Design Diary #1 – Foundations

Welcome to the first Radiant: Offline Battle Arena design diary. Over the coming weeks, and throughout our Kickstarter campaign, Lead Designer Jack Murray will be running a series of articles detailing ROBA’s design history, the general design philosophies behind the game and the specific processes that guide our card design.

ROBA is the product of two separate obsessions: I have been a competitive card-gamer for over fifteen years. I have been a strategy gamer (in the digital sense) since C&C Red Alert in 1996, though Warcraft 3 was probably the more significant gaming experience – certainly in the context of ROBA – because, of course, Warcraft 3 was the initial home of DOTA.

I have a vivid memory of lurking in the voice-chat channel of some friends of mine as they navigated their way through teamfight after teamfight. Though familiar with the broad strokes of the game they were playing, the granular details that define this genre of play were opaque to me. Abbreviations and acronyms flew thick and fast. Threats were identified, answers were issued, the pace of the game ebbed and flowed. Through the almost impenetrable argot, I was struck by a revelation: “These guys are playing a CCG.” That moment of inspiration was the genesis point for ROBA, though it took years to come to fruition.

All the elements were there: the in-depth dissection of team composition and character build was analogous to deck construction. The cycling of ability cooldowns imposed the same kind of resource management challenge as a hand of cards. Victory depended not only on each player’s knowledge of their own team’s abilities, but those of the enemy as well – of the relative strengths of each composition and the points of weakness that could be exploited.

Radiant is a MOBA-inspired game, but MOBAs, even the relatively simple ones, are hugely complicated machines. There are many ways one could approach this kind of adaptation. The MOBA is multi-faceted genre, with each of the many digital offerings emphasising different aspects of the form:

There’s the MOBA-as-Ecosystem, focusing on the autonomous, AI driven elements. Managing lane equilibrium and minion waves, creating favourable conditions for pushing objectives and farming scarce resources as efficiently as possible.

There’s the MOBA-as-Team-Building-Exercise, that emphasises players on a team coming together to execute a plan. Every team-member’s actions have the potential to be helped or hindered by those of their teammates. Communication is vital, but so is a certain amount of intuition.

There’s the MOBA-as-Strategy-Game, where it’s all about looking at the big picture. Drafting the right team, positioning your Heroes correctly, creating favourable lane match ups, responding dynamically to your enemy’s plan while continuously advancing your own.

And there’s the MOBA-as-twitchy-action-game, where execution is king. MOBA teamfights are these huge, chaotic brawls full of sound and fury but are guided by a need for incredible precision. Knowing you need to save your stuns to disable a powerful channelled spell is one thing, coming through in the clutch is another.

Any one of these facets could potentially serve as the core of a fun tabletop gaming experience but it would be easy to set too ambitious a scope and wind up with a project that sprawled wildly in multiple directions. Try to do too much and the game would be a mess – so I set myself some rules.

When I started working seriously on ROBA, I set myself some design goals. An early draft of the design document (dated August 2015) lists the key directives as follows:

– A game for two players

– Set in a fantasy world and feature a diverse and colourful cast of characters

– Fast paced and tactically engaging

– Fun to play with many exciting interactions and pivots

– Accessible to new players, but sufficiently deep to support long term competitive play

– Play time Approx. 30 Minutes

Unstated above, but equally important: Making a fun card game was more important than making a point-for-point replica of my inspirations. Radiant is inspired by multiplayer-online-battle-arenas, but it isn’t a multiplayer-online-battle-arena, nor can it ever be. That’s why we went with “offline-battle-arena” subtitle. We wanted to emphasise that ROBA is more than a facsimile, it is its own creature.

These were the pillars that guided ROBA’s development. Every design decision I made aimed to bring the game closer to these ideals. Often this meant that ideas I really liked got left behind. I think I probably generated enough unused material that I could spend the rest of my career working on different kinds of MOBA adaptation if I wanted to – but the game is stronger for this lengthy process of elimination. As this series progresses I will be diving deep into the specifics of how I went about achieving the game’s design goals, starting in Design Diary #2, which will discuss the Heroes that sit at the heart of ROBA’s gameplay.

See you in the arena!

– J