Q&A with Game Designers - Summer 2022 Edition (Answers): Part 1 (New Features, Gameplay, Events, Alliances)

Welcome to our Q&A with Game Designers - Summar 2022 Edition! Below you can find the answers by our game designers Tim & Joel to the questions submitted by the community here on our forum (see all submitted questions here.

SGG Staff Answering Questions:

  • Tim - Head of Game Design
  • Joel - Senior Game Designer

Index & Schedule

This AMA will be released in three parts, please see the schedule and content below. Please note that all questions were asked and answered in late June.

We have organized the questions into following topics (links will be added for each category, once the answers have been released):

Part I 2022-06-30T21:00:00Z

New Features & Content
General Gameplay
Events
Alliances (Wars, Titans)

Part II 2022-07-07T21:00:00Z

Heroes & Troops
Balance
Quality of Life

Part III 2022-07-14T21:00:00Z

Buildings
Resources & Items
Beta & Player Feedback
Misc / Personal

Join the Discussion

Share your feedback and discuss this Q&A on this topic:

7 Likes

New Features & Content

  • “So… what are these dragons that were mentioned last year?”

    • Tim: We’re still working on it:) It’s a big feature, bigger than any of the events we’ve ever done, and for the first half of the year we’ve been building the foundation for it (involving some buildings and other fundamental elements). In the latter part of the year, we will hopefully get to work on the new kind of gameplay stages and the new type of Heroes. There’s a chance that something reaches beta testing very late this year — but no promises yet.
  • “Are there any plans to expand the base? Currently there are 2 bridges exiting the base. I’m guessing those lead east and west. Where do they lead?”

    • Tim : Heh, we’re not actively working on anything related to the bridges specifically. Can’t comment more than that.
  • “You mentioned in last year’s Q&A that, at that time, you had already begun work on Season 5. are you already beginning work on a Season 6? how far ahead is content (potential content, whether ultimately released or not) worked on?”

    • Tim: We usually start working on a Season about 6 months prior to its scheduled launch, with some preparatory work with Heroes starting earlier. Can’t comment at all on Season 6 at the moment, though — stay tuned.
  • “Loving the artwork in S5 - by far my favourite map (unless AR is on). Each map has a different theme, who drives the inspiration for new map themes?”

    • Tim: We start really early on by scoping out the potential themes, which there are a ton of! S5 got together really nicely — we focused a bit more and a bit earlier on getting the Heroes, the map, the enemies and the stage backgrounds aligned into one cohesive package. Having a bit more time on it also allowed us to refine the art some more, and give some complex new things (such as the Amulets) more consideration.
  • “Are we going to see more Costumes from ToL or past HoTM?”

    • Joel: Many, many past HotMs definitely have a need for them so we’ll try to expand the Costume sets for them as soon as possible! A lot of players have their favorite HotMs, and it’d be really cool to be able to provide extra utility (and hopefully interesting looks) for them.
  • “What is the likelihood of having an event around players being able to swap their unwanted duplicate Heros with others who might hold duplicate copies of Heros they desire. Soul Exchange is a great initiative but let’s be honest, freeing up roster space is appreciated, but 15x5 Heros for 1x5* Hero is an expensive choice to make“*

    • Joel: Direct Hero swaps between players is something we’re not currently considering for Empires & Puzzles. It was a big push for us to get the Soul Exchange into the game — we’ll continue to keep a close eye on how it functions for the remainder of this year (and beyond).
  • “We currently have colorless trainer troops and colorless trainer Heroes. Will you release colorless Titans and colorless Heroes?”

    • Tim: As a game designer, I’m obviously quite keen on looking into what else we could do with the elements someday, beyond what we now have… but I have to say we don’t have any current plans related to this topic. Something for the future, perhaps!
3 Likes

General Gameplay

  • “Do you ever consider updating some core game mechanics, like damage calculation formula, the way how color stacks impact the tile damage, the tiles combinations (power shards/dragon shields) etc. or is it a set in stone that those aspects of the game will never be touched, outside of some new features and events?”

    • Tim: We’re very happy how the damage formula works, so touching it would be pretty counterintuitive. We had to do some future-proofing on it to ensure the formula would still work as intended when Heroes or enemies get notably stronger due to various reasons — but even that was primarily done to ensure the current functionality stays trustworthy no matter what.
  • “What are the biggest changes to gameplay upcoming?”

    • Tim: As always, we hope that upcoming features and Heroes make their mark and contribute to the game in meaningful ways. On that note, we hope that Monster Island — the co-operative Alliance adventure — will provide something completely new every month once it’s running at full capacity. The big dragon-related feature, which I can’t really say much more about quite yet, is also something that will hopefully add a new perspective to many familiar things, from Heroes to stages to PvP.
  • “Another match3 game I play just added a 3x speed mode to all animations which greatly speed up animations. I know SG has said this can add strain on old devices. Is this any more possible now?”

    • Joel: We’re not actively looking into adding a speed-up mode to the game. As with many other things, it will likely have both benefits and drawbacks, but considering how well our core gameplay works as it currently is, we don’t think adjusting it — even on a seemingly simple level (speed) — is really the best way to go.
  • “In a game, where a lot of our time is spent on auto farming, are there any plans on making this less time consuming?”

    • Tim: As said above, we’re not actively looking into changing how core gameplay or Loot Tickets work, at least as of now.
  • Is your team actively discussing any specific ways that the game can grow without requiring more and more screentime?”

    • Tim: We do keep track of screen time, and from our perspective we’re actually extremely mindful of that aspect of the game. One could say that each player probably has something they would like to do quite a bit more of each day. For example, I’d really, really like to play more PvP daily, as I only really engage with Wars and Tournaments; I hope that we could get something extra to do every day on that front. But that is just my own personal preference on that very specific matter :slight_smile:
  • “When are you going to do some changes on daily-routine tasks/quests (they are still the same since the beginning of the game !) or add a new one to give the players some fresh air?”

    • Tim: The daily Monster/Player/Titan tasks will most likely never be in need of a change, as those activities form such a core foundation. But the Path of Valor is — as I’m sure everyone recently noticed — something where we’d hope to make meaningful changes now and again, even in the future. Also, we are planning to do something with the standard quests as soon as we have some time to focus on it — it might take a little while, but we have a very clear plan for that front!
  • “Why the higher lvl defeated titans this POV instead of just defeated titans? It hurts smaller alliances like my own. If I can’t finish the POV path then there is little chance I will buy it.”

    • Joel: With PoV challenges, we want to have a variety of challenges for players to tackle — some easier, some harder. PoV is fairly lenient with its point system and it is not required to complete all tiers of all challenges to reach the end of the path. Of course, if it turns out that many players have issues completing the new path, we may review the point structure to see how it could be improved.
  • “There is severe dis-trust in the forums regarding pretty much all the odds that are stated on the Hero cards: Special chances, talent/ability chances, passive chances. Can you issue a clear statement that you are using an honest, un-tweaked, good, well code-reviewed RNG for all those, using exactly the stated percentages for both the defenses and attackers?”

    • Tim: I believe such concerns regarding RNG have been addressed several times already (though the last time may have been a long time ago)? From my perspective, I can say there is simply no need to tweak the chances in such ways in the game. It’s by far best to keep the system as simple as possible when it comes to RNG. This has been the case from Day 0 of the game’s development; the game is already so complex that doing anything unnecessary with any of the odds would just create problems for us.
    • That being said, some individual specials or talents may have some unintended oddities that were not caught during testing. We definitely try to fix these when we become aware of them. But these are always issues concerning a specific aspect of some very specific thing, not a widespread underlying RNG problem, or anything that would be designed to specifically benefit either the defender or attacker. For example, I think we had a problem with a specific talent in Puzzle Combat that made a Hero’s odds of reviving suspiciously high. Indeed, in that case there was a clear and easily reproducible bug in there — it took a while to identify it, but things were absolutely clear once it was found.
4 Likes

Events

  • “In Season 3 we have received some additional 3-4 star Heroes in the middle of the advanture, but for Season 4 we only received some at the start. Are there any plans of introducing new 3-4 star Heroes for Season 5 later ?” / “Why S4 is the only season without full set of Heroes on each grade?”

    • Tim: We also really, really enjoy adding new Rare and Epic Heroes to existing events, but it’s usually something we get to do only when there’s some extra time available between more urgent tasks. We’ll definitely try to do something for S4 and S5 if we happen to have extra art, design, and development bandwidth available at that time.
  • “With Kalevala approaching, will Sand Empire be replaced by Kalevala, or will it be sticking around? Also, is Kalevala the start of adding new Seasonal events and Heroes”

    • Joel: Kalevala was more of a result of us looking at this summer and realizing that even with a “regular” update (like a new Hero), the Sand Empire would probably not provide quite enough interest during the summer months. We’re evaluating the situation with the Sand Empire and its future. So we’ll check out how Kalevala goes, and that may inform us a bit more on what’s needed for next year.
  • “The majority of players think that War of Three Kingdoms (as it currently is) is broken. Have you any plans to revamp this event to improve the player experience overall?”

    • Tim: It was really interesting to develop and see how players engaged with W3K. It was also pretty clearly meant to be something that we could (or should) improve later on. Unfortunately, balancing the rules and the player experience of bigger competitive events tends to take a lot of time and resources — Alliance Wars had its matchmaking system extensively adjusted and further developed for over a year, if I remember correctly. This means that W3K, considering how it’s a relatively “infrequent” event, may not be at the top of our priority list for now. We definitely would like to develop the experience to be all it could be, but it may not happen immediately.
  • “Do you have any plans for W3K unused flags? What do you think of the event? This is more personal, but why should I put a lot of effort in W3K when I can get poor loot from skirmish, warband and Kingdom, despite an excellent performance?”

    • Tim: W3K loot, specifically, is something we’d still aim to fix within the year. As noted above, it’s unfortunately not at the very top of our priority list… but it sure would be great to get the rewards to at least align better with player performance!
  • “Why is the second generation of Challenge Events (Slayers, Starfall, Gargoyles, Villains) not getting a chance to have a similar life cycle that the old Challenge Events did before being lumped together into a Challenge Festival?

    • Tim: We’ve noticed that player behavior has changed quite a bit over the years — engagement and excitement with certain events does not quite last the same way as it did several years ago. This applied to varying degrees with Slayers, Starfall and Villains. It would have been quite sad if we ended up not having much or any “space” to run those events during the latter half of this year. Combining the three together (and adding some all-new things to the mix while we were at it) seemed like the best way to ensure that players continue to get the chance to engage with these event stages and Heroes.
      Please note that Sanctuary of Gargoyles will remain as its own event for the foreseeable future.
8 Likes

Alliances (Wars, Titans)

  • “Will we see 15 and 16* Titans added in the game?”*

    • Joel: We ourselves sure hope so, too. It may seem like an “easy” thing to do, but balancing them and their loot is not a trivial task. The project has always been pushed further into the future due to it being of lower priority than many other things.
  • “Any plans for more war types?”

    • Tim: Revisiting War Rules, doing more & different Wars, and improving the War of the Three Kingdoms are all things we’d really like to get to at some point. But aside from hopefully improving the loot of W3K, we don’t have anything currently planned yet.
  • “Other ways of increasing alliance participation in more meaningful way?”

    • Tim: We have something pretty big now in development that should go to beta testing in early fall. This is called “Monster Island” — it would be a monthly, Alliances-only event with really interesting co-operative gameplay for Alliances. So yeah, stay tuned and get ready to sink your teeth into this one alongside your Alliance!
12 Likes