Hello Guys,

GZMilky here. I am the directing game designer of the game. In the future i want to make posts here, trying to let you guys follow our progress in terms of game design and game mechanics. Today i want to begin with some basic things that we did in the beginning of the project. Basically the first important thing in terms of gameplay was to ask ourselves which parts of MMDoC (we see ourselves as a spiritual successor to that game) were great and we want to keep?
First and foremost it was the board system, which we all loved DoC for. We feel that it really adds a unique experience to a CCG. There were some disscussions as to whether or not it would make sense to change the amount of rows and columns, but after a while we came to the conclusion that it did not.
Next up were heroes. We also felt there was no change needed in this area generally. We do want to give each hero 3 different parameters that he can level, an ability and the card draw mechanic. What we do not want to do is to give any hero more or less starting parameters than 3 (these 3 can be distributed differently eg 1/1/1 or 1/0/2, etc, but not something like seeker with 1/1/2), because that caused problems over and over again in MMDoC. The heroes will also determine your deck. You will be able to choose Creatures and [Fortunes] only from your heroes faction and the neutral faction. Additionally the hero will have spell schools which will allow him to choose spells for his representive spell schools.
Speaking of spell schools, we figured that we will also work with 7 different ones.
Speaking of neutrals, there was a disscussion as to whether or not this is actually needed, because in DoC most of the neutral cards were straight up useless. However we figured that neutrals still have an important role to play, but we want to adjust them, so that overall more are playable. More detail on that on another post though.
Another point is "Quickness". What we mean by this is, that there were not many timers needed and we want to keep that. We do not want to have interactions in your opponents turn as that would require additional timers that make the game feel much slower. Considering that the game is highly strategical, there will be times when players need a lot in their OWN turn to think, but that is ok, because it goes along with our next big advantage of the game:
Competetivness. For a CCG, MMDoC required a lot of skill. This is what we want to keep. We do not want to design a game mainly targeted at casuals, but at those who seek a more in depth experience compared to for example Hearthstone. Nevertheless we want to keep the game as simple and as intuitive as possible as long as we don't have to sacrifice any of its strategical aspects for it. The old saying: "Easy to learn, hard to master" is what we are really aiming for.
Events: There was a disscussion about whether events are needed or if they are actually rather counterproductive. The result was that events are ok. They can help in certain areas, but also bring along some problems. For now we figured that we will keep something similar to events, but might replace it if we find something more fun during our initial tests. More detail on this in another post, too.
Lastly, as i already said we want to keep the 3 main card types:
Creatures (like), Spells (like), fortunes (like). However we identified a major problem with the role fortunes played in MMDoC. They were mostly inferior to spells. Most of the played fortune based decks were using the same neutral fortunes over and over again. Faction fortunes were almost always straight up useless or at least much weaker than similar costing spells. Sure there were some broken ones like Empowered Spell here and there, but this is certainly also not the goal.
We think we came up with a nice solution to this problem, but this is something for my next blog post, where i will be covering this topic in great detail.
Until then, enjoy your time and the updates from our other teams.
Yours,
Kai Krüger