Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1087: Exploratory Design

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

In this podcast, I take an in-depth look at our current exploratory design process.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so in the morning before I drive to work, I always figure out what my topic for the day is. And one of the things I do is I check to see, have I done it before? I've done over a thousand podcasts, so there are topics sometimes that I forget that I've done. But while looking today, I realized that there's a topic I did do, but I did like 10 years ago. And I decided that like a lot has changed in 10 years. So I'm going to do an updated version of this podcast. So the podcast is on exploratory design. So I want to really dig in deep and talk about what exactly we do in exploratory

design. So I'll spend a little bit of time talk about what exactly we do in exploratory design. So I'll spend a little bit of time telling the history, which I think I cover in the first podcast. But just for those that might not have listened to all thousand plus of my podcasts. Okay, so the story begins at the end of The Great Designer Search 2. Ethan Fleischer wins and Shawn Main comes in second. Now, we had done the second grade designer search a little bit different than the first grade designer search and the third.

Basically, what happened was we asked each person, each finalist, to build their own world. And then their challenges were all within their own world. And the idea behind it was we were looking for a little bit different set of skills. We wanted a little more cohesive, you know, building a world type design skills. So what happened was once they were hired, I wanted to continue sort of working with them and training them and, you know, teaching them.

So I came up with an interesting idea. There was a set upcoming, Khans of Tarkir blocks, how long ago this was, and I knew one thing about it. I knew that I wanted to do large, small, large, and I wanted the small set to be drafted with both large sets, but the two large sets did not be drafted together. This was back in the days of the three-set blocks. It was nearing the end of the three-set blocks. We were doing more experimentation and trying different things.

Every other year, the third set was large. So this was a year with a large third set. But anyway, I like this dynamic of the middle set being with both the large sets, but the large sets not being together. But why? Why was that the case? So what I did is I started a year before the set was even going to be designed. This was back in the days of design and development.

So I set up a team. It was me and Ethan and Sean. And I said to them, look, the three of us, we're going to solve this problem so that when we get to vision, we understand what it is we're doing like what what is large small large and so we spent that year really exploring like what made sense what could be there and spent a lot of time sort of investigating the area we weren't none of it was actually building a file none of it was actually building a file. None of it was committing to mechanics. It was all just understanding the larger questions at hand. And like I said, I originally did it as a one-time thing. I was trying to help Ethan and Sean sort of learn.

But it was so useful that I decided to keep it. And so from then on, we did exploratory design. Now, as the process has changed, design development became vision design, set design, play design. A lot of, you know, design has evolved a lot. And exploratory design has evolved a lot. So that is today's podcast. I'm going to talk about sort of nowadays, present day, what is exploratory design and how do we design for it? Okay. I think when we talk exploratory design, I have to divide into two sections.

What I call top-down and bottom-up design. I'm sorry. Sorry. I said that incorrectly. The first division is between new worlds and return worlds. And then within new worlds, we'll get to bottom-up and top-down. And so, okay, so the idea is,

the first thing Exploratory cares about is, is this a new world? Are we building something new? Or is this a return world? Are we going back to a known thing? That's the first thing that we will care about. Okay, in the new section about new worlds, it splits into top-down and bottom-up. Sorry, I got a little ahead of myself. So for those, I've done podcasts on top-down design, bottom-up design. For those who might not know it, top-down design means you start your design from a creative premise. Innistrad, Throne of Eldraine, Amonkhet, Theros,

those are all top-down sets. Oh, you know, for example, Innistrad started because we're like, hey, the genre of horror is very cool. It's fantasy adjacent. You know, what if we made a world that was all about the essence of what horror was? And so, in a top-down design, it's about sort of figuring out the flavor you're going for, and then you want to find ways to mechanically

bring that flavor to life. So, I'll use Innistrad as my example. Okay, so we're doing the genre of horror. So we have what we call whiteboarding meeting, where we're just writing a lot of things down. So usually on top down, the first question I ask is, okay, if we tell the audience we're doing a horror set or a gothic horror set, what would they expect? What exactly, if you know that we're doing a horror-th a gothic horror set what would they expect what what exactly if you know that we're doing a horror themed set what would you expect to see

um and we would write lots of things down and the key once again is one of the reasons that top down is very fun and and works well is that resonance is a really important part of design and that what we want to do is have the audience sort of recognize things and have attachment to things, not that we made the attachment necessarily. So, for example, when we were thinking about Innistrad, one of the things we wrote down very early on was monsters. Oh, there's monsters in horror. And so we started asking ourselves, okay, well, how do you convey monsters mechanically?

Well, we have creature types. You know, creature types do a pretty good job of it. And typo themes in general are very popular. So we're like, okay, well, we can make, you know, and what are the monsters we would expect? Well, we expect to see vampires and werewolves and zombies. That was the first three that we came up with. And then we realized with time we needed one more, so we ended up adding spirits or ghosts, which made a lot of sense. And then

the key there is understanding that monsters matter. Now, in exploratory design, one of the things I say about exploratory design is our job is to go wide, not deep. And what that means is we're not trying to solve the problems as much as we are trying to understand the nature of the problems and then potential solutions for the problem. But we're not actually picking the solution. We're just sort of, the way I would describe it is we're map makers in exploratory

design. We are sort of, okay, the vision team's going to go off and we're going to like, well, we're going to map out things for you. We're going to tell you where there's meaty design space and where there's thin design space. You know, we're going to spend some time sort of letting vision design and set design, everyone downstream, sort of know what's out there. So like with top-down, it's a matter of understanding the resonance space and really mapping that out and then figuring out

of that resonance space where is there good potential for a mechanical execution. Because it's not just a matter of will people recognize it, but it's like, is there a way to bring it to gameplay? Now, some ideas don't quite translate easily to gameplay.

Some might be something that you would do on a card-by-card basis. Maybe it's more of an art thing. You know, not everything necessarily seeps through play. But, like Innistrad, like we figured out we want to do monsters. Oh, there's a typo execution of that. Oh, we want to care about, you know, death. Oh, we can care about the graveyard. That's where dead things are.

We can care about things dying. That's what morbid ended up being. That like, you sort of pick your themes and then mechanically we explore how can you execute this. Now in Explore Your Design, once again,

we're not trying to pick the way to do it. We're trying to pick ways to do it. And so normally what will happen is I will give my team, so the classic example from Innistrad was we were looking at how to execute on the different creature types. Okay, what do vampires do? What do zombies do? Now, vampires and zombies, we had definitely done a lot of. Magic had done them quite a bit. And there's some interesting questions about what kind of archetype

could we build? What colors are they in? We pushed vampires in red where they had not been before. We pushed zombies in blue where they had not been before. So there's experimentation in those. But the real one that I knew was the big question mark was werewolves. I think at the time of Innistrad,

I don't know, we had done two or three werewolves. They were all mono-black. And none of them, like, to write home about, none of them were amazing car designs that people had great fondness for. So one of the things I said to the team is, okay, let's figure out how to do werewolves. And we talked through

what makes a werewolf. Like, well, it's got to be human some of the time. It's got to be a werewolf some of the time. Obviously, at night, it turns into a werewolf when the full moon is out. So the real question is, okay, how do we represent that? And so that's the kind of homework I'll give my team. I will give them a problem to solve, and then everybody tries to solve the problem. And normally, they'll try to solve the problem not just once, but in multiple things. And once again, wide not deep.

So usually what will happen is someone will design like two or three cards to sort of show an idea and then move on and design two or three cards to show a different idea and then a different idea. A lot of what we're trying to do in exploratory is really go is look to see all the possibilities.

And then the way it works is we'll have an idea and we'll explore the idea. So let's say, for example, we're talking about what to do with werewolves. So people will bring in different ideas. I remember I brought in Day Knight. Tom brought in Devil Face Cards. Anyway, we had a bunch of different ideas. cards. Anyway, we had a bunch of different ideas. And then what you do in exploratory is you play test. And then really when you play test an idea, there's three outcomes that you get to.

Outcome number one is I like it. Good. Good mechanic. Put it on the list. Vision can look at it. Option number two is it's bad. You're like, oh, okay, this is, yeah, no one needs to do this. And again, you put it on a different listing. We tried this, it didn't work. And then the third thing can be, okay, it's not quite what we want. I wouldn't call it good, but there's something there. And we will spend some time on the third category. We will do a little bit of iteration when we're trying to figure out the best execution of some stuff to see if this idea, there's something there. So we will play around in that space. Anyway, top down, we're looking at resonance. We're figuring out what, how to map the ideas to something technical, to something mechanical. And then we're coming up

with them. Oh, the first thing we do, by the way, before we play test is where we do theory crafting. What theory crafting is, is, okay, we've made a lot of magic cards. We understand a lot of things just from experience. Let's talk through each of the mechanics and see how we feel. Theory crafting is important. A, because it's much faster. You know, you can talk about something. And, hey, one of the advantages of doing the same thing again and again and again is you get shorthands and understanding things. There's certain kind of mechanics that, you know, let's say it's a kicker variant.

We've done infinite kicker variants. We understand kicker variants. We can grok that much more easily. But theory crafting only gets you so far. So theory crafting is really good for narrowing down what we think shows the most potential because we don't playtest everything. Usually in a meeting,

if I give out homework or something, you know, we could have 20, 30 ideas. We've got a whole bunch of ideas. We're not playtesting everything. So theorycrafting is a good way to sort of figure out where we think potential is shown and talk through things. But once you narrow it down to a smaller group,

at some point you do need to playtest it. Theorycrafting only gets you so far. One of the cool things about playtesting is when you actually dig in the nuts and bolts of trying to understand it, you just get a better idea of what is and isn't working. There's a lot of things that might in concept seem fine, or in concept not seem fine, but when you start playing with it,

you're like, like oh well that plays differently than I thought it would play and that happens a lot that's why play test like it's very important that you use the product in the way the end user will use the product well if the end user is going to play it we need to play it because we have to we have to get the experience and understand the experience that the consumer is going to have. Okay. The other thing about top-down is you also want to kind of understand your themes. Like, one of the things is we have what we call a mechanical heart.

And what that means is there's something about the set, like, there's some element of the set that really drives the essence of what the set is. Now, a mechanical heart, usually there's one thing that has primary importance. Like, what is the theme that really drives your set? So with Innishrod, a theme we came upon looking at all our different mechanics was the idea of dark transformation.

So a theme we can, and once again, we work with the world building team, so a lot of the thematic stuff is done in conjunction with the creative team. We're not, it's not like each of us work on our own in the compare notes.

There's a lot of back and forth. Members of one team will be on the other team and we'll talk a lot. So the reason we like Dark Transformation, the thing that we found out about what we were most interested in was,

so we ended up with four monsters that we really liked, which was spirits, vampires, werewolves, and zombies. The thing we realized very early on was, what do all four of those monsters have in common? They all were originally human. Humans die and become ghosts. Humans get bit by vampires and become vampires. Humans get bit by vampires and become vampires. Humans get bit by werewolves and become werewolves. Humans get bit by zombies and become zombies. In fact, when Innistrad came out

we had what we called the bite game because we realized how much of the time that you get bitten by the monster and become the monster. Anyway. So the idea that it's a human and humans become monsters was really cool for us. And so the theme of dark transformation was something we really played around with.

It kind of led, I mean, the werewolves led to the double-faced cards, but the double-faced cards made us realize that there was a larger theme we could play with. So we really played around with the idea of dark transformation. We played around with the idea of death. And we played around with the idea of dark transformation. We played around with the idea of death. And we played around with the idea of monsters in general. But anyway, the key is, exploratory is mapping out sort of the... I mean, vision will design what the mechanical heart is.

But exploratory will sort of talk about what are the candidates for the mechanical heart? What are the things that we... And sometimes you come out of exploratory just completely for the mechanical heart? What are the things that we, you know, and sometimes you come out of Exploratory just completely knowing your mechanical heart. Sometimes you come out like, oh, it's this. This is what we want. A good example of that is Dominaria.

The challenge of Dominaria was early magic, the first like 10 years of magic, most sets were on Dominaria. So Dominaria had done a lot of different themes. In a way that we, nowadays, if we do a new theme, most sets were on Dominaria. So Dominaria had done a lot of different themes. In a way that nowadays, if we do a new theme, we go to a new world, so that worlds sort of resonate. Oh, I'm the world all about artifacts,

or I'm the world all about enchantments. And it gets more nuanced than that. So now I'm Greek mythology and enchantments and stuff like that. Anyway, Dominaria had the problem of just, it was associated with too many different things, and we needed to consolidate it into something that gave it a cohesive whole. And a lot of exploratory design was understanding that, sort of the mechanical heart of what is it? What is it about? What does the world of Dominaria represent?

And that's when we ended up realizing that one of the unique things about Dominaria was how many events happened there, and how much the audience themselves had a memory of it. Because you, I mean, if you're a longtime player, you played Ice Age and you played Mirage and you played Tempest, which was Rath, but I got it overlaid.

So the idea of being a world of history, we ended up, that was something that really exploratory design helped us understand. How history was represented, you know, we had done some experimentation there. A lot of that got figured out in vision. But exploratory did start to sort of walk through

how are the different ways that you can do that. And that's how exploratory design works. We are trying to sort of make a sampler, if you will. I have a lot of metaphors today. We're giving vision design a box of chocolates so that it can try it out.

And each one's a different chocolate. You can see what kind of chocolate you like. So it's sort of, we do a lot of that. So one of the handoffs from exploratory design and vision design is often a document, or sometimes it's a presentation, just walking through all the mechanics that we found interesting in exploratory. And a lot of times what will happen is the first day of vision is okay, let's do a little download from exploratory. Here is the themes we

like. Here is the mechanics we looked at. Here are all the different executions. And usually it's a hodgepodge of lots of different things. It is not like it's this. It's more like here are a lot of different ideas. Now, I tend to lead Exploratory design teams. But the key is if I'm running vision, usually it's just me. If somebody else is

running the vision design, I sort of co-lead exploratory with them. I'm on all the vision teams, but I don't run all the vision teams. And so how much you walk out of exploratory knowing what you want, because I've been doing this for a long time, usually when I leave exploratory I have a very good idea where I'm going, meaning I tend to start vision very, very directed. Not always. Things can change. Lost Caverns of Excellence is a great example

where vision had an idea and things changed after the fact and it didn't quite work out. Although that's more vision instead of design. Usually exploratory, if I'm doing vision design, I walk out of exploratory having a good sense of that.

Okay, so I talked a lot about top-down. The other thing about new worlds is bottom-up. Ravnica is kind of the example here. So what bottom-up means is at your core, it's more a mechanical core. Zendikar was all about lands. It's something in which there's some mechanical core. Zendikar was all about lands. You know, it's something in which there's some mechanical thing.

Nowadays, we tend to start a little bit more top-down than bottom-up, but the other thing is if we're doing our job correctly, we should mix and match things in a way that you, the audience, might not even understand where we started. You know, every set should feel like it is very flavorful and very mechanically

connected. So, I'm just sort of talking about structurally how we build things. So, when you're building something like, or Zendikar is a good example, where I knew I wanted to base a set on land mechanics. I really wanted the land to be front and center. It had not been before and I thought it was a theme worthy

of us focusing on. And early on in exploratory, in vision design, sorry, in design, because it wasn't vision design yet, we spent a lot of time trying to understand lands. And that's another thing about, so in a bottom-up exploratory, it's more an exploration of execution, if you will. Okay, we want to do lands as a theme.

Okay, well, let's explore everything we can about lands. The first thing we tend to do is we'll look at what we've done in the past. Oh, we're doing a multicolor world? Well, what multicolor stuff have we done? Oh, we're doing a land-based thing? Well, what land mechanics have we done? We're doing a lot of exploration of where the space lies. For example, Ravnica was two-color gold cards. Okay, well, let me look at other sets that did multi-color. You know, what are the tools available to us? And technically,

Ravnica predates the exploratory design teams, but I definitely did some prep work on my own, and it was that prep work that got me to hybrid, for example. So in some ways, it's what the exploratory design team would have done. It was just me. I was the exploratory design team, I guess. But it allows us to figure out, like, A, are there things we've done,

and what are, like, for example, sometimes there's things we've done that we only do when we're doing that theme, and then we sort of tuck them back away. Like, there's themes we pull out when we do graveyard or we do multicolor. And you want to sort of understand that. Like, you know, there are cards that can change their color or, you know, cards that can reduce mana. Like you have to look at different things to figure out what you're doing. But it depends what you're caring about.

What is the essence you're caring about? But that's a lot of what Exploratory does in bottom, is you take your theme, you look at your theme. You know, with Ravnica, it would be, you know, or a later Ravnica set, let's say, maybe not. Original Ravnica, I did an exploratory design. But it's also about sort of looking at what we've done and what mechanical space there is, and how do we expand it?

Are there new mechanics we can do with lands? Are there new mechanics we can do with multicolor? You get hybrid, you get landfall, you get things that sort of push in new directions and understand them. But the difference between top-down and bottom-up is bottom-up usually is a little bit more about saying, here's our mechanical theme. Top-down has to find the mechanical heart, sort of the theme, if you will. Bottom- up more starts with mechanical, like, you know, Ravnica was about two-color pairs, Zendikar was about land. Like, you kind of start with the essence of what your mechanical heart is. And so, now, the interesting thing there is, the reverse of it,

is you're trying to figure out where the flavor can come from. When we were doing Zendikar, it's like, okay we want to, like, here's the mechanics that lands beget. Here's the kind of things we want to do. And then we sort of said, okay, well what does that mean? And then we worked with a creative team to come up with the idea of an adventure world.

That, you know, why are there more lands? Because they're adventuring and we wanted to make a terrain that was a little more wild, so we had things we knew there were more lands because they're adventuring. And we wanted to make a terrain that was a little more wild. So we knew there were more land cards. We wanted to show more exciting things. And so we picked a world that reinforced that. Okay, so that is brand new world.

But sometimes we return to worlds. So in a return to a world, the first thing we tend to do is understand the previous visit. Now, on return to worlds, there are two things. There are what I will call traditional return and what I'll call backdrop. So traditional return means we're going back to the world and we essentially want it to be the world as you know it. It's return to Ravnica. Guess what? It's guilds again and they're going to have guild mechanics and there's a certain structure that comes from that.

So when you're doing a return, first thing you do is you look at everything you've previously done on every visit there. So, you know, let's say we're doing the third trip to Ravnica. Well, we look at the first trip to Ravnica and the second trip to Ravnica. You look at all the different component pieces of what you're doing to understand

what are all the tools that we've used before and what ones we want to use again. Part of doing a return is you want enough, like here's the balance. You want enough repeating things that people feel like, oh, this does feel like the world that I know and love. But enough new things that it feels like it's just not a repeat of what you've done. That you're exploring some new space. Sometimes, by the way, when you return, there can be flavor needs. Rise of the Eldrazi, not Rise of the Eldrazi,

Battle for Zendikar is a good example. We were going back to Zendikar, but there was this war with the Eldrazi. So sometimes the new space is defined by a story thing. So like, a lot of the exploratory for Battle for Zendikar was understanding the Eldrazi. Obviously,

we had done some stuff with them in the rise of the Eldrazi, but it was a whole set and we had this war and like, what defines the Eldrazi? So you spend

some of the time trying to understand what you've done before and picking and choosing what makes the most sense to bring back. A lot of defining a return is making sure you capture the essence of that return. But there also is some new space. And part of that is, am I riffing off something we've done before?

Am I expanding out? Is there something new that we're bringing in? Maybe because of story reasons or environmental reasons? Is there something that we're doing that is adding a new element that needs to be reflected in the mechanics? Normally, on a return, you want something new. The real big question is how much new? We've definitely done stuff like a battle for Zendikar where, wow, there's a major component that just wasn't there before, or, you know, we left on a cliffhanger,

but, you know, something that really wasn't what the original Zendikar was. Other times, you know, Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow for Innistrad, we were trying to be more traditional Innistrad. You know, we layered something there. You know, there was a, we cared about

werewolves a little more, but vampires a little more. There was a wedding. There was a festival. You know, there were different events going on that might lend some space. Usually there's some environmental element going on that the creative team is bringing to it that might give you some ideas of where to go.

But anyway, the key with a return to is you spend a lot of time in exploratory sort of mapping out what worked and what didn't work. And where's the potential for the new? Where's the place that you can expand? And the key to the new on return is it needs to feel an extension of how the world is defined.

It needs to feel like something that belongs there. When you do a return, even with the new things, it wants to feel like, well, we could have seen that last time. Unless the world changes. Some stuff like the Battle for Zendikar, sometimes there's something about the world that changes. But excluding sort of a world change, are you doing something that feels endemic to what the world is? Meaning, had we done it last

time, would it have made sense? Maybe we didn't do it, but it would have fit the essence of the world. The other thing we do, and this is a more newer thing, it's what I call a backdrop set. The first sort of backdrop set, I guess, was War of the Spark, where we decided we wanted to be in Ravnica, and it was important

it was Ravnica, but it wasn't mechanical heart Ravnica. It wasn't centered on gold factioning. We had done that in the two sets right before it, so we were delivering on that. But, like, the Lost Caverns Ixalan, Murder Set and Cardal of Manor are both backdrop sets

where we're on Ixalan, we're on a Ravnica, but it's not... Neither is a faction set. Both originally were faction sets. There was a strong type of component. While they're doing a little bit of type of component, not as strong as that.

And the guilds come with a lot of baggage, and that's not what, like, it takes place on Ravnica, but it's not a traditional Ravnican set. So part of doing exploratory for a backdrop is A, understanding how do we capture the essence of the

world. Now, I will note we didn't know Lost Caverns Ixalan was Ixalan when we did Exploratory Design. In fact, I don't think we knew Ravnica was Ravnica when we did Exploratory Design for Murder, Accelerated Manner. So, I'm talking in some more future space here, because

we did know that Ravnica was War of the Spark, we did know Ravnica. So, I guess we've done a little of this, because we did know when we made War of the Spark that it was Ravnica. And we did do this, we didn't know Ravnica. So I guess we've done a little of this, because we did know when we made War of the Spark that it was Ravnica. And we did do this, what I'm about to explain, which is you want to figure out, how do I capture the essence of the world in the smallest space I can,

because usually there's a new component we're trying to play up. In War of the Spark, we had a giant story to tell. We had a planeswalker theme. We didn't want to take a lot of space figuring it out. Ravnica didn't get to be a lot of space figuring out, like, Ravninga didn't get to be a lot of space. But we could figure out what needed to be there. The same is true with Lost Caverns.

Like, this work got done a little later in the exploratory in Lost Caverns, but its work exploratory would have done. What about, you know, and so there's a little bit of what you do in return where you spend some time looking at what was done to figure out what makes sense. Now, the key to a backdrop is a backdrop has a little bit of a new world aspect to it because you're doing something new. Oh, we're doing underground. Oh, we're doing murder mystery, that you're doing some theme that you haven't done before. So a backdrop has a little bit of new worldness to it and that you're understanding your new theme

and exploring your new theme like you would a new world. But you're also looking for what was the old world? What is the new theme? Where's the connection? How do I make it, you know, what do I do in a Ravnikan set that makes murder mystery make sense but still feels like Ravnica?

So you're looking for some areas of overlap and areas where you can reinforce things. And that's very important. So the main thing, the reason I want to talk about design, like I said, 10 years ago I talked about it, but it's become a really useful tool.

Like, I think what I realized is when you're busy making a set, when you're committing to making a file and building it and making mechanics and stuff, that it's a different mindset and you really, you feel like progression is the most important thing. So you're constantly trying to build

and keep adding on to what you have. The idea that you can work on something before you have those responsibilities, you can work on something where it's like, hey, I have freedom here to explore. I have freedom here to map space, to go wide and not go deep. That is very, allows us to do a really good job of understanding the nature of what we're doing. And I think lets us build better sets. At one point, somebody came, it's funny,

when we did the changeover from design to development, one of the big questions was, hey, we're changing how we're doing things. Should we be doing exploratory design? So Brady Bell, who is one of our managers, he said, okay, I will go to some meetings and observe and then come back and say, you know, do we need to have exploratory design?

And so he came in and Brady sat in our meetings and listened to us. And then he went back and he said, absolutely, under no condition to remove exploratory design. That is fundamental. You know, what they're doing is actually really, really important. And so that was heartwarming to me. I kind of knew it. But it's nice having an outsider sort of come and observe.

But anyway, so that is exploratory design. That is what we do. Like I said, what we do in exploratory design will change based on what we're making. Like maybe one of my themes here for you guys is that each magic set is a different animal. You're making, you know, in some ways a different game.

It's connected. It uses the same rule sets and stuff. But you're making your own new thing. And so each thing, like, starts from a different premise, needs different needs. And so what Exploratory is doing just varies. Okay, we get to do research. What are we doing research on? Well, it depends. New world, old world, top-down, we get to do research. What are we doing research on? Well, it depends.

New world, old world, top-down, bottom-up, return, backdrop. Like, there's a lot of nuance of how we look at things. And so each exploratory will be different. But if exploratory is doing its job, when you walk into vision design, you just, it's as if you just feel so smart. Like, you're like, okay, we understand the problems at hand. Like I said, Exploratory doesn't solve the problems, but it really

defines the problems and it gives you a lot of potential answers. So vision design just starts the ground running. And one of the biggest things, by the way, one of the practical things is it used to take us much longer to get to the first playtest. Like we used to take two, much longer to get to the first playtest. Like, it used to take two, three months

to get to the first playtest. And now we get there in under a month. And I think a lot of that is the prep work of Exploratory just lets us go so much faster to getting a vision. But anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoyed this talk on Exploratory Design. A topic near and dear to my heart. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed today, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.