HEX Update – Warriors Got Talent

This week, we’re getting a double hit from Director of Game Theory, Ben Stoll.

Hi HEXers! As you saw yesterday, we’re patching next week Tuesday. Patching starts at 3 AM Pacific, so new tournament registration will close at 11 PM Pacific on Monday, August 24th.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s take a look at the second spoiler that players were able to see at Gen Con: the Warrior talent tree.

CLASS TALENTS

As you may or may not have caught wind of, we recently revealed the new talent system for the PvE campaign and we also spoiled one of our talent trees: the Warrior! I want to talk to you a little about the Class Talent system, which is a very important feature of the big campaign launch. Before we begin though, I want to throw out the warning that everything is still in development and subject to change. So, please keep that in mind as you read through this article.

MIGHT

As you may have heard on one of our streams last year, we were tinkering with a leveling system where you would start each dungeon at level 1 and would be more session-based using a mechanic we called “Might”. Well, the Might system is gone.

Not only is our current class talent system better for the game, it was clear from player responses that a traditional leveling system was what players expected.

PHILOSOPHY

It’s very important to us that the campaign feels like an RPG. As you’ll find when you finally get your hands on it, we generally want systems that blend everything you love about TCGs and everything you love about RPGs into something that is simultaneously excitingly new and comfortably familiar. Class Talents are no exception.

Part of feeling like an RPG is creating your own character, watching them grow and level up progressively over an entire campaign, and making impactful decisions that determine your character’s development.

Of course, the first impactful decision is which race and class you choose. Each race and class has many strengths and weaknesses, and while I want any player to be able to enjoy any class, each class plays very differently from the others. This should be apparent even before looking at the talent grids, just by virtue of the extreme differences in starting hand and health totals!

CREATING A CHARACTER

When you create a character, you will choose from one of 8 races (Coyotle, Human, Orc, Elf, Necrotic, Vennen, Dwarf, Shin’hare) and one of 6 classes (Warrior, Mage, Cleric, Ranger, Warlock, Rogue). From there you will embark on the campaign, where your specific race and class will color moments of the campaign, as the denizens of Entrath sometimes have very different attitudes towards one another based on these affiliations. There will even be certain adventures that will be exclusive to Ardent or Underworld characters.



(Right-mouse-click, Save Link As…)

Every race has six unique racial traits. You’ll get these at the very start, as these are defined by your heritage and upbringing, not by becoming a progressively more experienced adventurer!

Every class has its own talent tree (you’ll see the Warrior tree by right-mouse-clicking the image above and selecting “save link as…”). Note that this isn’t how the Warrior talents will appear in game. This was just how the talents were presented at Gen Con and best fit onto the display. You’ll unlock more of these as you level up, as they represent your character learning new skills, experiencing new things, and commanding a stronger presence.

Beyond that, every race-class combination (48) has two or three powerful unique starting traits that are specific only to them.

Creative ownership and combinatorial decision making has always been at the core of HEX, and pairing a given race with a given class is a decision that I want to be as fun as it is important. Some of these pairings, like our Orc Warrior here, will be simply pairing two powerful and complimentary ability sets together, while other pairings might more fundamentally change the way your class plays. You’ll absolutely feel the difference between an Orc and Elf Cleric.

HOW YOUR CLASS TALENTS WORK

After you start the campaign, you’ll shortly gain enough EXP to hit level 2. At that point, and at every level your character gains through level 20, you’ll earn one talent point that you can spend in your talent grid. For levels 21 through 25 your character will earn a permanent +1 Health buff.

The top two rows of your talent tree will be immediately visible and accessible. You’ll start with your Charge Power, and you can always spend a talent point on any talent in your top row to select that talent. From there, you can only select talents if they are:

Adjacent to another talent you’ve already selected.

Connected to that talent with a pathway.

Carving your own journey through your talent tree is a highly customizable experience; we’ve strived and are still striving to make sure the talents are balanced, with the exception of your capstones which are very powerful.

Like I said, at first only your top two rows of talents will be visible and accessible—when you hit level 8 you’ll unlock the next two rows, and at level 15 you’ll unlock the final two rows.

WHAT WILL MY CLASS TALENTS GIVE ME?

Special Class Cards that are shardless so they can be put into any deck.

“Affinity Powers” that support building your deck around a certain theme.

“Passive” Action Bar Powers

“Active” Action Bar Powers

Passive Increases to attributes like Hand Size, Starting Health, and even loot-farm increase.

Really, it could be nearly anything

JUICY TIDBITS ABOUT CHARACTER LEVELING AND CLASS TALENTS:

Level Cap is currently 25

You will be able to have multiple characters, of course

You will be given limited ability to re-spec as your character levels (we want your decisions to have weight, but we don’t you to be stuck from a single decision you regret).

It will be possible to achieve at-will respeccing with max level characters

There are four types of talents: One Point Talents Two Point Talents Free Talents (many of these will offer you a double-edged sword, since they are free) Capstone Talents (they cost multiple points, but they are well worth it—you can also only select ONE capstone talent)

You will automatically unlock Class Gems at Level 8 that are shardless threshold and unique to your class.

You will automatically unlock two other powers as a result of leveling your character that pertain to PvE systems outside of the main campaign.

SO TALENTED

I hope you are as excited to read about class talents as we are to show them to you! I have put all of my heart and soul into them, and the team and I have spent a ton of time to make them as awesome as the rest of the campaign experience is!

BECOMING A GAME DESIGNER: PART 2

I know it’s been a while since our last Game Design article, so if you want a refresher you can check it out here. The goal of that article was largely to get us oriented and give us a little perspective on game design.

This article, like the last one, is more crafted to set you up to be a great game designer, not to give you a bunch of text book information about how to design great games. That said, read carefully between the lines for game design principles that you should take to heart, and allow yourself the openness to be shown new worlds of intellectual perspective. You can learn so much about games just by feeling the ring of truth in a single sentence.

Our next article will finally turn more towards good ‘ol applicable information, featuring broad game design principles as explored through HEX, as well as design principles that make their home specifically in the realm of TCGs.

THREE MAIN INGREDIENTS

Personally, there are three main ingredients that I see determining the quality of game designers. The first ingredient by itself I see frequently in novice game designers, the addition of the second ingredient I see in game designers that are capable of professional work, while the third ingredient is the most subtle and what I see as the key towards mastery of the craft.

So, let’s talk just about the capacity for making art, doing science, and being your best self:

ART: IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY

Dreaming up cool ideas, telling a story that’s never been told before, and innovating new mechanics are all a big part of game design— unless you’re strictly involved in some of the specifically scientific aspects of game design, such as power level balancing, it is important that you cultivate your creativity.

I’m not going to talk too much about this ingredient here. Partially because it’s the hardest to talk about, the hardest to give advice on, and because I suspect you already have the foundation for this piece if you’re still reading. This first piece, the desire to create art, seems to be the most common primary impulse that first calls us towards game design.

A lot of the creative piece of the puzzle is simply imagination and the exercising of your creative muscles, which you likely already do if you’re a creative person. To exercise your creative muscles, you must create. Consume art. Consume games. Draw pictures. Write. Think up ideas. Write them down. Ask “wouldn’t it be cool if…” Most importantly, start mocking up your games!

You’re creating art, and you want players to have an emotional connection to your work. Think of the affection you have for every deck you build. That’s creative ownership and a way we build the art of expression in HEX. Players can make decisions that feel significantly different than other players. For an example, let’s take a game I have deep affection for and believe is a complete masterpiece: Settlers of Catan. In other words, where you place your road in Settlers of Catan might have some degree of stylistic choice to it, but not enough to really capture the feeling of Creative Ownership. Consider the difference between a control deck and an aggro deck in Hex, however. Creative ownership is also experienced more when the player feels he or she created the interaction instead of having it given to them by the game designers.

Though this first ingredient is where most of us start, it’s also where many get stuck.

Many game designers start with a “cool idea” for a game, and they sort of just fumble out an execution. And I’m not knocking this—it’s a good way to get started, and you may actually have a sound concept for a game; that piece is frequently not out of reach for a fledgling game designer.

The key is that you decide to realize that there are a ton of factors you likely aren’t considering; that your “complete picture” for your game isn’t really complete. And that has nothing to do with the awesomeness of your idea.

Maybe the world really HAS just been waiting for your new deck-builder that also features a roll-&-go style board, or your worker-placement game that finally introduces a thrilling combat element, or your MMORPG that offers a completely original thematic experience by blending fantasy, westerns, and kittens into a world that is profoundly spiritual in tone, yet surprisingly dark in aesthetic, or your party game that’s even MORE shockingly offensive than everything anyone has ever seen before, even in the most shockingly offensive corners of known art and media (!!!).

The ability to dream up cool ideas is not going to be enough to create a great game if the game designer can’t apply scientific principles to ensure that his or her vision actually manifests and is experienced by others the way he or she imagines it optimally in his or her own head.

SCIENCE: THE APPLICATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND ANALYSIS OF WORK

“In game design we craft a number of different parts, the sum total of which is our game. Understanding each part, what its function is, what the strengths and weaknesses of its implementation might be, and how it interlocks with the other pieces, is crucial.”

While the next article will give you a bunch of specific knowledge that can be applied towards effectively crafting a game, what’s much more important is actually that you understand how to apply this knowledge, how to work with it effectively.

The bulk of this work sort of goes as follows:

Develop an ever-growing vocabulary of perspectives to consider, both for the entire game and its individual parts. There is you, the player. But, then there are we, the players. People play games for different reasons and two people can experience the same thing but draw contrasting experiences from it. Think about who’s playing your game and what his or her perspective is. Which pieces of your game is each person drawn to?

Learn the relationships of these perspectives—could your six hour game be a party game instead of a strategy game? That intuitively sounds wrong, but let’s understand why: Fans of strategy games are more likely to be core gamers, more likely to be willing to spend more of their free time gaming. Strategy games tend to facilitate opportunities for a sense of an evolving progression across the whole session, whereas many party games feature essentially playing the same game over and over across a number of turns, with the total game’s progression offering very little additional context to those turns to keep them dynamic. This fights against total tolerable playtime.

Ruthlessly consider, implement, and analyze alternatives to any of your design decisions by accessing your vocabulary of perspectives.

And make sure that along the way you get a strong internal feeling (not intellectualized) for these principles—we’ll talk about how to do this later.

Remember, the key is keeping yourself open-minded—there is always a false ceiling to the level of comprehension you can have over a thing. If someone asks us why the usage of dice rolling in Settlers of Catan is effective, we could answer with any of the following three things, completely oblivious to the relevance of the other two—

There is a major moment of tension because the ramifications of each outcome of the die are vastly better or worse for each player. To deepen: There are all sorts of other emotional/social opportunities available because of the unique feeling of two of the four of us benefiting from a roll, three of the four of us benefiting, just one person benefiting—just think of the subtle differences in each of those outcomes. This range gives the game texture, artfulness, makes it more replayable and more nuanced in its penetration of your emotional life.

Rolling dice in and of itself is a fun method of randomization: It’s obvious if you’ve ever rolled dice—but ask yourself why? I can think of a litany of reasons that contribute to the magic of dice rolling. If you just train your mind to probe and plumb these things, you will too!

The luck element allows weaker players to win, ensuring that less skilled players don’t become disenfranchised. The less skilled player must have incentives to play the game a second time against the more skilled player or else there’s no game played at all.

We must always be sleuthing around, looking for more subtle factors, more subtle perspectives, to consider our decisions from:

While it may be fine for us to sort of just put a bunch of moving pieces together initially and see how it ends up, we ultimately must propose multiple possible executions of every given part and intelligently think through the ramifications of each option on the player’s experience.

The first thing we have to do for our foundation is also one of the things that’s easiest for the fledgling designer to miss, and skipping over it, he or she builds the whole house wrong. We have to figure out what questions we should be asking. When you first start doing game design, you likely won’t know all the questions to ask, but there is a lot of rhetoric out there to help you. Who is your intended audience? What sort of experiences do they like, does it line up with the experience you envision? What is an optimal number of players, of game duration to facilitate that experience? What sort of intellectual property or thematics pair well with this experience, or are appealing to the intended audience? What are the component costs of your game? If you’re trying to make a game a commercial entity make sure you consider stuff like production costs.

Once you’ve asked the right questions and come up with the right goals, you’ll have to play-test and analyze your testing to determine if your goals are being met. Then you’ll have to make changes to your rules to get closer to fulfilling your goals. That has a lot to do with game development, which is highly scientific, but we won’t cover it here due to the fact that it would be an entire article onto itself. Another time.

But one of the reasons to mock up and play-test your game is that you may find that what actually makes it fun isn’t what you anticipated; or maybe you thought that the thing to emphasize was the creative satisfaction of building a deck, but it turned out that what people are really latching onto and finding unique in your game is the relatively high variance of the hand you draw. Maybe you center the card file more around celebrating explosive moments and less around crafting a strategy.

One final tidbit: I find that Excel in particular is a great tool for mocking up board games and for learning to think structurally. Also, at least a little bit of math is inevitable for much of the realm of game design. In fact, Excel is the only piece of software that I have sentimental feelings for <3.

SELF: KNOWING YOURSELF, KNOWING OTHERS, ALWAYS GROWING

You cannot simply try to make great art and to do great science; you must strive to become a great artist and to become a great scientist. What this means is that there is more to game design than turning thoughts into ideas and game components. The parts of your mind that drive these core actions of game design must be nurtured independently in order to optimally carry out their function for game design.

Let me talk about a few of the attributes that prime your mind for good game design:

Open Mind, Open Heart

Even the most able-minded and scientifically skilled individual must come to realize that game design is a craft that deals with the application of intellectually constructed concepts that are learnable. Like with any other craft, you don’t know all of these concepts and perspectives (whether they’re widely known, commonly accepted, uncommonly accepted, specific to a given genre of game or applicable across all gaming experiences) when you first start making games. Just the realization that there is surely a ton of useful stuff for you to learn will propel you ahead of most amateur game designers. Following up and actually trying to learn it will take you even further. There is so much good rhetoric, much of it freely available online, by master level game designers from popular games or game companies.

Of course, even just “learning” or “reading about” these game design principles, and understanding them on an intellectual level, doesn’t necessarily cement them as an able tool in your tool kit. You have to apply the principle, work with it, and understand it at its essence so you can see the ways in which it is pliable. You have to feel the truth of the concept on an empathic level; every principle applies ultimately in some way to the experience of the player, and you have to strive to cultivate not just an intellectual, but a feeling sense of empathy with the way the principle impacts the player. To do this itself requires an open mind. To see that you have to do this is the first step and requires an extraordinarily open mind. Many people take it as a given that they are doing this implicitly, but unless you thoroughly check and inspect all of your assumptions, you may be following an instinct to serve the experience that is better for you as a player, and you don’t necessarily comprehensively represent the intended audience. And so when you start play-testing your games, be a social scientist, and make your play-test session about understanding your game better and understanding people better, not about getting a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on your game. Don’t go into a play-test session unconsciously seeking the comfort of “good feedback.” Even more dangerous than the unconditionally positive reviews from friends, is the feedback from your “pretty smart friends who are avid gamers and think they understand game design, but don’t have a clue.” Again, it sounds harsh—but the gaming world is filled to the brim with very intelligent people who actively think they understand enough about how games work to give feedback about their experience but don’t, and they will confidently give you misinformation.

Self Understanding

All game designers can be described in terms of strengths and weaknesses in various areas of the craft. Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, and why you’re strong and weak in those areas, is an invaluable asset in optimizing your game design work. Many new or merely decent game designers aren’t yet seasoned and mature enough to effectively gauge their confidence level in their various opinions—they are always all in on championing their opinion. But nearly every great game designer I know will tell you they’re anywhere from nearly certain, to very confident, to somewhat confident, to really not sure, or whatever. And further, they’ll be able to tell you why they feel that way. Where exactly their uncertainty lies, and why. That is the sort of person you can collaborate with.

You will have an easier time understanding your own strengths and weaknesses if you come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of those you collaborate with. Don’t make the mistake of lazily assuming every game designer you work with is equally skilled in all areas; don’t contribute to turning your collaborative game design into a haphazard democracy that yields mediocre results by ignoring the benefits of a team that is specialized in different areas. And don’t forget the part about humility from the first article! Always be humble and you’ll be amazed at the things you can learn for free.

Empathy

In addition to reading game design theory and making games on their own, the third thing I always tell game designers to do to work on their game design career is to pay attention to their own experience while they’re gaming. Remember, the game designer is crafting a specific experience for you, but they’re not necessarily trying to have that experience describe its inner workings to you. Your job as a game designer is to step outside of the immersion of the experience and observe yourself having the experience. Actually getting in touch with the experience you yourself are having is the best way to really understand it on a deep level. Normally, you get to the boss of a stage in some video game, and you’re focused on one goal: dealing enough damage to that sucker before he envelops you in fireballs. By default, you don’t have enough mental bandwidth to devote to self-examination. You’ve got a full mental plate of timing jumps and aiming your weapon. But you need to play with a new attitude. First thing is to notice your enjoyment, that you’re making a conscious choice to play this game. You may notice that you enjoy this boss fight. Then to go a little deeper, you note that you’re excited, maybe you feel some tension, and that’s why you’re having fun. Then you figure out why you feel that way, it’s because if you die you’ll have to start over, which would suck, so it’s creating a tension and an excitement. You also remember that if you win you’ll progress, maybe get a reward, a new story beat, and that is also contributing to the excitement. Then you realize that you just learned that tension is probably the single most important emotional component to many different types of game, and that a situation with two highly polarized outcomes both seeming possible in a given moment is the best surefire way to create tension, which means you just learned something really important about game design!

Once you understand how games affect you, you’ll be able to start to see how they affect others. Some experiences found in games are for a very narrow audience, but many experiences are experienced similarly by players everywhere, and so understanding yourself will do a huge service to you understanding others.

PASSION

Well, that’s a lot of summary info about what I think it takes to do game design, but how does one know if game design is really something they should pursue?

I think that sometimes our passions are love at first sight—we have an experience or an unshakable intuition that we are called to something. But for me and game design, it wasn’t like this until multiple years after I started working as a game designer, until I made significant progress and really got my bearings.

Game Design is an unbelievably deep, unbelievably complex, unbelievably demanding and infinitely masterable discipline.

The deeper you throw yourself into it, the more you can come to appreciate the sheer scope, the unexplored depths, the powerful ramifications of game design—all of this is what causes me to hold game design in a sort of reverence, what makes me so passionate about it. That, and the pure bliss of being right in the flow of design with a sense that you know where you’re going. But I’m getting carried away. None of that was apparent to me when I excitedly set out to “make some TCG cards for a LIVING!?” and it likely won’t be to many fledgling game designers.

I think that the only certain prerequisite for being a game designer is a love of games, not necessarily a love of game design. The love of game design will reveal itself to you or it won’t, but first you may have to do a little exploration.

Which is why I would say the second prerequisite for being a game designer is at least a curiosity to try it out. You don’t have yearn passionately all your life to be a game designer (although if you have, great!), but you probably have to at least genuinely be curious to find out if you like it.

NOW WHAT DO I DO?

That’s all for now! For those of you who that are still hungry for technical and applicable knowledge, we’ll be giving away tons of info about how to craft trading card games in our next article. But I can’t emphasize how much more important it is to prepare your mind for the work than it is to read a bunch of knowledge. No matter what, I hope you got something out of the article!

Thanks for reading!

VIP NEXT WEEKEND

August VIP weekend is happening August 28th through the 30th. Since last month’s event was flipped to Sealed Deck, this month’s is Constructed. This is the last month to earn Carnasaurus AA and Valiant Escort AA, so make sure to get yours!

Friday: 10:00 AM, 7:00 PM

Saturday: 3:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 6:00 PM

Sunday: 9:00 AM

Players: 16 minimum – 256 maximum

Format: 4 rounds of Swiss

Entry fee: VIP ticket + 500 plat

Prizes:

4 wins: 10 packs / 2 Carnasaurus AA / 2 Valiant Escort AA

3 wins: 6 packs / 1 Carnasaurus AA / 1 Valiant Escort AA

2 wins: 3 packs / 1 Carnasaurus AA / 1 Valiant Escort AA

1 win: 2 packs

0 wins: 1 pack

That’s all for this week. Please leave any questions or comments in the forums, and don’t forget to Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitch, and register on our forums.

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