical damage on their next attack. 

Health is more important than ever, but it’s also in incredibly short supply in Demeo Battles. Given that players have the ability to choose their own cards at the start of every match (rather than receiving a randomly selected hand), playtesting revealed that multiples of health potions would lead to an incredibly lopsided experience, where the team with the most health would have an unfair advantage. So now everyone gets just one health potion – and an equal chance to receive healing through other means, whether that’s a Healing Fountain or the sweet melodies of a teammate who opted to play Bard. 

A CHALLENGER APPEAR

It was a long journey to get to this point, but we’re incredibly excited that Demeo Battles will be in players’ hands in just a few short weeks – and when they play it, they still might find a few surprises in store!

To make sure players are ready for the new challenge that awaits them in multiplayer competition, we’ve created 40 single-player stages to test their skills and help them develop new strategies. They start out simple and great for beginners, but there’s no shortage of challenge the deeper you go – and you might just surprise yourself with some of the solutions you come up with. 

Demeo Battles even rethinks Demeo’s leveling system by introducing a catalog that gives you more choice, more control, and more rewards. As you earn XP and level up, you’ll unlock pages filled with goodies to choose from including new maps, tombstones, dice, skins and more. You’ll even be able to unlock all of your favorite heroes from the original Demeo to see how well they hold their own in the arena.

Thanks for checking out this quick retrospective on our development process to date. And, once the game is released please do share your thoughts, suggestions and inspirations. Demeo Battles will be ready for play starting November 9 on Steam (flatscreen PC or VR), Meta Quest (VR) and Pico (VR), and we hope to see you there!