14 DAY TRIAL // Hearthstone is now officially launched and already attracting a lot of players with its mix of card-based gameplay, traditional collecting concepts and fast-paced matches and the development team at Blizzard had many of the best ideas for the experience after the team iterated and failed a lot.
Eric Dodds, the lead designer, is quoted by Gamasutra as saying that the title was never a top priority, which means that at one point his entire engineer contingent moved to another project.
This means that the Hearthstone team had plenty of time to create prototypes using paper and Flash, many of which introduced ideas that never made it into the released experience.
But the simple fact of putting them together meant that ideas were flowing around freely and Dodds states, “It’s not rocket science to iterate fast. On Hearthstone we had tons and tons of bad ideas that we needed to try, and then not do.”
Hearthstone has abandoned a number of traditional collectible card mechanics, including tapping, variable resources and minion specific abilities, which makes the Blizzard experience more streamlined and less exhausting to play.
But the team at one point tried to reduce summoning and found that without it, the game felt empty and missed some actual stakes.
The developer adds, “We were trying to simplify something, but we lost so much depth. We just decided to undo it and do things the old-fashioned way.”
Another result was the addition of the single hero power, which exists in order to give players something to do when no other move is available and to compensate the fact that minions are simpler than in other titles.
Dodds also says that the way cards interact with each other was inspired by a talk that was given by the creator of Plants vs. Zombies at the 2012 edition of the Game Developers Conference.
The Blizzard developer also believes that game makers need to focus on making sure that players always have fun and never move into an emotional state where the experience they are interacting with makes them unhappy.
Hearthstone is set to get new content in the coming months, which probably means that gamers will be able to get access to more heroes to choose from and more cards.
At the moment, Blizzard is working on a full Multiplayer Online Battle Arena title called Heroes of the Storm, which is in technical alpha.