The Future of Draft: an Interview with the Game Designer
Part 2 of notmydance's insightful interview with Sam Stoddard, the lead designer of Snap's new Draft mode.
If you missed it, catch part 1 of this interview at the link below!
notmydance
Sam Stoddard, how involved have you been with the limited-time game modes in Marvel Snap during your time at Second Dinner?
So, [when I was hired] we had Deadpool's Diner which had come out previously, and Jules had done High Voltage. Sanctum Showdown was very close to or already completed. Glenn Jones had shepherded and designed that one. I came in with we need more game modes, as that was kind of the big push as of then.
Which game mode did you start working with or on?
The first one I designed and pushed for was Grand Arena, but due to timing how much work had to go into it, we ended up doing High Voltage: Overdrive first. Glenn had the big idea behind a lot of what Team Clash was, I was the one who led the engineering team and the rest of the design team to get all those ideas together. That is basically what my job is – taking these ideas for various game modes or various features and kind of becoming the vision holder for that team. Working with game designers and UX people and engineers to figure out how we take that initial vision into something that players can actually play.
Considering you were a lead designer of Grand Arena, what about Grand Arena inspired Draft mode?
Being able to have alternate versions of cards where you've got your regular card, but you also have your version of it in Grand Arena where now there's extra text on it. That’s important that we have that ability to do some LEGO-ing of abilities on cards. Having the Skills in Grand Arena was another one we're able to reference on these cards. Also in Team Clash, you start getting these abilities that can interact with [specific] cards. So we can add things onto cards so they're more than just their base card.
I had no idea other limited-time game modes heralded in features that were needed for Draft! Did any other game modes have features needed for the eventual Draft mode?
Arena Grande, the April Pool's event, did! It’s a good example of when we got duplicates in. If you look at those decks, a lot of them are things that were like very silly, the one that I made – I thought it was the most hilarious – was the Hulkling deck. Because obviously it's very silly that you have this deck that is nothing but Hulklings, but it works! These are the kinds of things that very early on felt like Snap but there's something else going on that's different… that's exciting. There were a lot of these things that I might not want to play the game [with] all of the time, if I was playing them in a constructed format because things would just become too stale. But when you're trying to use them in a draft environment, where you've got to make all these decisions and you're not going to have every time, that's where you’re getting these dreams of, “I have three or four Thors, and that's a crazy dream.” But if you get to have that happen, like wow! That is super fun.
In limited-time game modes, these other versions of cards are very strong. What happens in Draft mode if a combination is too powerful?
The nice thing with Draft is that drafts end. The answer is that we're trying to make our drafts very quick. Even if the rogue-like elements allow some people's final deck to be super broken, you only get to play it through up to five wins. You don't get to play this thing forever. You get to make the deck and then hit the final end state of Draft. You only get to go through it once. If you lose to somebody's deck which is crazy because they have this super 1-Cost Galactus… well, okay. I lost, but at the same time you can get right back into it, play the rest of your games and you know that's not inherently a problem with the whole environment. We can sculpt these very powerful rare things that don't happen very often and something that's fun to chase after. I want to make a lot of decisions in my draft to get the super powerful thing that's very hard to accomplish. That's a fun quest for people.
With these building blocks of limited-time game modes, we have gotten Sanctum Showdown Surge recently – a combination of Sanctum Showdown and High Voltage. Might we be seeing versions of Draft in the future with Sanctum Showdown scoring or maybe starting out with a champion like Grand Arena?
I don't want to go too into teasing that, but when I was conceptualizing Draft, [building blocks were] a big part of it, and not even just Draft. As I've been taking over the feature design/vision holder/product owner [role] for all these game modes, a lot of it was that idea of I want to have stuff with that sort of building block ability to mix and match things. I think that gives us that ability to be able to do these new things as a live service game, that’s important. The great example is Sanctum Showdown Surge. Adding the extra card and Energy really gets you to reconceptualize things quite a bit about, “How do I think about this and this version of Sanctum Showdown differently than the core version of Sanctum Showdown?” Similarly thinking in the future, if you are drafting for High Voltage versus drafting for standard Snap, you will just draft differently and that is one way to add in a lot of new and different things over time.
What about a version of Team Clash or Grand Arena with Draft mode features, is it ever possible to break into that?
One of the most dangerous parts of any kind of game design architecture is saying stuff will never happen. When you look at Snap's core design, there were a lot of things that have taken us a long time to get around to. Even as we first started working on Draft mode, there are certain elements of the game that said, I'm always going to have twelve cards. So, what happens if we have a different number than twelve? And the answer was that there are certain things that just break because as [Marvel Snap] was being designed, the initial idea was always twelve. So we wrote down there's always twelve cards. That's the kind of thing that I've tried hard as I'm designing to make sure that I'm not doing. Never saying that we're never going to do XYZ because at some point in the future, we may want to do Y or Z. So, it's a thing that obviously [we] want to make sure this stuff is theoretically available [in] other places even if there's no real plan to use it yet.
How do you tackle that replayability for Draft mode in making new and unique interactions?
Augments add a lot of that interest. The thing I really liked about Augments was they added the ability to get a lot of combos. Also, it solves a big synergy problem where I can have Augments that are sort of more focused for one deck or a another, and by putting a card that would not normally show up in that deck with a different Augment, I'm making it so that there's a lot more versions of that deck that run around and can exist. The optimal version of many of these decks will not be the optimal version. A Move deck is not going to have just traditional Move cards. [I] might want to have Afterimage on my Venom or something. Now as I move these things around, I'm actually clearing out my board but retaining all this Power. Those are the kinds of things that add a lot of replayability and create a lot of new moments that are fun to discover.
Augments seem to add a lot of variety, what would change if you swapped all of the current ones with brand-new Augments? Does that compare to Grand Arena but with different champions?
In both, we can obviously make up a lot of new ones and change which ones are available. That goes a long way for letting us make some sort of future seasonal cadence or some sort of future version of Draft. If we took all the current Augments and swapped them out with different Augments, even if the card pool has not changed at all, it would feel like a very different version of Draft. And that's the kind of thing that I think is important for being able to create these sorts of experiences for people it feels like there's something they've never done before, and I think that is important [for us] to accomplish with this format.
My favorite thing about this game mode is the little robot that comes down and shows on its screen/face your score and I love its design; does it have a name or designation?
There's been a couple of internal names thrown around for it now, but it does not have an official name, and we don't want to externally throw any names out – especially because anything that we would throw out, people would probably latch on to. So, I'm very curious to see if people start calling it something that's clever or if people adopt a name for it. I think that would be very interesting.
Will we be able to see that robot return in the future with Draft mode and how soon might that future be?
Yeah, that one's certainly a big question. It's certainly a thing that there's been a lot of talks about. I'll say Draft is probably one of the most ambitious things that I have worked on since I've been here. It is a huge mode. There're a lot of unknown unknowns with it. There's a lot of like, “Are people going to actually like this?” “What are the parts that people really enjoy?” We're gonna learn a lot as we launch this and we are viewing this first run to some extent as a bit of a test run. I believe wholeheartedly that this is an amazing direction for Draft and I think that people are really going to enjoy it, but one of the worst things you can do as a game designer is the “the children are wrong” thing, right? We’re not just going to keep doing this and eventually they'll figure out they like it. That's not how you should make games! You should make games so that your players enjoy it. We're going to be looking at the feedback, seeing what really worked, what didn't work, and we'll be figuring out exactly what that means for the future of Draft. Because ultimately, we want to design something that players have as much fun as we do when playing it.
What does the future of Marvel Snap and limited-time game modes as a whole look like in the future?
Even beyond Draft mode, a lot of the other things that I and other people have been championing internally are really starting to see the light of day. The biggest one that I'm really excited about is that as Draft comes out is that we have free decks we are giving out by just logging in. I think a lot of people when they come into Snap see somebody playing a deck on stream [and] go, "Oh, I want to build that deck." Well, it sometimes takes a long time to build that deck. We're creating all these ways to really make it much easier for new players to come in and to have these cohesive and understandable decks.
Is there anything else you really want to tease or discuss with me today?
I don't think there's anything else in particular other than it has been great to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day do so well and I am really looking forward to Avengers: Doomsday. I think our creative team has really been knocking it out of the park with a lot of their stuff. I love the Fractured Frontier as something that the creative team has come up with and I love seeing. I can't speak highly enough about our entire team and all of the people that I've worked with on Draft mode. The robot being an example of something that, somebody was like, well what if we did this thing and then they just kind of sketched this thing up and then all of a sudden that became, oh, this [robot] is awesome thing now and we get to work with that great idea. These are the kinds of things that I love about the team at Second Dinner. It is full of very passionate and skilled people. It's awesome to come in with these rough sketches and have other people come in with cool ideas on how to solve things or how to present them in a way that really ties everything together. I'm very excited to see the community's reaction to [Draft mode] and I cannot wait to see how it goes!
This article was featured in-game by Second Dinner during the inaugural run of MARVEL SNAP Draft.
