Making of a HEX Encounter

Hey all, Corey Burkhart here with another “Makings” article for HEX. Usually I talk about making cards, but with the Chronicles of Entrath: Chapter II just around the corner, I wanted to do something special. Rather than share just one campaign card or just one champion, I instead want to share how we make an encounter and how that encounter fits into the campaign experience as a whole.

With Chapter II, you’ll experience many of the same things you did in Chapter I. We still have dungeons, faction specific encounters, battleboards, and thematic encounters. But with Chapter II, we wanted to step it up. We knew we did some solid work with Chapter I and the Howling Plains, but we also know there were some areas for improvement. We’ve learned many lessons while building HEX’s campaign, and we wanted Chapter II and the Alachian Sea to show that off.

One of the encounters that I think highlights this is the second encounter node you’ll experience on the Alachian Sea – Captain Chumspike! Captain Chumspike and his dastardly band of minotaur pirates attempt to fight you for rowing onto their territory. We knew that we wanted Captain Chumspike to fall in line with the Minotaur lore of being pirates and mercenaries. As such, we tried to make that ring through in the champion and the deck. Here was our first take at Captain Chumspike many moons ago:

Before the creative team’s pass, we had Captain Chumspike’s name as a placeholder as you can see. However, the art shown here is a bit later in the process so it’s a touch more polished. The initial concept for Captain Chumspike was to give the feeling that he’s a ruthless ruler of the seas, an unstoppable force that you can’t defeat. The best you can hope to do is survive with your vessel and your life. The design you see here does succeed in that goal, but it does so in an exceptionally mechanical way. A player has to enter into the encounter and read all of Chumspike’s special rules text to understand the way to win.

This is not ideal for getting players enthralled with the campaign experience. One of our goals with any content, but campaign specifically, is making you feel like you ARE the character. We want to give the sense that you could be part of the encounter, duking it out on the high seas. When you read a champion with text like this, you instead get pushed into the meta mode of mechanics. Chumspike’s first pass asked players to do a small reading comprehension quiz instead of being entertained by the content around them. Improving immersion and bringing the content directly to the players was one of our goals to improve for Chapter II.

Chumspike wasn’t clicking just yet, so we put a bookmark on his encounter design and dove down into the specifics of his deck. After the design team gets back from laying out the overarching story of our chapter, we build out the specific encounter decks so they’ll see how many new cards some of the decks will need. We aim to use most of our new cards for dungeon nodes, player rewards, and highly specialized encounters, but we also want to make sure that each node has its own piece of novelty. This often means that even a single encounter within a chapter could have its own card, and many times players can earn these cards for themselves. I’m a big fan of the one we included in Chumspike’s deck because it embodies strongly what the minotaurs in Entrath are up to on the Alachian Sea. I think many players will be interested in collecting him, either for their decks, their mercenary decks, or both.

This card was designed early in the process. We knew we wanted aggressive pirates that would board your boat and try and take over like in the quintessential pirate movies or novels. When designing PvP cards, we usually focus on balance between the two realms of constructed and limited. When it comes to campaign cards, there is a touch more freedom. Cutthroats are fast, mean, and scarier than most things you would see in PvP. That’s not to say that we don’t worry about the raw power level of the cards that we’re making, but the focus is less about keeping power in check and more about making tons of exciting options and challenges for our players. After all, the AI won’t complain, no matter how many times you punch it in the face.

With Hired Horn Cutthroat I think we met our design goals fairly well on the first shot. We have a card that’s exciting to collect, that’s challenging to play against in its specific encounter deck, and that fits right in with the minotaur pirate theme. We don’t have an exact term for this in R&D, but it’s been an ongoing joke that designs that can enter the file as one design and go out to the internet as the same design are A+++ designs. We seldom make those and it’s not something we strive for, as there are many good reasons a design can change from start to finish, but I think the guys did a bang up job with this card. That might not seem like that much since the card is quite simple, but it’s truly very difficult to make a card one time and have it enter the game unchanged.

As we moved into the testing phase of Chapter II, most the team was in the client playing games and making sure everything plays well. We were busy tweaking the encounters and making things feel correct within the games themselves. While we were busy with that, other departments were hard at work also. The engineers came back to us with some sweet new technology they had been working on while the art team continued to evolve the look of our cards:

The engineers told us about encounter dialogue. Essentially, the ability to spawn conversations in the middle of the game was a power they had moved into our clients and we could use at will. Rather than putting a ton of work onto campaign engineers, we now had the power ourselves to set these interactions up. These conversations are just like the dialogues you’ll have on the campaign map, in panoramas, or in dungeons, but they can happen dynamically during a battle. Here’s a sneak peek at the conversation as you’re escaping Captain Chumspike and his dirty group of minotaur bandits:

What this does is at certain points in an encounter based on event, we can spawn a dialogue between any number of different characters. This was immensely helpful for us in increasing the immersion of our campaign. No longer would we need champions that looked like that first version of Hired Horn Captain. Instead, we can remove most of his complicated text and have the encounters hide or reveal some of the mysteries of the battle as it unfolds. This is similar to how we have battleboards affecting the encounters themselves, but is presented in a more interactive and engaging form.

After a couple more iterations where the team tested out various ideas for the encounter, we settled on a version of Captain Chumspike that was fierce, simple, and I’m sure you’ll see at least a couple of times during your adventures in Entrath.

We’re still experimenting with encounter conversations. We really like all the possibilities this tech opens up, and we’ve even gone back and put some conversations into the most deserving encounters in Chapter I. Be on the lookout for those as well when Chapter II hits. We’re really excited for how much these interactions improve the campaign and the new feelings that this feature can evoke. I, for one, cannot wait for Chapter II of the Chronicles of Entrath. See you on the sea!

Corey Burkhart-

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