Personal Project - Twolyst

[LordTeshima]

With the recent news about the sunsetting of Duelyst, I have finally decided it is time to stop lurking and make public a little project I have been working on and off for the past few months, if not over a year. I called it Twolyst because I wanted to recreate some of the core mechanics and cards in Duelyst in my own image. The product in its current state is quite dismembered, having no semblance of balance, the core set is, for the most part, the only thing I have worked on, and even that is not even completely fleshed out in effects the way I want it to, some don’t even work, and I’m still uncertain about many of the mechanical and design changes I made. But seeing as there is little time to continue working on this project, I feel it best to get it out there now so people can hopefully find a little enjoyment with it. Some of the core principles I wanted were an overall slower pace, by starting at a lower mana and making cards overall much weaker, limiting the power of removal by making most conditional or more expensive, and in turn I hoped those two things would make some late game cards more viable and fun. Reducing randomness was also a major factor I considered. I don’t think any of that has really been achieved yet as I’ve had no balance testing, and most changes are simply random ideas that flew through my brain at some point in time and I thought to myself, “I wonder if I can make that work in Duelyst.”

Regardless of what your opinions are on the balance or design changes, I hope some can find a small amount of enjoyment in this project. I will include a download link in this post as well as in the video description. It can be installed by going into your Duelyst folder and replacing “duelyst.js”. For reference, mine is found here: C:\BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment America\Duelyst\resources\app\src. I recommend saving your current duelyst.js file in a safe location on your computer if you ever wish to revert, or I believe clicking repair in the launcher will also do this. Also, unfortunately this can only be played in Sandbox, and all cards and skins are unlocked.

I am open to any suggestions on cards or mechanical changes before the game finally comes to an end, I’m sure many people have much better ideas than me, but keep in mind I am a Freshman CS student with very limited knowledge and time. Hope you all enjoy.

Here is a short video I made explaining most of the changes I made. Apologies it is not very professional, and some sections have much louder audio than others.

Download Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQa2nJHv8idL6zGK7qpw_gVFzW-5k6M_/view

I have also made a small compendium of a few of my favorite cards: https://imgur.com/a/oW806bG

Hopefully my final edit, but I’ve also created a short video demonstrating how to edit some basic properties of a unit for anyone that is interested in messing around with the code as well.

[halcyon98]

This looks like it was a ton of work. I really like your keywords/quality of life changes too. Thanks for doing this.

[atheistmantis]

Very interesting!

I’m not agreeing with almost all the proposed changes but I like for instance the new range attack rule, and in general I appreciate the time and effort put in trying to offer alternative solutions.
Let’s hope this game migrates somewhere else where it can thrive.

[boronian]

A lot of effort went into this! Wow, my respect for it

[zanestheargent]

I specially enjoy how you made all artifact hate cards actually sensible now.

[LordTeshima]

Thank you! Many of the changes I implemented were never meant to be permanent. I would work on the game vigilantly for a week or so and drop it for over a month, usually returning whenever a random idea for an effect passed through my head. By virtue of being the first set (Core), I knew I wanted to work my way through the sets chronologically so I placed effects on cards that I didn’t necessarily think needed them for the time being, thinking eventually when I got to a set that I think could use that effect I would go back and update the old card. I remember posting this and watching my own video once through and face palming when it showed Keeper as a 5 mana 3/4 giving both Generals invulnerable. Never once do I remember making that change, and I think it’s a particularly bad idea too (among plenty others). Another thing was the Artifact change, becoming permanent upgrades. Just a random idea that I thought would be cool to try implementing, while in practice is probably a huge burden for the balance of the game. But oh well, most of these changes were simply for the sake of change, I don’t believe the game needs a large overhaul of every card to be great, but I wanted to see what that would be like and mostly to have fun editing some code. I’m very much open to community suggestions while the game is still live!

In response to Zanes, I actually wanted to eventually phase out all artifact removal if I were to keep the proposed artifact changes, however that was something I was always really uncertain of how I wanted to approach and again was mostly just an experimental “I wonder how this would work?” If I were to either keep some forms of artifact removal or revert the change to artifacts, I would still prefer to implement cards that either destroy the lowest cost artifact, most damaged, or either oldest/most recently equipped, to add some variety. What I really wanted to do was make it so that pings would not remove durability, or it would only lose durability when your General attacked (not counter attacked), but these are all things I wasn’t sure how to do and immunity became a very easy implementation for someone who really didn’t know what they were doing.

Thank you everyone so far for the kind words. I have been very passionate about the game since beta, and I am really hopeful that it can survive this in some form.