Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #765: Graeme Hopkins

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with Graeme Hopkins, one of the finalists from the first Great Designer Search and someone who currently works on Magic: The Gathering Arena.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been doing a lot of fun interviews. That continues today. So I have Graham Hopkins with us. Hi, Graham. Hey, Mark. Okay, so I'll start by asking you the question that I ask all of my guests. How did you start playing Magic? of my guess, how did you start playing Magic? Ooh, started playing Magic. That was a long time ago. I believe it was, I want to say it was late 1993. I had some friends that went to this math and science private school

that they started hanging out with them one day. They started talking about this crazy card game called magic um so i think a couple of days later i walked down to my local store which was really just kind of a sports card store which had some games right um and they had a box of uh unlimited starter decks and so i bought a few of those brought them back to my friends handed them out. We all opened them up. We kind of played the entire weekend and that was the hook, right?

I got that amazing Crawl Worm that was obviously the rare, the best thing I've ever seen. Okay, so this is like 94, 95. 94 probably was Unlimited, right? I'm not sure when that came out. I think it was like late 93, early 94. Yeah, Unlimited came out end of 93, beginning of 94.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you've been at this a long time. I want to say, yeah. Okay, so you played Magic for a while. Did you play Magic straight up until the first Great Designer Search? Not necessarily. I played it quite a bit for a number of years until I went off to college

a few years later. And surprisingly enough, I mean, I'm a little antisocial, so I didn't really find a bunch of friends that played Magic, so I kind of took a little bit of a break there. Believe it or not,

it was actually Magic Online that got me back into playing Magic. I saw an ad for it in 2000 or something like that. Helped beta test it a little bit. But yeah, I remember coming back and seeing cards like Spiritmonger at the time that just made my jaw drop. It's like, this is not quite the Magic I remember. It's really made a lot of leaps since then and so I mean I dove back into it pretty heavily there and have been playing ever since from that okay so what

got you to apply for the the very first great designer search oh my goodness so I I was I was one of these guys who I mean I I was already for years i was making my own magic sets like you know by myself right at home um not for reals necessarily but i mean i was making full sets i actually programmed up some tools of my own because i didn't know that there were some that existed for creating magic content um would print them out and print on sticker sheets you know cut out all the stickers stick them on basic lands and commons, play test them. So I had already been doing that for a number of years. And so when I, I want to say in 2006, when I saw that,

your article saying, hey, we're doing this great designer search, it was just the strangest feeling. I just saw that and I'm like, oh, I've been waiting for this. Here we go. It's time to do it. I can do this. No problem. So let's talk a little bit.

So what was it like? So the Great Designer Search, so you have to write essays, right? You wrote like 3,000 words of essays. Then there was a multiple choice test. Yep. And then there was a design test where you had to design cards. What is your memory of all the tests? What's your memory of going through all that? My memory of that was staying up really late every night because, of course, I had a day job, too.

Right. So this is sort of my second job of just kind of going over it and over it and over it again um the the multiple question actually the multiple question uh or the multiple choice question test part uh i remember that being pretty like quick and simple i'm just like oh just kind of buzzed right through it um if my memory was correct i think i was like just above the bar of what was accepted for correct answers there yeah um but yeah as far as like the essay and the design stuff i certainly spent a lot of time on that um in fact that whole period i don't remember exactly how long it was but in my mind it was at least three months um It was long nights every night. It was, it really was a second job, but it was super fun. Like it wasn't grueling or anything like that. It was just like,

this is my second job. I love it. Okay. So maybe you might not know the very first great designer search originally was going to have 16 contestants. One dropped out of the last minute so we actually had 15 contestants and then uh there were still five like it the the it worked similarly to the other ones and that there were five different challenges but we would knock out multiple people in in each challenge so like i think we knocked out like three people then three people then two people then two people um so what was what was that part of it? What was part of sort of what's your memory? I know late nights, but what was your memory of getting judged and having cuts? It was certainly, it was a very mixed bag, right? It was very stressful. It was very, at both difficult to hear all the, you know, hundreds of places I fell over. Like this is,

this is what you did wrong here. this is what you did wrong here. This is what you did wrong here. But at the same time, I'm not sure if there's a period where I learned so much about something I was very interested in, right? So it was really eye-opening to be able to apply the actual discipline of really making magic cards to like, you know, to what I had been doing and what's going through my head.

So if I remember correctly, the way it would work is we would send you all the judge comments and the new assignment was like on a Friday or something like something like that. And you had like the weekend to do it. You had, I think 48 hours roughly to, to do each challenge. And then I think we did it five weeks in a row. Like, later on, we started spacing them apart.

So, like, there was a week for you guys and then a week off. But you guys were, like, five weeks in a row. Like, every weekend for five weeks in a row, I think you guys had a challenge. It was intense, yeah. What is your biggest memory? What is your proudest memory of the whole GDS? Do you remember?

I'm not sure. Gosh, that was a long time ago. I was, I guess my proudest memory is I had, I sort of had some aspirations of being a game designer, right? But I've never really been tested. I mean, there was a period where I ran an online game my proudest memory is I had I sort of had some aspirations of being a game designer right um but

I've never really been tested I mean there was a period where I ran an online game for for many years but um it was a it was a different thing it was a very small audience um so I guess my biggest memory was sort of just feeling uh just a sense of validation I guess of like i i've always thought i i could do this to some extent and it's it's it's a very good feeling to see that i'm not just getting shut down at every angle right like um the the nuggets of like of that i would get like some good feedback some praise of like something a cool design or something like that it really uh really sunk in and okay so if i remember correctly so it's like 15 not to 12 not to 9 not to 7 not to 5 not to 3 and then three people so you alexis jansen and ken nagel all got brought to wizards what was that like oh that was that was a very interesting

uh couple of nights i mean it coincided with the Wizards holiday party, I believe. So we kind of came out and had a pretty... Oh, and it was also right after these really intense windstorms in Seattle. So I came out, and it's the first time I've ever been to Seattle, right? And I get out there, and there's a tree on the road. And I just, this major road, right? And I just thought that was so strange. But yeah, it was it was a windstorm

of a day. And then at the end of the day, when I'm about ready to fall over. Right. It's like, OK, now it's time to go party and dancing. And so, you know, just kind of like turn it up a little bit. So it was just a really crazy day, just filled with so much, so many fun things. And I mean, seeing the office for the first time and just, yeah, it was just a magical day, really. Yeah. So I think that day was first I gave you guys a tour of the building. So you got to sort of see it. Right.

None of you had ever been there before. And then we do what we call the gauntlet, where you had three one-hour interviews, where there were three groups that would rotate between the three of you. So you basically had three hours of interviews. I remember those interviews. And then we had lunch or something. Somewhere around there, we had lunch. And then we had a live challenge. The final challenge was a live challenge, where I gave you guys all a challenge.

You had one hour to do it. And then you guys, plus a few R&D members would then review all the work at once and you would sort of talk about your stuff. We had to pick the best of all the things that had been done. We were sort of looking at how you interacted with people. I assume you were aware of that.

Yeah, that was a really fun moment there. That room, once we all got convened and looked at our design and we brought in the rest of r&d we're all packed i think it was the danger room right yeah we were there were just like 20 people packed in this tiny little room um like with this and you guys were great with uh sort of playing the scenario of like it's the last minute we need to print this set right now we need to make the decision um yeah it it was crazy and fun. Yeah, the basic

premise, and so usually it's the premise I do with the final challenge, is we have to change something at the last minute, and this is the set we're making. It's an actual magic set, right? Like, this card and this set had to be changed. So, like, it has to fit all these criteria. We can't change collector numbers. Like, there's all these

things you have to worry about to try to at the last minute fit it. So it's really a very specific design. And that has happened. Not quite as crazy, I think, as what we pitched you guys, but we have had some last minute changes. Okay, so, and then after that, right, it just so happened that we

coincide that with our holiday party and so we announced the winner at the holiday party. Yes. So anyway, you did not win. Alexis Jansen won. But you did get offered internships. What happened there?

I did. Yeah, yeah. In fact, on the way over to the party, Randy Buehler gave me a ride over there. And he was already planting the seeds of what I was going to be doing. We were talking a lot about programming and games we like and stuff like that um so yeah i was offered um a position to help with some of uh the digital initiatives that we were working on at the time um working on programming some of the games that we had um which we ended up doing for a number of years after that. So sort of my job at that point was do programming on these games we were working on,

in addition to working on Magic Design sort of like as the secondary job that I had. And, yeah, just interesting things on all sides. So it's like hit all of my interests, right? It was almost perfect. I was almost happy that I didn't win, right, in a way. So you've worked on a bunch of sets. A little memory of some magic sets you've worked on. Yeah, I've worked on quite a few.

I think, I mean, the first thing I ever did was actually on a development team, believe it or not, for Conflux. But I think that was sort of a last minute addition there. But I mean, Zendikar, Innistrad, Rise of the Eldrazi. There are a lot of really, really interesting sets that matched up with my interest really early on. It was really cool. Like the adventuring stuff and the horror. I love the horror side.

Um, the Eldrazi with, you know, crazy tentacles everywhere. Uh, yeah. Um, yeah,

those were, those are some of my favorites. So, so we'll, we'll talk through real quickly. So let's talk about those three. Cause those are pretty cool. So,

so Zendikar, so the story behind Zendikar, so I'll fill the audience in and then you can, is, um, I had pitched for a while this idea of a land set and the R&D wasn't really up on it. So the challenge that I was given from Bill, Bill Rose, was, okay, we'll give you, I think it was three months to prove, to prove the concept. And so I said to the team, okay, okay, guys, we have to prove that lands can work. And we just, we were just big land design after land design. What was that like? It was crazy. I mean, I think we went a little bit off the rails of like things that we wouldn't necessarily do and things we wouldn't do in certain colors and things like

that. Um, but yeah, I mean, we did, I have a lot of memories. I mean, that was the first design set I worked on. So, I mean, just sort of crazy things all over the place that I wouldn't necessarily expect to see, but it's worth saying anyway, right? Because it brings up interesting ideas, interesting discussions. I mean, at one point, I remember like Red was, you know, searching for lands and putting them into play and things like that.

Okay, so then we got the okay to do the land set, and then Doug came up with a cool idea of making an adventure world. What's your memory of that, of turning into an adventure world? I think it, my memory was that it blended in really well, because it kind of

it gave it a foundation that people are very used to seeing of like you know know, in video games, you see lots of adventures, lots of exploring lands. I kind of remember thinking of other games that I would play at the time and how I could sort of implement that type of design into the cards we were making. Yeah, I thought it was a great blend. yeah I thought it was a great blend I remember when that started to come together there was this sort of

there was sort of a tension building in R&D of like I don't know if this set's gonna work right and I remember yeah once this adventure came in it really I could feel it sort of curve around like oh yeah yeah this is good we're going places now

yeah I think the interesting thing is when you say adventure world, people are like, oh, that sounds fun. And we say landset, they're like, I don't get it. So,

yeah, the most boring part of magic, right? Lands. So, okay, so let's talk about Innistrad a little bit. So,

Innistrad's interesting also where I pitched the idea of doing a horror set for a while and it kept getting pushed back a little bit. And finally, I got the go-ahead from Bill, and one of the interesting things about that set was it really was the first top-down I had done, really,

where it's like, okay, the whole set's going to be built on, the flavor's going to determine everything we do. So what was that like in Innistrad? Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that a lot. So I had certainly on very small scale, like maybe late at night, I just feel like doing a little magic design, and I designed an Iron Man card or something like that,

a top-down thing. But for the most part, that was not how I thought about magic cards. I'm sort of more of a mechanical and like numbers based guy. And I'm the kind of guy who can sometimes might forget the cards names, right? That sort of thing. So coming at it from that angle, like made me think about the cards in a very different way. And I felt like some of the best things I had made came out of that. Some of the best things a lot of people had made came out of that because it was just something we weren't used to doing and we hadn't really done before.

I remember sitting in our meetings of going through everyone's lists of like, here's all the cool horror, top-down horror cards I've made and just continuously just going, wow, like, wow, we can't make all of these. What is your favorite card you made that ended up seeing print i think my favorite card is probably evil twin um one of the one of the few cards i've made that just like from top to bottom got printed like exactly it's how it came out of my brain right um just really trying to play on that idea of the evil twin comes out and

takes out the original and assumes the identity, right? I really liked how that one came together. I was proud of that one. Okay, so last one. Rizal Drazi, Brian Tinsman was the lead for that. And Brian has very bold ideas

wow that set was insane yeah and Brian was really excited the idea of these giant monsters I know Brian is a big fan of like Cthulhu and that sort of style story so it was fun to do

to do giant horror mystical sort of creatures so what was that set like? that yeah that was giant horror mystical sort of creatures. So what was that set like? Yeah, that was quite possibly the most one of the most fun design sets I had been on. The mentality

of that whole room, I'm trying to remember exactly who it was. I know it was Brian. I believe Greg Marks was in there, I want to say. I think Aaron was in there. Was Matt Place on the design team? I'm not sure. Oh, he might have led the development team. He might have led the development team.

Yeah. Ryan Miller, I think, was on that. So it was just lots of, a lot of like crazy, crazy designers in a room, I guess I want to say. designers in a room, I guess I want to say. Sort of from the beginning, the dictate from Brian was like, hey, there's no boundaries here. We're doing crazy things. I want to do even crazier things. I want to take magic in a place that it really hasn't gone necessarily.

necessarily. So yeah, that was probably the most like out there, like outside of the box design team that I've necessarily been on. It was just chaos. Okay, so let's talk. So you, let's talk a little bit about programming, because one of the things that I'm enjoying on these interviews is getting people to see a side of magic they don't normally see. So so right what do you do right now what are your day job right now uh right now i work on uh the arena client i do programming um mostly on the front end uh client side so what would you say the front end for the audience what does that mean yeah sorry so this is what you actually play with right so when you when you if you play arena you open up the game you um you're you're building decks you're joining events um you're you know viewing your collection things

like that um you're playing duels against other people um so i work on that actual app that that you interact with so just to give people a sense how many designers how many programmers and such are there on arena like how many people do that? Or do all the different programming, not just the front end? So, I mean, on the programming side, there's... I would say there's on the order of, like, 20 to 30 that work directly on the app and probably another, like, at least 15 i'd say that work on more things like building uh like building the app and deploying um then of course you have the art

um you have like the support um player support um event design there's lots of non-programming tasks, people working on it too. So it's a fairly big project. The thing with programming is like the more you throw together, it's sort of, in some ways, the more difficult it becomes. So it's, yeah, so there may not be quite as many programmers as one might expect, but there's still quite a few. So let's get a little idea. So let's say we're doing a brand new magic set. So I'll, I'll just pick Ikoria cause that that's the last sort of, I mean, we have the core set, but Ikoria is a little more of a good example and it's a complex set. Um, so we want to do Ikoria. So we, we do our work. So how do you guys start learning about new sets? What, what, what, how does that work on your end? Well, these days, we're moving more and more

towards working kind of early on with with studio with R&D Studio X um so we have our gre team which is our games rules engine this is the this is the code that sort of runs the actual game and processes all the rules and make sure everything works um they will get together with uh some of the designers uh more early on to see what sort of problems are going to come up this happens during vision design so i i meet with them first during fit so it's during the point where i'm working i or my other people are working on the set so very very early is when we start meeting them for the first time good good yeah it's yeah in the past that may have been not quite as uh strict there but yeah we're hoping to i mean at some point we may move to where like, we just design the cards together, but yeah. So very early on, we sort of try to hammer out the

potential problems that like, hey, this is going to be a real issue for Arena. Maybe we shouldn't do that. Or like, here's something Arena's good at. Maybe that can help out um later on as we start to get um card files in progress card files um we'll start running them through our uh our parser right so we when it comes to actually programming the cards a good amount of that we just kind of get for free these days um we have some some code that can actually try to read the cards and figure out what it should be doing um it doesn't always get it right and it gets some percentage of it close right so let's explain the eyes real quick what a parser is so um essentially there's a language to magic and we we've taught the computer, for all intents and purposes, this language.

And so anything it already knows, for example, let's say we make a simple card, like a French vanilla or something, you know, a creature with flying, like it goes, oh yeah, I know that. And every time we make a template, we teach it the template. So if you're just using all existing templates

that we've used before, usually the person goes, oh, oh, yeah, I know that. I know all the pieces to that. I can figure that out. And right. Sometimes it kind of knows like it. It varies from completely knows it to kind of knows it to like, I have no idea what you're asking me. Right. Right. Yeah. So most cards, I would say at some point require some sort of human work, right? But, I mean, if a card like Lightning Bolt comes through, I mean, it can just spit out the rules for Lightning Bolt, right? Okay, so you get the parser, you figure out, and then, so what happens then?

So now you have cards that the computer knows and cards the computer doesn't know. So what's that next step? The next step is we start doing a lot of play testing i mean we do a lot of play testing internally um we'll have card sets come through and uh we'll just we'll just run events on the on the second floor right to see like hey here's a here's a sealed event here's a draft event um here's a an event with some pre-constructed decks we put together just because here's some cards we want to test um and uh usually at that point most of the things are working there will be some cards that you know just sort of hang the engine indefinitely um because they're not quite there yet um but at that point we just start really just looking at finding the issues and fixing any problematic cards.

Yeah, so one of the things I find very fascinating is one of the things that we have to learn on the design side is where are there problems? Like, what is hard for Arena to do or for Magic Online to do? And there's some weird things. Like, I guess a few things I'll share with the audience and you can jump in here. Like, one of the things is having mana have a particular function, like, you can only use this mana to do this particular thing. I know it's hard for computers to do. The human brain is a pretty amazing computer, and by comparison, computers, at least right now, are pretty dumb. So yeah, it's certain things that might interact with the auto-paying system for mana. Like, you know, Arena has a system where it tries to detect what you should be tapping to pay for your cards and things like that.

And so yeah, things like that will really throw it for a loop. Another thing I know that's problematic is blocking more than one creature. I know it's very problematic for Arena. Yeah, there's, of course, UI issues, I guess I'd say. I wouldn't necessarily call it an issue, but UI additional challenges that we have in the digital world where humans can just swoop cards around on the table and just sort of invisibly see the connections, right? Whereas on a computer, it has to be not only usable, but very clear. And sometimes that gets very difficult and very complicated, right? Yeah, the two things to also remember, I guess, is one is some things are hard

to program, meaning it's just difficult to make it do what you want to do. Other things are, it can do it, it just would be annoying for the players. Like, one of the things we have to watch out for is, right, let's say you do something that's constantly triggering, that means it's asking you all the time do you want to do something, and if that thing is constant, let's

say we make something that, in the gameplay you only want to do a tiny, tiny portion of the time, but it would be asking you constantly that would get really annoying so even though the computer can do it it's a matter of is that would people want to do that not that it can't do it right exactly and and then we've implemented some things that go towards that um like for example arena has this full control mode where normally you're not in full control normally arena's kind of making a few assumptions for you like hey you probably don't want to stop before your draw step that sort of thing um or you you might not want to do this

trigger because the only thing it can hit is your opponent's creature and why would you want to give your opponent's creature plus two plus two right um but you but it we've given you the option of always opting into this like no slow down stop i i want to make all the decisions i want to make the decisions you wouldn't expect me to make um yeah yeah so okay so we so you guys play with it you sort of uh make sure the things are working um is there any other interaction like make sure the things are working. Is there any other interaction? Like, one of the things that I find interesting is, on your end of making magic,

like, what is something that you do near the end part that maybe people aren't aware that you're doing? Or I guess I should say, what's the end part? The audience probably doesn't know, since, you know, this is not a job they hear a lot about. So, okay, so now you've playtested. What's the next step? Well, I mean, the next step is we figure out there's all the event design. So how are we going to be interacting with this card?

Just having them is one thing, right? But we might want to implement um special events that showcase the new set or showcase new mechanics um so there's there's a lot of work being done for um on the design side of arena which is you know figuring out what we're going to be offering to the players um especially currently in that we're large in many ways, um, players, a lot of players are moving to arena right now due to the challenges of face-to-face play. And so there's been, um, one thing we've been trying to stay on top of is keeping things interesting, um, in the accelerated play that arena offers.

Right. So like the games are a lot easier to turn through an arena um a lot of them can be quicker sometimes um so we want to make sure we keep things sort of keep what we're offering as far as events rotating around to keep um play shaken up a little bit and interesting right yeah that's the interesting point you make um that tabletop and digital have different play patterns like one of the things about digital right is you can just burn through games much faster you can you can play a lot more at once right and so what happens is uh there's concerns on digital about having more options available because you know once you do the same thing so many times, you want to do something different.

And I know one of the things we always talk about with you guys is there are ways we can work with you to help create more opportunities and more different ways to play and stuff. Mm-hmm. And I think in the future, it's something that we've been ramping up.

So it's something I know that we want to have more, like a stronger relationship between Arena and Magic Online and R&D so that we can help generate things that might even be, you know, unique or something that is used differently online than it's used maybe in tabletop and such. Yeah, well said.

So anyway, we are wrapping up here. I'm almost to work. So is there any final thoughts you want to say of your your time in magic or at wizards before we wrap up for today just just that i'm stunned by um how quickly and uh uh fun or i don't know what the right word is there but there's so much work that goes into making a magic set that much more than I had ever thought just be, I was like, well, you design the cards and then someone paints the picture. Right. Um, it's incredible how many, um, how much

coordination, um, it is to make a set and to do that every three months or, you know, every couple of months, it's just, um, it's very stunning. And I've, I felt very, very lucky to, to be able to, uh, be a part of that, you know? Well, it is fun having you around. So I'm excited. Actually, uh, Graham is on a design team right now that I'm working on. So it's fun. That's right.

It's fun to work with Graham again. Uh, so anyway, I want to thank you for being with us, but guys, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time thank you for being with us. But guys, I'm at my desk. 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. So I want to thank Graham for being with us. Thank you, Graham. Thank you, Mark.

And guys, I will see all of you next time. Bye-bye.