Think Like A Game Designer - Ryan Sutherland — From Instinct to Innovation: Balancing Mechanics and Theme in Game Design at Stone Blade (#10)

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Ryan Sutherland is one of the top up-and-coming game designers in the industry and lucky for me, he works at Stone Blade. Ryan was one of the lead designers on the newest expansion to Shards of Infinity, called Shadow of Salvation. In this episode, we speak about his journey into game design, developing games at Stone Blade, and what it’s like to work on digital games versus physical games. Ryan has a lot of awesome insights that can help anyone who’s looking to develop their game design skills. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Ryan Sutherland. Now, Ryan may not be a name that you know, but it is a name you should know. Ryan is one of the most talented designers working with me at Stoneblade Entertainment.

And prior to working with me, he was one of the finalists in the great designer search for Magic the Gathering. He also worked on the Hex Digital Trading Card game. And Ryan is the lead designer of the most recent expansion to Shards of Infinity, Shadow of Salvation. So we dig a lot into the process of designing Shadow of Salvation, which is a really fun and really intriguing challenge. I was really happy to work with Ryan on. We talk about deck building games and a deep dive into the mechanics of deck building games and how to think about designing them and developing them. We also talk about the differences between designing a cooperative game and a competitive game.

And in fact, Charger's Infinity started off as a very competitive deck building game. It's very one-on-one-centric and you're attacking other players directly and transforming that into a cooperative game with Shadow Salvation where you're working together to take on ever-increasing difficulty of villains and a choose-your-adventure storybook where we even have a... audio version that will like read of a professional actor read the story to you as you work together it was a really fascinating challenge and something that I had never really done that kind of a deep dive before and so we break that whole process down in this podcast chat in addition we

talk about digital games and physical game design differences user interface design the keys to creating and releasing tension as the centerpiece of your design and much more Ryan is an incredibly talented incredibly promising designer I would feel very lucky to have him as part of my team. And I felt like I owed it to the world to share him with the rest of you. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So without further ado, here is Ryan Sutherland. Hello and welcome.

I am here with Ryan Sutherland. Hey, Ryan, how you doing? Hey, doing great. How are you? I'm doing really good. This is actually really fun because, you know, most of the time I do these interviews and we have chats, it's, you know, people I don't get to see that often. But you, I get to see pretty much every day.

We work together. And so this is actually going to be fun to have this form of conversation. Yeah, it's kind of interesting to be so formal about just talking with you. But yeah, I'm excited. I always start these episodes in the same way. You know, a lot of people that are listening are aspiring game designers, people that want to get careers in the industry for giving a story about how you got into the industry. What brought you here?

What's kind of your unique origin story that got you into game. design and got us to be working together. Sure, yeah. Well, I was like a lot of those people who are listening. I was interested in game design, but honestly, I didn't even think like it was something that people could like easily get into. And, you know, I'm not saying it is something everyone can get into very easily. But for me, it was kind of like there's a lot of luck and there's a lot of you got to just

keep moving forward, I think. So for me, I got my first. gaming scratch from like playing Magic the Gathering like a lot of people and I ended up into in their first great designer search so the great designer search was an apprentice style game show that Wizards of the Coast did where they were

looking for new game designers from everywhere around the world it started out with a thousand people I believe thereabouts and they would have it down to 16. And every week we would do different challenges based on Mark Rosewater and the various people at Wizards of the Coast who would look for new things from the designers. And eventually they ended hiring three or four of those designers. I was not one of them. I was, I did very well in the competition. I made it almost to the last round. But it did spark that drive in me that like,

This is something that I could actually do. And I kept thinking about it and kept moving forward and trying to find new avenues to become a game designer. And several years later, in 2014, I had the opportunity to work on Hex Shards of Fate, which was a Kickstarter digital card game. and at that point I was living in Houston and had the opportunity to either, you know, continue in my field that was finance, which is what I went to school for, or, you know, take a flyer, move out to California and see if I could jump into the gaming industry, which luckily, you know, that was over five years ago now and I haven't looked back. It's been a blast ever since then.

That's awesome. There's a lot I can relate to in that story. So I want to go back and pick a couple pieces of this up. So first thing is when you go to join the Great Designer Search, now this is 1,000 people all, you know, what made you think that you could do this? What made you decide a lot of, you know, I'm sure there's not even if a thousand people applied.

There's tens of thousands of people or more that would love to have that chance. Why did you decide to make that leap? and try to go for that. Yeah, it was kind of one of those things where it's like, you know, might as well. You know, like, it's going to go to somebody. I think I'm good at this. I think I'm going to have a good shot. So I was like, sure, let's do it.

Why did you think you were good at it? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, at some point you have to have faith in your own instincts. And I felt like my instincts were good. And this would at least test them if maybe I wasn't good. But I felt like, I felt I had enough confidence in what I could do. And I was going to test myself. Even if I failed, at least I could learn something along the way, you know.

That's great. I mean, and this is sort of a lesson I hear and try to echo myself constantly, which is that like that, you know, willingness to, you know, sort of trust your instincts, put something out there. And, you know, with reasonable certainty, know that things are going to hit walls and aren't necessarily going to work, but you're going to learn and get up and go again. And that's the.

next thing I wanted to touch on from the story, which is like, okay, you went through, you did the challenge, you got pretty far, but then, you know, you didn't get hired. So arguably, this would be a failure and a setback that maybe could have stopped in your tracks. Yeah, you could see it that way, but, you know, like I said, there was a thousand people. I ended up as one of the top four or five. That's, I don't see that as a setback or as a failure. Right. I mean, obviously I was disappointed. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And that's, And that's where like I often, again, even, you know, when I have conversations with the most successful designers out there, you know, that everybody, you know, your designs and your goals never all work out the way you want. That's if, in fact, if they do, if you always hit your targets, that means you're not aiming high enough.

Yeah, absolutely. And so you taking that leap, being willing to trust your instincts, being will put yourself out there against the whole world of magic players and people who want to be magic designers and coming out near the top gave you a huge leg up and gave you move forward. And then, of course, when you applied for other jobs and started moving down the other fields, that was a key component to it. Oh, yeah, definitely. And it's just like, okay, sure, here's where I fell. But, you know, and you take the hit and you got to keep moving, though, because I knew I was good, but just not quite, you know, I couldn't get over that last hurdle. But you just keep moving forward and you eventually will get over those hurdles and you'll find new avenue. is as long as you keep moving forward.

Yeah. And one of the things that I, you know, you talk about your design instincts. And this is, this is cool because this is sort of the first time in one of these conversations. I can sort of speak from the other side here because, you know, I hired you because your design instincts are awesome. And I discovered you in part because, you know, you were working with friends of mine and people I knew and had hired from the team in HECS.

And I'd known about the designer search. And then we were able to have a conversation and a couple. And it was just instantly clear to me that you, you know, you were spot on with your design and things. You had a lot of like great insight and the right kind of attitude for this job. And so it's been very cool to now. And then what we've been, what, two years plus now we've been working together? No, not even that. Like a year and a half, I believe.

Year and a half crazy. Yeah. So, you know, and in that time now, not only have you been able to add huge value to the projects that were running when you kind of got here, but now you've been able to build some of your own projects that are. going to be coming out soon. And one of the ones that you lead design, which I really want to talk about, is Shards of Infinity Shadow of Salvation.

So first, for the Shards of Infinity brand and being able to come on and work on a project like this, what was it like and how did it differentiate it from things you've done in the past? Yeah. So I've definitely never worked on specifically a boxed product before. Like, when I worked for previous games, it was like this evolving game where you're kind of building new cards,

but you're not creating a product that people are going to pick up off the shelf. And immediately, this is exactly what they're going to be playing through. And it was also interesting because it was one of the first times I came into a product that already kind of had a life of its own. Like I had already played shards before I had even worked for you. So it was interesting and daunting. to try to take on a product that already existed. And I love shards already.

So I was a little bit, you know, I was a little hesitant about, I didn't want to mess up what was already so great about the game because it plays so well on a one-on-one experience that, and we were ambitious in thinking, you know, let's take this game that's already great in a one-on-one. and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves,

but, you know, make it a co-op experience, which is turning it completely on its head. Yeah, it's one of the things that I remember being equally scared working together on this project because it is such a departure from the kinds of work that I have ever done before and that really anybody on the team had done before building a cooperative gameplay experience,

and let alone building a cooperative gameplay experience, but building one that was, living inside of, you know, built on top of this engine that really was intended to be a very sort of vicious competitive experience and streamlined for that. So it was one of those things that I think we took on in part because I had a lot of, you know, faith in your abilities. And you had, well, maybe not a background in designing for these sort of box experiences. Certainly a lot of a lot of experience playing these box experiences and some of the co-op games. What serves as inspiration for you as you were kind of working on this design?

Yeah, so I've always loved Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games like that. And it's always been fun to have that joint experience of we're all working together in trying to take down these big bads and getting that persistent upgrade abilities of your your characters as you're moving forward. And I do agree, it's strange that we decided to take that experience and put it into such a one-on-one head-to-head game. But I really enjoyed, you know, trying to rise to that challenge. In the past I had actually, when I was working at Hex, we had a bunch of dungeons where

you were playing against different decks and you're slowly, building towards a climax. And I really enjoyed creating challenges for players. And some of that carried over here. The new element, of course, was that cooperative experience that we're all working together. Yeah, yeah. And I had had similar kinds of backgrounds back when I was working on the World of Warcraft trading card game and World of Warcraft Minter's game.

We had built sort of PVE style experiences or many versus one. style experiences with like the inyxia raids and other things. So I had gotten some exposure to that type of design back then, but in this version where it's a complete, you know, the whole games in a box experience and you're, you know, really sort of pushing people through, not just one encounter, you know, or one, but really a multi-tiered story with many encounters and modal choices. And it was really the project, we knew it was going to be a lot of work, but it ended up being even more than we had thought, I think, to get it.

And I'm so super excited with where we landed, but I want to sort of piece out some of these lessons. So, you know, I remember when we were first working on some of these initial encounters, we realized pretty quickly that we needed each one to sort of feel unique and somehow change up the core of the game. When you're approaching that challenge, maybe give an example of one of them and, like, kind of think about how you thought about approaching that with some of these encounters. Yeah, so I totally agree.

I think that you have to come up with what is it that's going to make this feel different than any of these other co-op experiences that we're doing? And it's important to have, and hand in hand with that, it's important to have friction on the players so that they're not just buying the same things that they're normally buying every time that they play. And so you end up with... I found that that was the key, I think, to unlocking how we're going to make each of these different, was saying, hey, we're going to make it more difficult for you to just try to put your head down

and not pay attention to what's going on through different means. For example, the trapper, which is one of the first characters that you'll battle, ended up having all these different traps where it's trying to pigeonhole you into, you have to buy this type of card. If you don't, you're going to get punished for that. And by kind of like theming that whole encounter around these traps where you're being forced to buy things

that normally wouldn't go into your deck, you're suddenly not able to just put your head down and just say, hey, I'm only going to buy this type of card because that's the type of deck-end building. But taking that further, we ended up coming up with other ways that other bosses would mess with the players in various ways.

And I feel like that was very key to... Yeah. Yeah, I want to dig into some of that because so Vendandi, I believe, is what we ended up calling the trapper. Right, Vendandi Omega. Yeah, which was our, you know, the sort of basic name

that he lays these traps for you and that you have to sort of work to get around them. And it's two things here. One is this idea of tension and frustration. So often I think players or new designers don't realize like that's like the heart of the whole job is creating and relieving tension in games. Right. You're creating these scenarios where it's like, okay, I really want to do this. This is my, this is my core thing. And then we could put all these roadblocks in front of you that force you to like dance around them and interact in different

ways, right? And the same is true. Obviously, in the PVP games and in a deck building game, you want to scale your deck and have your strategy arc in a clear direction that's going to, you know, exponentially grow and do awesome things. But your opponent is obviously trying to do the same thing. And you often need to, like, you know, interact with the center row or, or slow them down to stop them from doing what they're doing. And there's this sort of back and forth that's very strong in Shards of Infinity. And this now takes a different kind of tactic on that because you don't of the other players to mess with you or to sort of force your strategies to adapt. So we have to find ways for these kind of, you know, NPC villains to do so. And one of the things I found really

interesting as we were doing this is like the types of things that you can let a player do to another player versus the types of things that you can let an NPC sort of automated villain due to a player are very, very different. You want to talk about your thoughts on that, on that kind of distinction? Oh, definitely. Yeah. I think. think you can actually get away with a lot more when it's a boss that's being driven by some sort of randomness as opposed to I'm doing this to you. It feels much more invasive whenever a player is forcing you to do something than this unguided hand of this villain is doing that same thing. It also allowed us to do things that were,

it felt like you were being attacked, but ultimately it was not necessarily as bad. Like some of the card passing, I thought was interesting in that it feels bad to lose one of your cards, but because you're still playing in a co-op experience, at least your team still has those types of cards. So just to clarify,

so this is where one of the effects from the villains or one of the monsters causes you to pass cards from your own hand or your own deck to another player. Right. And you know, like you permanently lose that card. And disrupts your strategy, which you,

you know, you were probably, you had that card because it was optimal for your deck, but now it's going to somebody else. Exactly. Yeah. So that helps throw some of those monkey wrenches into the machine that players are building.

And I feel like that would, that would be very, very invasive and would feel very bad if one of your best cards went to your opponent. However, luckily, we have, because we built it as a co-op experience, while it's, while it doesn't feel great to lose your best card, at least somebody on your team is still utilizing it. And maybe they're not utilizing it as well, but that's one of those, you know, those roadblocks

where, okay, well, maybe now we have to change our strategy because I don't have the card. Now, Justin, you've, you've gotten my really good card that, you know, works well with this certain strategy. but now maybe it's time for you to start utilizing that. And the more times you give players that chance to like pivot and try to re-evaluate where they're at and move forward, I think that's that is so much fun. Those moments of, hey, we have to change our strategy right now

because this monkey wrench. I think that's so much fun to rise to those challenges. Yeah, and it's really where I think Shadow of Salvation differentiates itself from the other entries into the Shards of Infinity Universe, really almost any deck building game that I've played, it's that these challenges are there that, like, force you as a team to have to adapt. And not only it, you know, we basically ended up designing like six entire mini games, right, because the campaign mode, which people can find online, we actually have an audio

book on our website, stoneblade.com, or you can like, you know, go through the story and click on the different parts that are there and follow along with the book in the game. And then, you know, each chapter of the three chapters, you pick one of the two encounters you want to go through. And then that has its own set of challenges, its own strategy that you have to, like, deconstruct and play. And then, of course, there's all the different things that change within each encounter of the order of cards come up and which cards you buy and then which cards you save and modify

for your deck. And so it just creates this like one of our main goals for this was to really have as much replayability as possible for a story-based game. which is really challenging, right? There's a lot of great games out there where they have this awesome story that's kind of linear, but then once you play through it,

it's very hard to come back to that. And so when you were thinking about replayability and how we build that into this structure, what were other factors that were going on for how you built this? One of the nice things is that Shards is so replayable out of the box, like just as a head-to-head game, that a lot of that carries over

to whenever you're playing through the co-op experience because you're not necessarily going to be able to rely on building the exact same deck as last time. But as far as the villain's side of things, we want to make sure that because we built, the villains run off of their own deck. So at the same time, while you're getting the chaos and the randomness of what's going to be available to buy,

you also have that randomness of what challenges you're going to have to face on every single round. And I think that the combination of those two things work together really well to make every time that you sit down to play a little bit different. And sometimes you're going to have to change the pace of the play that you've taken into a certain encounter, because suddenly the villain is ramping up in one aspect

and you now have to say, okay, it's go time. We have to go right now. And other times you can kind of, you know, take a little bit more time. And there's also the aspect of the upgrade cards that we included. So not necessarily in the first encounter, but after that, like your deck is different

at the very beginning of the game. So you might change completely how you're playing between this time that you've played and the last time that you played with a differing playgroup because you have a brand new card in your deck. And so for the audience, it hasn't been exposed to this. So what we're talking about is there are cards after end of each encounter. You can what we call saved cards or you can pick a new card that gets permanently added to your starting deck for the rest of the campaign. And so your starting deck itself will change over time. and therefore your entire gameplay, of course,

is going to be influenced by having these sort of pre-built cards into your deck and you're given a subset so you can never guarantee you're going to have the same one and they build on each other. So it snowballs into very different directions over time. Yeah, definitely. Like, sometimes you'll end up like starting off with extra mastery and then you'll want to be the guy who's finding new ways to build mastery faster.

And other times, like, you're just the power guy and you're just trying to deal with all the different monsters that are coming out. The different shadow champions, excuse me. Yeah. So we're constantly dancing around our, one of the challenges as a game designer is that you have your playtest names that you use throughout the entirety of your development process. And then towards the end, we start putting real names on things.

And most of the time, this is actually really, when I'm, you know, even at conventions and people start talking about a card and they'll start talking about card interactions and ask me questions. They're like using their real names because obviously that's all they know. know and I have no idea what they're talking about. It's like, oh, no, no, that was Elon Musk and the trap monster. I'm like, oh, okay, I know what we're talking about now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like, I'm sitting down here and I'm like, right, we had the hacker and the, and none of these names make any sense anymore. Oh, yeah, no, I actually had to bring up the spreadsheet, and I have in front of me for the for the game. So I can remember the actual names as we're talking. Perfect. I should have done that as well, but, but, yeah, this is, you know, Yeah, game designer struggles.

Oh, yeah. So there's one, you know, I, you know, we're talking a lot of specifics about, you know, this game and this design, but I really, you know, I try for, for, I mean, hopefully many people in our audience are familiar with Shards of Infinity and hopefully they're all picking up Shout of Salvation, which should be just coming out around the time this podcast goes live. But, but I really want to be able to, you know, have the, the principles from here that apply to you, regardless of what you care about, you know, whether you care about the specific game or not. So the next thing I want to talk about is a challenge that we really wrestled with a lot during this process, which is how do you develop a game like this? Like how do you think about balance when it's a player versus, you know, environment encounter? We're all cooperative, but the game could be two to four players. And, you know, we have a variety of different scenarios coming up.

How did we, how did you think about it? Let's start that conversation because I think there's a lot of, of lessons to derive from that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting ways of approaching that. The first thing we did was we knew that we wanted to scale from at least two, up to four, maybe

five players whenever we were approaching this. So we knew that we wanted to have some way that every single player is going to have something that scales up the difficulty as well. So that's how we ended up making the shadow deck

where the villain has all of their different abilities and shadow champions that creates difficulty for the players and create those challenges. And throughout the time we were playing, I think it kind of went up and down in difficulty, and we had a lot of debates over how difficult to make it because obviously we don't want to make it a cakewalk

because then you don't have that feeling of things are difficult and if there's no challenge, then there's really not a lot of fun there. However, on the flip side, if we make it too difficult, then you just knock everybody out right at the beginning, and nobody really wants to play the game, because if you're just getting shut down right away, then you also don't, you feel like you can't even get in the door. Right.

Finding that sweet spot of difficulty is key. And then, you know, we have a couple of other factors when you're working with, first of all, obviously, we don't know the skill level of the players that are going to be playing the game. Certainly. And while Shadow of Salvation requires you to have purchased Shards of Infinity prior to playing it, so presumably you're at least somewhat familiar with the game, there's pretty wide levels of skill that you can be developing around. and the question of like who should we be targeting really primarily, how do we make sure we land in the right place for the novice player versus the mid-level player versus the advanced player to hit that sweet spot of skill was something we wrestled with a lot.

And, you know, we kind of backed into an interesting solution for that, I feel like, where not only did we have the, you know, sort of the variance within each game, but we ended up with a, you know, our story actually kind of gave us an out to give us some leverage there. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, certainly. So the story that we're doing is kind of a time travel story. We have the new character, Res, who's from a brand new faction, coming back in time to

prevent a future calamities, similar to the Terminator or other time travel tales. And one thing that we, and what we figured out was. that since he's a time traveler, he should be able to reset, you know, if things go dangerous or disastrously for the players. So what he does is he'll just rewind time. But when you rewind that time after a loss, you also get to take a, you're saving, you're bringing back a card with you. So those same saved cards that we said that you get from defeating encounters, you also get one

even when you fail, which ended up being a great balancing mechanic for, you know, for play groups that may not be as skilled. At least they'll be able to play again, but with a brand new card in their deck, or two or three cards, if that's what's necessary in order to get them to move forward in the story. And it doesn't take much, it doesn't take very many cards to vastly improve a starting deck, that's for sure. Yeah, so it's, it's, you know, one, it creates this, this clever option for us where, you know, we were able to get some of the best of both worlds where we could make the encounter pretty challenging so that even skilled players will, you know, have trouble getting through, you know, or make it have it be exciting. But also make sure that there's a escape valve, if you will, for more casual players or less skilled players to be able to catch up.

And we also were able to scale difficulty because it's a three encounter campaign. we were able to scale the difficulty from encounter to encounter where the first tier encounter most people should be able to beat without too much difficulty the second counter is much harder and the third encounter is pretty you know you're even the best players are not going to get through it every time and you're going to have a you know you're going to hit a wall depending upon how things go but I want to also tie into another issue which is something that that was I think unique to the fact that we did this as a deck building game and that made it even more challenging which is that deck building games as I mentioned earlier have this exponential

curve of power, right? The whole point of a deck building game is that I'm adding more cards to my deck, which make it easier and better for me to add even more cards to my deck and scale more power and so on and so on and so that at a certain point the players become so astronomically powerful. I mean, in it starts infinity in the normal game, you would just have infinite power and just kill everything, that no matter what the boss could do would just be crushed by the players and the player efficiency. But there's this earlier period where that's not the case at all. and so trying to find a boss that could like scale properly with the players was something we spent a lot of time on.

You want to talk a little bit about kind of how we approach that problem? Yeah, we definitely tried to make sure that the early, we're talking about the different villains, or I'm sorry? Yeah, well, so like the villains, like we ended up using the mastery track from Shards to scale, the villains actually is a game of mastery on their own to scale. to scale along with the players. Yes, definitely. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely wanted to make sure that the villains were playing on kind of the same axes

that the players did. So we ended up giving them their own mastery track. But instead of putting it all on the cards, we also gave them like kind of a player sheet or a villain sheet in this case, where as they hit certain thresholds, different abilities would happen or they would get new passives, which would make the game harder. the longer the players let the time go on. Also, the shadow monsters would also be dealing more damage

or be doing more nasty things, like making players discard cards or even banish cards that they wanted to keep. Yeah, and so that we were able to sort of create that same sense of like scale and exponential growth for the bad guys as the good guys are experiencing. And I definitely feel as we play that there's that tension of like are we going to like cross this threshold where the players are strong enough and they can

kill the boss before the boss gets too strong and then the players have no chance left and so it's been a fun it's a fun experience to play through yeah sometimes you're like okay well we can leave this uh shadow champion here however if the boss gains like two more mastery that thing is going to deal like 20 damage and that's that's hard to that's hard to just like leave on the table whenever you're kind of, as a group, you guys are deciding how to split up all the damage. Yeah. All right. Well, we've, we've dug deep into a shout off salvation, which I love, and I can't wait for everybody to kind of play. We got to show it off at Gen Con this past year, and people seem to love it, but we only had very few copies that were gone in hours.

So getting this actually into players' hands and seeing how they, how they like this experience is going to be pretty awesome and must be pretty exciting for. you as your first lead design of a physical box product. Oh, yeah. I am beyond excited to see this thing and have my own copy of my hands even. Yeah. Like I don't even have one. I wasn't even able to get one from Gencom.

Yeah, they were gone real fast. So now that, you know, you've worked on, you know, some box products, you've worked on, you know, several of the Ascension expansions and a variety of other things, as well as digital products and sort of collective games. How do you view the difference now between working on physical products versus digital products or even this sort of open-ended kind of collectible things versus box games? You can tackle either question. Sure. Digital really makes you think differently. You have to think about how the user is going to experience things in a very, in a different way than you do in a physical product.

Because in a physical product, whenever you're building something that you're going to, play test with, you have it right there in your hand. And like, what you build is exactly what players will see. When it comes to digital products, sometimes it's not, that's not exactly the case. Sometimes on the back end, you're doing things that the players don't actually see what's going on. And it's very interesting to get those distinctions and make sure that the, um, the player experience is great depending on what product you're actually working on. So I want to dig into that a little bit because my my instincts is to some degree the opposite, right, but on a base level, on a digital game, like I get to control your on ramping

experience and everything you see in a very fine detail. I could just say first, do we do this tutorial step, then we do this thing, then we unlock this thing. Whereas in a box game and a physical game, it's much harder in that you open. the box and here's all the things. And if you're shuffling up a deck to deal stuff out, I can't control, you know, that you're only going to see the easiest cards first, or you're only going to see the certain experience first. So what is it when you say that the digital is less controlled? What do you mean by that? Well, so I totally agree with what you're saying.

When you're first being on ramped onto a product, it's much easier in digital because you actually have that arbiter of like, you're never going to accidentally break. a rule in a digital game because the game itself is keeping the rules straight. The thing that I found that was interesting working more in the digital was that sometimes it was sometimes you would make a card. Because when I worked on Hex, we played almost everything physical before we could ever get anything into the computer and actually play it digital. and sometimes you make a card that's completely simple to use in physical,

but in digital, you'd have to think about how it is going to be to interact with that card. For example, if you had a card that said, say, click on this, pay one resource, depending on whatever game you're playing, and this gets a bonus. By doing it in a digital world where you have to click on that, card, you know, eight times in order to give it a bonus, it's, it actually like, you don't realize that when you're playing physically because you just go, I'm going to use this eight times. Whereas once you actually have that experience of playing it digitally, you're like, oh, this is actually like not very fun to have to click on this card eight times.

And, you know, that's just a very simple example of it. But there's a lot of different types of cards that we realized, oh, you shouldn't actually make a card like this because the actual click. count or other various things about the card, the play experience of that card is like it's just not, it's not something that you actually want to have a player interact with. Gotcha. So a lot of this is sort of user experience and user interface design. Exactly.

And a consequence of the fact that when you're doing your design and development, and this is something I talk about, even if you are working on a digital game, most of the time you want to be starting with physical cards and physical design and development because that's just way faster to iterate on. And you don't know for sure when you're working on the physical prototype what it's going to feel like when you're in the digital world. Exactly. Yeah.

You have to think about how it is, how you're going to interact with this type of thing in a digital world. So things that are like requiring players to constantly upkeep. a card is a pretty negative experience from what we were doing. Right. Gotcha. So I think that that makes a lot of sense. And then there's, you know, strengths and weaknesses to both platforms when it comes to that, right? So the digital side obviously can track a lot of more data and it automatically shows you what's happening when cards are being modified or there's some confusing behind the scenes mathematics between an interaction. It can handle all of that stuff easily. Those

things become very cumbersome in the physical world, but in the physical world, you can do things that are just like you said, simple, right, like, okay, yeah, I'll use this eight times, this ability eight times, or the card will just tell you what to do, and a player can understand that, or is in the physical world, it can be very cumbersome to program and build and make it work within the interfaces that exists. I think one of the interesting recent examples I've noticed is that, you know, for Magic the Gathering, when most of the time before, when you would like look at cards and then put cards on the bottom of your deck, you would just put them in the order you wanted.

And then in the digital world, doing that is a real pain in the butt and ended up taking a while and delaying things. And I've noticed they've changed the designs recently to putting cars at the bottom of your deck in a random order for, and I think that largely because of the impact on digital. Yeah, there's a, I mean, even pulling back from that, like talking about the magic online versus magic arena, just like tapping your lands. like magic online you have to physically tap each of your lands in order to create the mana whereas arena they you know they're trying to streamline that and it's right and you and you lose and you do lose something when you make those streamlines like there are a lot of times the you know they'll tap lands incorrectly or you're the auto skip function uh gives away information or you have like delays that gives away information or there's all these like little things

that are like, you know, you lose something out of the experience, but the net result is that they've streamlined it for digital in a way that's like pretty, you know, pretty amazing and awesome. And it was, I agree with almost every design choice that they've made on that team. But there are real tradeoffs and there, you know, elements of the physical game that get lost when you really try to build something for digital and vice versa. Yeah, definitely. The way that you interact with cards is just so different. I mean, even like, there's.

even some cards that they've even said that they were not going to try to make a card like this because digital exists. I kind of, there's been some cards where I did have a fun spot in my heart where it would randomly, or everybody has to like separate their three, they're all their cards in play into three piles and it destroys one of the piles of random. and the cumbersome nature of having to do that in a digital format, they've written an article about how we are not going to do cards like this anymore. Sure. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting other little elements about the things that you can do for digital. Like one of the things I think Harstone does a really good job with is like their like big effects are like super like animated and things are flying around the screen and there's all this cool like, you know, the sort of bells and whistles around it can really be, you know, a lot of the payoff just entirely on its own,

which is not something you really have as a tool when you're working in physical games, or, you know, you don't have a budget like Blizzard, I guess. Yeah, for sure, for sure. There is something to the visual nature of some things, definitely. Well, when you're building out games, how much thought do you put in it? So I think, you know, working with you as long as I have, I think, you know, you and I are similarly very mechanics first kind of designers. But, you know, how much thought do you put into the aesthetics or the theme or components and stuff when you're doing when you're doing your own designs? Is that something that's like been changing over time or other scenario?

You know, is there a story of a time when that's really influenced you? I think, for me personally, I think theme is extremely important. I think that's one of the most important things to me. Even like if I if like I think it's important to find the mechanical hook that you're looking for, but you want to be able to make sure that it can be layered onto something that actually resonates. I think that having the marriage of mechanics and thematic is one of the most important things for me as a designer.

I find it important to like even if I were to like create a, role-playing game. I want a sword to feel different than like a hammer. Like, I want there to be a mechanical difference between those two things. And, like, I might feel, like, because of this mechanic,

I'm like, yeah, this feels like swinging a hammer, whereas this feels like swinging a sword. And I think there's, I think that's just like a very visceral thing that's hard to, like, exactly explain how that feels, but like, I find it to be always a challenge but always so rewarding whenever you can have somebody say like, yes, this is what it feels like to swing a hammer in this type of role playing game or anything like that.

I've always, I was always disappointed whenever like in Dungeons and Dragons, like it's just a different stat block. Like this one deals one more damage but it's less likely to hit. It's like, oh, that's so boring. Why isn't this hammer actually like crushing this armor or, you know, why isn't this slicing through? I think that's, I think that's super important in order to get things feeling right. Yeah, yeah. There's often a tradeoff in that world between getting that fine-tuned, you know, theme and mechanic working. And then the sort of complexity and number of edge cases you end up having to introduce in those worlds.

yeah no definitely like you don't want to make it so it's like okay well if somebody's playing this or wearing this type of armor then they're this is going to deal extra damage like i don't know i think it's interesting where like it's it's important to come up with very simple ways of making this feel different and uh trying to make the difference between two things uh important but as simple as possible I think that's one the most challenging things and again one the most rewarding things. Yeah, there's a couple of pieces to pick out from that. One is I think it actually this is another thing that emphasizes like the difference between a digital game and a physical game. Like I think in a digital game you can like you could get a lot more detailed in like how those distinctions work. Like you can have because the hard work is in the background in a lot of ways where you can have games like civilization where there's like a million different subparts of things that are happening. That's like if you want to dive. you can dive deep or if you want to just play at a service level you can play it as a surf level and it's fine it all just works or um battle tech is an interesting example right so that's like a role playing game that has a very detailed thing about like heat sinks and each of their pieces of armor and how attacks can strike in different things and missiles work different than lasers and lasers work different than you know like a power sword and i i was like oh this is so cool i loved reading the books but like actually playing it was like spreadsheets the game uh and that didn't sound like fun to me but playing you know you could play it on the

And they actually just released, I think, recently of Battle Tech online. And it's super cool because you can like, again, you can, I think giving players the feeling and the option to sort of deep dive into something and have it feel that that versimilitude, that feeling like it's, this is real. This is how it would be in real life or this is the thematically correct thing, but not putting them in a position where unless they are going deep down that rabbit hole, they're not going to be able to figure out what's going on is really that key. Yeah, no, definitely. I think maybe it would be illustrative to highlight some of the games that you love, that you don't work on. What are the kind of games? Obviously, Magic we've talked about. What other games take up a lot of your time and attention and you kind of aspire towards as good examples out there?

I am a sucker for a good card-based rogue-like, such as Slate Aspire. Yeah. I think those, I think a lot of those games, like, they're still kind of in the same family as, like, TCGs and other card games. But they do such a good job of having that feeling of I'm getting better through upgrading my deck. And I think they do a great job of, like, making, like, for example, in that game, when I was talking about hammers versus swords, like, those things actually do very different things. Like a rogue using a dagger is going to draw cards but deal less damage, whereas, you know, a sword is going to deal more damage. And that's always such an interesting distinction to me, even though it's like it feels very minor when you just talk about it. But the feel of playing cards in a certain way definitely plays differently.

Well, yeah. And there's another, that's a great example. We can spend some time dissecting it. But there's another example of a design trick, which is that why is drawing a card feel like a dagger? They're not alike at all. That doesn't make any sense. But what you've done is when you establish your design language

and you're establishing, like, no, no, no, what we mean, when we say you're going to have more options because you draw cards and you're going to do less damage versus a sword that just does more damage, you're like, okay, well, now I can kind of see that there's this connection, that a dagger is fast. So I get an extra card. And that's how what it is.

You're doing this quick strike. That's what I mean. Right. And you say quick strike and it's small damage, draw a card or get an extra action or whatever. And you start to establish the link in the player's mind so that when they get introduced to another dagger down the road or a rapid attack or whatever, they're going to have expectations. And now it feels like a dagger. It feels like a quick attack. And that I think is really important.

And one of the examples that came to mind is when we were in, I was working on the versus system training card game, which was like all the Marvel and DC characters, we used all the underwater characters, you know, Aquaman and Namor or whatever. We used the discard pile to represent the ocean. So they would always have things that interact with the discard pile. And again, that's not a natural association anybody has. Like, why is my discard pile the ocean? But once you saw it enough times, every time you saw a, you know, character that was focused on, water powers or the ocean, you know, whatever, that this is what would happen. And so now it created this story.

And it's like, oh, yeah, cool. That feels like Aquaman. He's going swimming and picking cards out of the, out of the discard piles. Like, sure. Yeah, using mechanics to establish the theme, I think is, yeah, I think that's one of the, one of my favorite things when creating a new game and finding new design areas and saying, okay, well, this means fire in this world. and this is lightning.

And like, one of my most cherished memories from gaming was the first time I ever played Final Fantasy 7. As a kid, I just was not that into RPGs or video games in general. But the first time I played the demo for Final Fantasy 7 and I had the option of ice, fire, and lightning. And I click one of them and it does the animation. And all three of them were the exact. exact same, but that animation made it feel so different. And so, and it's so, but if it would have done just like a little bit different in each of those, like fire ads like damage over time or ice like might stun you, I think that helps establish exactly what you're what you're building

between those, those different differentiations of this deals damage. Yeah. I want to, I want to dig further into the the rogue-like deck builder kind of the genre and what it means in general for for our industry and maybe who knows maybe we'll dig into some fun little design brainstorms here i i think that i love the fact that the concept of sort of deck building and you know either you know from collectible cars world to the deck building genre has now sort of pervaded all different kinds of genres and it's entered into, you know, as sort of a piece of game grammar, if you will, you know, the same way that like Connect 3, you know, bejeweled type thing, you know, everywhere. And it's just like a subset of a of a block you can put into other games.

And I think the seeing the roguelike progression is pretty awesome and seeing it in a variety of other places crop up. I think that, you know, we spent some time talking about this, but really trying to figure out how do we take, you know, I know that the designer of a roguelike, he's mentioned, Ascension is one of his inspirations. And now, if we were going to use Roguelike as an inspiration, if you right now live on this podcast, we're going to use Rogue Like as an inspiration to make your own next level style of this game. How would you approach that? Oh, man.

For me, I think... Put you on the spot. Yeah, right on the spot. I think what I'd want to do is I'd want to include the player in building the cards a little bit more. I know a lot of these games allow you to upgrade cards. and I think that's cool and all, but I think, like, actually being able to, like,

I actually played one of these roguelike card games. I was like, okay, this is pretty interesting what's going on here. And I think that there's something to, like, allowing players to completely shape the cards that they're putting into their deck and kind of build them the way that exactly they want to. But I think, I mean, obviously you need to be careful about that because you don't want to make it, again, turn into some type of spreadsheet where I have to, I have 80 different variables on this card that I have to manage. Sure. I mean, didn't Hex have a system kind of like this where you could like socket effects into cards or something like that?

Yeah, we had ways where like on certain creatures you could socket in like a keyword. Gotcha. Which I think is not quite where I want it. where I'd want to be. Later on we did do fusion troops, which was fun. That was take these two creatures and literally combine them together,

combine their costs and stats and everything. So is that the other thing you're thinking about? That would maybe even... Yeah, I think ever since we made that, I was like, oh, this is... There's definitely something to this. Like, being able to combine these things, having that feeling of,

I'm combining these things together to make exactly what I want, I think is interesting. Well, I think there's another I think there's another route to do it too, where maybe you give cards something like a sphere grid, like a simplified sphere grid or battle grid where you could upgrade or add certain abilities to each card. What do you mean by sphere grid or battle grid? Okay. So in Final Fantasy 10 or Path of Exile, they have these very complicated maps of abilities on cards that you can add additional.

ability or generally they were just on your character but I'm thinking like more abstractly like on a card you can open up this card and there's like a different there's like three or four different things you can choose to add to this card right sort of an upgrade tree that you know can kind of go down different yeah I guess that's close enough just an upgrade tree to each card would be an interesting way of approaching yeah and and I want to tie this back into some of our earlier conversation too because like I agree with you like my first instinct when I hear something that does like oh man that's going to be really hard to balance and like being you know giving people that freedom and flexibility without it being something that's just going to get like super degenerate super

quickly is is a is a challenge but when you think about something like slay the spire and you think about our previous conversation about like pvE campaign challenges and development versus pvp like I'm inclined to think you can get away with just a lot more of that like let people play with these random things, but control, like, how often they're able to get those, those ludicrous combos, right? Sometimes you play Slay the Spire and you just get this just busted deck that you could just crush everything, and it's like super trivial to go through the campaign. And other times, it is super impossible to get through the campaign. And so there's this interesting, that, I think, a more wiggle room, if you will, to give people that freedom to customize and just

more variety of experience to keep coming back and coming back and coming back is worth a ton. And so I feel like there's actually quite a bit of space here that hasn't been explored. Yeah, I think you're completely allowed to people break to quote unquote break the game, especially in a rogue-like game because there's an end. Eventually the player will have to restart. And even though they broke it this time, you know, next time they're not going to have the same options. Everything's going to be changed. There's all these moving parts that you're not going to be able to necessarily do exactly

we did last time. Yeah, I think that that's both a key to creating that replayability. But there's also a challenge that comes with it. I'd like to hear you talk about a little bit, which is, you know, with these roguelikes and these experiences, they're, yes, they're start over and there are a variety every time, just like in a tabletop deck building game experience. But then once it's over, you feel you lose that entire sense of progress. You lose that entire sense of what's going on. And so each thing is kind of bite size. I mean, I remember I got super obsessed with Slay of the Spire for a while, played it a ton, kind of felt like I'd been there,

done that, and then put it aside and I haven't picked it up in a while, although this conversation is going to make me want to play it again. But do you think there's ways to sort of maybe get more of that feeling of long-term progression

or other things that's kind of some kind of persistence or thing that's going to keep people hooked in the long-term? Like, you know, when it comes to deck-building games or tabletop games, there's the social aspect and the community aspect that I'm playing against other people, but in a game that's like a solo experience, Is it, are there ways to think about making that more compelling and more, more connective over the long term?

Yeah, one thing a lot of the rogue likes do, and I think Slate the Spire does this a little bit, but not nearly as much as others in the genre, is giving you permanent unlocks as you've played. I think for the first few games of Slate the Spire, you're unlocking new cards, but obviously there's a point where, you know, they can't just, they can't have you unlocking 300 cards or whatever. And I don't think, I think in that style of game, you don't want to be, you know, doing that for forever because for various, I mean, you want players that have access to everything at a fairly early point in the game. But I don't know, maybe there's some sort of like Hall of Fame mode

where you retire these characters and they have some type of ongoing effect that might help. help you in the long run or maybe you can call them in at some point in the future. I definitely like the idea of like after you've finished with this character, that's, that was amazing. Like you, you remember this run for, you know, for the entire time that you're playing the game trying to relive the glory. I think there is definitely some sadness in that, like, you're never going to get back to that, but, and that the game doesn't commemorate very well those things.

I think having some sort of like Hall of Champions that may or may not actually affect your game or maybe at some point you'll be able to recall that character and play through a harder mode using that deck would be interesting.

Yeah, that sounds kind of cool. I also think your idea about like creating more modular cards that you can modify over time, I think is potentially another piece to this puzzle, right? Because like one thing is like, all right, well, yeah, I can unlock cards that don't exist, but how many cards is that, you know, are we going to design and how often or,

how long are we going to keep people from them is going to provide a natural cap to that progression. But then if it's like, no, actually, now you start modifying cards, you start building your own cards and each run lets you build a new card that didn't exist before. And now that, so there's a sort of potentially, truly limitless progression, or at least, you know, functionally limitless of the number of different things you could do and create and change. You can build quite a few systems in order to allow cards to keep evolving

and keep becoming more powerful. I also think there's just something about the social part of, you know, card games, deck building games, things in general that maybe there's still a way to integrate. You know, I like the fact that Slay the Spire and those roguelikes are solo experiences, but I kind of want there to be.

more ways, you know, some tricks that I know they use are like they'll have their daily challenges and leaderboards and things that kind of like let you compare yourself to other players and sort of feel like you're connected to a community. But I'd love to figure out ways to make that connection stronger, you know, almost like where you could, you know, export your, the exact dungeon you went through and have other people battle or build your own custom dungeon that people have to go through or vice versa. You know, there's like little, like they feel like there's more space to explore there that would be really interesting. Oh, definitely. And I think, I mean, I thought you were going to go down this line, but I

assumed that I don't know exactly how it would work, but some sort of co-op version would be amazing. Yes. Well, that, that obviously is something that people want and have asked for, I think, explicitly for a while. And yeah, how do you build that properly? What does it look like? I can imagine both like, yeah, not only a co-op version where you're sort of battling the same things, but a version where you're all racing up the same dungeon tree at the same time would be really interesting. And when you run into each other, what does that mean? And feeling like that turning the thing to make it feel more alive,

I think would be really, really cool. It's interesting to think about. I mean, even if it was like, you know, one of my favorite pastimes is throwing together a bunch of buzzwords. But like the Battle Royale, rogue-like, or CCG, just hasn't really been mined enough. I agree with you completely. Yes, no, I think.

But like if you had a bunch of people start on the same map and they can move around all these nodes and upgrade their decks and eventually you run into each other and you have to battle each other. Yep, yep. Well, that's a lot to build, but sounds like. It's an ambitious project, but that's never stopped us before. No, ever.

If any of our listening audience wants to take a crack at it, You can, you know, hit us up and message me on Twitter and see what you got. So you have to drive your game in the Twitter limits, and then we'll talk about it. This has been awesome. All right. Well, I know we're going to continue design chats like this for many, many days and years to come. But it's been really fun to be able to do this in this format and share you as a designer, as there's many people who may not be familiar with, and all of your thoughts,

which I've been super excited to get to know so well. over the last year and a half or so. If people do want to know more about you, other than me bragging about you through Stoneblades communications, is there anywhere they can find you online or anything you'd want to point them to? I'm on the Twitters at Sutherlord.

At Sutherlord. Pretty ambitious name there. Thank you. I was the first Sutherland. I will not be the last. other than that that that's what we generally were to find yep and we'll uh you know we take you to take you out to the conventions a good good chunk of the times at least for uh gencon and uh and others but uh this has been awesome uh is there anything else you want to share uh before we uh we cut this off

no no i just i really enjoyed this chat and i uh can't wait to see what else we got up our sleeves Awesome. Well, this is a good time and I'll see you Monday and I'll see everybody in the listening audience in our next podcast next month. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books are sold.