Over the last handful of years, deck builder games have surged in popularity. Because of that, it’s been difficult for some titles to stand out amongst the crowd. For Tom Ferrer, co-founder of Tako Boy Studios — the studio behind RPG deck builder Cross Blitz — it’s something that was noticed immediately but not really worried about.
“When we first started development in 2019, it wasn’t as popular,” Ferrer said. “So I think now going forward, right, like you see all these deck builders come out as we’re developing this game…that’s not good.
“But I honestly think our game stands out anyways. We put a lot of polish into it, just the art direction itself, [and] the story.”
With most deck builders, Ferrer says he noticed a trend of them mostly being roguelike games. With Cross Blitz, he and his partner Phil Giarrusso took more time with the game to make it deeper than that.
The game contains a mix of elements from Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic The Gathering, and traditional RPG elements to give players an experience they haven’t really seen before. And it’s all in a complete, package with deep gameplay and deck-building mechanics without the free-to-play tropes such as wait times and heavy pushes for microtransactions.
Speaking of the gameplay, it started out as what Ferrer calls a “paper prototype” back in 2019 to get the base of what they wanted going.
“[It was] just me kind of messing around,” he said. “I really like the idea of you’re not able to sort of control where your minion goes. It’s just straight. So you have these like lane-based battles and it just kind of went from there.”
Ferrer added that he also used influence from the card games he’s loved throughout the years to make the game he’s proud of.
Cross Blitz is slated to enter early access later this year. A full 1.0 release date will be announced when the team is “super happy” with where the game stands during the early access period.
For more on Cross Blitz, including information on future updates, possible multiplayer, and more, watch the full video interview from The Indie Initiative above. To get alerts when new exclusive interviews go live, subscribe to Insider Gaming’s YouTube channel and turn on your notifications.
You can catch up on the last episode of The Indie Initiative featuring Axis Football 24 right here.
