Wizard101 Interview
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Q: What was the impetus behind creating card-based combat, and how did you manage to break it down so effectively to make it simple to understand and yet have the layers of thought behind it (like the whole element of the round-by-round power points)?
Coleman: That's the real trick, isn't it? One of the hardest things we've had to face was to strike a balance between depth of game play (which is necessary for our CCG to feel strategic) with an approachable interface; we had to find a way to layer the design concepts so that a player could start with just the basics and learn new elements over time. The thought process is something like: start with health, damage and healing spells. Pretty straight-forward. Now let's add in accuracy, damage ranges, and spell ranks. OK, that works. Now power points. seems like that might be confusing, so let's marry that concept to the spell rank, make them one and the same. That works! Oh, and hey, let's tie that into mana consumption, too.
It takes a lot of iterations, we would try one idea, toss it out, then try another. What was it Thomas Edison said, (I haven't failed, I've just found 10,000 ways it doesn't work?) That's a lot like design, it required a fair number of tinkering to make it feel right. The basic concepts haven't changed much since we first had the idea, but the devil (as always) was hugely in the details.
It's hard for me to even remember a time when basic RPG concepts weren't something completely familiar the idea of (hit points) seems so basic, right? But if you want to stretch outside of the normal audience, you have to go back and explain these things. You have to explain how hit points work, and experience, and really build the experience from the ground up.
