- Why I changed the evolution system + Open Playtest now live - 30 July 2026
Let's start with the playtest bit. On the store page you can now access the current build of the game via Steam. There's a "Feedback" button in the main menu if you want to share your thoughts on the game. It currently features two stages, a brand new tutorial and about 85 cards. So give it a try! Okay, on to the update part:I tend to complicate thingsHow upgrades work in Life Altered was one of the first things I posted on Steam. In my mind it has been a selling point of the game, mostly because I haven't seen anything like it in other games. The basic idea was you had to choose one card to evolve and one card to sacrifice - and the type of card you sacrifice would However, I have to confess that while it was a fun system to build it was never quite fun to play. And some recnt playtester feedback seemd to confirm that feeling. I think the reason for this was an overlaod of decisions th…
- Events and May 2026 update - 7 May 2026
Let's talk about events, because I recently revised a few of them a little and added some new ones. Events are a staple of the genre. You enter a room and instead of a fight you have some kind of situation and have to make a choice about it, usually knowing the consequences of each choice. I love events as a player. When I play Slay the Spire I try to hit as many events as possible. I am not quite sure why. But I can tell you that there are events I like and events I don't like as much. I found that events that have one clearly optimal choice are kinda boring. I like the events where I have to gauge the risk versus the reward (lose some health, but gain something else) or where the choices favor different strategies of play. Some of the first events I added to the game didn't adhere to this insight. I had an event where you lose 20 HP, but raise the ceiling of your max HP by 5. Yes, it'…
- Unified visual style and April 2026 update - 5 April 2026
When I started working on this game, I wasn't sure how to even create or acquire any of the visual assets I would need to bring the game to life. I figured I would simply start with placeholders and work out the details later. After a while I started adding prettier assets bit by bit, either by buying asset packs from dedicated stores or by commissioning artists. At first I wanted pixel art. I hoped I would be able to learn how to make acceptable pixel art myself. But after some time I realized that I just didn't have it in me and commissioning good pixel art was expensive. I also couldn't find the kind of assets I would need in asset packs. I love pixel art, but sadly I just didn't have the budget for it. I eventually found an artist to create illustrations of enemies in my game that I really liked. It didn't really work with the rest of the imagery I cobbled together, but I enjoyed th…
- A few words on iteration + Progress Report March 2026 - 8 March 2026
There's this meme currently being shown pretty often in dev circles. It's just showing the start of a project with the tag line 'make it exist first' and then a more polished screenshot with the tagline 'you can make it good later'. I like that one, because for the last two years (since I started making games) game development has been largely about iteration for me. You make something, and then your learn how to make it better and chisel away at it. I think the important thing is to be able to enjoy the process for itself, otherwise you'll go mad thinking about spending so much time on something that has a very good chance of being a financial loss to you and be played by only a handful of people. I have been thinking about this a bit more than usual, because I have spent the last 4 months mostly creating enemy animations. At the start of development, my enemies were made in MS paint a…
- October 2025 Progress Report - 2 November 2025
This will be the first month where I don't have some musings on game design while learning game design. I've been a bit focused on developing the game. For the last month I've been hard at work to expand the demo with one more stage. The second stage will take players into eastern Siberia. For this I have coded a few new enemies, events and abilities. I am also trying to only allow enemies on each stage that would normally appear in those areas. That means that if you have already played the demo on itch or GX.games, you might be somewhat confused that the mutated Mole for example (who was one of the first enemies before) does not behave as it did before. That is because there are apparently no moles in the rain forest, so I moved those sprites to one of the new enemies of Siberia and replaced the moles with these ants: Anyway, read the enemy tool tips and you'll be fine. However, you c…
- Enemy Designs + September 2025 Progress Report - 1 October 2025
When I started making the enemies for this game, I was trying to glean insight from more experienced developers talking about it. One thing the developers of Slay the Spire said stuck in my mind especially. They designed their enemies (especially elites and bosses) to pose challenges for certain deck constellations. So if, say, your deck's success rests mainly on being able to play 20 cards per turn, you'll have a more difficult time beating the time slug boss, because it automatically ends your turn after you played 12 cards. Crystal ScorpionWith that in my mind, I had a couple of ideas how to make enemies more interesting than just having them attack and block with different strength. One such enemy is the scorpion (internally called 'crystallizer', since the scorpion sprite is likely one I will exchange later on). It has the 'crystal' stat which negates the first piece of attack dama…
- Demo + Deckbuilder Map Systems + August 2025 Progress Report - 2 September 2025
Ok, since I do have something to announce this time, let me get it out the way first: You can now download a demo of the game on itch.io:Life Altered on Itch.ioMore on that below in the progress report, but first... A look at different map systems for deckbuildersMost deckbuilders handle progression from battle to battle via some kind of map. As one of the pioneers of the genre, the map of Slay the Spire seems to be the template most other games build on - and indeed so I have I in Life Altered: (side note: looking at it side by side, I am annoyed at how much more visual clarity the StS map offers to my own design - I'll have to rework that) You have your basic branching paths with map nodes that are filled with different type of rooms by a hidden algorithm (you have to make sure that certain room types do not cluster in some areas for example) and players can plan their way through it,…
- Ascension System + July 2025 Progress Report - 3 August 2025
Sometimes there are ideas in a game that must subsequently change all other games of the genre in the same direction. Like cross-hairs in shooters (didn't exist in Wolfenstein 3D or the original Doom) or (for better or worse) fast-travel in open-world games. I thought for sure that after Hades every roguelike game to come after it would adopt its brilliant ascension system. And maybe some of them have, but I have not yet encountered one. If you haven't played Hades or are unfamiliar with the ascension mechanic in general, let me explain: When you win a run and kill the final boss (or achieve the final objective) in a roguelike game, often you are tasked with doing it again, only now the difficulty has been raised. It's a mechanic I really like as it prolongs the fun you can have with a game, if it is done well. In most games, this difficulty progression is pre-ordained by the developer.…
- A word on consequence in roguelike games + June 2025 progress report - 3 July 2025
I recently listened to an interview with Jay Ma (one of the developers behind FTL and Into the Breach). She talked about how in her new game (the amazing Fulcrum Defender on PlayDate) she chose to have a replenishing health bar, because she got a bit tired of roguelike games that punished players for early game mistakes. Meaning that if you lose health in an early battle you would carry the consequences of it throughout the rest of the run. I liked this thought a lot. And it seemed like it could help me solve a problem I had. I previously basically applied the Slay the Spire formula for map progression: you choose a path with battles, events and rest points - the latter of which gives you an option to upgrade a card or heal your character. However, I want my game to focus a bit more on upgrading (evolving) the creatures (especially since I want players to experience stacking evolutions…
- Infections: Life Altered's Curse Mechanic + May 2025 Progress Report - 2 June 2025
This month I (among other things) finalized my infection mechanic (which is analagous to curses in many other deckbuilders). So let's have a look at how it works! The curse mechanic I'm familiar with is that you draw a curse like any other card and then it usually does something bad unless you can discard it before the turn's end. And I tinkered with a similar mechanic for my dice-based game: Just occupy one die face with a curse and issue the debuff if the player has not been able to reroll that die before that turn's end. However, not only did it not fit very well with the game's theme, it also posed new design problems with the dice. What if there was no space on the die? Would the player just get of scott free? That would further incentivize players to fill all their dice with crap as soon as possible. Or would I have to remove a creature? That seems like a real downer in gameplay.…
- How evolution works in Life Altered - 4 May 2025
One of the more ambitious features of Life Altered is its evolution system. The system is designed to solve two problems: 1. How do players further customize a die that already has 6 creatures on them? 2. How do players get rid of creatures that no longer fit the deck they are building? The solution: in order to evolve a creature, you have to sacrifice another - and the kind of creature you sacrificed will determine which upgrade the evolved creature will receive. I want the players to able to upgrade the creatures on the dice multiple times and in multiple ways. So sacrificing a plant will reward players with a different kind of upgrade for their chosen creature than sacrificing a mammal or an arthropod. Each evolution is unique While evolving a creature by sacrificing one of the same class will usually result in a numerical upgrade (say dealing 10 attack instead of 6), things get more…
- And introduction, a new look and some progress - 12 April 2025
I decided I wanted to try and use this space to give monthly (yeah, let's shoot for monthly) updates on how I'm doing with Life Altered. But first, an introduction: Hi, I'm Senescent Leaf, an indie game dev from Germany, making his first (commercial) game. My intention behind Life Altered is two-fold: 1. I love roguelike deckbuilders and after playing Slay the Spire for 2000+ hours (and counting), as a player I had a tough time trying to find a game that captures the same zen-like feeling I have when playing StS, but with new mechanics. So I decided I'd try my hand it. What makes Life Altered different from StS? They key things are: Playing with dice instead of cards (more on that in a later post), having three characters per run instead of one and multiple stackable upgrades for every die you play. 2. I also love biology and the weird and astonishing things that exist in nature after a…
