Hell is Hungry! teaches me that it is hard to let go of your darling ideas, clever baby angels, and brilliant and entitled toddlers.  Committing ritual sacrifice of game mechanics, fantastical mental concept art, or unclever phrases you have coined is necessary.  It is survival of the fittest in our pursuit of fun, simple, memorable games and products here at DiceStory, but it requires that our entire team love to watch our ideas of yesterday die on the vine for newer, faster, sexier ideas of today.  I hate it, but I love the outcome.

"What should our Hospital Art look like?"  I asked the team.  I regretted it as soon as the words left my mouth. It unleashed hell, at least a swirling circle of it. Im not afraid to admit that one of my personal Hell is  "Art by committee."  Those three words are some of my least favorite words in the entire universe outside of "Sir, Please leave."  Our development team gets along fantastically, and yet suddenly we all have opinions on what a simple, cute, reduced color palette hospital should look like for one of the cards.  

The good news is that through our discussion about art, our brains were distracted just enough that we stumbled upon a solution to the Challenge system we have wanted to implement for Hell is Hungry!  We knew that we wanted to incentivize players to risk attacking another player and the solution fell into our laps.  We would give the defender an advantage by having the attacker sacrifice a valuable card in order to start the process.  This gave defenders an advantage which we discovered that they loved.  If the attackers were successful they would capture extra souls, pushing them closer to victory, and in some circumstances could allow them to force the end of a round.  Attackers felt rewarded for taking a risk, displaying patience, and evoking a strategy. Defenders did not feel cheated because they had the upper hand, and next round, if they wanted, they could bring the challenge right back to the attacker.

-Jack Davis