State of Game Design 2023

State of Game Design 2023

It’s traditional as a year comes to a close to look back on what you’ve accomplished over the last 12 months. As the head of the Game Design team I’m tasked with the responsibility of providing perspective on what we accomplished in 2023. This past year we released three booster sets:

• League of Villains

• Undaunted Raid

• Jet Burn

League of Villains

League of Villains was our last booster set with our classic Prerelease kit, a large box designed for retailers to distribute to players. Undaunted Raid introduced the Player Prerelease Kit which contained everything a player needs to play inside: boosters, promos, informational cards, and a box you can use to contain your stuff for the event. Our aim was pretty simple: streamline Prereleases for both players and retailers. The verdict? This was an overwhelming success as being able to hand each player a single item improved lives for the folks running events while players got a neat keepsake for the event and a certainty they’d receive all the materials they paid for at Prerelease. You can expect to see us continue with the Player Prerelease Pack in future releases.

Where League of Villains represented the end to the classic Prerelease Kit and Undaunted Raid the launch of the new version, Undaunted Raid represented the last set with our classic UniVersus cardback before we transitioned to the new version in Jet Burn. Credit for the sake of this redesign lies with our excellent Creative team who worked hard to bring the vision to life. We worked closely with them to provide feedback from a player’s perspective, and it was a magical moment at the company box opening party online getting to hold the new cards in our hands. The rough steps to building a new product goes something like this:

1. Idea

2. Prototype

3. Test

4. Feedback

5. Change

6. Repeat from Step 2

The cardback change also came with updates to our symbols and how we position data on the front of the card. There was a lot of prototyping, testing, and feedback during that time including at the HLC with actual players at the start of the year. Prototype testing is great, but it can’t compare to the tens of thousands of players using the cards once they’re in the real world. That’s a significantly higher amount of feedback coming in, and a powerful tool in helping us continue the process of building and refining fantastic products. We’ve got some tweaks based on that feedback you’ll see in the future and watching the prototyping process play out for our card design is one of my favorite parts of 2023: it’s a design process working exactly as it should. Coming up with an idea, testing, taking feedback, and making changes. I get chills every time I hold a new card in my hand.

Undaunted Raid

Undaunted Raid represented a significant amount of changes all at once in a single set, so I want to dedicate some space to this set specifically. Our goals for the set included making the opening of booster packs more exciting, streamlining the pack purchasing process, and getting excitement up for fans of the game. To do this we delivered a few big wins:

• Eliminating the “Unlimited/1st Edition” printings. I think the intention behind this design choice was well intended but in practice it led to players feeling disappointed to receive some product over others. This was particularly true when only one version of booster packs had Chrome Rares included in them. A UniVersus fan should be excited every time they get their hands on a box of UniVersus, so making the decision to end this practice was a no brainer. And so far you’ve seemed to agree!

• Re-introducing Chrome Rares. At their inception Chrome Rares were a big hit, and I was excited to lobby with my team to bring them back in Undaunted Raid. Fan engagement shows this was the right thing as “chasing Chromes” is still one of the most thrilling parts of reading posts about new product releases. I lead the team making the game, and I still hold my breath every time I open a booster hoping I’ll see one!

• Adjusting our Secret Rare distribution. Prior to Undaunted Raid there were 2 Secret Rares per set, and they came approximately one in every three booster boxes. We felt, and I strongly advocated, that we could make Secret Rares appear more frequently but still be compelling for high-end rarity cards. In Undaunted Raid we introduced our new distribution: six Secret Rares per set, now approximately one in each booster box. This meant your odds of opening a specific Secret Rare were approximately the same, but the frequency of opening one at large went up. The data shows this has been pretty popular and we plan to continue with this distribution model.

Undaunted Raid was a milestone set for UniVersus, paving the way for Jet Burn after it and a lot of the products we’re releasing next year. For me it holds the mark as the most important booster set we released in 2023 because of the huge amount of firsts it represented.

Challenges

The tournament seasons this year saw us take several banning and errata decisions. We use these decisions to help balance cards and formats after new sets have “gone live.” As I discussed before about prototyping, we have a topnotch squad of game designers who iterate on ideas to turn them into playable designs. But as a team of six people working for several months we just can’t generate the amount of play data all of you can once you get the cards in your hands. Bans and errata help us tweak things that may be problematic and we typically try to use these tools in the following ways:

• We errata character cards. If you’re a fan of a particular character, it’s a real bummer to not get to play that character anymore because of a banning so instead we adjust the text so you can still play your favorite persona.

• We ban problematic non-character cards. Players are less likely to build an identity around a given attack, asset, or foundation, and we don’t want to live in a world where lots of cards have different actual text for play than what the card says on it.

When we make banning and errata decisions we use several criteria to help us make the decision:

• Tournament play data (how often a card appears in decks, how much it wins, what cards it appears with, etc.)

• Internal testing data

• External feedback

Back Alley Haymaker was a card we had our eyes on for much of the year. It had been a popular staple in decks, but within the bounds of “strong but not over-played.” Post-Nationals the data clearly showed it was warping metagames and we took action. We had suspicions this was going to be true, but needed stronger data to be certain. Because of the impact to players of losing access to a card, we take seriously the responsibility of making a decision like banning one which is why it took a bit longer to make the final call on Back Alley than some fans on social media would have liked.

Looking Ahead

Throughout 2023 the Game Design team spent a lot of time examining what makes UniVersus great, but also the challenges it faces as a game. One challenge struck us as the most significant impediment to future growth: onboarding new players. UniVersus has a high skill ceiling, but learning the game as a new player is incredibly daunting which leads to many fans leaving before they have time to fall in love with the game we care about so much. I’ll be sharing with you some changes next year to help address that while keeping the core of the game the same as the one our long-time players fell in love with.

2024 will also represent our most ambitious foray into the amount of great worlds we bring to UniVersus. Early on this year Game Design was brought the challenge of working with more worlds faster while still producing high quality products. We settled on Challenger Series, the first release of which launches in just a few weeks! I’m excited to see this fevered dream I came up with on a car ride home from a team meeting in Bellevue, Washington come to life. It’s a lot of fun to play, and the work our Creative team did to make the collector booster really dynamic for fans who like to “bling” out their decks is breathtaking. Sharing this product line with you is one of the things I’m most excited about in 2024.

We’re also shifting to delivering four booster sets per year instead of previous years which maxed out at three. This is another step in the direction of allowing us to bring you more worlds to explore and really expand the notion of UniVersus being the game “where worlds collide.” Yu Yu Hakusho: Dark Tournament represents our first step outside the world of My Hero Academia in several years, and I’m thrilled at the first-of-its-kind release experience our Organized Play team has put together. MHA will return for Girl Power later in the year before we close on visiting Attack on Titan. Our first set, Battle for Humanity, is over a year in the making and I’m so so thrilled to share the process of making it with you. While all of our sets next year are fantastic, I think the work we’ve done in B4H is going to blow your minds.

In Conclusion…

There’s no doubt in my mind 2023 will go down in the history books as one of the most significant in UniVersus history. My hope is that despite that it will pale in comparison to what we’ve got coming in 2024! Thanks to all our fans who joined us on the journey this year, and I look forward to sharing with you what we’ve been working on over the past few months.