(Read our review of Rack and Slay here.)

In this exclusive interview, we delve into the mind of Fabian Fischer, the talented indie developer behind the incredible game, Rack and Slay. Fabian shares his journey in creating this unique and challenging game, offering insights into the design process, inspirations, and the challenges he faced along the way.

As a special treat, we’re giving away two copies of Rack and Slay to celebrate this exciting interview! Simply leave a comment on this post to enter the giveaway. Two lucky winners will be chosen at random in seven days!

What inspired you to create Rack and Slay? Were there any specific games or mechanics that influenced you? Perhaps you are a fan of snooker / cue sports / billiards / pool?

I have followed snooker a bit in the past, but funnily enough, I’m not super into the actual real-world cue ball games. My starting point for this game came more from the wish to explore the tactical roguelike from a new angle revolving around physics and positioning. Many strategy roguelikes are all about moving units on a grid or playing cards, basically highly focused on numbers and eking out stat advantages. That can be super fun, but I wanted to move away from tropes like “dealing damage” and instead handle as much of the core gameplay as possible in the physical space of the game world itself. To keep the physics manageable, I started with the player and enemy characters being simple balls, so the billiards theme just was a fun addition that came naturally to the prototype.

Games I like to bring up as inspirations are Keith Burgun’s Auro which is one of those “turn-based on a grid” games, but largely stays away from numbers as well and handles a lot of its gameplay with the core “push” mechanism. Throughout the development I also thought back to Zach Gage’s Pocket-Run Pool, which did have a “high stakes” mode that would randomly place obstacles on a pool table, so you can see the reference points. And finally Brotato really influenced the overall structure of the game, i.e. alternating between letting you make strategic drafting decisions in the shopping phase between levels, but then allowing you to immediately test them out too.

Can you tell us a bit about your gaming background?

Sure! I’ve pretty much been into games as long as I can remember. It started with watching my dad play games on C64 and Amiga (I have vivid memories of King’s Bounty for example, basically the game that became Heroes of Might & Magic later). Later I would myself play everything I could get my hands on from simple arcade and action games to strategy games, tycoons, sports management, shooters, everything really. Starting in the 2010s I plunged into the indie rabbit hole with games like Braid, Minecraft or Super Meat Boy, and soon after fell in love with the “roguelike renaissance” (Spelunky, Isaac, Dredmor) and I haven’t really emerged since.

This was also the time when I, alongside my studies of computer science, really got into the idea of making games myself. I did dabble in the Warcraft map editors a bit before, but didn’t create anything serious. Learning more and more about game design brought me into the world of designer board games as well, which at the time truly was a breath of fresh air away from all the established video game tropes. You can really see the systems in the open with board games, and observe how everything interacts without the “black box” that many digital games can be. So besides making small digital games I also started working on physical ones, which resulted in the card game Crimson Company later on.

We would like to know about the development process for Rack and Slay. How long did it take? Was it an iterative process that evolved into what it is today or had you planned this type of game (in its final form) from the onset?

Ha, interesting question! I’d say it was both. I did have some core design pillars from the very start, such as the fact that I wanted the player to only ever worry about aiming and shooting on their turn. All the other effects were always supposed to be situational. Plus, as mentioned before I wanted to stay away from the “dealing damage to enemies” trope, so as much as possible would have to be handled via actual physics interactions. This also resulted in a kind of follow-up principle of having all elements interact with both you and your enemies, which is for example why they can pick up collectables just like you (and sometimes you might have a reason to actively force them into doing so).

That said, a lot of it was iteration as well. For the first 6 months I was mostly working on my own, tinkering with the core gameplay and adding the first bits of content, but not really planning to make this a bigger, commercial project yet. When Graeme (2 Left Thumbs) approached me about a potential publishing partnership, things got more serious quickly. We found an amazing artist in Victor Negreiro who ended up replacing basically all the prototype and asset-pack graphics I had used before, and added so many fun animations which really brought the game to life. Besides integrating all the new art and fleshing out the content more, I also started focusing more on the “product side” of things by adding additional modes, polishing up the menus, adding lots of settings to customize your experience and so on. All in all it almost took another year to get to the finish line, with a first public demo release in the middle of that, which brought in tons of feedback for even more polish and balancing to be done. Of course there was another wave of feedback after launch, so the game has seen quite a few patches (including multiple significant content additions) since.

What are some of the unique features that set Rack and Slay apart from other deck-building roguelikes?

So first of all I wouldn’t quite call it a deck-builder. Instead of drawing from a deck to generate a set of random options per turn, you create a persistent “character build”. Items you draft for example grant you extra shot power, health or lots of different passive effects. Those can range from generating gold in certain situations, to spawning chaotic mini balls, to straight up throwing bombs at your enemies. You’ll find many synergies among those items, although they’re more free-form than in many other games. There are no “rarities” or “tribes”, you just draft items from a random selection and build up your power throughout the levels.

Besides that though, I would say the big unique aspect about the game is the physicality of it. Positioning matters a lot, momentum matters, enemy balls have different weights, you need to plan your path around randomly placed obstacles (or destroy them with the right item combinations). The game is all about spatial relations between objects basically. Numbers do come into play when it comes to shot power, your own health and the economy aspect, but those are adjacent to the core gameplay, which is all about shooting yourself at enemies to bump them into holes or traps or other enemies, or causing explosions which again push all the balls within their radius away, often causing yet more ripple effects. Especially in turn-based games, this focus on movement and physics in a continuous space is not something you see all that often.

The card art is phenomenal! How did you approach the design of the different cards and their subsequent mechanics in Rack and Slay?

The item’s art style is all Victor basically. I did have all the items in the game before they had proper art, but I just used icon representations from game-icons.net and the likes, some of which stayed kind of close and just got repainted to look cool, but many of which got replaced more or less completely. I provided ideas for what some of the item artworks could depict, but Victor had a lot of creative freedom there and really made them stand out in a way that they deserved it. They’re the “heart of the game” in a way, they’re where the fun is in the long run.

In terms of mechanics, there are basically 3 broad buckets of items: “Instant power” items (that e.g. grant you shot power or gold right away), “econ” items (that generate gold, power or health continuously), and “physics” items (that e.g. throw bombs or mini balls or affect enemies in other ways than just via you hitting them directly). There was a balance to be struck where you need enough economy items to always have options to build into (since gold would fuel all the other stats like shot power, healing and so on throughout your run), but also you don’t want them to take the spotlight away from the “obvious fun” physics items that would do wacky things immediately.

When it comes to difficulty balancing, what are the key considerations you make?

I think I have a slightly different approach to difficulty than many other games, especially in the roguelike space. I don’t assume all players will make their way through all the difficulty levels, or even try to. I treat difficulty more like a chess Elo rating, where you want to find the one that’s “right for you” and then sticking with it is absolutely fine. What that means is the lowest difficulties in the game are intentionally easier than you’d maybe expect from other games of the genre. Also, difficulties in the game are pretty granular, i.e. the difference between 5 and 6 isn’t very big, but between 5 and 20 you’ll find a significant difference in the level of challenge. And finally, I’m also not gating any content, or speed of unlocks or achievements behind reaching specific difficulty levels. You will unlock all the items in the game by beating levels on whatever difficulty you feel is the most fun, no need to push into territory you’re not (yet) ready for. This is in keeping with the game’s highly accessible core gameplay, which was as mentioned planned from the very beginning.

When it comes to the actual numerical balancing of difficulties, it’s just about playing the game a lot and talking to players about where they get the sense of the game feeling unfair. Difficulties in Rack and Slay are basically a big table that feeds into the level generator, including minimum and maximum values for enemies, special enemies, obstacles, spikes, holes, pick-ups and so on. So throughout the development there was a lot of tweaking of those numbers pretty much constantly until it “felt right”. It’s one of those topics in game development where there’s no easy path and you can’t just calculate the correct answer. You basically take your best guess initially and then hone it in from there.

Do you have any plans for future updates or expansions for Rack and Slay?

I am indeed still working on the game. Currently finishing up the localisation system and waiting for the first translations to come in so that the game can be made available to the non-English-speaking audience as well. On top of that, with the same update, there’ll finally be a macOS port and the usual bunch of fixes and tweaks. I also managed to squeeze a few more performance improvements into it, which should especially help some of those high-level endless mode runs go a little smoother, and it will finally allow us to enable endless mode on the Nintendo Switch. Beyond that, I’m constantly collecting and pruning ideas for potential future content additions as well.

Will you be bringing Rack and Slay to the cloud?

Honestly, no plans as of right now. As a solo developer, I’ve got my hands pretty full with supporting the different PC platforms plus Switch already. However, if there was a great opportunity, I’d be totally open to it, just wouldn’t know where to start right now!

Any future titles in the pipeline?

At this point I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll always have more ideas than I can realistically work on, so it’s all about making a good choice in the moment. I’m slowly starting to think about a new project at this point and started cooking up a few promising concepts, but it’ll be a while before I’m confident enough with one of those to take it public.

Random question: name your favourite game(s)!

Mosa Lina totally blew me away last year with its emergent gameplay and aggressive randomness. I’ve basically been playing it daily for a year now!

Other all-time favourites of mine include the previously mentioned Auro (for opening my mind to spatial gameplay), Monster Train (my favourite deckbuilder for its customisability of builds), Super Auto Pets (haven’t missed a weekly pack yet), Spelunky (a master class in elegant game design), and – to mention at least one linear game – Portal.

Finally, where can our readers get Rack and Slay?

The game is available via Steam (including a free demo): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2311990/Rack_and_Slay/

On Nintendo Switch, the game is in the EU/AUS (https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Rack-and-Slay-2618382.html) as well as the Americas (https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/rack-and-slay-switch/) stores for now, but we’re looking into adding more regions alongside new supported languages soon.

Thank you so very much for having me!

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