Achieving Two Worlds, Every Year: How Magic the Gathering Sustainably Doubled Its Worldbuilding

[Music] people welcome it is Friday the last day of GDC 2017 this is achieving two worlds every year how Magic the Gathering sustainably doubled its world building to tell you a little bit about Who I am and potentially why you should care my name is Jeremy Jarvis I am the principal designer of worlds and IP for magic my background is in freelance illustration I was one of the last watercolorists and I was hired in house in 2005 as lead concept artists for magic I failed upwards within a year to be senior art director for Magic and spent a decade in that role so from lure one to anything you've seen now I personally art directed that world I commissioned an art directed over 9,000 cards I was the sole art director for a while so that thing you remember from the last decade that great magic card I did that that thing you remember from the last decade that you hate screw it I did that to whatever God don't give with both hands so that is Who I am why you should care I don't know they gave me a microphone for an hour so maybe you shouldn't on a related note please write this talk if it's important to GDC it's important to the track it's important to me so full disclosure this will be one of those oddly specific talks so we are going to be talking about Magic the Gathering I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with magic and our players or fans those of you that are other industry professionals I know you don't make an analog card games we are going to be talking about magic and analog card game and specifically a lot of the examples are going to be about Tala desh because that is the most recent public set and I can show you some behind the scenes stuff from it so while we're talking about world-building and how we achieve world building this is what the talks really about creating and maximizing flexible solutions to solve in flex both needs the reason I didn't call the talk that was holy God did you hear how that sounds so we're going to be talking about world building so here is a brief history of magic in case you don't know magic was created and introduced at Gen Con in 1993 its original Genesis was as a way to spend time between games of DMV so 1993 to 2017 someone at work helped me do the math that's 24 years 24 years of product releases let me help you visualize what that looks like each of these logos represents hundreds of cards to the outside world to us at Wizards it represents learning and iteration and this is the stuff from before when I started working so let's talk about the better stuff I want to say cold snap was not my fault it was not my fault I was there but we were just following orders so so over these 24 years through all of these product releases we have learned we've iterated and I want to talk about what magic is today and how we've grown through those 24 years so here's what we look like magic is still a card game we're a really great card game but we approach our worlds as cinematic and immersive we want players to believe in them and care about them and care about our characters this is our quality bar we have set it so high for ourselves and now people expect it and we love to deliver on that we want to be world-class in the way we look what I look Fila is our world building because we want to be in the company of the other great games we enjoy and our fans of and we do this twice a year now we build these worlds twice a year so I want to talk about some context around what that means what it takes to achieve those two worlds a year so let's let's start with the challenges it is not blue sky world building it would be awesome if the job was just twice a year create two crazy good worlds right that's that's hard enough but it's not there are constraints the first constraint is the very fundamental nature of magic the five colors of magic every world we build has to cover those five colors it's a five up there are land types associated with those five colors of magic that's Magic's resource system if there is a world premise that can't accommodate those five land types we don't get to do it crazy fire elemental world that's pretty cool right are there Islands no not going to do it it's just the nature of it other constraints again it's not blue sky we are always working with a mechanical theme we very much believe that magic is at our best we are doing our best work when the world creative and the sets mechanics are lockstep with each other examples of those mechanical centers artifacts matter enchantments matter color pairs big creatures and you've seen the output of us working in these mechanical spaces artifacts and Kalla - enchantments and Pharaohs color pairs of course Ravnica and it's guilds big creatures the eldrazi of Zendikar so again we're starting with a can a confined space based on trying to do the best creative for the mechanics for the set I want to show you our creature grid this is a visualization of what we call the creature grid this has to be solved for every set the cards will demand it there will be small blue flyers in a set and just to kind of explain the constraint space the the squares that are x8 magic doesn't do the read no longer gets small flyers we get medium and large flyers and Red Dragons and whatnot if an artist creates the best coolest flying Hydra in the mind and in god we don't get to use it because green doesn't get flying in hydras or green so I want to talk about one of these boxes in particular just to kind of talk about the constraints for Cal adesh let's just talk about medium sized black non fliers now typically the default the go-to is vampires and zombies but remember we were we were trying to do a specific thing with Cal adesh its optimistic it's beautiful its brightly lit can you imagine what zombies and vampires would have would have felt like here God who is that for that makes no-one happy but it probably makes a couple people happy and I can't speak to that so again the cards are going to demand answers for that square so for Cal adesh we created a new fantasy race we created the ether born which you know Cal adesh is about a plane of inventors that uses ether to power these crazy inventions and as a result of that ether use these ether born are a living output of that cycle and they are short-lived they are opulent they're pretty selfish which is why they're black because they know they're short-lived you can see that they kind of crumble away releasing the ether back into the environment so that they're beautiful they fit within Khaled Esch they're kind of romantically tragic and more importantly they are very of Tala desh they fit the world cosmology and all of that work and it was a lot of work that's one box there are lots of boxes they all have to be solved for everything another constraint now that we're going to two worlds a year it is more important than ever that we do what we call swinging the pendulum so starting with the open vistas and the beauty of Zendikar - the kind of quiet tight cluster phobic dread of innistrad - the bright sky and optimism of Cala desh - amin ket which comes out in a few weeks and i can't really talk about it but it's not khaled Esch we know it's important to change the look and the tone of the settings because we need people to be excited twice as often now we're into two worlds a year so we are constantly planning not only as we world build to keep it off the last world but to keep it off the worlds that we're going to do so we have to be deliberate with our spins most of those are creative constraints or constraints given to us by the card set let's talk about a logistical one simultaneous global release our dates will not move there is no soft launch there is no soft patch we cannot move by a day because of this we print magic in 11 languages we sell it in over 77 0 markets around the world and it has to hit those stores at the same day our organized play system around the world tournament organizers have rented venues sometimes years in advance our dates are not going to move that's a very hard constraint okay so with that pile of constraints in mind let's talk about what our inflexible need is right we need to build two worlds every year it is our release model it is what the organization demands now in order to do that we need to of the year a world guide it is the world guide that allows us to ensure quality and ensure a vision across all of the cards within a setting because it is a global talent pool that we have built to illustrate the cards I don't think a lot of people realize that it is zero people's job within the walls of Wizards of the coast to paint magic cards we do not have an art studio set up all of it is outsourced to this robust illustration pipeline of the most talented people that we can find to be our partners in bringing the world's to life so is that world guide that allows us to fully utilize that worldwide talent pool and we are constantly adding to that talent pool because we have to because we're going to make lots and lots of cards so the world guide has to be rich enough and robust enough to cover the needs of all the cards it is hundreds of concept illustrations and often hundreds of pages it's not just for artists it's for writers as well and so it's not just a simple turnaround per race we need variation and variety because because cards because lots of cards and that's not even that's not close that's close but still not right about four hundred and fifty cards a normal block needs about four hundred and fifty cards worth of Illustrated content and remember that these are game objects the art has a job to do if you miss read a card based on the art even upside down and across the table that can cost someone a game and right at the kitchen table that sucks losing a pro tour because of it is terrible and so there is a real job for that world guide to do it has to do a lot of lifting all right so let's recap what our needs are we need two world guides a year each one has to cover 450 cards they are working from a constrained mechanical space we have set ourselves a very high quality bar that we love and now players expect our dates will not move and we have to concept artisan house we do this with two concept artists and we've trained the organization to expect that pile of assets to happen in three weeks so let's talk about our solution our solution to all of those constraints and to all of the demand is contractors we bring in contractors just like everyone else that's what we do what if that was the talk and I just walked off right now so we do bring in contractors would bring in five people for three weeks but the real solution is our concept push and so what we're going to be talking about is how we have learned to organize ourselves and to optimize our processes for the solution to be sustainable and successful all right so let's dig into that let's start with the simpler time I'm nostalgic about this when this was our release model and we only only had to build one incredible world a year what takes Hollywood six to eight years and a lot of games two to four we just had to build one a year one world guide would cover three sets and then there was a corset that historically did not need concept support so within that model let's break down our solution and how we've made it work let's start with magic our DS organization we have our noble and righteous creatives we have our game designers and both both of these halves of our D report in to the same leadership body and that's magic art I might really be in trouble right now my my department has not seen this so so that is magic Rd and the point here is our creatives are not a service department we do not want a culture of handoffs we are literally the same team and not in the touchy-feely we're all on the same team for magic since in the sense of we share bosses right that's the sort of integration we want for magic again because we believe ourselves to be at our best when mechanics and world creative is lockstep and this is the most fundamental visualization of us wanting to be that true wanting that to be true we are literally organized that way now our process again we want integration not a culture of handoffs here is a visualization of our process now you start with a block concept that can be bottom-up like a mechanical desire like to color factions or it can be top-down like magic does Egypt world we agree on the block concept and then both of those wings of R&D start working and very quickly we start sharing members between the teams we have a design member on our initial world building team that they move in division design we have a creative liaison on the vision design team we are constantly informing and responding to each other and collaborating through the entire process and yes there are handoffs like a process can only be so soft but we are not a culture of handoffs we want to be a culture of integration for the good of the product for the fun of the player so I'm going to give you a couple examples of how this can potentially break down it's a little bit of a cautionary tale 2011 we introduced innistrad to the world innistrad mechanical center is graveyard matters things going into the graveyard coming out of the graveyard being in the graveyard and so it's creepy it's got the car there are vampires there are zombies so make sense right graveyard matters got the car a decade before another set had that same mechanical Center Odyssey was also graveyard matters things going into the graveyard coming out of the graveyard being in the graveyard it was about pit fights and these octopus people called cepheid's and merfolk and an artifact called the Murari there were even and cartographers graveyard matters right at some point clearly if you a be the to Odyssey broke down somehow there was a disconnect from too many handoffs are not enough integration and the creative and the mechanical center just diverged from each other and it's not that it looks bad it looks great there's a lot of great art in Odyssey but the world concept is certainly not lockstep with the creative center with a mechanical center so they got a little lost and disconnected through that process we don't want that so phasing our own work front loading the problem space this is where we and creative especially have really learned through iteration how much work of our own work the work that we are going to do anyway how much of that is healthy to front-load and here's why it's important for the con Sep push we have three weeks we don't have time to shop we don't have time to have that I'll know it when I see it art director attitude again we don't have that art studio setup if we did okay fine that might be a great attitude to have we don't have that luxury and so we don't want to be overly prescriptive to the artists but we do want to know enough about our own work to set them up for success so they don't come in and waste time blindly swinging and here's a healthy balance we found in what work is productive and healthy to front-load codifying what magics twist on the given subject matter is here is a real-world example this is almond cat people can hear the same word and get to different places mentally magic does Egypt world okay we needed to codify that this is not dirty dead archeology tomb raiding world this is a living thriving beautiful fantasy Egypt it is magics take on Egyptian mythology and it is the stronghold of Niko bolas and so just codifying that so that people are able to jump in and hit the ground running also codifying what's off the table what parts of a given genre or trope space are we not interested in seeing again we have to be stingy with subject matter if we want to keep making magic sets so we will take stuff off the table for future us a great example from kal adesh is we wanted this plane of inventors where there's going to be a lot of artifacts a lot of people a lot of artifact creatures we wanted that to be about innovation and optimism not about a rise of the machines story and just saying a plane of inventors that create artifact creatures it would be very easy for people's minds to go there we went ahead and just nailed that down on the front end don't bother making cards about that don't bother drawing pictures of it we're not doing that here what fantasy races populate the world and why and this really goes back to that creature grid we try to make those decisions upfront whether there are elves here or Nagas what there doing what are they about what is our white non-human races of lienen is a dwarves are they in red or they and white we need to make those decisions instead of being like I don't know you know we'll know when I see you feel it out maybe elves maybe not and I don't mind telling you that we used to make that mistake that's why we've learned so much about this the attitude used to be hey words are more flexible more responsive than art is so let the artist come in and do a bunch of impressive work and then the writing will cater to that and what we realized iteration over iteration is we were wasting a lot of time sometimes we were frustrating the artists and we ended up after the concept push still having too much work to do to get to a hard stop and so that is one of the conversations we front-load making decisions about the creature grid this one's related what groups are here and how are they awesome a lot of times we have creative super types whether that is a guild or a clan or a faction and the way we approach setting artists up for success so they're not blindly swinging without being prescriptive because we don't want to tell them what to come in and draw right if we wanted to say Boros is about pointy helmets and curvy swords we could be working with much less talented people to get those results we want to be working with the most talented illustrators that we possibly can and we want to give them as much freedom as we possibly can but at the end of the day we we still need our worlds to be our vision and we still need to make sure that our needs are met and so we talked about and front-load what these groups are doing what they care about what their role in the world is so we could talk about Boros through the lens of kind of righteous military and let them solve what that means visually instead of wasting their time talking about curvy swords so that's mostly what we front-load and that takes us to our first milestones to set ourselves our first milestone to set ourselves up for success which is the kickoff document this is this is literally a picture of the Calla - kick-off document there is it is not an impressive achievement of technology but it is a great achievement of thought and us again front-loading the work that we're going to do anyway there's also a presentation and it's it's what we use on the first day of the concept push to present to the artist to compel them and excite them towards our vision of the world because the more invested you guys know this any given creative is the better the work they're going to do so we give them as much freedom as possible we give them the kickoff presentation and let them start working so this is where we start to create a feedback loop we use that global freelance talent pool to staff these concept pushes so I'm going to talk more about the feedback loop later and I don't mean feedback loop in the like healthy communication with time - pivots or delay I mean feedback loop in the audio sense of when the microphone becomes aware of its own output when the originator of a signal becomes aware of its own output so remember the feedback loop we're going to talk more about that later so we're going to bring in five artists for three weeks they're going to be our partners and an incredibly important phase of making magic so here's how we maximize that concept team certain worlds have needs that others do not and we're able to cater those five slots to specialists that can address that problem space a great example is Ravnica Ravnica is a plane covered entirely by city and so guess what you need a lot of artists who are very comfortable with a lot of architecture we can even add people if we need to so again this is where the flexibility of the concept push concept really starts to come into play we are able to ensure team culture which is important again like it's because we are drawing from our freelancers it's been College since a lot of these people were in a collaborative environment some of them have never been in an office environment and it's been a long time since they've stood at a wall with other people and received open feedback about their work so it's really important that the people we pick are going to give us this sort of culture and not this sort of culture so if we have two illustrators that we think might not get along we just don't bring them in at the same time we get to make those decisions on a case-by-case basis we get to mitigate other challenges simply by who we're able to bring in like just think about communication because we are bringing in partners partners from around the world not all of them speak English as their first language and that's fine we just have to be aware of it so we don't invite too many people at the same time and get into a scenario where they are literally having trouble communicating with each other or with us we are very deliberate about who comes in when just to avoid potential issues and once we have made the decision about which five people are correct for the setting that is our second milestone we have hopefully created the optimal concept team for that particular world for those particular challenges at this point we have either set ourselves up with the right people to be able to come in and hit the ground running or we have it is a milestone so let's talk about how we structure those precious three weeks week one free exploration after we give the concept push kickoff that document in that presentation we let them just explore whatever spoke to them whatever excited them regardless of what their specialty is regardless of what we thought they were going to do first week is free reign we get a lot of weird stuff we don't end up using a lot of it but it can lead to the lightning strikes that we don't ask for that we didn't know we wanted and again we're bringing in very talented people for a reason and we don't want to stop those lightning strikes for happening so the first week free reign second week we start to tighten up some we need to start to force the world to take shape this is an actual picture of one of our concept walls this is back from looks like the Pharaohs concept bush and we have our first tier in e-pass where the art director has to apologetically go and start to take stuff off the wall that's not working we start making decisions about materials and shape language we start to take design motifs and really loudly bless them to be spread across more assets so that we start to work towards a unified world vision week 3 we get tactical we start to give assignments and as you all know artists love assignments regardless of that's Eric to shop regardless of that funny picture it really is a very positive process because after you know it's just kind of tightening that funnel of starting very broad and tightening up and they understand that by week three the challenge is now to be heroic I need you talented artists to solve what a dragon is here for me I need you to fix this thing that isn't quite working yet and they really step up to that challenge so week three is tactical assignments and at the end of week three we hit our third milestone which is the resulting pile of concept art and it is a pile of stuff it's a lot of assets and at this milestone the world guide is either set up with the quality and the content it needs or it's not so there is a cleanup and finalization stage where our two in-house concept artists take the reigns and really start doing the edits and bringing things in line with each other and filling holes and this can go on for some months as we really unify to ensure the quality and vision of that world guide because the world guide is our fourth final and most important milestone when the world guides done the product cards our artist pool is either set up for success or it's not so that that's the process that we've iterated on from lauren through cons of tartar keyer and that simple life ended with concept art here then the need changed our product release model moved from this to this to to set blocks a year each with its own creative so what that meant was our inflexible need which was only one incredible world guide to populate hundreds and hundreds of cards with world-class assets turned into two of those we needed to do it twice without sacrificing quality we don't just get more time we don't get to double our headcount and we had to figure out how to accomplish this and how to accomplish it sustainably and so our new flexible solution was our old flexible solution we just do it twice it's a flexible solution it's scaleable like all of those learnings that allowed us to do it once in how much is healthy to front-load how our organization should work how we avoid a culture of handoffs all of those things work it scales we just have to take ownership of it it did create a new problem this cleanup and finalization phase we used to have months to do it and our concept artists no longer had that luxury and so we needed to find a new way to get to a hard stop faster so that we could start front-loading that helped the work for the next push and so in order to do that our concept is still scalable we just did it more so we have a small push after the push prime where three artists come in for another three weeks and help us get to that hard stop this has led us to further customize who we invited in and when as an example we bring in more international talent for that primary push and we have learned that a really great thing to do for that follow-up push is bring in more local artists we have a lot of our illustrator several of them are local to the Seattle area they've been working with us for years and they're able to come in they understand that it's a different challenge that the challenge is to clean up and edit and help us get to that hard stop and we have really built that relationship with them so less communication is needed they understand the job they understand what they're doing and they come in and just take a hatchet to it knock it out of the park so a flexible solution will scale that's literally how we do it solving it for the first time solving it when it was just once a year was actually much harder much harder than scaling it once we knew what we were doing this is tangential but it's worth talking about the concept push as experience design there is a potential pitfall in this wonderful flexible solution that pitfall is it depends on freelance illustrators very talented ones right those freelance illustrators have all the work they want to do they owe us nothing they can say no and we need them to want to say yes because we want that level of talent in-house so beyond the normal niceties of being good people and picking them up at the airport and we are all of our creatives are good people I'm the worst of us and just tell you you know we hang out with them we take them on hikes I never leave the office but a lat allegedly there are cool things to do in Seattle there are trails and a mountain and Fraser lives there so we play rock band with them we I'm pretty sure this is illegal that's too many people in one car but they really had a good time and with us we get to know them outside of the office environment they get to understand our culture inside the office environment we get to know them personally and you know we have a sense of them from working with them out outsourcing art we certainly know their talent we certainly know their reliability we we have a pretty good bead on whether or not they are personally a sociopath but we get to spend that face time with them and because of that the concept pushes have become a stealth hiring pipeline it was it actually used to be a stealth hiring pipeline until this presentation of our of our seven outside creatives five of them have been hired through this process of being card illustrators being brought in on a concept push and then when we had an opportunity to add to our organization we're able to just reach out to someone who's been part of this weird wonderful process that we do a couple times a year and knows us and knows wizards culture at least in broad strokes and it's worked very well three of our four art directors came out of this and both of our in-house concept artists so let's look at that flexible solution and how it has come to inform that feedback loop that I was talking about earlier when the originator of a signal becomes aware of its own output we have this organization a well structured organization of magic Rd magic Arnie's job is to make cards lots and lots of cards because we're going to make lots and lots of cards we need this robust global talent pool then we mind that global talent pool to pick the perfect five partners to come in and work with us for three weeks on a concept push and that concept push out puts a world guide and that world guide is used to make cards lots and lots of cards because we have an organization that makes lots of cards and so we need a global talent pool and then we use the concept plate and so on and then when we have an opportunity to add to our organization the concept push is our recruiting ground and so we have this entire system where the cause we have chosen to do the work this way over time the work becomes easier and more sustainable to do so I'm going to pose some closing questions one of the exercises it can be a little frustrating but I really enjoy running is when we figure out something that is true for magic either an aesthetic value that we care about or a way of doing something or a process or whatever it is when it was counterintuitive to get there but we got there and it works really well try to backwards engineer what the correct question would have been to lead us to that answer had we been smart enough just to ask ourselves that question and so were we more clairvoyant here are the questions we could have asked ourselves to get to these answers to this process that is working really well for us I will ask them to you can your organizational layout better reflect your desires for the product this goes back to that org chart we have the same bosses because we want the creative and the world concept to be fully integrated can you better phase the work that you own to set the next phase up for success the work that you own that you're going to do anyway I'm not talking about organizational revolt this your sandbox can you better set the next phase up for results just based on how you approach and phase your own work can you find a sustainable answer for problematic annualized needs the concept push used to be a crisis for us and it happened every year if it's going to happen every year on schedule there is no reason to let it be a recurring crisis figure out how to sustainably meet that thing it should only be so miserable to make games that make people really really happy find a solution for annualized needs where can you introduce a flexible solution within your inflexible production cycles how can you fully maximize every ounce of that flex and this really is the last one if you don't take anything else away I would really love for you to think about this whatever your discipline is where can you answer a need with the process or pipeline that fortifies itself over time again that feedback loop are there places where you can set up systems processes pipelines whatever that because you have chosen to do the work that way over time it becomes easier to do the work that way so with that we have some time I want to open this up to questions I would love to answer anything you guys have to ask all right guys this is the last day of GDC I know that every hour at GDC is a major decision a significant time spend there's so much talent here and so many things to learn I really appreciate you spending one of those hours with me and with magic and with Wizards of the coast thank you Oh oops you're backlit sorry great um hi thanks very such an insightful talk as an aspiring producer it was great to gain insight into how you manage your art pipeline my question is you said that your company is very specific in your timeline so do you ever deal with crunch time like what you have to release on this certain day so what do you do if you're not quite there do you have to how does that work for you it's gonna release it's no matter it's gone yes yes we have not missed a street date since I don't know that we've ever missed a street date so the real answer to that what do we do with crunch times is again we have lots of reps in this we release a major block product every three months so if you hit a crunch time more than two or three times we try to accommodate with the new process or a new way to phase the work I believe that all great process is versus something like you know I'm not smart enough to just be like in the abstract here is the perfect process to accomplish this but I know what I don't like seeing happen over and over again and we will pivot and figure out the best way to accomplish that work yes crunch times can happen a lot of that pressure comes from our desire to work up until the last possible moment on the development of the set we're trying to get as much real-world feedback on the play environments as possible so while we would in theory just love to start earlier and earlier we need to wait as late as possible to get that real-world feedback for our best development for the set and the good of the play environments and so there can be crunch times last-minute changes sometimes cards change to the point where the art no longer works for them we have to call in favors to our friendlies and that art pipeline so the answer is try to see it coming don't let it happen if it does suck it up that's why it's called work and not happy fun time all right let's go over here hey thanks there's like absolutely kick-ass talk and thank you I was wondering so it feels like you've really refined this process for this one game over a very long period of time and it seems like that's a well-oiled machine at this point I'm wondering how easy do you feel it would be to transplant those exact learnings onto another game or do you think this is this is exactly how this one game works and this is the perfect process for magic but other games are going to have to take ten years to figure out a process that's good again so I think it is a very good process for magic and the reason that I kind of audibled at the beginning of this is like people it's going to be weird not only specific is because I don't think the way we phase stuff the way or whatever I do think those questions at the end are good questions to ask yourself but every game like D&D we're in the same building they have very different processes different needs we do share learnings back and forth that sometimes we share team members but we make things in very different ways and if we're making things in different ways on the same floor of the same building I'm certainly not foolhardy enough to stand up here and be like I've solved this for all of you all of you all you need to do is bring in five people for three weeks thank you so it does work very well for us I'm not claiming it's perfect yet right but it's working well and we are able to consistently ensure that quality without it being a weeping gnashing of teeth meltdown every time and so for the time being I'll take it cool thank you all right thank you hi my question is about how this very well design process is integrated with R&D and mechanics like how early for example do the mechanics have to be set in stone for our to start or is it all happening at the same time or sure that is a good question and the answer changes from setting the setting we have what is called arc planning where there is a cross-functional team of us that from different disciplines within R and D gets together and decides what the product lineup will be it used to be the five-year plan we always had a five-year plan we knew what settings we were going to whether that was top down it's finally time to do Greek mythology or it was bottom up like we want wedge factions that five year plan once we doubled our world buildings became a five-set plan that no longer gets us five years the coming out of Arc planning we know kind of what the heart of the set is whether that is a creatively driven heart or a mechanically driven heart so to answer your question if it's a mechanically driven heart like Khan's of tarkir where it was we don't know what the creative is but it's going to be five wedge factions of some sort and we want to do a draft matter set so I should probably be time-travel gender than time but that was the answer never if you are a creative never ever tell a time travel story it's so miserable it's really really hard not to ruin your whole thing so we will often have that much information if it is bottom up if it's top down we know less and that vision design process starts iterating on mechanics and that's why we are constantly informing and responding to each other a lot of those mechanics get thrown out just like a lot of the concept art gets changed or doesn't make it through to final but we are constantly aware of when something's working really well and design sometimes will come over to us and be like we nailed down a mechanic it's really good it's really fun can you build around this and we say no recruit you like and just because it's fun when no we say yes let's build around that turns out we want to make fun games and conversely when we're like we accidentally discovered a new hotness like one of those artists came in and did something really cool an example of that the MELD mechanic Eldridge moon Vincent proce was one of the artists that came in he did a great concept plate of two angels fused together in a fairly horrible way the designer one of the designers saw that and was like hey I've been wanting to do this mechanic where you take two double-faced cards and they transform and stick together and that's where meld came from so we're nailing down things constantly but the sequence is never knowable like a lot of our process is again having enough flexibility to have the confidence that we will get to the answers because we have the right people involved so the answer is it changes time to time and give thanks hi great oh thank you thank you so my question was similar to his but a bit more specific and that was am a what point in the world building in concept and process do you actually decide on what the individual cards should be and then is our when you go to the talent pool do you say I need a piece of art for this particular card and does it ever work in Reverse I somebody creates a cool piece of art that could be a great card afterwards sure so the way it works is the world guide is not only for external partners it is for ourselves like the again it is setting us up for success it's us throwing a pass forward to future us to be able to deliver on the job we need to do so that world guide is used by our writers that we have of magicard ease creative team we have artists we have writers our writers on a card by card basis go through look at the raw mechanical jargon and say okay it costs red red it's 2-1 when it comes into play it destroys an artifact as probably a goblin right and then they write you know an art description that points to concept plates in the world guide and they find a fun and of the world way to represent that concept and then it and they do that card by card hundreds of them and then the art directors take those card concepts from the writers and hand select which artists is best to paint that goblin who really hates artifacts and then we you know get the results and we go through sketches we get feet we give feedback we get to final we will work backwards from arts sometimes and when that usually happens is if in development the card changes enough that the piece of art no longer works we have to recommit at we can't have that you know if it's really a cognitive disconnect that's not fun for anybody but if that arts really great we'll go ahead and buy it and pay for it and put it in a holding pin and ask designers to find a home for it our best place to deploy that is currently commander since we don't have a corset the course that used to use a lot of that so there are many cards that you guys have seen in commander products that were art just waiting for a good home that a designer stepped in and heroically rescued awesome thank you Thanks I'm curious with these three week pushes a couple times a year I mean it's great that you treat the artist so well while they're there but why not just keep them on staff keep them in-house keep them working for longer periods of time and study income right so even if even if someone came to me and said hey Jeremy how would you like a staff of 40 artists and that's my CEO right there hey Chris can I have a staff of 40 artists yeah so so even if that were offered to me and it has not been I would still want for that you know to have a concept push it is such a creative explosion it is one of some of the flexibility it offers us as we try to swing that pendulum and keep our settings fresh and off of each other we have different people working on them people that have different aesthetic values whose brains work different ways so you don't get into a yep it looks like a magic setting right Cal adesh is clearly not almond cat and a lot of that is from the ground up because of that concept push the cause different talent was involved I would still want to bring fresh people in like of those five slots for every Sep push we have jobs for those slots usually like we have a pacesetter someone that we know is going to work fast so that we don't have to ask people to work fast they'll just see what that person is doing and be like OSHA and either the helmets faster but one of those slots is for an x-factor for someone who has been impressing us with card art that we can bring in and see how they are in-house and deliberately to add new ideas new blood to the process so I really love that flexibility it gives us and because part of scaling the process part of why I was able to flippantly be like I don't know we just did it again we did have to staff up we did have to add a writing resource an art direction resource we went from one concept artist to two but their job is to help us run that flexible process to help own those concept pushes and world guides so that we can continue to scale them we have people that know what they're doing that have been through the process that can come in and help us own the process and then continue to have a very flexible solution to it does that make sense great hi I know you're more creative than designed but I was curious what are your thoughts on the switch from the one block or one block three sets per year to the two blocks of two from the design and playtesting perspective do you think that that team has encountered similar challenges to scaling up or do you think like that process is pretty much the same so I certainly can't dig down on that I can you know the best I could do is tell you what I hear people complaining about and I don't want to do that but yeah I can tell you that both teams have had to adjust like we both hit like you know it magic Rd is full of very very smart people and so you could theory craft about what the resulting problems are going to be you'll hit some of them maybe even a lot of them you're not going to get all of them the unknown unknowns have bitten us both I can tell you that but again because we're you know we are outputting a set every three months we are able to to respond to that and you don't get to slap us twice we will figure it out even if it takes us some iterations but yeah doing new things is hard thank you yeah thank you I with the three weeks to do the concept push and being the contractors the artist I just want to know how often or what's your process for reviewing being able to foresee problems of course correcting okay so we give that concept push kick off week one is free exploration we don't take anything off the wall we let them put stuff up and talk about it across pollinate we will if there's something on the wall that we don't love and we know it isn't going to make it through and it starts eking out into other people's work we will step in and say hey let's let's not that's enough of that like let's let's not do this anymore we do have typically two reviews that first week where we'll talk about not to talk about what we don't like what we really try to do is find the stuff that we love the stuff that we want to see more of and bless it really loudly so that the artists are able to just do more of the things naturally that we're wanting in that second week there are two to three reviews at the wall our process is to have the creatives and some of the the stakeholders our internal people talk at the wall discuss with each other outside of the presence of the artists so they don't hear mixed signals and then we bring the artists back to the wall and the art director collates that feedback makes his or her decisions and the art director is the only voice the artists hear and third week we have at least three reviews at the wall as we try to get to a hard stop thank you yeah thanks hi what are your three favorite or most proud of sets that you've worked on oh yeah asking me to pick between my kids I like the one that got a scholarship so world-building is I find two different sorts of rewarding one is when you're working within a known trope space and you're able to really knock it out of the park I know you guys haven't seen armin kent yet but early on in that arc planning phase both Sean main and I were doing some exploration about whether or not there was enough good material to populate all of those cards right because some world premises just don't scale and it's not based on the depth of the mythology it's based on the depth of what people know like the job isn't to make trivia it's like you have to play into what what is in the zeitgeist and I was like I was really not super positive on the prospects of an egyption world as like yeah it's been done to death and there and just going through that research phase just digging down in google image search I was like oh god no no one's no one's knocked this out of the park yet no one's done this yet people have played in that space the best versions actually of Egypt are kind of the sci-fi takes on it where it's like a really interesting twist on taking the aesthetic and completely recontextualizing it but so far is taking the mythology itself and delivering an alternate version of it that is really really fun to be able to show people a version of something they already like that is just better than what they've seen before hopefully and this is me I'm whatever I'm being selfish yeah it's great serous is another example of that that's very rewarding and also when you're able to rock a Henry Ford and be like had I asked the people what they wanted they would have said faster horses people didn't know that they were going to really like Cal adesh right Cal adesh started as we need an artifact set this is in the product lineup this is a good home for it we don't want it to be mirrored in because mere dunes now new phyrexia and that's kind of off message for we're doing so not mirrored an artifact set steampunk magic hasn't done that yet let's do steampunk but it's you know it's not going to be steamed because the game's called magic so and none of that dirty brown stuff like I don't want 450 cards of dirty Brown rusted metal so we could we could set it in India because you know of British stuff and steampunk is Victorian yeah but none of them let's let's not do that that whole colonial thing that's not super awesome for people so yeah steampunk that's not steampunk in the Victorian that we stripped all the Victorian out of and gave the veneer of a fantastical India right I I know one actually emailed me and asked for that but holy God it's so much fun and it looks so good and so it feels really really good went through our process we're able to come on something that we haven't you know we haven't seen before there's nothing to that concept push kickoff document that presentation was really hard because we could not find any images of what we wanted like it just didn't exist the images we had the starting place of Cala desh was jewelry was ornate jewelry and we said hey look at that earring show me a gear made out of that and then we built a world from those gears so over delivering on expectations and delivering on the lack of expectations those are those are my favorite I know those aren't particulars but I'm not I'm not going to do that okay thanks alright so you've talked about sort of the ironed a process for the main block releases are there similar iron D processes for like commander sets or conspiracies yeah yeah typically they are smaller teams but certainly there is always a creative rep on let's take commander for example there is a creative liaison on commander that is working with them about who the commanders are what the cards are commander is for typically a very enfranchise crowd and so we get to do kind of insightful throwbacks and know let's set this went on Kanagawa and people will get a kick out of that but yeah the price it's not as long and often not as structured but that collaboration is absolutely a part of everything we do Thanks Thanks it was similar vein to his I just wanted to see like you three prints going on with modern masters and I want to know where do you choose to do different art and where's the story being told like but terminate you see a Sun Titan being destroyed and then there's a raised dead where sometimes being brought back what do you find use art and what do you find to make those sure so when when I was working on those master sets or any 100% reprints set my target for when to when to there when you make new art for an existing card it's one of two things it's either alt art right where it's typically a side grade we're just making it different like promos for example right they get alternate art and then there's facelifts where there's something that we honestly think we can make better and so I work I would work with the developers and have them give me kind of a stack rank list of what the most exciting cards were what we're going to be the most meaningful to players to see again and then pick those that I thought I can honestly facelift and improve in a way that people would find exciting but in my opinion just changing the art for the sake of changing the art doesn't really make people happy and we actually saw that with from the vault legends all of that art was was perfectly good - excellent and it's like yeah but part of the value of the skew is people really like alternate art and so we arbitrarily changed half of it I did that I was told to and I did it nobody liked it that was for nobody and so I loved to face liftings I wish we would do less alt art one word like the you got to Invitational cars were made after the people that created the cars and now you have the new ones which are there there's a vein that people don't like that where do you why is that done as such or is that just because why do we take real world people off of cards because it breaks immersion because it's vanity press and you know the game needs to be for everyone and when you do that it's nothing against those cards or the people represented on them it's just it becomes trivia right of who is this and why does it feel a little out of place and so you know no one's going to show up to people's houses and take their Invitational cards away you get to keep them forever but as we reprint them going forward we want it to feel of the time of the place and you know we don't want to cater to too few people with any given decision we want we have a global audience and we want to do the correct thing for the most people thank you thanks hey yeah this is outside your area that I'll ask anyway I was just wondering how much computer simulation you do and playtesting if any ah I can answer that okay I thought that could happen I can tell you that I do zero computer simulation when I'm looking at pictures and coloring at my desk okay [Music] okay I thank so much for disclosing so much it was pretty cool a big part of the game itself is the large set versus the small set and a lot of times or at least so far there's a shift in tone you know what we literally call that but the tonal shift pretty good man you nailed it um how much of the world building three weeks are spent trying to identify the large block versus the smaller block or do you have a mini cycle that mirrors this development as a follow-up for the small Senate its that follow-up push that typically owns the brunt of that we talk about it a lot in our initial world building when we're trying to front-load that work of what that tonal shift will be for example in Khalid Esch the skyline has a good deal of amusement park on it right in ether revolt it squares off the building's change and that whimsical skyline becomes harsher and more right-angled now we didn't get a lot of that right-angled concept work out of the push Prime out of that first three weeks but we set up the skyline so that we could a be it and those results from the follow-up push so we think about it early enough that we can set it up with the primary push and then if we need to we can pay it off with the follow-up push I think that's that's a great question I didn't know people cared thanks for great suck water your contingencies your crisis continues you say you're in week two week three and it's really not where you want it to be how would you handle that like the quality's just not well I mean I'm trying to think of the worst situation we got ourselves into like how do you plan for that scenario or we plan for that scenario by having already worked with the illustrators on multiple multiple things right some of them have been card artists working with us as partners for years before we bring them in-house right and we've never had someone the real liability honestly because we have a sense of their talent they the reason we bring them in is they then just smash and stuff out of the park for years for us the real liability is if someone were to come in and just crumble under the environment and the pressure of an office environment and we haven't had that happen the times when we found ourselves short or thin in places it's been our fault like going back to shards of Ellora which was we were working on that in 2006 it was the first full world guide that I art directed we we didn't know like we didn't even have placeholder names for things Bant wasn't Bant it was the white green blue house and we were staying house so it wouldn't say guild because of Ravnica an esper whoo god Esper was really hard we knew that every creature there was going to be part artifact and so we wanted it to be you know they replaced parts of themselves but we hadn't really thought about it because the the idea at the time was that idea that like words are more written flexible than pictures are let the pictures come first and Zoltan Boros and Gabor Xie came in Hungary and I remember at some point they just really fixated on it like it was it was nothing to solve and they were going to do it and they worked really hard and it just wasn't working and it wasn't working and Gabor who's like I don't know 600 feet tall I remember him coming over to me and he's like JJ blue is the big suck and I was like yeah buddy it is I know there's blue is the big suck but that was our fault we hadn't talked about it enough we hadn't front-loaded enough work now when people come in like four dragons of torque here we're not talking about okay there's five to colored dragon clans and there's going to be a white blue one because they're Ally colors and led by an ironically a white blue dragon so I don't know figure it out no we're talking about a jatai and it's perfectly reasonable to ask someone to solve for the white blue dragon clan but it becomes an opportunity when they get to prove themselves and solve for jatai herself right and that just takes us front-loading the work and setting them up for it to be a good experience and a rewarding experience because to your initial question I've rambled a little bit they already have the talent now if someone did come in and choke we would we would use the flexibility in the in the system and just bring in more artists on that backup push like there have been some times if if we scoped it correctly and we're like man this is this is a lot for five people we can just add people to that solution and I'll walk into Magic's Director of Operations and be really pitiful and I'll be like Ken not going to be able to do the thing you asked to do so I need another five thousand dollars to bring in another person and Ken will be like I will give you ten to shut up and get out of my office and I'm like yeah I work well with people so you know as long as you scope it correctly you can you can achieve things all right that looks like it thank you guys I really appreciate it

Channel: GDC

Views: 67,291

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, magic the gathering, game design, game production

Id: 9LijlGLFKTE

Length: 67min 2sec (4022 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2017