What happens when you combine Hearthstone, The Hunger Games and FTL? Meet Insane Robots

pcgamesinsider.biz:

When indie developer Rob Davis from Playniac gives me the lift pitch for his latest project, Insane Robots, it certainly turns my head. 

“We're saying it’s Hearthstone meets the Hunger Games, but also it's FTL as a card game,” he explains.

“We wanted something that was really easy to pick up, has these card battles at its centre that seem really simple but get more and more complex and strategic as you go. You're doing that in a world that is precisely balanced. You have to balance your resources really carefully to survive; you're fighting in arenas to be the last surviving robot.”

See? That’s quite the ambitious pitch – it takes the procedural generation from a title such as FTL for its level design, and marries it with a card-based battle system.

But despite using Hearthstone to describe Insane Robots' card game elements, Davis says that Playniac's approach is different to Blizzard's behemoth. 

"The decks that we have are much simpler than most trading card-type games," he explains.

"We intentionally don't do collectable or purchasable cards; our game isn't freemium where you buy cards, it's a game that comes with everything you need to play it in the box. We have a smaller deck and have focused the strategy of the player and what you can do with all the combinations that come out of that deck.

“There's a maximum of 24 tokens [cards] that you end up with being able to play. That's a much more concise set that you're dealing with, and you don't customise that. You are able to alter your robot with what we are calling 'augments' and there are 100-plus of those in the game.

“You can change the probabilities of what might happen in the deck, the cost of moves, or your robot’s capabilities, but you can't change the deck