Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #93 - Top Down Design
Episode Date: January 31, 2014Mark looks at how we design when we start from the flavor. ...
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Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.
Okay, so today's topic is something that I've talked a lot about in my column, what we call top-down design.
Okay, so let me start by answering the question I get a lot, which is, why is top-down design called top-down design?
lot, which is, why is top-down design called top-down design? Oh, real quickly, let me define what it means. So top-down design is when we start with the flavor, and it's the jumping-off
point for the set. It starts from a flavor bent. Theros and Innistrad are examples of recent top-down
designs. Like, oh, we're going to do a gothic horror world. Oh, we're going to do a world inspired by
Greek mythology. A bottom-up design is when you start from a mechanical place. So, for example, Zendikar
started as the land set. Ravnica started as a set where we're going to represent the two
colors, make people play two-color gold. Now, no matter which direction we go, we intermingle
flavor and mechanics. So, if our job is done well,
Zendikar feels very flavorful. Ravnica feels very flavorful. But what I'm talking about
is technically when you're building the design, which direction did you come from? So anyway,
people always ask me, where in the world did the term top-down design come from? Now at Now, at first, whoa, sorry. Sorry, traffic, car coming right at me.
Okay, so where does top-down come from?
Now, I kind of assumed that it was, like, you know how you use an expression long enough that you're just like,
oh, this is just an expression people use.
And then I realized, no, actually, I think I came up with it.
So I did a little research.
Here's where I believe it came from.
So if you look at a magic card, the top of the card is the title.
Then there's the art box.
Then there is the card type line that has the subtype, has creature types.
Then you get to the rules text.
Then you get to the power, toughness, and the legal text and collector number.
Well, the top half of the power toughness and the legal text and collector number. Well,
the top half of the card has the vast majority of the flavor because the title and the name and the creature type are all on the top half of the card. So top down came from, oh, we
start from the top of the card and go downward. So a top down design is, well, I know what
the name of the card is and kind of what it looks like,
and, oh, I'm trying to match the flavor of the card making the rules text.
Where bottom-up is, I have the rules text, now I figure out what the flavor is going to be.
Now, we have an awesome flavor text, sorry, an awesome creative team.
Oftentimes, we make a mechanic, and they come up with a perfect match, and so it feels very connected.
But I'm just talking about where we start.
In the end, we want everything to feel meshed and interconnected. But anyway, top-down design
is when you start from a place where flavor is the jumping-off point. And I've talked
about this a lot in this podcast especially, in that one of the keys to creative endeavors
is you want to make your brain attack things from a different angle.
I've talked about this a lot.
If you go at something in the same direction, your brain will hit the same neurons and you tend to get the same answers
because the brain will follow a familiar path.
But if you come at it from a slightly different vantage point, then you're thinking of it differently and you find different answers.
So, for example, when I do top-down design
you just use
Theros as a recent example.
Oh, well, everything I was doing was saying,
oh, does this match Greek mythology?
And so my lens that I was looking
at things through was a lens I'd never
used before. I'd never designed a Greek mythology
before. And so I was making all sorts of
interesting decisions because I was using
a new thing to judge by. That's one of the reasons top-down is nice. And bottom-up also does that where when I was making all sorts of interesting decisions because I was using a new thing to judge by.
That's one of the reasons Top Down is nice.
And Bottom Up also does that where when I was doing Ravnica, I had never done a gold set before that focused on two-color play.
And so when I did that for the first time ever in Ravnica, you know, it guided how I wanted to put things together.
Okay.
So today's podcast is going to be about how we do Top-down design, sort of the lessons of top-down design.
Okay, so thinking about it, I realized that communication theory does a very good job of explaining the key lessons.
So for those that didn't listen to my podcast on communication theory, my podcast, plural,
in communication theory, there's three things that you have to strive for.
One is comfort, one is surprise
and one is completion
so I'm going to walk through top down design through those three lenses
because I believe it gives a good example of what you need to do
to do good top down design
okay so number one, comfort
okay so let's say I'm doing a top down design
I'm going to use Innistrad and Theros as those are the two recent sets I've done that were top-down design.
Okay, so what happens is the first thing you want to do,
and this is when I have both my first meeting of Innistrad and my first design meeting of Theros,
I said the following to my team.
Okay, guys, we're going to brainstorm.
What is everything you would expect that this, you know, for Gothic horror
or for Greek mythology, what would you expect?
So, for example, in Shroud,
we started writing up the board.
We're like, well, we expect vampires and werewolves
and zombies and ghosts
and we'd expect, you know,
nighttime and candles and bump in the night
and we're just writing everything down
that you can think of, you know, victims, and everything that you can think of
that gothic horror would be to you.
And the same for Greek mythology.
It's like centaurs, and medusa, and pegasus,
and minotaurs, and gods.
We wrote everything down that we expected.
And the reason this is important is,
part of doing top-down design,
the reason to do top-down design is that it plays into the concept we call resonance.
And what resonance says is, okay, if you are trying to make somebody,
I, as any kind of creative person, but especially the game designer,
I'm trying to connect with my audience.
I want them to be invested in the game so that they are excited.
Remember, game design is about
creating entertainment and experiences, right? That you want people to experience something,
and you want them to feel something, experience an emotion. And one of the tricks to doing that
is to take things that your game player already understands.
Because they have lived a whole lifetime.
They have all these experiences.
If you tap into pre-known experiences, and that could be real life experiences, it could be pop culture experiences,
but something that they know and understand, what happens is that you are piggybacking, if you will,
on emotional things they already have.
Emotional feelings they already have.
And so, for example,
if we're doing gothic horror
and you, you know,
there's expectations that come from gothic horror
because they've watched movies
and they've seen TV shows
and they've read books
and they have expectations.
So part of doing top-down design is you want to meet that expectation. and they've seen TV shows and they've read books and they have expectations.
So part of doing top-down design is you want to meet that expectation,
that there's a level of comfort that, for example, Champions of Kamigawa.
So historically speaking, there are three blocks that have done top-down design,
Champions of Kamigawa, Innistrad, and Theros.
Also, we did one set, Arabian Nights, that was top-down design.
Now, the difference between Arabian Nights and the other three blocks
is Arabian Nights was top-down,
but Richard was trying to,
as best he could, match Arabian Nights.
He wasn't trying to create an inspired world
by Arabian Nights.
He was trying to actually make,
you know, capture Arabian Nights,
where what we do now is,
you know, Kamigawa and Theros and Innistrad, we were trying
to create our own magic world inspired
by those
top-down flavors. We weren't trying
to do, for example, in Theros,
there's no Zeus. There is
Heliod, which has elements of Zeus,
but it's not Zeus. It's different. We were doing our versions
of things.
I bring up Kamigawa because Kamigawa is a good example of some mistakes that we made.
I think Innistrad and Theros are top-down done well, and that Kamigawa is top-down with some
major mistakes made. And we learned a lot. One of the reasons I think Innistrad and Theros are
as good as they are is we learned some important lessons from Kamigawa. This is one of them.
So Kamigawa went into, looked at Japanese
mythology as inspiration,
and so one of the things that they got into was
Shinto, I do not
buy tons of Greek mythology, so I'm
not Greek, tons about Japanese
mythology, so I'm
going to talk the best I can, but if I'm a little off,
that's because I did not,
this was not my set, I did not
lead that set, And so I'm
not quite as off. I spent a lot of time and energy on both Greek mythology and Gothic
horror. But, so we did some stuff with Shinto. We did a lot with the kami. There's a belief
in Japanese, I think in Shinto, that like every object has a spirit associated with
it, I believe. Anyway, what we did, though, is we captured something that,
while being somewhat true to Japanese mythology,
was not very known by a lot of the Western audience.
So we created a lot of stuff that wasn't as resonant as it could be.
I mean, I think there are a lot of resonant tropes for Japanese mythology.
But instead of sort of hitting the more obvious ones,
we would try to stay true to it,
but the problem was we weren't as resonant as we needed to be.
And in fact, Kamigawa also taught us that
it's very, very important that when people first experience your top-down,
that the thing they expect is there at common, you know, you want them
to run to the stuff they expect first, you know.
So if you're doing gothic horror, well, you want the monsters to show up pretty quickly.
You know, you don't want like all these unknown things sitting in common.
You want your vampires and werewolves and zombies and ghosts and stuff sitting right
there.
And same with Greek mythology.
You want your minotaurs and your centaurs
and your cyclops and the things that you would expect. You just want people to see them quickly.
Okay? Now, the idea is that doesn't mean you can't ever do more obscure things. Hundred
handed ones would be an excellent example, which is we have a hundred handed ones. If
you know Greek mythology, it's a big part of Greek mythology. We didn't want to not
do it. We wanted to include it. And we wanted to have a reward handed ones. If you know Greek mythology, it's a big part of Greek mythology. We didn't want to not do it.
We wanted to include it.
And we wanted to have a reward
for people that really knew
the source material.
But,
unlike Chems and Kamigawa,
where we put some of that stuff
at low rarities
that people just didn't know,
a hundred handed one is rare.
It's like,
you're most likely not,
it's not going to be
the first card most likely
that you're going to open up and see.
You know?
And the idea is,
one of the lessons of Top Down is, makedown is, make sure that your as-fan, your low rarities
are things that are comfortable that represent the thing you want.
Because one of the things that's important is that when you are trying, the point of
top-down is to connect with your audience on an emotional level, right?
You want them to go, oh yeah, you know, oh, you're doing so-and-so?
Oh, is there this? Yes, there is.
Oh, is there that? Yes, there is.
You know, you want the audience to be hoping for things and deliver on most of that.
You know, for example, if I went out on the street and pulled Magic Players and said,
okay, when you think of Thing X, what do you think of?
When you think of Greek mythology, what do you think of?
I want us to hit most of those top ten answers.
Now, I'm not saying all those answers have to be the major thrust of what's going on,
but if you ask people and they really, really think there's going to be a Gorgon,
well, I kind of want to make sure we have a Gorgon.
Like, Greek mythology, you know, Medusa is pretty central to Greek mythology.
I'm not saying we need a lot of them.
Obviously, we didn't have a common one, but we did have an uncommon and a rare that were high profile.
Like, hey, you want to see a Gorgon?
We got a Gorgon for you.
And a lot of what we also did in top-down design
is you look at what magic has done before
to see if the things that, like, for Greek mythology, one of the things that Ethan
did, Ethan Fleischer, I had him do some research ahead of time for Theros, and he wrote down
a booklet.
And the booklet mostly broke into two categories.
First category is, what are things we would expect to do that magic has done, and what
are the things we would expect to do that magic hasn't done?
And we wanted to make sure that things magic had done, that we had enough
of those there, because there was a base already built up. One of the examples was, I knew
I wanted a little bit of tribal, not tons, because the way that that played out, as I
explained during my Theros, my lengthy, lengthy Theros podcast, that we found that people
knew Greek mythology, they didn't think of races together in the same sense
like they would in Innistrad,
where monsters, you do kind of click together.
But I knew I wanted some tribal,
so I went and I said,
what is the tribal players would most expect and want?
And I decided it was Minotaurs.
Minotaurs have done a little bit of tribal stuff in the past.
Homelands, obviously, they did some tribal.
I know Didgeridoo was very popular.
I knew that there's this desire for Minotaurs and Minotaur tribal.
Okay, Minotaurs are super resonant,
even though, ironically, the actual group of Tauji has one Minotaur.
In our world, there's many Minotaurs, not one Minotaur.
And it's become a race that magic is used quite a bit.
So that seemed like a very good place.
Okay, so first off, number one, comfort.
Figure out what your audience is going to expect,
deliver on expectations,
make sure that expectations are a low enough rarity
that that is what your audience is seeing.
Okay, time to move into the second part, surprise.
Okay, so now that you're doing something,
it's important that you do everything you can to capture the stuff that people expect.
But then you want to make sure that you add some unknown element to it.
So, for example, I will use Theros because there's a clean example here.
So, we wrote on the board what you expect.
And as we wrote things on the board, it became crystal clear that there's an expectation of gods.
Gods are about as central to Greek mythology as you get. But while we want to deliver Greek
gods, we wanted to surprise the people a little bit. And the reason is, we didn't. When we
do a top-down set, our goal is not, like Richard was doing in Arabian Nights, our goal is not
to just capture 100% in which it's just that thing. We want to do our spin on it.
We want to make it a magic thing.
And so with the gods, as I explained in my Theros podcast, we wanted to take the essence
of Greek mythology, which was the gods, and the essence of magic, which is the color wheel,
and put them together.
So what that meant was we ended up making 15 gods, 5 major that are monochloric, 10
minor that are two-chloric.
And each one of them had to embody either the color or the color combination that they were god of.
And then what we did is we chopped up all the existing Greek gods
and took elements of them to make our new gods.
Now, why did we do this?
Because there's a level of comfort.
You expect gods. We have gods.
You, in fact, expect attributes of gods.
We have attributes of gods.
But we've mixed and matched them in a way
to make something new and different.
And that is important for top-down,
I feel, that you have some newness to it.
Now, even Richard doing Arabian Nights,
which was what he was trying to capture,
didn't make up stuff.
While Arabian Nights might have had djinns and
efreetz, Richard made up specific djinns
and specific efreetz. He definitely gave
us some spin of his own to it. And
in magics, now, you know,
Theros and Innistrad, even more so.
You know, we definitely took our take
on things. Yeah, they're gods. They're our
gods. They're color wheel gods. They're magic
gods. And
the reason that is important is
that essentially what you want with a top-down set is you want to create comfort, meaning
you want to draw the audience in. Oh, and here's something important. I use Innistrad
to make this out, which is one of the fights you'll have sometimes is trying to be realistic
to your source versus fighting expectations. For example, in Innistrad, we were doing gothic horror. In gothic horror,
the zombies in gothic horror, there's not a lot of them, and probably the most famous
is Frankenstein's monster from Frankenstein. Now, if you know the actual story of Frankenstein,
Frankenstein, it's a story, he actually is an intellectual, the monster, that he is intelligent, that he has conversations.
The idea of Frankenstein being like, ah, Frankenstein, that's modern.
That is not an old school version of Frankenstein.
That's not what the book does.
But that is what people expect.
but that is what people expect.
And likewise, when you say zombies,
people expect what I call dawn of the dead zombies,
which is the zombies that kind of slumber and are dead and aren't really bright and say,
brains, brains, you know.
That's the kind of thing you expect.
So when we say we're doing zombies,
well, people are going to expect Frankenstein's monster,
but like, you know, universal style Frankenstein's monster, not Mary Shelley.
And they're expecting Dawn of the Dead zombies.
Well, guess what? That's what we're delivering.
Did that actually match our source material?
No, no, it didn't.
But that was the expectation.
And you cannot fight expectation.
If your audience expects something and you're trying to deliver to it,
you have to match what the audience expects.
In Theros, the other example is the kraken.
Kraken's from the Scandinavian mythologies,
not from...
I mean, now, there were sea serpents in Greek mythology,
so it's not a crazy stretch,
but we knew, thanks to...
What's it called?
Clash of the Titans, both version movies,
that, you know, release the Kraken, that people expected a Kraken, and they'd be upset.
So we made sure to deliver that, you know, that even though it's there.
And my other example of this is, Richard Garfield made a game that was called What Were You Thinking?
Its design name was called Hive Mind.
And the premise of the game is that you get a topic, What Were You Thinking? Its design name was called Hive Mind.
And the premise of the game is that you get a topic,
and then you're trying to write down the answers that everybody else is trying to write down.
Okay?
So, one of the categories one day was insects.
And it turns out that one of the top answers was spider.
Now, now, you might say,
What? Spiders aren't insects. Well, now, you might say, what?
Spiders aren't insects.
Well, you see, it didn't matter.
The goal of the game is to write down
what other people wrote down,
not be correct.
It wasn't actually write down five insects.
It's write down the five things
that people think they will think of
when you tell them they're insects.
And not only that,
what do you think they think other people will write?
So the funny thing is,
everybody in that room might have thought
or might have known that spiders weren't insects,
but enough of them thought that other people might not know that,
that they wrote down spider, and the correct answer was to write down spider.
So when doing top-down, you do have to match expectation.
Now, that said, once you match expectation, once you give something,
players then want to be shaken up a little bit.
Players do want us to say, okay, we've given you Greek mythology, but here's some stuff that's a little magic-oriented.
You know, here's our versions of the gods.
Here's our versions of some of the stories.
You know, we definitely captured a lot of things from Greek mythology, but we put our own twist on them.
And the fun of that is,
once you have the comfort level,
once you, you know,
oh, you're doing Greek mythology,
you're doing top-down Gothic horror,
oh, yay, vampires, yay, Greek gods, whatever,
at some point you're like,
ooh, but what's new and different?
What are you giving me that I haven't seen before?
And that's where
we get to sort of
put our own spin
and it's fun for the audience
because magic's still
a game of discovery.
You still want people
to want to look and see.
Now part of it
is seeing things
they already know
and if we did them
and part of it
is finding new things
and you want to balance there.
The top down
isn't about being slavish
to your source material but, and this is important, you do have to balance there. The top-down isn't about being slavish to your source material, but, and this is important,
you do have to follow the feel, meaning everything you add has to have the right feel to it.
We can't just do Greek mythology and go, hey, look, it's something out of Norse mythology
that has no connection to Greek mythology.
You can't just go, here's Thor with his mighty hammer.
You're like, what?
That's not Greek mythology.
So you have to sort of make the thing fit.
Okay.
So now that gets us to the third part, which is completion,
which is that it's not just about making individual pieces.
One of the things that I talk about a lot,
and this is, I mean, the completion aspect of design talks about this quite a bit,
which is you can't just think about your designs in isolation.
Meaning, if you just make every card and don't think about anything else in the set to make each card,
the end of each card in a vacuum makes total sense.
For example, let's say I say, okay, I'm going to do a Greek mythology set.
And I make a card, and I forget about everything else I'm doing
and just make a Greek mythology set.
Those individual cards in a vacuum might be awesome cards.
But the thing is, you are working together.
Your game does not live in isolation.
Your cards do not live in isolation.
And so you have to be very conscious of how things interconnect.
Especially in Magic, a game in which people will take cards
and put them in their deck.
Meaning, and this is important to remember, we, as trading card game makers, are making
a game in which we're giving you components.
Now, remember, when I talk about trading card game, that is a really, really important distinction.
That most other games, when you take the game and open the box, when you open your box monopoly,
it's an experience that's a unique experience.
I'm sorry, it's not unique. Every person opening
a Monopoly set, or a basic Monopoly
set, is getting the same things.
And if I go to my friend's house
and he has the same Monopoly set I do,
we're going to play the same game.
Not true for Magic. Magic is different.
When I go to my friend's house, if I'm playing
with my friend's Magic cards, they might speak
different cards, or I'm playing against his cards, they're different cards.
And that is one of the things that makes magic a very different game.
But, remember, people are going to experience their game by taking the components and putting them together.
And so our job as trading card game designers is to make sure there's cohesion.
Now, in top-down design, what that means is I have to be very
conscious of how things fit together. For example, let's take Innistrad as a clean example in
Innistrad. I was trying to tell a story of the monsters impeding on the humans. Really what it
was was a story of the humans in peril where things were bad. I mean, remember, in story,
you want to start your story from the farthest end away from where you want to end up.
Well, the ending of our story was the freeing of Avacyn and, you know, the good guys come and save the day.
Well, then I needed to put my heroes in a pretty bad place to make that story interesting.
Well, if the humans were in good shape, well, Anderson coming
back, what does that mean? No, things have to be bad. In order for things to have to
be bad, I wanted a relationship where the monsters were impeding on the humans. Now,
the monsters weren't working together. It's not like the werewolves drew up a plan. No,
the werewolves were doing werewolf things, the vampires were doing vampire things. But
in order to create the sense that they're you know, they're in trouble, I decided
that I needed to isolate the humans. Well, how do I do that? Well, one of the ways to
do that was to create structures that I left the humans out of. So, for example, I did
a bunch of cycles in which the monsters all got stuff, but the humans didn't get things.
And the idea being to get the sense that the humans were distinct and separate from the monsters
and make them feel isolated.
I tried to isolate them in my design.
Now, there's no way for me to do that.
I mean, that is a design that only works in conjunction.
Now, the good thing I'm going for, because I was doing top-down,
that top-down was humans were the victims.
The reasons we had humans, and the reasons we did human tribal for the first time,
was it was very important to me that the victims got represented. Why?
Because in horror stories, the victims are a key part of the horror story.
You don't tell horror stories without victims. And the victims are human. Why are they human? Because the whole point of a horror story is to get your audience to identify with the hero so that the horrible things that happen to them,
you go, oh, that could happen to me. I am scared. That would be scary if it happened
to me, you know. Because a big part of any sort of creative endeavor is you want to give
your audience what we call a POV, a point of view, that you want them, if you're trying to get emotional responses, usually what you do is you connect
them to the hero or the game, the center of the game, such that they're experiencing things
they need to experience. So in Magic, you're the planeswalker. You're having a duel against
the other planeswalker. And so I'm trying to make sure that when we build our sets,
you know, I want the humans to feel like victims.
It's very hard to do that on one card.
I mean, I could do, you know, human comma victim, but, I mean, it's a little heavy-handed.
What I want to do is demonstrate that the humans are in trouble.
Now, part of that is by making the humans smaller, you know.
A monster versus a human, the monster's going to win.
Now, luckily, white, it its nature is humans teaming up and
has smaller creatures, so it works well there.
I mean, that's why humans weren't white
in the first place.
But the key is, you want
to make sure that when you're doing top-down
that not only are
you creating the elements you need,
but you understand how they structure, because
the audience is going
to want a sense of structure to what's going on
and it'll help them give that sense of completion.
In fact, one of my pet peeves is
I did not do a good job explaining to Eric
that the curses were a cycle that left out the humans
and so the green curse got left off
and then, well, not really.
It's hard to recognize a pattern when the pattern's not complete.
Having cycles of four,
you really need all four,
and that was me dropping the ball
in that one tiny area.
But I'm just saying,
it's that notion of completion
that's important.
Okay, now I've gotten off the freeway,
which means I'm not too far from work,
so let me do some recap here.
Okay, so when you're doing
a top-down design,
you start and make sure that what you're
doing is resonant, that there's comfort, that you are capturing the things people expect you to be
capturing. Then we get to surprise, which says, okay, make sure that not only do you capture what
people expect, but you put some twists on it that are your own. That when people come to see
something, yes, they want familiarity, but they also want some sense of identity, but you put some twists on it that are your own. That when people come to see something, yes, they want familiarity,
but they also want some sense
of identity, that you are doing something that's
giving it your own spin.
For example,
in movies, I didn't bring that up, but
let's say you're going to take a classic story.
Highwood's getting ready to do
fairy tales right now. You're going to do Hansel and Gretel.
Well, hey, you want Hansel and Gretel,
there better be
a house made of candy, and you want a, hey, you want Hansel and Gretel, there better be, you know,
a house made of candy
and you want a witch,
but you want some spin on it.
And I believe the spin
like in the last one
was like,
there are witch hunters, right?
That they lived
through this experience
and now they're hunting down,
I didn't even see the movie,
but from the poster
I got this much.
But you want to have
some comfort,
but then you want
some spin on it.
You want some take on it.
You know,
there's been a bunch
of Snow Whites.
Well, how is your Snow White different than other Snow Whites?
I didn't see these either, but Mirror Mirror, I think, was a more modern take on it,
where Snow White had a little more active role.
And Snow White the Huntsman, I mean, both of them.
She becomes more of an active fighter.
She's more involved. She's not as passive.
And that's a big part, I think, of how,
I mean, it just was a modern take on the story, but it had its own take on it, it wasn't just a
story you knew, but, I mean, once again, I didn't see the movie, but I'm, it was called Mirror, Mirror,
so I'm sure there's a magic mirror, I'm sure there's an evil queen, I'm sure there's dwarves,
there's probably seven dwarves, you know, you definitely want to deliver that there. Okay,
so you have the comfort, then you have the surprise
finally, completion says
not only am I making the components
but what does my audience expect of the components
that I can't just make individual components
that once I start making certain components
there's an expectation that other components are going to be met
that I have to make sure that I am
not just building pieces, but building a whole. And I have to figure out in my design what my
overall feel is, right? That my part of creating the resonance that I want is creating resonance
in the micro and resonance in the macro. And once again, one of my ongoing themes,
I have a bunch of themes,
is in the macro, in the micro,
that says if you want something to happen,
if you want an audience to feel something,
it has to appear both in the big picture
and in the small picture.
In magic, that means the set has to show it,
the cards have to show it.
You know, that you,
that I want to show it through my set design, I want to show it
down to my individual cards. That
whatever theme I'm doing, I want to keep
hitting that theme. In Theros, for example,
I was trying to build up a sense of adventure.
Well, I wanted cards that built.
I wanted mechanics that built.
I wanted a style play that built.
That my theme was hit at every level
from the micro all the way up to the macro.
And remember, when you are building something,
that your big device is made of a lot of small devices,
and so you want that to carry through.
Okay, so top-down, comfort, surprise, completion.
How, by the way, you told me when I was studying this
in communication in school
that this thing I learned about,
and by the way, this completely applies to like
TV and film and all sorts of stuff, and like,
oh, this would be very good for game design. I'd be,
wow, I was pretty, kind of cool.
You know. But anyway,
I'm driving in, I see
the wizard's building, and I'm pulling my space.
Or not my space. A space.
I would say my space, too. I feel like I have my own person's space, which sadly I'm pulling my space. Or not my space. A space. I always say my space
because people feel like
I have my own person's space,
which sadly I do not.
Okay.
So,
I hope you guys enjoyed
hearing about top-down design.
It's something that
I think we're getting better at.
It's something that
has gone over really well.
Both Indusrider and Theros
went over gangbusters.
So,
we will be doing
more top-down design.
I know the future
of seven-year plans. There's more top-down design
coming. It's not every year. A, because
I think we want to mix it up, and B, because there's
not an infinite number of things we can do top-down design.
It's a lot smaller than you think. But
anyway, thanks for joining me today.
Oh, it's pretty much a good
average 30-minute ride. So not a lot of traffic today.
Which is good for me. I don't know if it's good for you.
But anyway, thanks for joining me.
And while I always love
talking about doing
top down design
I also like
making magic
talk to you guys next week
bye