Games I’ve been playing: Backpack Battles
Lately I’ve been having time to try some new games, so I’d though I’d share some insights from titles I’ve been playing. Starting with Backpack Battles.
Backpack Battles is an auto-battler where you’re trying to make the “most potent” backpack of them all. You don’t actually attack yourself (at least visually), so the items you have in your backpack define how effective you are in combat.
The core logic is a resident evil-like inventory management system where you’re trying to fit different items into the limited slot space you have. Items have adjacency bonuses, so its not only about placing them, but placing them in the most efficient way possible.
Your first step in your journey is picking out your hero. Heroes start with different starting items as well as a custom backpack. Each backpack having a different amount of slots and a passive effect for items inside. For now, the classes are: Ranger, Pyromancer, Reaper and Berserker.
With that bit of context out of the way, what I really want to talk about is a couple insights that I’ve found very valuable.
Round Based Matchmaking
Contrary to most games in the genre, BB (Backpack Battles) does matchmaking per round instead of per match. While matchmaking per match allows for better counterplay (after all you’re playing against the same people consistently throughout the match), per round also has significant advantages. Most of all, the ability to spend as much time as you want within rounds.
This means you can take a bathroom break, get a coffee or even stop your run all together and continue later. The quality of life improvement for the player is palpable and, in my opinion, something that we’ll see more and more in auto-battlers in the future.
The key in order to make this approach work is having a system with enough depth that players consume all their mind space making their own builds work. In that kind of environment, the extra time is valuable and the reduction of counterplay isn’t felt as much. As an added bonus, this fixes an issue with could be potentially critical for BB.
Often you’re in a position where the only way to make that new piece fit is to re-organize the whole thing. That takes time. Time that you likely wouldn’t have if the match was live with other people. But because it isn’t, then its just a matter of patience / laziness. If you’re taking a run seriously, you do it. Otherwise you might just take a chance.
This also allows some matchmaking shenanigans which you couldn’t do otherwise. For example, you could use the same player vs several other players. Since there’s no actual match to be a part of, any player that is within the same round is potentially a competitor. Of course, there are other factors, like rank and win / lose streaks. But regardless, the potential to match everyone vs everyone is there. A player’s kit doesn’t need to be off the matchmaking pool just because they just got matched with somebody else.
Perhaps it can be seen as a detriment, since the feeling of PvP is much diminished with this approach. But I welcome this change. It made be think of purely PvE auto-battlers and how those could use a lot of what is here efficiently.
Effectively themed UI/UX
Something that is often underestimated is where the player experience meets theme. And that’s an area where BB clearly put some work. The four elements you interact the most while playing are:
- Your backpack (1), where you put items
- The storage (2), where you keep items while you move things or while you don’t have a place for them yet
- The sell chest (3), where you move things over if you want to sell them
- The store (4a), where you buy items
- And the reroll switch (4b), which refreshes the store’s stock
Not only are all of them properly themed, but because of the way they’re distributed it makes you carry and spin items around. This brings a tactile feel to BB, which helps selling the fantasy that you’re holding an item in your hands and finding a place to fit them. Often I’d find myself spinning an item several times while thinking, right before I fit it in. Its a similar feeling to what a fidget spinner would give you, but in digital form.
I also love how the “reroll button” is not a button at all, but an old-school switch like one you’d find in a lamp (there’s even a lamp right besides it). I imagine this was done to avoid miss-clicks, since its within the same area as the store items.
Valuing quality of life
The Items Library is fully searchable by text and you can also filter by tag. That’s the kind of quality of life you need to truly make something like this useful. Otherwise as the game evolves and new items are introduced, this could quickly become too big and cumbersome to use. It does wonders for learning the game and confirming knowledge.
In the same vein, you have a comprehensive log that you can go over to see exactly what happened during a battle. Both in real time or just take a peak after the battle is over to see what really happened. It even plays it back for you with updated UI for stats, status effects and background, effectively making it into a pseudo replay feature. A log like this was certainly a necessity to test and balance the game in the first place. But most games wouldn’t take the extra effort to make it clean and then open it up to players. Love to see it!
At the end of it, Backpack Battles is a blast and I welcome anyone to try. You can buy it on Steam for 12.99.
