This is where I analyze games I’ve been playing, previous projects I’ve worked on, and whatever else comes to mind.

Magic the Gathering and Mana

Magic the Gathering is one of my favourite games. I’ve played it ever since I was young. As I’ve grown up I’ve often asked myself why Magic the Gathering(MTG) has remained on top of the trading card game market for so long? One answer is the engaging gameplay the MTG offers. I think a huge part of that gameplay success lies in it’s mana system. I want to take the chance to analyze the mana system in Magic the Gathering and compare it to other TCGs like Gwent and Hearthstone.

Just to explain the basics of magic, the main goal of a magic game is to reduce an opponents life total from twenty to zero (there are other win conditions, though this is how most games are ended). To do that the player will need mana in order to cast spells. Mana is generated by tapping (rotating a card 90 degrees) a land card. Once a card is tapped it will only untap on your next turn. Once a card is tapped it can no longer be used until it is untapped. Think of mana almost like the currency needed to cast spells. Mana is split into five different colours; White, Blue, Black, Red and Green. Included in the cost to cast cards is a specific mana colour cost which must be paid using the mana colour depicted in the cost. This limits the types of cards a player can have in their deck. For a more in depth explanation of the mechanics, I have included a link to a youtube video explaining how the game is played.

Okay now that we understand how the mana mechanic works, let’s dive into some pros and cons of this system in isolation. The biggest con to this system is it’s inconsistency. Since getting mana is tied to getting a card, players can end up with too much land cards in their hand or no lands at all. This leaves to some games that never have a chance to get going as one player is struggling to cast anything. This leaves both players feeling unsatisfied with the game. The second biggest con is more powerful lands giving a player a distinct advantage in the game. As the game went on powerful lands were added with the ability to draw the exact type of land card the player wanted. This led these cards to demand huge prices and gave the users of these cards a huge advantage (this was fixed somewhat by printing less powerful versions which were easier to access). The first and most major pro of this system is it’s customization. For example most magic decks run two colours of mana, sometimes even more. When a player is constructing a deck this choice of mana colour is one of the first that needs to be made. The mana colours for cards aren’t merely cosmetic, each mana colour plays differently. This gives players a huge amount of customization in their playstyle. Playing only one mana colour is all well and good but by combining two or more colours you have access to a wider array of play styles. This also restricts players because having too many mana colours can often be difficult to play and requires very certain cards to work. This limitation forces the player to make a deck that isn’t simply a list of the best cards, but to pick a strategy and use the one or two colours of mana in order to pick their cards. The second major pro of this system is it paces the game. You first start out with small creatures and as the game goes on more powerful creatures and spells are cast. This creates a slow start and a big hectic finale. There are a few more pros to talk about but we’ll get to them in the next section.

Now how does this system compare to Hearthstone and Gwent? Well, hearthstone implements a mana system where one mana is given each turn. This mana can be used to cast any card so long as the player has enough mana. Gwent completely forgoes this mana system in favour of playing a single card per turn. Both games suffer a similar problem to each other. The customization is more restrictive due to the mana system. Hearthstone implements a system where the player must choose a class to play and can only play class cards and generic cards. Gwent has you playing as a single faction with cards restricted to the faction of choice and a small number of generic cards that any faction can use. In MTG the mana system allows me to play multiple different mana colours with each mana colour having it’s own playstyle. I can’t decide to play a Shaman-Wizard in Hearthstone or NorthernRealms-Nilfgaard in Gwent. I’m forced to only pick a single faction or class. Having mana as a card like in MTG frees the game up to allow this mixing of factions because the mana colours you decide limit your deck building. If you pick two colours for example you need to include enough land cards of each type to make it viable. This is why five colour usually doesn’t work, the more mana colours you add the less consistent your deck becomes. This dissuades players from picking all five colours and picking the most powerful cards, which would make the decks very similar. Hearthstone and Gwent don’t allow this because their mana systems are always consistent. The player always knows they’ll be able to play a card in both systems and they know when they’re going to have mana. If Hearthstone and Gwent had the same faction system as MTG then all the decks would look the same because they would simply use the most powerful cards from the respective factions.

In conclusion, the mana system in MTG is controversial. On one hand it means the game is less consistent, relying on both players to get consistent land draws. On the other it gives a huge amount of freedom for the player to pick their play style all while still offering deckbulding restrictions. I really like playing both Hearthstone and Gwent, but I’ll always come back to MTG. Through the mana system it allows players to pick a play style of their own and personalize the game in a way no other card game can really match, and it is a contributing factor to the game’s success.

What makes a good intro?

Video game intros are designed to get the player hooked on the game. It’s the first thing the player encounters and interacts with and sets up expectations in the player for the content to come. I believe that a good intro sets up expectations, gives players the controls and skills they’ll need later on, and gets the player narratively invested in the story. Recently I’ve finished Ori and the Blind Forest which has been an incredible game. I believe that Ori and the Blind forest has a fantastic intro that accomplishes everything I’ve outlined and I wanted to walk through why it’s so good. (Spoiler alert, leave now or have the intro spoiled……. okay here we go)

The first thing we see is the spirit tree. I believe this was done to introduce the concept of the spirit tree as early as possible as it serves as the foundation of the game’s narrative and has the player asking questions about the tree and it’s purpose. The next thing that happens is we get to take control of Naru. This serves to introduce the player to the game’s most basic controls as well as setting the expectation that this is a 2D platformer. Moving left or right. This has the added effect of getting the player to sympathize with Naru, which is needed if we want the emotional impact of the intro’s ending. We keep traversing to the right where we encounter our first obstacle. Naru can’t progress to see Ori without jumping. So the player will need to experiment in order to figure out which button is the jump button. This is a way to teach the controls to the player without the need for a tutorial.

Now the player understands basic motion from right to left and understands how to jump. The next scene has the player taking control of Ori. While Naru was slow to control, switching to Ori is to get the player used to Ori’s agility and speed (although the speed is reduced in this cutscene). Next Ori hops on Naru’s back and we are once again tested on our jumping ability. With that obstacle out of the way we are presented with a cutscene showing Ori and Naru bonding together and constructing a bridge. This is done to show the passage of time as well as preview one of Ori’s future abilities. The point of this cutscene is to get the player invested in both Naru and Ori aided by the fantastic soundtrack to help direct the player’s emotions.

Next, we play as Ori heading back along the same way we came. This is to set up the expectation that the map will require us to go back to progress. This is a super important expectation to set very early on. Players expecting a more traditional platformer as opposed to a metroidvania, will be confused about the need to backtrack and explore. This puts it in the players mind that sometimes the path forwards lays in places we’ve already explored.

After that we see the spirit tree calling out to Ori and Naru taking Ori inside. This is done to get the players questioning what the player was seeing. Next we see Naru’s health start to decline and the forest around them is dying. The player now knows that something is wrong and Naru and Ori are caught in it’s path. Naru leaves to go find food for Ori. The orchard we once explored that was bright and beautiful is now replaced with dying and decaying trees. All of the fruit that Ori and Naru eat as food is now gone except for a solitary bunch. Naru is injured trying to get the fruit. Once Naru returns to the cave we Naru give the last bit of food to Ori, sacrificing herself for Ori’s survival. As Ori walks back to the cave, remembering the good times with Naru, Ori finds Naru dead. Ori and the Blind Forest earns this emotional gut punch through it’s use of music to set the mood as well as taking control of Naru and Ori so the player can empathize with them. The player is now fully invested in what happens to Ori.

This intro is fantastic. It sets up expectations so the player will know what to expect going forward, it taught the player the most basic controls and gave them the tools to start exploring the world, and it invested the player in the story and had the player asking questions and wanting answers. It does everything that an intro should do in my opinion and I think it’s a fantastic example that shows what intros should be.

Learning from mistakes

I had to learn a lot while working on Tales of Rostra. It was the first time I had ever worked on a dialogue and cutscene system, and with that came a lot of mistakes. I would often hear “Sean the cutscene broke again” or “Sean the dialogue isn’t working“as they were testing their own features. It came up often as a subject of discussion in the team and how it was difficult to work with. They weren’t wrong. Both systems had some core flaws. There are three core reasons why these systems had flaws and I want to discuss them and talk a bit about what I learned from this experience.

The first reason the cutscene system failed was too much freedom over variables. Since the cutscenes were customizable, I needed to be able to change every aspect of their function. I did this by giving a ton of access to variables in the inspector. The problem with my approach was, the system needed very specific things in order to work. This was a problem born of both design and code. If you didn’t correctly input all the actors and all the actions, it would break. If an array wasn’t set correctly, it would break and so on and so forth. What could I have done to fix this? Well the first would be to build in some safeties. I should have used lists instead of array so I could delete elements I wasn’t using. I needed to check for improper conditions and properly account for them by halting the cutscene and outputting an error. I should have used Unity’s inspector tools to limit what values could be input.

The second reason was lack of a central database for the dialogue system. I created a prefab for the dialogue and used the inspector to input it’s dialogue. This meant that if I needed to go change several dialogues I would need to go to several different objects and manually change the text. This led to several mistakes in the dialogue needing to be corrected and it made it hard to tell what was going on since the text would be so long it wouldn’t be able to display the entire string.

The third was an over reliance on booleans. I used them to dictate the flow of these systems. The problem with that approach is if a boolean failed to trigger at the right time it would cause the systems to break. And these booleans had a habit of not flipping correctly. This is a core system design failure. I should have structured the code in a way to use less booleans and use other systems to my advantage such as using a state machine.

I was initially apprehensive when I was asked to work on the Hub World and Narrative systems for The Wish of The Strays, but then I realized it was a chance to take what I had learned and improve. I improved upon the cutscene system by relegating the customization to a data table and using more thorough error checking. This system ended up being easier to use and debug. I used Unreal’s datatables as a centralized location for all the dialogue. So I could more easily tell what I was writing and if changes needed to be made it would be made from a centralized location. Lastly I used the UI and other systems to reduce the amount of booleans needed and made sure the flow of the system was better controlled.

Ultimately, I’m happy with work I did on Tales of Rostra. Did I make mistakes along the way? Sure. But it was a fantastic learning experience and it was exceptionally fun to work with the team. I’m proud of the work that I did but I’m even more happy that I could learn and improve from it.