Depth
On the other axis from width is a game’s depth, and this is determined by how deeply you can engage with each of its systems.
For example, a knockabout, arcade style karting game may not have much depth to its driving systems, but it will be ‘wide’; relying on weapons and crazy tracks to add interest (compared to a ‘serious’ race simulator, which will usually have incredible depth to its driving model, but may not be as wide – i.e. it won’t have weapons or shortcuts).
For the purposes of this piece, depth is how long can you play a game before you feel you’ve mastered its systems and know exactly how every scenario will play out.
If you find yourself downloading bite-sized games from the app stores then deleting them after a couple of goes, it’s because they have no depth so quickly become boring (that said, it can be therapeutic to play shallow games, letting your muscle memory take over and getting into a game’s ‘flow’).
Even though it has a very small possibility space, Combat Cards has quite a lot of depth. You can spend a long time building the ‘perfect’ deck for each Warlord, and carefully considering where to deploy and move your cards can win you seemingly impossible battles. Then there’s when to attack or Ready, when to take out enemy bodyguards or focus on their Warlord, plus out of battle ‘metagame’ decisions such as which cards to upgrade.
This was a deliberate decision for us, because as fans ourselves we felt that Warhammer 40,000 players want to be able to use tactics and mastery to do well, not just idly tap buttons or have luck determine who wins. But we also wanted to make a quick, easy to play game you can fit into short time gaps – therefore we chose giving the game depth over width.
Design
So, now we’ve looked at a games’ width (the number of options you have) and depth (how much you can think about those options), we can see that those two dimensions give you a games’ possibility space.
We can also plot any game’s position on those axes, which is something game designers spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ll let you in on a little secret here – you don’t need any specific skills to be a game designer – it’s just thinking about stuff.
Before I get lynched by my colleagues, what I mean is that while technically anyone can do games design, the reason you need game designers is that it’s their full-time job to be thinking about this stuff so the rest of the team can be thinking about their stuff.
You’ll often see this in action in videogame studios – someone will suggest a cool idea which everyone gets excited about, but the designers will be the ones thinking ‘cool, but what does that do to the game’s possibility space, and is that a good thing for our intended audience?’ There can, in short, be an element of being a realist / party pooper to the role (though if someone’s idea does fit the intended audience then designers also get the fun job of turning a cool idea into an actual design, so it’s not all party poopery).
Conclusion
Let’s bring this all together and apply it to Combat Cards. With every feature we add to the game, we consider what that will do to our possibility space. Do we want to add more options and widen it? Or do we want to deepen it by adding more to think about in what we already have?
Keeping this balanced is key, because too far either way really limits who can enjoy the game. Too deep and it’s scary, too wide and it’s overwhelming. This is an ongoing topic for us, because it’s inevitable that Combat Cards will slowly become deeper and wider over time. We need to balance this to suit both players who’ve been with us for a while (who want the added depth and width), without overwhelming new players.
If you’ve made it this far, then thanks for letting me go on about a pretty abstract concept, but on the plus side you can now entertain yourself through even the dullest of games by working out if they should have added more depth or more width to make their gameplay more interesting.
As ever you can get in touch via our Facebook page, leaving a comment here, or mailing [email protected].
Thanks,
Stu
Hey Stu,
thanks for the insights, I’ve began playing this game two weeks ago and enjoying it quite much. I have a question regarding depth – specifically Campaigns.
As a new player I try to participate and most often than not, I cannot compete with players having higher level cards and access to different more valuable cards due to their player level.
The current system seems to favor the ‘older’ players or players with a bigger card collection.
Are there any plans to separate the players in different brackets? E.g. having different campaigns running in parallel one for level 1-20 players, 20-40 etc.?
Cheers Dimun
Thanks for the question. We don’t have any current plans to split players across leaderboards because while it’s true that ‘veteran’ players tend to get the top prizes, those players also need more duplicates to upgrade their cards. Conversely, newer players won’t tend to get as many prizes, but what they do get is still relevant to their current progress through the game.
Rather than using multiple leaderboards, we’re aiming to make sure all players get rewards through systems like Missions (which are only about ‘you’ and don’t care how other players are doing) and the upcoming seasonal leaderboards we’re working on. More on this in a future blog post.
I think that one especially important aspect to consider is that the game does not (unlike MtG for example) have any live combat against live opponents.
This is critical because a deck building game’s most important aspect is the precise usage of a specific deck. Exactly as you mentioned in your article, the depth of the play.
Why is this relevant? Because we are essentially building decks to fight against artificial intelligence that (aside from being mismatched -scissors vs paper – or being out leveled) is not very clever and has a massive disadvantage over the actual player.
This means that the player does not have to be overly competitive or be so familiar with the depth of the game in order to win battles. He might not perform top tier in campaigns off the bat but he will not be absolutely smashed and discouraged.
This leads to my main point, being that more depth is better. You said that you cannot go too far in either direction, but in my opinion, a game which is played versus an AI opponent will never be as discouraging and won’t putt off players. I think it will be the opposite. Winning will encourage them to play more and discover how deep the game really is. Instead of just feeling bored by a shallow and repetitive game. Thus introducing new mechanisms and even more depth of tactical choices should be encouraged by the team.
Lastly, there is a sentence which a famous company called Blizzard North (pioneers of gaming) have always said when designing their games. Go all out over the top first, try it out, then reign it back in to a fine balance. So to that I say, go crazy, try new and wild ideas, be bold, and whatever doesn’t stick eventually balance it out.
Thanks for the perspective. We have plans to improve the AI but that work isn’t as high priority as the changes listed in the most recent update. We’re also looking at balancing cards and special rules, and while we don’t intend to go too crazy, we do agree that it’s better to ‘over improve’ something and then readjust it later.
More details on these changes will be shared soon.
Hi there. Nice post and a great game. I been playing during a month and after this time I would find intersting to have a better filter or order options on card list viewer. Or even a small atributes information in each card in list view. It would be nice to help us when building decks. I think it’s a great game but I would put more effort on UI/UX experience. Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the suggestion. We’re working on an improved deck building flow right now, which includes better filters and options to display more stats. Look for this in an update soon.
You talk about how depth is important one of the things that encourages the use of different decks outside of campaigns though is completing objectives to earn experience to level up. However once you reach level 62 there is no need to worry about objectives as the experience only accumulates but no longer serves a purpose. Are there plans to change what objectives give you to encourage more diverse decks or possibly increase the level cap. Personally I have currently got 1634 experience out of 40,000 and don’t see the point in getting anymore so that aspect of the game has become meaningless meaning my deck outside of campaigns never changes as getting my killpack is more a matter of using 1 deck I have found earns it for me the quickest
Yeah, it’s a good point that XP stops being valuable once you hit maximum Rank (though you do still accumulate XP, so when we add new Ranks to the top end you’ll already have reached them or at least be on your way to them). There are very few players at max Rank so far, so solving this problem isn’t super-high on our list of priorities. However it will become more important as more players get to max Rank so expect us to revisit this area at some point in the future. Thanks for the feedback and the suggestion.