Released: 19-11-2025
Platform: Steam
Development time: 11 months
Genre: Roguelike Deckbuilder
Dominova is a roguelike deckbuilder where you chain dominoes together to create satisfying chain reactions. In 2024 I played a lot of Slay The Spire and Balatro and felt inspired to make my own deckbuilder game. The theme I chose was dominoes, since it was a recognizable theme but not overly done on Steam like dice. For financial reasons I wasn’t able to work longer on it than 12 months, so that was the deadline I set out for myself.
The hardest part was getting to a stage where I felt the game could be tested and full runs would be possible. When making these types of games a lot of systems have to get in place first. You can test them individually but for many of my testers the game didn’t make a lot of sense until the systems where all connected.
While working on the game I also underestimated how important tooltips are for these kinds of games. It is the most UI intensive game I have made until now and I learned a lot from it. For example having certain keywords in your tooltips that would then explain themselves in a different tooltip. Translating all the text in 11 different languages like Chinese and Russian was a lot of work.
These types of games are infinite content generators once they are done, due to their random nature. Getting to that point does take a fair amount of content to be made. As I am not an artist I had to be a little creative with the visuals. I chose to take pictures of my surroundings and then edit them a bit in photoshop to make Nova Cards. There are more than 150 with each their own effect. I also used particle effect asset packs from the asset store to make the visuals on the board. Making these all work together in visual harmony was also quite the challenge.
What makes me really proud of this project is how deep it is. There are a lot of strategic layers and decision making going on when tackling a level. I always complain in roguelike deckbuilders how luck is such a big factor in these types of games and I am happy that Dominova is more skill based than luck based.