This weekend, we'll be blogging from Sierra City, CA! We've all gone up together for some 'team building exercises'. Just kidding. Actually it's for fun. One of the things we've been doing is playing Magic: The Gathering. I've been playing Magic on and off since it first became popular around 1995. Each time I come back to the cards, I think it'll probably just be more of the same. But the game continually surprises me. The designers keep finding new ways to twist and recombine old mechanics, and keep introducing new abilities and rule variations that revitalize the game. I figure there must be some good design lessons from Magic that we can apply to Overgrowth. Here are three of the design choices that I think have made Magic great.

1. Five color organization

The world of Magic is broken up into five elemental colors. Each color has its own temperament and suggests its own gameplay style. For example, green focuses on large creatures and spells that cover the land with overgrowth:

Red, on the other hand, is all about fire, speed, and powerful damage spells. The colors are carefully maintained to be distinct and balanced. Each color synergizes with two allied colors and antagonizes with two enemy colors. The colors provide a simple structure that organizes the whole world of Magic.

This type of organization - high level, intuitive, and distinct separation of classes - is characteristic of a lot of great games and stories. The Lord of the Rings primarily concerns five archetypal races: humans, dwarves, elves, hobbits, and orcs. Starcraft includes three quite distinct species: the Zerg, Protoss, and Terran. The classes in each of these cases, like the colors of magic, occupy opposing points on a circle of possibilities:

Image on the back of every Magic card.

In Overgrowth, we already have an organization system quite like this: Rabbits, Wolves, Dogs, Cats, and Rats form a pentagram of dispositions. Here's what these species might look like if they were Magic cards:

What do you guys think about this kind of organization scheme? We will talk more about distinctions between the Overgrowth species a bit later.

2. Every card has a use

In the early days, many magic cards were fairly useless in competitive play. This meant a lot of casual players ended up with weak cards and decks that sputtered along, barely able to make any non-trivial plays. To get a deck really roaring required buying a ton of cards. Plain, weak cards like Mons's Goblin Raiders and Merfolk of the Pearl Trident perhaps made bombs like Serra Angel and Shivan Dragon look more epic, but they diluted the fun of the rest of the game.

Old cards (shown above) had inconsistent coolness. New cards are all at least kind of interesting.

These days, Magic prints very few dull cards. Pretty much every card can find a useful place in the right deck, and even the really bad cards tend to have interesting or unusual mechanics that at least make them fun to consider. This is not just because useless cards are rarely printed anymore; it's also because each card is designed to have more synergy with other cards in its set.

I think this evolution has made Magic a lot more accessible. Whereas in the past I struggled to make workable decks out of hundreds of cards, now I can pick up a random pack of 75 and immediately pick half of them to form a pretty powerful deck.

I think we can apply this principle more or less directly to Overgrowth. For example, it may seem cool at first to have rats that can be totally dominated by the other species, but I think it will be more interesting in the end for the rats to have their own redeeming skill set. Giving every card, species, weapon, etc a viable use is a way of making the 'balanced' rock-paper-scissors gameplay that players tend to enjoy.

3. Flavor text and flavorful art

Magic somehow manages to tell compelling stories directly through the cards. Sure, there are Magic novels and other expanded universe media, but these only add to an already flavorful world. The cards accomplish this storytelling through three primary outlets. First, many cards have flavor text, which are little sayings, character quotes, and observations at the bottoms of the cards. Second, card art depicts a consistent and specific world. Each set of Magic cards takes place in a unique environment with a unique story. Artists are given detailed style guides and you can get a great feel for what is going on just by looking at the illustrations. Third, the actual card mechanics are carefully thought out to reflect the setting. For example, in the Ravnica set's story, there are four competing guilds. Each guild has its own special mechanics and design tendencies. For example, the Boros guild focuses on fast, small creatures whereas the Selesnya guild concentrates on slower but bigger beasts.

'Mana producing artifacts' for three of the Ravnica guilds.

Magic's flavoring is a great example of implicit storytelling. In most games, whether on paper or on screen, players don't want to be bogged down with lots of reading or force fed stories. For example, Metal Gear Solid 4 got a lot of criticism for being half cutscenes. It's important to keep story from interfering with gameplay.

How can we apply Magic's success in this regard to Overgrowth? One really direct way would be to give inventory items some associated flavor text. In editor mode this would be easy - the flavor text would just pop up in a box in the item browser. In the actual game it'd be a bit trickier. Maybe we could give items inscriptions, or they could be found with notes or verbal descriptions, or the flavor text could be memories your character has about the items?

Do any of you guys play Magic? If so, what aspects of its design to you find notable? Do you think collectible card game design is applicable to video games?

I've started prototyping the fighting in Overgrowth, and found that the charged attacks in our old design doc were too complicated to be fun. For now I reverted to the Lugaru attack style, where players hold the strike key down and automatically attack when the opponent is within striking range. However, I've also added initial blocking and grappling. Here I am on the left about to block an attack from rabbot:

Fight Controls

Below are the controls so far! I'm leaving out Jump and Crouch for now -- I would like to keep the combat simple at first, to make sure that the foundation is solid before building on it too much.

Basic controls:

Strike(hold) - attack when an enemy comes within range
Move(tap) - dodge an attack if timed right, opportunity to counter-strike
Grab(hold) - block if far away, clinch if close

Clinch controls (dominant):

Move+Grab(release) - throw in movement direction
Strike(tap) - hit grabbed opponent

Clinch controls (victim):

Move(tap)- struggle to get free
Strike(tap)- hit opponent
Grab(tap)- attempt counter-grab (if timed with enemy strikes)

These controls are mostly working in the current build of Overgrowth, and should make it into the next alpha for those who pre-ordered! I could really use feedback on how the controls feel. I am considering removing the block -- I think it might slow down the gameplay too much, but it's hard to tell without more playtesting. Do you have any thoughts on these fighting controls?

We just released the first scene of the Overgrowth webcomic -- click here to check it out!

We found that making storyboards is a fun way to get a better sense of the setting and characters, so we wanted to try making a longer one. It turns out that an extended storyboard is a comic! Jeff made the comic viewer, Aubrey drew the artwork, and I wrote the text.

What do you think of the comic so far? Do you think we should make more scenes?

Most people see E3 as a tradeshow mainly good for creating a press frenzy for mainstream game companies and their upcoming products. However, while E3 doesn't seem super indie friendly at first glance, I would argue that it's definitely worth attending. Here's why:

It's Affordable

E3 tickets are free for gaming industry professionals, even those working for small indie companies. Compared to the Game Developer's Conference which cost me $175 for the cheapest type of ticket, this already seems pretty good. If you want to have an official booth at E3 though, that's when things get pricey. Fortunately, Indiecade is working hard to solve this problem and managed to provide subsidized demo stations on the expo floor this year where indie developers could show off their game projects.

Hands-On Market Research

E3 is all about providing live demonstrations of the technologies of tomorrow. Understanding how gameplay intertwines with a control scheme is easiest when you can actually play a game. I was definitely excited to get my hands on games like Halo ODST, Arkham Asylum, Left For Dead 2 and Ruse. I had hoped to try more 3rd person combat platformers (because they are most relevant for Overgrowth), but the God of War III line was super long and Splinter Cell Conviction demo was being played by members of the Ubisoft team.

Networking Opportunities

E3 puts you in a sea of 40,000 people from all areas of the gaming industry so you never know exactly who you'll bump into. While waiting in line just to get into E3, you may find yourself standing next to the principle engine programmer for the Halo team (yes the lovely Corrinne Yu). Anyone you see holding a fancy looking camera is probably affiliated with a major gaming news site, so go say hello (I stalked as many as possible). Those people at the front desks of publisher booths might make a habit of redirecting everyone with publishing inquiries to their company's main corporate phone number, or they might be producers themselves, happy to give you their personal business card. Any afterparties you can find are networking bonus rounds.

Watching Pros Promote

The big companies put a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to get people excited about their games. Aside from using amazing models and awesome celebrities like Richard Marcinko (think Sam Fisher but in real life), companies also have PR pros describe their games during live demos. Some of these promoters could probably make Pong sound next-gen. I'll definitely be trying to capture their energy and style if I end up manning an Overgrowth demo booth at future conferences. A common tactic is to come up with special names for game features. Homefront, for example, is powered by the new "Drama Engine" which will do things like cause debris from explosions to land dangerously close to the player's position instead of exploding randomly.

In conclusion I think the conference was pretty useful. Indie developers might not need to send their whole team to E3 but it's good to have an agent in the field. Do you guys have any questions you want to ask me about the conference?

Here is what is new in Overgrowth in this weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's done!

John just got back from E3. You can see all of his pictures on our Facebook Page. He's going to write up some more on that pretty soon. With E3 just ending, Apple's WWDC is just starting! Luckily I received a student scholarship from Apple, so I will be attending this week. WWDC doesn't really lend itself well to photographs like E3 but I am way more excited about it. We should get Overgrowth up and running on Snow Leopard pretty soon, and I am really excited to test out the new Mac OS X developer tools.

In Overgrowth development news, here are a few highlights from the source repository:
- New xml file formats
- Decal saving and better hotspot saving
- Some bug fixes
- More physics editor stuff, but it's not ready yet for real use
- Added ragdoll flip recover for Rabbot
- Added aggressive rabbot
- New terrain simplification (OffTheGrid)
- Added Rabbot health
- Improved shove
- Added duck under shove move
- New cursors
- Bug fixes

Thanks as always for all the support! See you guys in IRC and the forums.

To get some discussion going, what do you guys think about the new iPhone announced at WWDC today?