DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

Welcome to Dead Man's Draw!

Welcome to the Dead Man’s Draw forum! We have been working on this game since 2006, so we are thrilled to give everyone the chance to play it.

You're probably thinking, “You've been working on a mobile pirate card game for 7 years?!”

Well…. kinda.

The truth is that when I was working on Fall from Heaven I designed a mini-game to be playable in Fall from Heaven called Somnium. I enjoyed creating it, and it got a good response from fans. The goal was to boil a strategy game down to that big moment where you decide to risk it all or back off and play conservatively. In Stratego, it’s the moment when you attack an unknown enemy hoping it’s their spy and not a bomb. In poker, it’s when you go all in. And in Somnium, it was in deciding if you draw another card or pass and collect all the cards you’d collected that turn.

Fast forward to 2012. We knew we would be starting a mobile studio, and so we held a game jam where we all pitched ideas for mobile games we would like to play. Somnium was one of the designs selected, and we gave it to the mobile team to create and improve. Through that process, they made it much better than Somnium had ever been. They added abilities to the suits, tournaments with different rules and victory conditions, and turned my old mod into a beautiful game.

We went through a few different themes to find something that really clicked with the gameplay. Somnium was part of a fantasy game, so a fantasy theme was appropriate for it. But the fantasy theme didn’t make much sense apart from Fall from Heaven. We considered a "casino noir" theme, "old west," "bright cartoony" (this one was horrible) and were all locked into making the casino noir version when Leo stopped by my office. I knew we had it as soon as he suggested a pirates theme.

The team has done an amazing job and I couldn’t be prouder of the game they have produced (and I’m having fun playing their other games, but more about those in the coming months). Let me introduce the talented folks that make up our mobile division:

Chris Bray – Lead producer of Stardock's mobile division. Chris was hired to come in and start our mobile studio. He also produced Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion while we got the pieces in place.

Bara Kathawa – Developer, formerly one of our of our web developers that we stole away from Stardock corporate to come help us make games.

Leo Li – Lead artist for Dead Man’s Draw, and concept artist and 2d artist for Fallen Enchantress.

Mat Mason – Developer for Dead Man’s Draw and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

Bruno Sommer – Developer for Dead Man’s Draw and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

I’d also like to thank all the folks at Stardock and our friends and family who have been playtesting Dead Man’s Draw and providing feedback as well as the QA and marketing folks that also worked hard helping us setup the mobile studio and get our first game ready.

A few questions you may have:

When will Dead Man's Draw be released?

Very, very soon. Watch this space for updates.

What platforms will Dead Man's Draw be released for?

iOS on your iPhone, iTouch or iPad. We may support more platforms in the future, but we are starting with iOS.

Will there be more mobile games?

Yes, we currently have Star Trails and Hero Buster being actively developed and played. Those two are scheduled to be released in the next few months.

Why is Stardock making mobile games?

We love strategy games, and we want people to be able to play them whenever and whereever they are. Some strategy games take hours and are better played while sitting at your computer, and we want to make those games. Some can be played in a few minutes while you are wating for the bus, and we want to make those games too. We want to make great strategy games, in every form you want to play them.

Does this mean Stardock is going to stop making PC games?

No way. Stardock may have a new mobile studio, but we still have a lot of exciting PC games to announce and talk about. Stardock is going to be doing more than it ever has in the PC space, not less.

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killswitch469

Join Date 04/2003

Sounds cool. I wish you guys luck with your mobile games division. However, I hope you don't become just an iOS developer. I hope you guys come to droid (and even WP8 at some point) ASAP. I haven't found many games in the google play store really to my liking yet. So Stardock's entrance into the mobile games market interests me.

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Quoting korn469,

reply 1

I hope you don't become just an iOS developer. I hope you guys come to droid

I agree. Please port these games to Android. I would buy them all.

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Great game! Pretty addicting so far, I'm a huge fan! For some reason the apple store is down though, so they won't let me rate it

Hurry up with Star Trails, it looks great! Thanks for all the hard work

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

Thanks for the support guys. We are definitely looking at other platforms too.

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Ok so I've played for a few hours now and I have a few questions:

Why does the player move first? So far all I've found is misery and frustration when going first. It's much like movement in Battletech (old '80s board game, not sure if you're familiar) in that moving first puts you at a huge disadvantage. All those cool cards you get and could possibly string together are worthless because they all depend on your opponent having cards. Every single game I just pick a card and wait for the AI to finish &*^%ing me and then try to recover as best I can. Is this an attempt to push an in game purchase that lets you go second or something? I don't understand. I'm pretty sure a lot of my frustration with this game stems from that.

With the upgrades, is there a tree so I can see what upgrades there are? Is there a way to go back and unlock upgrades that I've "missed"?

The AI seems to have far better luck than I do. I guess that's not a question, and I realize all things are random, but there doesn't really seem to be a high risk high reward strategy, it's all just luck. If I happen to get x card then I can keep chaining things together, but otherwise, there's never a benefit to going beyond three cards, it's just too risky. If the fourth card isn't a duplicate, most of the time it's just...another card. A five of keys when I have the 4 or the 6, so what's the point? That being said, the first "Tournament" has the rule that busts go to opponents. If there was a high risk high reward play style that would work, but there's not! Forcing me to change my strategy WOULD be interesting, but the only strategy seems to be playing it safe, and now it just feels like luck of the draw is beating my broken body over and over.

Why is there a damaging card in deck? The octopus ends up sinking me 4/5 times, yet it doesn't hurt the AI 4/5 times. I'd understand if I could force my opponent to take one, or make him get one on his next draw, but I can't do that. All I can really do is see it coming (If I had the right card at the right time) and leave it for him to...have. The AI is rarely hurt by it and more often than not it forces the AI to draw extra cards and string things together to hurt me more. (Oh look, the AI got ANOTHER cannon. That's only the sixth cannon in a row he's managed to pull out and shoot my top card with.)

I guess that's where I'm at right now. Pretty frustrated. I understand in app purchases are the norm these days, but I despise them as a rule, and will never purchase them. If you'd made it $6 out the gate I still would've bought it, just because I have faith in products that say Stardock on them, and I understand that other people may not have purchased it at that price point...I dunno, I understand the business behind it, but that doesn't mean I like it. I'm slightly disappointed by that. Mostly I feel like the game is alllllllllllmost there but not quite. Having to play an opponent 10 games in a row in the first 5 levels because you're getting owned is pretty frustrating. I'm a gamer, I'm decent with games and strategies and I'm not a noob, and I almost threw my phone. Maybe there's a way to tweak it a little bit. I dunno. I probably won't buy Star Trails until I feel that my frustration levels have been addressed either soon in the game or with a patch.

Excellent level of polish, the game seems to have been fairly well thought out, I don't particularly feel like spending money would help me in the game though, I get owned whether or not I have one of the traits turned on. The story would be more interesting if the people you played in "getting the crew" or whatever that story line is actually gave you little bonuses. Like if...whats-his-face-the-chin-lover-guy made each mermaid card worth one more point per star you defeated him by (3 stars? +3 points to each mermaid card!). I kinda assumed that's what would happen and it didn't, but oh well.

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

It is a weird psychological phenomena that people tend to over-emphasize other players luck (or lack of bad luck) and under-emphasize their own luck. It leaves people with the feeling that, where luck is involved, the AI is getting some special help because it feels like it that are lucky more frequently than the player. We deal with this phenomena in all of our games, as does any game developer that builds games that include luck (and the tendency isn't just with AI players, you often have human poker opponents that feel like they are "hot" but since we know their isn't a computer possibly intercepting results we don't feel cheated).

This came up a lot in Civ4 where your attack odds would be posted as having a 97% chance of winning a battle. And sometimes it felt that having a 97% chance to win was more like a 50% in actual play. Leading lots of people to suspect that the calculation was wrong, that the random number generator was wrong or both. When in fact you did win 97% of those battles, its just that the 3% of losses were remembered and felt so much bigger while the 97% of wins were forgotten.

There isn't a AI advantage to the kraken and such. The deck is shuffled and uneffected by whose turn it is. If you decide to pass, the card the AI draws is the same card you would have drawn.

Though we are proud of the fact that the AI is very well programmed in DMD. That probably seems like a minor feat for a card game, but the interactions of cards can be complex and the team did a great job of creating an AI that plays just like a human player.

As for who goes first. It isn't an attempt to monitize anything. The player went first in Somnium as well, and that didn't have any in app purchases. It just feels more natural for the human player to be able to act first because thats the standard in strategy games. Though I do agree that there is a slight advantage to going second. The second player gets to take advantage of cannons and swords first. The first player gets to take advantage of hooks first.

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I'm fully aware of the psychology of luck, but I'm also fully aware that random number generators aren't random. I'll keep track of each of my games as a small sampling, but I'd love to see the statistics behind a full test that I'm not capable of running. Either way, maybe this just isn't the game for me. I thought there would be more strategy involved, but it's almost like playing the card game War; It's almost 100% luck.

Edit: Doesn't it just drive you nuts when the only active guy on your forums is criticizing you? (I promise I mean well)

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

Heh. No, it's cool. We talk a LOT about the role of luck in strategy games. There is no right answer, it's part personal opinion and part magic. Luck can be good for forcing a player to adapt to circumstances, but bad when the player feels like they don't have control.

Roulette is all luck. It's fun to pretend there is skill involved ("its been Black the last 4 times, its gotta be Red next!") but there is nothing but purely random chance. A competent player is just as likely to win as a master player.

In Magic the Gathering the randomization of the deck introduces luck to the game and forces both players to be constantly evolving their strategies. Unfortunately it also means that sometimes you will simply lose due to bad draws. It also means that the game isn't entirely player skill. A competent player will, on average, lose to master player, but sometimes they will beat them.*

Alternatively Chess has no randomization involved. A competent player will never beat a master player. Every win or loss is entirely determined by the players skill and nothing else.

Those are all great games. Randomization doesn't make a game good or bad. But player and game designers prefer different points on that spectrum. Jon Shafer is a big fan of minimal luck (he'd prefer it for things like world generation and allow things like combat to be as deterministic as possible). But at the end of the day it really depends on the needs of the game, what makes the game the most fun.

For Dead Man's Draw it was important that the game could swing. The more we minimized randomness the earlier in the game you knew if you were going to win or not. Randomization never changed, it was the abilities of the suits that made the effect of that randomization larger or smaller. For example, originally you could steal any card with Cutlass's. That was a huge swing card, if you drew a Cutlass (which was random) you got a big advantage, That was to random. By limiting Cutlass's to only being able to steal cards from suits you don't have we turned it into a rubber band mechanic**. Though it was still a random draw, we maintained the feeling that the player could win or lose the game at any moment and it kept the player interested and focused on the last few draws in the game (with more deterministic solutions the player was bored with the last quarter of the game which was a much larger problem).

I would argue though that DMD floats closer to the Magic the Gathering level of randomness than Roulette. It isn't close to 100% luck, and a master player will beat a competent player most of the time. The strategy comes in playing combos once all the suit abilities are unlocked.

* Unless they are using my Stasis deck which is unbeatable!!!

** Rubber band mechanic is a term that comes from racing games where they would give speed advantages to players that are behind in the race to help them catch up and keep the race competitive.

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Interesting. Especially since most of my friends refuse to play risk specifically because of the RNG.

What I've found with the rubber banding ability of the cutlass is this: The cannon allows me to destroy an opponent's card, and naturally I want to do the most damage possible while preventing him from being able to use those same cards with a hook hand against me. The problem is that the most damage I can do is to remove the last card in a stack so those cards are providing no points, instead of reducing his overall points by a negligible amount (from a 7 to a 5 instead of a 5 to 0), but when I do that, even when he's beating me, he's able to use the rubber band effect. There's no cap! There needs to be a hard cap on the rubber banding effect so that people who are ahead can't negate what should be a viable strategy (suit denial). The worst card is the cannon, but I can't destroy those because if I do, they will be stolen and used against me.

So far my win-loss is roughly at a 1 to 2 ratio. I had a game earlier where up to the 3 card mark I had 4 busts in a row. The same game, the AI had five turns that netted him at least 8 cards (I had one). That's a bit much. Now I realize this was one game, and there are bound to be outliers, but I've only had 2 games that could be considered blow outs, whereas I've lost by blowout probably 1/3rd of my games (1/3 are close wins, and 1/3 are close losses).

I would argue that DMD is far closer to risk than MtG. Your strategy can be completely erased by someone else's luck, whereas in MtG, well built decks are able to handle some bad draws with only minor hiccups.

(would you rather continue this by email so I don't clog up the boards?)

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Derek, thanks for the PC version of DMD. Loving it: it's a well-designed game of chance and strategy which is easy to learn and fun to play.

I'm looking forward to unlocking more of the upper-tier abilities.

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