Some of you must think that we have cushy jobs. I mean, we get paid to play and design games. How tough can that really be? What are the challenges?


Your Deck Has Been Redesigned

One of the trickiest things to adjust to as a game developer has to be that your game is constantly evolving. Most of you reading this are accustomed to reading a spoiler list or opening a box of cards and trying to formulate a sketch of a powerful looking deck. You gather the appropriate cards and put the cards together, then test the deck and tune it. Now imagine if someone came back to you and said, “We cut card X from the set,” “That character can now only be used during the recovery phase,” “That character’s ATK has been bumped down to 8, not 11,” or, “That text is ongoing now.” Once a preliminary design file has been handed over, there are cards that are being changed every day, if not every hour. It is hard to describe the extent to which things are in a constant state of flux. While it doesn’t take long to realize that this process is part of the job, I’m sure everyone here finds it a little frustrating when deck after deck they put together gets “fixed.” When you spend an hour putting together a deck only to see that the card you were basing it on has changed before you had ever played a single game, well, that’s just no fun.


Deck Championing

Everyone is going to have their own favorite cards, deck archetypes, or team of Super Heroes or Villains. Each player gravitates towards building decks around those themes, cards, or teams. I think it is only natural that once you’ve built such a deck and it does well, you tend to “champion” it. That is, you tend to me dismissive of other’s complaints that some of the cards in “your” deck might be too powerful. In the end, it is important for you to play against your own deck or make sure someone is opinionated enough to make you realize you aren’t evaluating things objectively.


The Battles

A good percentage of the people I work with have played top-level competitive TCGs. We are all kept in close quarters to foster discussion and facilitate card overhauls. Or at least, that’s what they tell us. When it comes time to playtest and egos are at stake, if you are having an otherwise bad day, you have to make sure you keep your head on improving the design of the game rather than on winning some random match. That’s not always as easy as it might sound. Fortunately, everyone here is also very good-natured. Only Danny Mandel tends to trash-talk during games played in the R&D room, and I guess it’s only fair since we poke fun at him the rest of the day.


The Game Designers Turn a Deaf Ear

Ah, if I could only show you some of the cards that come my way. The designers often have some very creative ideas. Sometimes you just don’t think a card is going to be healthy for the game, but they don’t see it your way. My most successful retorts are:

“Let’s save that for a later set,” an all purpose gem. That’s why I can’t share the aforementioned cards with you—I can’t give away future cards. Yeah.

“Are you crazy?” This one generally only works against Danny.

“I don’t think that is a strong enough effect,” which usually catches them off guard since they are ready to fight a battle over the card being too powerful. This is a harder one to pull off.

In reality, though, your main recourse is to come up with a slant on their idea that you think is feasible. This is the most fun part of the whole process. These guys know their comics, and if you can figure out what they are trying to “capture” on the card, it is a lot of fun trying to get that idea into workable shape. Danny always contends that there must be some way to cost an effect, almost no matter how “broken” it is.


The Papercuts

Putting together a deck of proxy cards isn’t always a barrel of laughs. Maybe it is just our process.


The Donuts!

Will Estela is one of cool fellow just out of our arm’s reach. Every Wednesday he brings a truckload of donuts for everyone in sight. This tradition of “Hump Day” donuts is apparently not actually a tribute to me—yes, I was surprised to find this out, too, but apparently it’s a way of helping us get over the hump in the work-week. What’s so challenging about donuts? Well, occasionally Will brings them in on Monday instead and this leads to great confusion amongst us as to the actual timing of the arrival of the weekend.


How the Arkham Inmates Fared During Development

After that glimpse of of R&D life, I return to some specifics. Last week, I focused on a couple of Teen Titans cards. Both of those cards were weakened, although the “nerfed” version of Garth was actually improved for play in all but the most degenerate of decks.

Before I move along to an overview of Arkham Inmates development, I’d like to note the “solution” to the Dr. Tzin-Tzin “riddle” from last week. I’d like to commend BigSpooky for posting the full solution on VSRealms.com. If Dr. Tzin-Tzin were able to ready a character you control, he could, in theory, ready himself. You can get to infinite endurance by teaming-up the League of Assassins with the Spider-Friends and having Madame Web and a readying mechanism, like Press the Attack (or Teen Titans Go or Cosmic Radiation with yet another team-up) in play. Not the easiest series of events to pull off, but that would get around the intention of the card. There were a number of possible fixes, but the simplest was just to make it only affect an opposing character.

I thought it would be interesting to go back to the initial “alpha” DC Comics Origins file for playtesting, right after it had been narrowed down to a single “favorite” idea. Before you’d ever had the pleasure of dealing breakthrough to your opponent, DC Origins was in the works. I tried to categorize to what extent each of the final Arkham cards resembles the initial ideas. I’ve separated out characters and non-characters in the following groupings.

Rewritten
6 (Query and Echo, Ventriloquist, Firefly, Clayface, Killer Croc, Bane)
3 (Arkham Asylum, Riddle Me This, No Man’s Land)

These cards bear no resemblance to the initial designs. They were rewritten entirely either because they were deemed too hard to balance or out-of-flavor, or were superceded by better ideas. The reworked cards often fit into other card themes the designers were happy with, as happened with Clayface and No Man’s Land in the exhaustion theme, and Query and Echo as another means of utilizing a character in hand like Harley Quinn. Arkham Asylum was changed to fit into both of these themes.

Very Similar Idea, Re-Balanced:
9 (Ratcatcher, The Riddler, Mr. Zsasz, Scarecrow, Professor Hugo Strange, The Mad Hatter, and all three versions of The Joker)
6 (Blackgate Prison, Paralyzing Kiss, Kidnapping, Prison Break, Cracking the Vault, Rigged Elections)

While The Mad Hatter probably deserved his own grouping of “Vaguely similar idea,” most of these cards were only a balancing point or two away from their final versions. These cards tended to get restrictions on what time their power could be played, whether they affected all characters or just attackers/defenders, and other things of that nature. Some of the characters were further balanced with boost.

New ATK and DEF
2 (Harley Quinn, Man-Bat)
0 (Not Applicable to Non-Characters)

Exactly the Same
4 (Two-Face, Penguin, Charaxes, Poison Ivy)
1 (Fear and Confusion)

The last two groups survived playtesting largely unscathed. The first of these two groups only had an ATK or DEF number changed, while the final five cards listed here didn’t change at all other than small templating changes.

I hope this gives you a general impression of the scope to which the cards get reworked. I’m not sure what general conclusions to draw from this. These numbers seem to support the idea that non-character cards are more challenging to balance than character cards. While characters have a very central role in the game, there are also certain stats and abilities that are easier to make guesses on for playability. To make a team-specific non-character card that is going to be “splashy” enough to play when there are already many good generic effects open to any team seems a more challenging process to design and balance.


Thievery and Bribery

As with many teams, there was at some point a brief panic over the belief that this team might be too good. This came about in part because at the time Prison Break (then named Museum Heist) was worded, “As an additional cost to play Museum Heist, exhaust an Arkham Asylum character you control. Discard any number of cards from your hand. Draw that many cards.” Prison Break is an interesting if not very powerful card in its current incarnation. When you could keep whatever cards you wanted, while exchanging your unwanted cards, the Inmates had extreme consistency. Prison Break was deemed too powerful a search card for whatever might ail you. It was modified to its riskier but easier-to-play current form.

In addition to this card manipulation, the Inmates really liked to nab opposing characters at the time. Besides The Mad Hatter, the team also had a plot twist for stealing characters. One day, this card was given a big boost in strength. That card was ultimately cut from the set, but all of the bribery that was going on was a little too much for some to tolerate. I can still hear Omeed’s cries of despair to this day. It didn’t help that much of the testing was in the mirror match, where the stolen characters still fit in well with their teammates on the opposite side of the board and could be utilized by any number of cards, including a more powerful version of Blackgate Prison. You could steal your opponent’s guy and KO it to draw three cards. Those cards didn’t last long.


That’s all I have for this week. Send any comments to DHumpherys@metagame.com.