Hi, everyone! This is the 4th article in our Lost Lands series. (If you missed the previous ones, I'd like to encourage you to head back to the first and then follow the links at the end for 2 and 3.)
In this week's article, I'm going to depart from the usual format and dial things back to the birth of the game and then talk about the evolution of our card design process, arriving at three new spoilers from Lost Lands Part 1 that were created using our latest version of it.
I'm really hoping you will read the whole thing, and find it illuminating or nostalgic or both, but I'll understand if you skip to the end to get to the spoilers.
"Shadow Era" (the incomplete set)
Right from its earliest debut in closed beta, community involvement has always been incredibly important to Shadow Era, both for improving the app and the card game simulated within.
In terms of card design, this community involvement started out as posts on the official forum for each batch of 10 cards as they were revealed, followed by ongoing player input as each card was implemented and saw more action. Successive versions of the game incorporated this feedback to nerf and buff problem cards accordingly, as well as introducing more cards to fill out slots in the set. This worked really well for creating the pool of 120 cards that were included in the debut of the game on iOS.
However, as more cards were added and as the player base continued to grow, the task of balancing the card pool as a whole became increasingly more difficult and more important. More cards meant more interactions and more cards to review; more players meant more opinions and more people to appease (or anger) with each change.
The development team could no longer just read forum comments and make a decision. There were simply too many voices, from new players to veterans, from casual to highly competitive, and the loudest ones were not necessarily the most useful! A dialogue was often needed to understand why people thought what they did, and conducting that dialogue with the entire forum community just didn't work. A new approach was needed ...
Call of the Crystals
The first major evolution of the design process was therefore a departure from seeking feedback from the entire community to help do the majority of rebalancing, opting instead to use the Players' Focus Group (PFG), which, as the name implies, is a focus group representing the players of the game as a whole.
This allowed the fundamental idea of community involvement to be retained, but with two main advantages over the old approach: the smaller group of recruited volunteers offered much better opportunities for engagement and deeper dialogue between players and the Design Team; the amount of noise that could sometimes disrupt the balancing process was greatly reduced.
At its inception, the PFG consisted of about 30 players who were selected for their knowledge and experience of the game, and their first task was to help the newly formed Design Team rebalance the entire first set of Shadow Era, including approximately 27 cards that had not yet been released.
The PFG operated as a combination of forum discussions and play-testing on a private server. Sure, there were the occasional heated arguments and controversies like you might see on the public forum from time to time, but the drama was manageable and it didn't take long to arrive at the first list of changes to be implemented and tested. From there, more changes were suggested and another iteration occurred.
There were several iterations over a six week period until our collective work was released onto the public test server, where the whole community could again start giving their feedback on what they were seeing and playing, which then fed into the eventual live release of 1.503. As part of 1.503, we also standardised rules such as all items being permanent whilst all support abilities are temporary and how damage-over-time effects (e.g. poisoned and ablaze) work. Damage types were also added to many cards at the same time, which we have built on to great effect since. An official rulebook was published at this time to bring everything together. (The game had operated rather inconsistently in various ways until that point.)
The PFG involvement was undoubtedly a masterstroke, but there was something else going on in parallel that called for improvements further upstream in the design process ...
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