Winning three TGA awards, the "Joker Card" developed by a single person is a huge success. | Game Insights
Written by | Feng Ruiyang
Edited by | Liu Shiwu
Besides the "upset" of "Cosmic Bots", there are still many remarkable aspects in the 2024 TGA award-winning works, including the relatively niche but "underdog-to-champion" "Joker Card".
In the TGA awards ceremony on the morning of December 13, "Balatro (Joker Card)" won three awards: Best Independent Game, Best Debut Independent Game, and Best Mobile Game. Previously, it also received honors such as Apple's Annual Apple Arcade Game and TGA's nomination for Game of the Year.
Up to now, Joker Card has sold 3.5 million copies, received a 98% overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam, and was developed by a newcomer developer, LocalThunk, alone. This raises the question: How can a small-scale card game, without a strong art style, almost no community operation, and even without a plot or a main character, achieve such success just by its creative gameplay design?
Simple Rules and Diverse Gameplay, Low Threshold and Addictive
Joker Card is a Rougelike card game. It draws inspiration from Texas Hold'em in terms of card types and concepts, but has a completely different scoring method and game goal.
Game screen of "Joker Card"
In Joker Card, players need to achieve a higher "ante" by completing rounds. The "ante" of each level is divided into "small blind", "big blind", and "Boss". When playing the "Boss" of each "ante", players will encounter a debuff in the rules.
In each round, players will have several opportunities to play and discard cards, and they can play up to five cards at a time. The score of a single card play is determined by factors such as the card type, the current level of the card type, the special buff provided by the card face, the buff provided by the joker card, the buff provided by the level or coupon, and so on. The scores of several card plays within a round are added together. If the specified score requirement is not met, the game will immediately end in failure.
If the player passes a round, they can then in the subsequent store, purchase joker cards, tarot cards, planet cards, game cards, etc. to improve, in order to obtain a higher score in the subsequent rounds and meet the clearance requirements of that round.
Common card strategy games, such as Hearthstone or KARDS, are where players edit a deck outside the game and use this determined deck to play after entering the game. The goal of the game is to reduce the opponent's health to zero through cumulative damage.
However, Joker Card has nothing that can be edited outside the game. Within the game, it is divided into two states: within the round and between rounds; all edits and enhancements to the deck occur between rounds, with the aim of being able to play cards in the next round to obtain a higher score to meet the clearance requirements of that round.
In comparison, the Rougelike gameplay brings stronger randomness and more diverse gameplay - before starting a game, players cannot choose or predict what will happen in the next game, and each game may have new surprises.
Within such rules, Joker Card has almost no plot or setting, and players can start playing without any background knowledge.
Compared to similar games, such as "Slay the Spire", which is also a Rougelike card game, Joker Card is based on poker cards, with mathematical concepts for descriptions and relatively simple scoring rules, making it have a lower entry threshold and be easier to get started for players. Unlike the health mechanism of "Slay the Spire", "Joker Card" only has two results in each round: pass or fail. Mistakes do not accumulate, so players do not need to be overly anxious.
Game screen of "Slay the Spire", where concepts such as "block" and "power" are more abstract and require time to understand
Joker Card provides a very strong immediate feedback through simple graphics and sound effects. For example, if a single card play can meet the round score requirement, the chips for scoring and the numbers at the multiplier will start to shake, and the icon will start to "ignite" with the corresponding burning sound effect. Another example is that if there are multiple bonuses when playing a card, there will be a "ding" sound effect for each bonus calculation, and the pitch will get higher and higher, and the numbers on the screen will also get larger and larger, bringing an audio-visual impact.
Screen from the official promotional video of Joker Card, where the scoring area is shaking and burning when a single card play is excellent
In addition, Joker Card has a relatively fast overall pace, with each game lasting up to about twenty minutes. The clearance score requirement for each level of "ante" increases extremely quickly. "Ante 1" only requires a score of 300, while "Ante 6" requires a score of 20,000, "Ante 11" requires a score of 7,200,000, and "Ante 16" requires a score of 8.600e20. In each round, either the score is not enough and the player is immediately out, or the player gets an almost doubled score. Such a strong contrast brings a gambling-like thrill to the player.
Clever Design to Address Common Problems in Rougelike Games
In addition to having many advantages, Joker Card has also found its own methods to address the common problems of Rougelike games and avoid negative experiences that might "discourage" players. These clever handling methods are worth learning from.
First, the Rougelike gameplay needs to solve the balance of strength between different builds.
"Build" refers to a series of enhancements in a specific direction. These enhancements can work together to achieve better effects. For example, "All cards are regarded as face cards" and "Face cards + 5 multiplier" belong to the same build system.
There are at least dozens of build styles in Joker Card. Not only can more than a dozen card types be played, but a build based purely on jokers can also be achieved, making balance particularly important. If the balance is not done well, some builds are too strong and some are too weak, then it is equivalent to the game having a "standard answer". Once players cannot complete the strongest build in the game process, they will have a strong sense of frustration.
There are a total of 150 kinds of jokers in the game, providing a variety of powerful bonuses
In order to achieve overall balance, the bonus provided by each non-development transitional joker card is basically stable in pure numerical value.
These joker cards can be divided into two categories: providing chip bonuses and providing multiplier bonuses. Among them, the chip-type jokers are all +50 - 150 chips, and the multiplier-type jokers are approximately +15 - 50 multipliers or multiplied by 1.5 - 3 times. Although the upper limit of card play can be greatly improved after the optimal build is fully realized, even if the card draw is not smooth, each build has an acceptable lower limit of strength. After players are familiar with the rules, they can often reach "Ante 8" through operation, that is, clear the game.
In addition, Joker Card has also made several updates and adjustments since its release to further optimize its balance.
Secondly, a solution needs to be found between "the build is too easy to achieve, resulting in boredom after realization" and "the build is too difficult to achieve, resulting in players being unable to have the desired game". Facing this dilemma, some jokers and "coupons" need to be unlocked in subsequent games after completing the specified conditions in the game, which slows down the speed at which players complete the full build.
Overall, it is very difficult to achieve a specific build in a normal game of Joker Card - there is no directional selection mechanism for jokers, and the jokers that appear in the store are purely random. Players can only choose whether to buy after a specific joker appears; and jokers do not appear in a cycle, which means that the appearance probability of a specific joker cannot be reduced by methods such as "buying and then selling".
However, Joker Card provides 20 different "challenge games" with initial presets, providing basic builds in different directions, which players can directly choose when they want to obtain a specified experience.
Figure: Some "challenge games" with specific rules
Finally, every round of Rougelike games needs to start from the beginning - no matter how many tens of thousands or hundreds of millions of scores were achieved in the previous round, the next round of the game still needs to start with an initial deck of several tens or hundreds of points, and it is not certain whether this round can eventually exceed the historical highest record.
"After achieving an extremely strong build, one feels that there is no more pursuit and it becomes boring" is the reason why many players eventually quit the game. In Joker Card, although the evaluation standard for whether a round is cleared is the score of the card play, the explicit and non-numerical operations that players will perform in this process can also bring fun.
"In the previous game, 5000 damage was dealt, while in this game only 4000 damage was dealt" may be frustrating, but "In the previous game, a five-of-a-kind was dealt, while in this game a full house was dealt" will bring players two pleasures.
In the case where there is only one card of each suit and value at the beginning of the game, modifying the cards through tarot cards, etc., and finally playing five identical cards at once, this kind of thrill can be obtained without the need for numerical incentives. And in Joker Card, there are many other similar "thrilling points".
Full House "Glass Cannon" (Image source: Bilibili up master "Xiaoxiao Xiaoxiao zx")
These clever designs make the game highly playable while being a small-scale, Rougelike, and card game.
Return to the Essence: Bringing a Good Gaming Experience to Players
For players, in the early stage of playing "Joker Card", by discovering different jokers and achieving diverse builds, they can have a fresh experience in every game; in the middle stage, as their understanding of the game increases, players can use almost the same cards as before but score exponentially, which can bring a lot of a sense of achievement. (Note: "成就感" could be translated as "a sense of achievement", but it seems the context is not completed here. Maybe there is a mistake in the original text.)
And when the game time reaches hundreds of hours, achievements such as "putting gold stickers on all jokers" and "Glass Cannon, one shot with billions" and other creative gameplay can also become new pursuits for players, providing more playing space.
Therefore, although Joker Card does not have a "main storyline", players of various stages and styles can find their own goals in the game and have fun in the process of achieving them.
Currently, more and more games emphasize aspects such as art, music, operation, and marketing, attracting players by making the game more perfect in all aspects, like an interactive movie or art piece. For example, the card strategy game "Library of Ruina" released in 2021 was widely praised for its music and plot, but was slightly criticized for its gameplay.
The theme song of "Library of Ruina" has over five million views on Bilibili, and its popularity even exceeds the game itself
However, Joker Card returns more to the essence of the game, bringing a good gaming experience to players through interesting gameplay and mechanisms.
Nowadays, we have better hardware and software than before, but many games are just exquisite in graphics but lack characteristics, and the mechanisms are complicated but just pieced together, which makes players complain that the games have become "not fun".
The success of Joker Card proves to us a fact that seems to have been ignored by the game industry for a long time but is important - As a game, being fun enough is the simplest, most direct, and most powerful way to attract players.
Image source: Steam
In the Steam store, the positive rating of "All Reviews" for Joker Card is 98%, and the positive rating of "Recent Reviews" is even 99%.
In a "game off-year", the "alternative" success of Joker Card deserves our attention and reflection.
This article is from the WeChat public account "36Kr Games", and the author is Feng Ruiyang.