Designer on Battle Suit Aces

Trinket Studios July 2025 - Oct 2025

With three months left before launch, Trinket Studios hired me to oversee the finishing touches on the design of Battle Suit Aces, a stunning game that's part card-battler, part visual novel, and part 90's anime. I either designed new abilities or rebalanced existing abilities for most player cards and enemy cards, including defining many of the cards for key enemy factions like the Skiads and Carrion Riders. I also revised each combat encounter in the game and revised the progression design and each of the suit, drone, and ship mods. I also designed 13 of the 15 puzzles in the game.

Implementing Redraws

Battle Suit Aces is a narrative game focused on meeting cool new characters, inviting them onto your team, and adding them to your deck. However, Battle Suit Aces also isn't a traditional card game: the player has no real "hand", and usually only draws one card each turn. This means that recruiting characters unfortunately has the side effect of bloating your deck size and preventing you from drawing your best cards or relying on your favorite synergies. The first thing I proposed after being hired in July was that we allow the player to pay "Command", an already-existing resource, to discard the cards they were choosing from and redraw more options.

At first, every redraw cost 1 command. However, this caused a dissatisfying tension between redrawing cards and using command in other ways. I proposed making the first redraw free, charging 1 command for the second redraw, and charging 2 command for the third redraw. This lets players redraw whenever they're not thrilled with their options, but forces them to invest heavily if they're in dire need of a specific card. While the core issue of deck bloat still exists on a structural level, this was an elegant, extremely easy-to-implement solution which mitigated most of the problem.

Designing the Skiads

The Skiads are an enemy faction led by Kadi, a brutal tyrant who uses an army of robots instead of employing human pilots. When I joined, few Skiads cards existed aside from Kadi herself. The "Thorn" is the most important unit to establishing the Skiad's mechanical identity - these automated mechs are all about getting hurt and dealing more damage because of it. They have no sense of self-preservation because they're not alive!

This is a very familiar archetype to anyone who has played a lot of Magic: The Gathering. I designed the "Needle" because I knew from experience that it would be the perfect enabler for all other Skiads cards. I experimented with payoffs other than damage before circling back and creatng the "Shiv", which grants its opponents spikes to help it damage itself, and gets permanently stronger to distinguish itself from "Thorn's" temporary boosts. Finally I knew this type of faction would benefit from a card that wanted to be destroyed, rather than just damaged. The "Spite" card is a bit of a landmine that presents some sequencing puzzles for the player while helping to keep the Skiads from dealing too much damage to themselves too quickly.

Updating Jaeger

One of my favorite card design stories is the ability I added to Jaeger. Jaeger is part of the "Patchworks" faction, which means he's one of the core cast of characters that players spend the most time with. It also means that his design needs to be easy to understand. His primary design purpose is to introduce characters to the "Spread" ability. However, when I joined, he had no additional abilities to add appeal or tell us about his character.

I observed from the story that Jaeger is a pretty well-rounded character - he's relaxed, studious, athletic, artistic, logical, responsible, and fun-loving. Instead of trying to capture all of that, I focused on Jaeger's good-natured competitive rivalry with Felix, which is reinforced in many conversations and much of the battle chatter of the game. I designed the above cost-reduction ability to reflect how Jaeger is always in tune with his environment, observing his teammates and getting inspired by them to keep improving. As an added bonus, the cost reduction allows the player to fit Jaeger's attacks into turns in creative ways, which conveys some of that flexibility that feels true to Jaeger's character.

Combat Design

All the combat encounters in the game existed in some form when I joined the team, but in addition to affecting combat by editing enemy abilities, I also directly revised each combat encounter. This involved editing the building blocks used by our random battle generation system. Originally, these building blocks came in three types - standard, catchup, and filler. I identified the need for a "debut" type which allowed us to intentionally design how generated battles begin.

For non-random battles, we use a similar deployment system, but without the pre-defined building blocks. I edited our deployments in these bespoke battles to ensure that certain enemy types were not repeated too often, that enemies became more difficult over the course of the fight, and that there were surprising peaks and valleys of difficulty spread throughout our larger battles.

Faction Rewards

As the player engages with different factions, they earn reputation with each and can spend that reputation to purchase rewards. I was responsible for fine-tuning how many reputation tiers existed per faction, how much reputation needed to be gained to earn those tiers, and what rewards were available within each faction. When I joined, each faction only awarded 4 tiers of rewards, which I doubled to 8 to allow players to recruit all 5 pilots and still be able to unlock some drones and mods if they wished. I also rearranged faction rewards so that every faction rewarded the same number of suit, drone, and ship mods.

Pictured above is an excerpt from my notes during development. I made a diagram for each faction detaling what I planned to keep, what I planned to remove, and where I planned to place the mods I was removing.

This is the finished result. Because the Typhoons, the Comets, and the Enigmas are encountered later in the game, they require less total reputation to earn all reward tiers, and the thresholds for the first few tiers are lower so that players naturally unlock a good number of rewards even if they're only dipping their toes into a faction.

Cutting Mods

While editing the suit, drone, and ship mods for the game, I came across two mods which I convinced Trinket to cut. Both mods allowed the player to ensure that a particular pilot was always drawn or deployed at the start of a battle. It's important that card games not allow players to subvert the need to draw cards or generate resources, because you end up cutting out the structural elements which force the player into interesting decisions. Both of these mods would have done this if they hadn't been cut.

Drip Feed and Kickstart are two more examples of mods that I thought were too powerful to ship with. These mods generate resources at a deceptively powerful rate for their cost. The effect is the player is pushed too quickly out of the beginning phase of battles (where they are on the back-foot), and into the middle or end of battles (where they are able to easily defeat threats as they appear). However, instead of cutting these mods, we ended up having them only appear in "Gentle" difficulty mode. Because fast-forwarding to the part of the battle where you can feel powerful is exactly what we want to happen at this level of difficulty!