Friday, December 5, 2008

Suggestions for Version 1

While I am basically done working on MTG Forge version 1, I wouldn't mind trying to add something to it which would increase its replay value. I know version 1 can get boring and I'm not sure when version 2 will be playable with a few cards. The hard part about asking for suggestions is that most people don't know which features are easy or hard to add, which I completely understand.

My only suggestion is a simple quest mode. You would start out with a basic deck which you would improve by earning money. Basically MTG Forge would look and play the same but you would earn money for each game that you won and you could buy cards and booster packs from a store. This would make the game harder since your cards would be less powerful, say bye-bye to Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt.

I can't really think of anything else to suggest that is easy to program. Let me hear your suggestions and what you think about "quest mode".

p.s.
Did anyone enjoy reading through this article that I typed about Magic's humble beginnings? I thought it was very interesting. The article was written by Magic's creator Richard Garfield.

7 comments:

Rule said...

I really liked that article about the beginnings of Magic :-)

Unknown said...

I dunno, I think quest mode would be a lot of extra effort for the v1 architecture... unless the bulk of it would be directly ported to v2 when ready.

I think you should just concentrate on helping us to refine the card codebase, incorporating the cards we've posted, and making sure to remove all hard-coded cards when they've been replaced by keywords. I know that of the global pump spells I submitted there are still a couple of them hard-coded.

I submitted an attempt at adding comes into play tapped and cycling, but they don't apply to lands, because lands just get moved into play, without checking for these special abilities... that needs to be looked at.

Another suggestion - figure out a way to modify the graveyard list window to allow us to play flash-backs and unearth.

Maybe it might be simple to copy some of your mana parsing code to v1 to handle hybrid. There are a ton of simple "cards.txt" cards that become available if you make that one change. Make it for December 24th's release.....

Anonymous said...

Quest mode would be *AWESOME*. However, it would probably take a long time to implement correctly, with all the bells & whistles.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Rob Cashwalker completely, except for putting you on a deadline for Christmas. ;-)
Because, lets face it, once the current batch of cards have been properly added, somebody will have made new cards and found a way to add new keywords and and and... well, you get the point.

In the end, V1 will continue to evolve and change as long as there are people playing it.
V2 may shift the main attention away from it, but even then there will be die-hards still using V1.
(at first because V1 has more cards, then for old times sake and then just because they can)

Having said that, quest mode... mmm... yummy???

Anonymous said...

A good quest mode would be very, very nice.

Forge said...

Hybrid seems alot easier than a quest mode. I have hybrid mana working in version 2.0.

Cashwalker,

"I submitted an attempt at adding comes into play tapped and cycling, but they don't apply to lands, because lands just get moved into play, without checking for these special abilities"

Handling lands is difficult, because they have to be treated like a special case. Currently lands do have not hold a SpellAbility object like all other Magic cards. In the future I could change that, so that lands have a SpellAbility.resolve() that just puts the land into play instead of just mechanically removing it from your hand and putting it in play. If all cards had a SpellAbility it would make the programming more general, and general code is good.

Forge said...

"Another suggestion - figure out a way to modify the graveyard list window to allow us to play flash-backs and unearth. "

I would have to add a "play" button when you viewed the graveyard. Everything else would work, but I'm not sure about "removing the card from play" that both flashback and unearth require. I'm guessing that would probably break something, but I'm not sure.