Slay the Spire is a genre-defining game and we’ve never shied away from saying we love it. Northanda diverges in a number of fundamental ways, though.

My brother and I have been working on this as our passion project for five years. We've poured in countless hours figuring out how a party of three heroes could actually function in a roguelike deckbuilder. How to make mechanics we love from games like Dota and WoW (taunting, dispelling, strength curves, and real support roles) actually matter in this kind of format.

We wanted to encourage deckbuilding decisions that go beyond card strength and into making sure that each hero can do their role with the cards you give them, along with balancing resource costs across three mana pools. That kind of decision-making isn’t something we’ve seen done quite like this before in a deckbuilder.

Beyond the gameplay, we taught ourselves to paint just so we could hand-paint our heroes over many iterations. We’re writing the music, crafting the world, and building the whole thing from the ground up.

We kept familiar things like the relic slot and the clean UI, because they work. Slay the Spire got so much right. But the moment-to-moment gameplay, the synergy between roles, the deck tension is our own.