We've been trying a ton of different things with game design over the past year or so, and have been developing and testing the game in public since April. Everything has been in flux. As the design has begun to settle down some, we're ready to enter the tightening phase: teaching the game, polishing the game, and completing game features, eventually all leading up to a push to grow the game. And since it’s the end of the calendar year, we thought it’d be a good time to do a quick recap of where we’ve been and where we are, and to lay out our plans for where we’re going.
A quick recap of the beta so far.
- Started developing and testing the game in public in April.
- Invited player waves and iterated on the biggest pain points discovered with each wave.
- Iterated on hero design and item design in conjunction with waves and community discussion.
- Increased the strength and impact of heroes across the board.
- Made several passes on card design to make more cards relevant and improve gameplay.
- Added ranked play.
- Added hero demo puzzles.
- Added various UI components to better convey the game state (status effect icons, glossary fly-outs).
- Experimented with shop rules and simplified shop UI.
- Experimented with multicolor cards.
- Experimented with factions.
- Experimented with multicolor casting rules.
Where are we going? (AKA: Open beta when?)
There are still quite a few things we feel need to be in place before we’re ready to enter a major growth phase of the game. We will need to invite new players before then to test whenever we add something new, but the aim will still be testing things, rather than inviting players with the goal of growing the player base just yet.
We don’t want to enter any major growth push until the game is ready for a wide range of players to consume without bouncing off of it. Additionally, we want to be in a place internally where we no longer have catch-up work to do on the main game experience and can shift our focus more towards new content as soon as open beta starts.
Players should have a clear way to learn to play the game.
- In-game tutorial to teach the basics.
- Hero card demo puzzles to teach individual cards.
- Informative UI and effects.
Learning game strategy should be fun and players should have a long runway available before being thrown in the shark tank.
- Improved bot play to make playing against bots more meaningful.
- More single player missions and a system for regularly adding more missions.
- Progression for playing with friends, incentives to invite friends and play with friends.
- Progression for playing vs bots, not just ranked.
- Clearer unlocking progression for hero draft.
Gameplay should be relatively stable and not constantly changing as players are trying to learn the game.
- We should largely be done with large game-changing rules experiments.
- This doesn’t mean we’d ever stop changing cards, but that we should get to a point where it’s less frequent, and more often bundled together in larger patches.
More game modes to bridge the gap between the relatively lighter experience of hero draft and the heavier experience of constructed.
- Advanced hero draft is the most likely candidate.
- Ephemeral events so that we can add temporary game modes to focus the player base.
- Focused playtest events.
The game should be both functional and fun to look at.
- Final card art.
- Beautiful animations and effects.
- Beautiful board.
- Effects that serve a functional purpose, conveying what the cards are doing and the resulting game state.
Alright, alright... So what’s the roadmap then?
We’re getting ready to ship Tutorial Beta 2.0 to existing players early next week. We’d like to test it with the current player base first for a few weeks before trying with new players. Once we’ve got our first round of feedback we’d like to start inviting small waves of new players who signed up for the beta but hadn't played 1.0 while we iterate on teaching the game.
Sometime in mid-to-late January we’d like to start letting players invite their friends as our main way of inviting new players while we continue to iterate on all the above goals. We expect we are a few months away from slowing down constant changes to cards, game rules, and balance. At that point we expect to spend more of our effort on UI, UX, and all the many features listed above on the road to open beta and eventual release.
We expect release (with open beta and a growth push happening shortly before then) is far enough away that it would be a disservice to try to pin down a date right now. We know what we need to do before then, but for now it’s still one foot in front of the other until the game is ready for it.
And now, for a glimpse of the future.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a thousand twenty pictures looking to the future, some concept art and some card art hot off the presses.
CONCEPT ART: An updated vision for the Hero and Creep cards placed into the playfield; with the goal for a cleaner, more readable card presentation with regards to typography and active/passive ability recognition. (Click for full-size image.)
CONCEPT ART: An informational and actionable hover state for cards on the board—a work-in-progress implementation of this is in beta at the moment. In the background, concept art for the board, towers, timers, a siege engine, and Riki. (Click for full-size image.)
Final Art Preview: Green
Final Art Preview: Blue
Final Art Preview: Black
Final Art Preview: Red
Downloadable Background: Team Fight
(Click for full size image.)