Design Corner 1: Unveiling TRU's Evolution

Introduction

Welcome to Design Corner, our new blog series written by the whole Two Robots team! We follow a simple tradition here: the game is built by all of us — designers, engineers, artists, and playtesters — so these posts come to you on behalf of the entire studio.

The goal of this series is to invite you, our players and audience, behind the curtain. We'll talk design philosophy, walk through the changes and improvements we're making, and keep you posted on where Two Robots: Unleashed is headed. We're glad to have you along for the ride.

How Two Robots: Unleashed Plays

If you're new here, the quick version: TRU is a collectible card battler about building robots and using them to beat your opponent.

• You build bots by drawing and playing scrap cards. There are four types — head, arm, leg, and torso — and once you have at least one of each in a rig, you can build it into a bot.
• Scrap comes in different colors, and a bot can only be built from scrap of the same color.
• A built bot can attack your opponent directly; land three attacks and they're defeated. Or, instead of attacking, a bot can commit — plugging into the device at the center of the arena — driving toward an alternate "commit" victory.
• Every player also fields a Hero with three innate powers: free, one-shot abilities you can trigger on your turn.

That's the loop. The rest of this post is about how we turned every piece of it into a decision.

The Problem We Set Out to Solve

Early on, TRU was simpler than it is today: draw cards and play them until you had enough robots to attack your way to victory. The "strategy" was mostly to play as many cards as you could — you were limited only by your hand size and the rule that you couldn't mix colors in the same building zone.

Even after we made every scrap card cost 1 mana, something still felt off. We noticed we never preferred one kind of scrap over another, and there was never a real reason to avoid playing a particular piece. All you had to do was drop a head, an arm, a leg, and a torso of the same color in a zone, and repeat until you won.

We boiled it down to two problems:

• No meaningful distinction between colors.
• No meaningful distinction between scrap.

Solve those, we reasoned, and the bot-building phase would open up into something with real decisions and real depth. This post is about the first of those two — color. (We'll tackle scrap, and the "Unleash" system it inspired, in Design Corner #2.)

Giving Color Meaning: The Color Set Bonus

Our solution was to give every bot a unique buff based on its color — what we call the color set bonus. Build a bot entirely out of one color, and it comes onto the field with an identity baked in.

Green, for example, is themed around poison, so Green bots always carry the Corrosive keyword (dealing poison on hit). These buffs already existed in the game as effects you'd apply with separate cards — so making them innate to each color both deepened each faction's identity and kept implementation light, since we were building on systems that already worked.

Suddenly the color you built with wasn't just a restriction — it was a strategic choice about what your robots actually do.

Changes We've Already Made

Alongside color identity, we shipped a batch of combat improvements this month.

#1: Improved Combat Flow

Total Destruction of the Robots

The combat loop of TRU revolves around playing scrap, building robots, and strategically attacking or committing your robots.

However, we noticed that once players reached the end of this loop, there wasn't a chance for it to restart. Broken robots would leave a large amount of scrap on the field, so even though your offense was gone, your entire defense remained. The attacking player wasn't sufficiently rewarded for breaking the robot, and the defending player didn't feel any significant consequence. In practice, we found that players often struggled to deal damage in the second half of the game, and experienced players would end up timing each other out.

All these factors led us to our current solution: when a robot is broken, the lane is completely emptied as well! This speeds up the offensive/defensive back-and-forth and creates more chances for offense in the late game.

It also introduces a pleasant risk/reward trade-off, where players must consider whether to build a stack or not. The defense of a 7-scrap pile might be worth more to them than the damage dealt by a 7-scrap warbot.

Reversal of the Heart-Based Power System

Another issue we noticed in our combat loop is that losing players were unintentionally made to do worse (what's called a "negative feedback loop"). The original system was set up so that you lost one of your three hero powers every time you lost health. Though this makes sense from a lore perspective, it feels disempowering from a gameplay standpoint.

As a result, we reversed the system! Now, players start with 1 power and unlock more with each point of damage they take. This creates a natural balance between the advantaged player with high health and the disadvantaged player with more strategic options.

It also introduces risk/reward strategies for intentionally taking damage early to open up offensive/defensive options.

This also raises the question: what sorts of powers should players have access to? That question lays the foundation for:

#2: The New Customizable Power System (name pending!)

We decided that letting players pick which powers they want available in-game would be an exciting way to customize playstyles and make commanders/factions feel unique.

Currently, our system allows you to choose between two options for each of the three powers, with each tree emphasizing a different playstyle. Each set of six is unique to that hero and complements the cards of that hero's faction.

To see it in action, keep reading to learn about TRU's newest playable faction!

#3: Introducing the Green Faction: Radixplor!

Radixplor centers on two main concepts: Corruption (Rust) and Death.

As a result, its two hero power trees revolve around these concepts — the first path focuses on creating rust, causing it to spread, and boosting its effects, while the other involves discarding cards, resurrecting bots, and granting them UNDEAD to stay alive longer.

Whether you want to commit to one style or try a mix of both is up to you! And thanks to the color set bonus, every Green bot you build already comes ready to poison — a perfect example of color shaping playstyle.

#4: Improved User Experience

"Visual Clarity" is one of the most important tenets of our user experience philosophy, and we're always working to make the game both look better and read more clearly.

Some recent changes:

• Swapping the scrap part icon for the HALT squares, which make each part far easier to read at a glance
• Adding a low-battery icon that animates when a power is ready

On our list for the future:

• Changing the shield icon to show duplicate parts
• Adding a clearer timer
• Making room for icons in the build area
• Redesigning the cards for better visual clarity

A Roster Built on Rock, Paper, Scissors

Green is only the beginning. As the game grows, we're designing a full roster of factions, each with a distinct theme, a virtue (the thing it's great at), and a real weakness to match.

Strategically, TRU rests on a foundation of rock-paper-scissors: factions tend to specialize in one of three win conditions — Attack, Commit, or Stall. We picture each faction as a spike on a radar chart, strong in one direction and deliberately soft in another. Because there's no limit on how many factions you can combine in a single deck, the fun comes from mixing identities so they cover each other's blind spots.

A few of the identities taking shape:

• Lysafar (Blue) — electricity, speed, and samurai. A rushdown faction: high card draw and bots that are usable immediately for the fastest possible offense, at the cost of weaker bots and a hard time playing the commit game.
• Radixplor (Green) — death, poison, rust, and scavenging. Weakens opponents over time and thrives in the late game, but can be outpaced by commit-focused decks.
• Ignaeter (Red) — rage and explosiveness. Buffs its bots for big, direct damage and Marks its victims so its hits land hard — strong offense that struggles into stall.
• Civardus (Yellow) — mana, light, and monastic discipline. A resource-management faction that generates and trades mana to land expensive, game-swinging plays, but needs its bots to survive to get there.
• Vitaus (White) — biobots and modern science. An all-rounder that finds and buffs its biobots and protects them with Taunt and Stealth, getting powerful units onto the board faster than anyone.

Designing a roster this varied takes real rigor, and we hold every card to a high bar before it ever reaches your hand. We'll open up that process — how we brainstorm, evaluate, and balance cards — in the next Design Corner.

Where the Game Is Headed

As for the future, please look forward to more factions, each with their own biobots, abilities, statuses, and commanders. We're also hard at work revising the commit system and cleaning up the arena, and we'll dig into both in the next Design Corner.

Thank you so much for reading!

— The Two Robots Team