Eons ago when the world was young, Forge didn't have a quest
mode. While the 1-on-1 matches,
drafting, and sealed deck mode was engaging, people were clamoring for more. The natural evolution was some sort of quest
mode but the details were fuzzy.
The overall discussion about this new "quest mode"
had one major focus: a limited cardpool where you would earn more cards. While this was a good start, I had to still
hammer out a few details before I started coding. In order to show progress I came up with the
idea that each "level" would have a different title like "Interested
Newbie" up to "World Champion".
While the superficial titles didn't change the gameplay, it did make the
quest mode seem more like a videogame.
I tried to be funny and one level was named "Better
Than Jon Finkel". If you continued
to play one more game after you quest had ended, your title would read,
"Serra Angel is your girlfriend".
This was intended to be a videogame secret but I don't think it
surprised anybody. The girlfriend remark
always made be smile when I saw it.
The quest mode allowed players win new cards but the exact
details were sketchy. A few people
suggested a full-blown card shop but that would require a separate, new user
interface which would entail many more hours.
I took the simple, easy path and players would win a booster pack full
of random cards, this giving them cards that they did and didn't need. (I thought about how to give players only
cards that they needed but that seemed complicated so I decided to ignore the
issue.)
While the quest mode was very simple, it was very
addicting. At first I thought that
quests should be 20 or more matches but through playtesting I learned to enjoy
short quests. Short quests with only 10
matches was the mode that I played the most.
Some people took questing to new lengths and played more than 100
matches.
The quest mode has grown and added many new, exciting
features like a card shop as well as other bonuses like buying pet creatures
that begin the game in play, as well as being able to buy more life (because
you start the game with only 15 but you can have more than 20). The current quest mode awards more money if
you win in under 5 turns and even has special opponents that functions like
videogame bosses which can only be played once after certain events.
Maybe in the future Forge will have XBox badges like
"Won the game with 30 life" or "Decked the computer". Several people have mentioned that they would
like a puzzle mode where you have one turn to win the game. (Years ago the Inquest magazine had a twist,
you had to lose the game in 1 turn.)
What features do you think need to be added or removed from the quest mode?
Enjoy questing,
mtgrares
Posts
5 comments:
Being a keen Magic player and Java developer, I was keen to have a play with Forge but have run into some problems with the 29-Jul-0211 version.
Basically I can't seem to cast any spell. I tap the mana which goes into my mana pool, but when I click on the spell to cast the box at the top left says "Pay Mana Cost " but only the Cancel button is enabled, not the OK button.
Any ideas?
Click on your mana pool in order to pay for the spell.
To pay mana costs, you either have to click on land or the mana pool.
Or you can play the spell first and then tap land.
I haven't played in a while so maybe this has been changed already but when I was playing quest mode my biggest complaint was how much more gold you got for decking someone instead of just beating them. This meant that it was profitable to play a slow control deck and intentionally avoid winning until you drew Jace (or whatever) and decked them. You had to choose between playing boringly or getting very little gold to buy more cards with...
Unknown: Balancing quest mode rewards to make it fun for all kinds of decks is pretty hard. For now, you can tweak it yourself by going to the res/quest folder and editing quest.preferences with notepad or the like. The last 11 rows specify rewards.
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