Hearthstone Panel Fireside Chat

Development Team

• The Hearthstone development team is the smallest team at Blizzard!
• The smaller team has helped them pursue their dreams for Hearthstone and allowed them to focus on the important things.
• Everyone on the team, and more importantly, Blizzard, has always loved card games.

Goals for Hearthstone

• Hearthstone is a game for everyone. A game for everyone has to be accessible.
• Although they kept things simple, it still has plenty of depth. No one likes a game you're done playing after a week.
• Keep the game physical. Make it feel like the players are actually holding and playing their cards.
• Accomplished through animations!
• It was important to keep the game flavorful.
• As Hearthstone is based on Warcraft, and more importantly, World of Warcraft, the team aimed to keep that Warcraft feel, but adding some more silliness to it.
• The gameplay had to be fast paced.
• Games that will be played on mobile need to be finished quicker for those on the go.
• Having mana crystals as a resource you gained per turn kept the speed up because you aren't waiting for resource cards each turn.
• The game had to be fun.
• Getting rid of things like resource destruction and milling really helped keep people from feeling like they were doomed.

Making the Game

• There was a lot of iteration and prototyping with Hearthstone.
  
• One of the physical prototypes hey tried as to cut text out of the cards. Cards were created with only art and attack/health values and they found they could play it well. This is why you only see portraits on the battlefield.
• Hearthstone was put onto a web interface after their physical testing. Much was learned about designing the interface here.
• Combat Tricks! It's a trap! If you attacked your opponent and you had a combat trick up, it would allow you to play a card on your opponents turn to mess a round with their attack.
• They found out when they removed Combat Tricks, it was actually a lot more fun and it increased the pace as well.
• The interface moved onto being more comical, and then they thought "hey, what if this game was played in a tavern?".
• The next version of the gameboard involved setting the player inside of a virtual gameboard on the table in a tavern.
• Being a virtual card game, it let the developers do stuff that would be very hard, or impossible to accomplish in the real world.
• Examples include Thoughtsteal, Nozdorumu, and King Mukla.
• There were also plenty of cards that did not work out though as well.
• Devouring Ooze: Battlecry: Gain +1/+1 for each game you've lost in a row.
• Auto-Pecker 4000: Deal 1 damage to any player who mouses-over this minion.
• Worldflipper X-50: Flip your opponent's screen upside down.
• Although they wanted to keep the game feeling physical, having a pile of cards on your screen to form your decks was frustrating.
• This lead to the current version of the Deck Builder!
• A lot of the developers really love draft mode. They knew something had to be done for Hearthstone.
• In a normal draft, you buy in with a set number of packs, and pass packs around a circle of friends and each pick one card out of each pack until all the cards are gone.
• Normal drafing wouldn't work with Hearthstone though. What if people didn't have enough friends to play draft, or their friends went offline?
• Asynchronous drafting was created to fix this!

Making a Card

• What makes a card awesome in Hearthstone?
• Cards must be easy to understand. You should be able to look at a card that you just got out of a pack and can think about how you'd be able to integrate it into your deck.
• The original version of Whirlwind was too complicated and required too much thought to process the card.

 The Beta Test

• Over one million beta invites have been sent out so far!

Future Patches

• Some really amazing stuff coming up.
• Card changes!
• Mind Control cost is being increased to 10.
• Starving Buzzard health is being decreased to 1.
• Unleash the Hounds is going to be changed, but they aren't sure yet.
• Ranked playmode changes!
• There are going to 25 new ranks in ranked playmode.
  • Each month, all players restart at Rank 25: “Angry Chicken”
  • Players will be matched against players of similar rank.
  • Win a game, acquire a star!  
  • Acquire enough stars and you’ll rank up!
  • Each rank has its own icon and medal.
  • Win streaks may give additional stars.
  • At higher ranks, you'll lose a star if you lose a game.
• Each rank will have 5 star levels.
• Ranks will reset every month at the start of the next season.
• At the end of each season, if you participate in that season, you will be given new artwork for your card backs!
• The Arena changes!
• Three new keys being added for a total of 12 possible wins! 
• Molten Key
• Frostborn Key
• Lightforged Key
• If you go past 9 wins, there will be even better rewards!

The Future of Hearthstone

• Going Mobile!
• There is work on the Android version of Hearthstone. No time frame currently, but likely the second half of 2014.
• iPhone will be getting its own version of Hearthstone in addition to the iPad.
• No matter where you play Hearthstone, you will always have access to the same cards and the same opponents.
• Expansions!
• New cards, new features!
• Reconnecting. The developers are working on a way to let you reconnect to games in progress after you've crashed or disconnected.