Designing the reward draft

After every wave the player gets three rewards to choose from. Pick one. Stack it on the build. Continue. This is the central system of the game. It’s also the system we’ve rewritten three times.

The hard part isn’t presenting three choices. The hard part is which three choices.

The trap

The first version was naive. Twenty-four rewards in a pool, pick three at random, here you go. It produced two kinds of run:

The first kind: every choice mattered, the build felt earned, the player walked away thinking about which arrow would synergize best with the modifier they’d pulled in wave one.

The second kind: the player rolled three rewards that didn’t combo, picked the least-bad option, and the run quietly became boring. Random draft means random combo quality. About a third of runs ended that way.

We needed to control the floor without controlling the ceiling.

Synergy scoring

The pickability of every reward is now scored against your current build. Each reward has a list of synergizes partners — see the abilities catalogue for what we’ve published so far. When the game picks the next three options, it walks the pool and biases toward rewards that combo with what you’ve already got.

But — and this is the important bit — it doesn’t only offer combo rewards. The draft is weighted, not gated. You’ll still see Splitshot in a Voidpierce build sometimes. The bias is around 65/35. Enough that the run feels coherent. Not so much that it feels predetermined.

Tier rules

The other thing we control: each draft has exactly one Arrow-tier reward, one Modifier-tier, and one Summon-tier. Always. This means you can’t get stuck with three modifiers and no way to dump them on an arrow. It also means every draft is a real decision: which axis do I push on this turn?

There are exceptions — boss-clear drafts offer three rewards of any tier (“Tribute drafts”), to let the player do something dramatic on the spike. Plus a few special rewards that don’t fit any tier and appear as a fourth option (“Etchings”) about one run in five.

The thing we keep cutting

Every prototype, we draft a “trash” rare — a reward that’s flashy on paper but mathematically weak. Twin Comet — fires a small explosion when the run timer is an even number. That kind of thing. The intent is to give the player something memorable to laugh about. The result is always the same: a player who picks it once and then never picks it again, and a small persistent feeling that the draft “wasted” one of their three slots.

We removed it again two weeks ago. We will probably try it again next year.

Where we are now

The reward draft is in the second-to-last beta-grade state. Synergy lists are written, scored, and tuned per-reward. Tier rules are locked. The boss-clear Tribute draft is wired. Etchings exist but aren’t varied enough yet — that’s the next iteration.

If you’re in the closed beta, the draft is where we’ll most want your input. Tell us when a draft feels predetermined. Tell us when one feels random. Tell us when you laughed out loud at what came together. That’s the dial we’re tuning against.

— Mo