Pox Nora: Developer Interview

My waking hours have recently been consumed by a new game—one that combines CCG deckbuilding and tabletop miniature gameplay into an online turn-based RPG. It's like somebody slipped into my dreams, plucked out my favorite games, and combined them into a super-game against which I am powerless. There's even an undead army and—get this—a frog army. Add in the fact that it runs completely through a browser, so I can actually build armies while I'm at work, and I'm in turn-based strategy heaven.

The actual game review itself will appear next week, but for now you can sate your curiousity on my interview with Paul Clarke, one of the game developers who worked on Pox Nora.

Fellfrosch: First of all, great game. It combines so many of the elements I love and never find in PC games these days that I really feel like it was designed just for me. It’s also loads of fun and has several layers of excellent strategy. It’s a home run.

First question: Pox Nora combines elements of tabletop miniatures with elements of collectible card games, in a system that can only really exist on computer. How did you come up with this idea? Did you set out to make it like that, or did it evolve over time?

Paul: What you see in PoxNora is the original intention. The game’s features have changed during the process, but it is very much what we set out to make. First of all, we chose to make it a computer game so that we could have a certain level of complexity, but we wanted it to share the feel of a miniatures/card game. The advantage we have doing it on a computer is that the computer can handle complex calculations and rules very quickly, whereas a tabletop game must be simple enough that a human without a calculator and a degree in physics can play it.

Fellfrosch: The artwork in the game, both the paintings and the unit models, is outstanding. How did a relatively small developer attract such great talent? At what point in the design process was the art commissioned, and to what degree did the art drive the unit design?

Paul: Any collectible game must have amazing art and great game mechanics to succeed. With that in mind, art drove PoxNora from the beginning as much as the game mechanics did. The game was written with its artwork on the walls. How did we get such amazing artists? Well, we were very fortunate to hire some extremely talented artists for our in-house staff, and we also commissioned artwork from freelancers. Our expansion sets have more amazing art, too, as our staff expands and we include new talent. Sometimes our artwork is so good that it’s better than the Rune it’s designed for – and we rename or otherwise tweak a mechanic to fit the art.

Fellfrosch: What were some of the games that served as your inspiration for Pox Nora?

Paul: Certainly we’ve played the traditional collectible games – Magic: the Gathering, Heroclix, and all their peers – and no game in the collectible genre stands a chance without acknowledging those. But we also wanted to create our own game, with our own feel. We never wanted our players to feel like they were playing Heroclix online or a board-based version of Magic: the Gathering.

Fellfrosch: What are your favorite games to play?

Paul: My personal background is in strategy games of all types – especially board games like Shadows Over Camelot. I’ve played more collectible card games than I can count, and I grew up on all varieties of video game. Sometimes I think Oregon Trail influenced my entire life. Some of the people around the office play a lot of World of Warcraft (who doesn’t?), Starcraft and Magic: the Gathering. Oh, and we play a lot of PoxNora.

Fellfrosch: Why did you choose to make it playable over a web browser?

Paul: Accessibility. Writing the game in Java and launching it via WebStart means that more people can play it. Our game works on both Mac and PC without any extra work. This also makes releasing patches very easy, and lets us use the web site for things like managing runes. It’s also a game that is only played online and the web browser is the hub of all things on the internet. Through web browsers, people play games, check e-mail, read news, and interact on forums. There isn’t a better place for PoxNora.

Fellfrosch: How were the six factions created? How integrated (or how separate) are the design team and the creative team? How did you decide which abilities to give to which factions?

Paul: When the PoxNora project began, the design team and creative team were the same. Our company is fortunate enough to have a lot of very creative people and everyone gives input and suggestions, and so over time some division grew between design and creativity, but for our expansions we’ve also expanded the design team. As for how the factions were created and how we decide what to give them: we have a set of concepts for each faction and when we introduce new Runes for them, we compare those Runes to the guidelines. We want players to identify with the factions – one recent conversation in our chat room involved players talking about how they would each only play their favorite faction. As expansion sets are designed and released, we are also going to be expanding the number of factions and working to create more balance between the factions.

Fellfrosch: There seems to be a great disparity between the power levels of certain runes and faction bonuses. Are those calculated risks? Are there answers to every problem built-in to the set? Do you intend to tweak power levels if it becomes necessary?

Paul: We are constantly tweaking game balance. The differences of runes versus faction bonuses are important, in our opinion, to help make each faction unique.

Fellfrosch: The faction bonuses help make theme armies viable, but still nowhere in the same league as armies based on abilities—an all teleport army, for example, or one that focuses purely on defense bonuses. Is this what you intended, or do you have plans to boost the faction bonuses a bit? Or do you see theme players and “best army possible” players to be two separate groups?

Paul: We have raised and lowered the faction bonuses several times. During Beta, we completely rewrote them. Some of the faction bonuses are more important than others right now. But all of them are just compliments to the other strategies of a faction, and I don’t feel that a deck should ever be based solely on the faction bonus. A weak K’thir deck won’t win just because it has +1 SPD.

Fellfrosch: Did your internal games or beta testing create a metagame of “best” armies and strategies? What were they? What type of army do you typically play?

Paul: Before and during the Beta, any time someone had a “best strategy” we tweaked the power level of that strategy. During Beta, I built an army that focused on the Quickening spell, which (at the time) doubled all your attacks for the round. I used it to blitz my opponent’s shrine and could often win quickly and decisively with just one or two champions. Another super-combo during Beta allowed 2 units (plus 3 spells and some equipment) to do nearly 600 points of damage to a Shrine in a single turn (Dwarven King + Quickening, Mobility, Draconic Benediction, Forge Hammer). We never want a single strategy to dominate all the others. That’s why we’ve toned down the stun abilities in the game recently. My favorite thing to build right now is a deck that’s 13 to 17 runes of a single faction, plus some of the “essentials” from other factions – Backfire, Nora Mine, Draconic Benediction. But spells should never be the focus. To win, you’ve got to take your opponent’s Nora Font and storm the Shrine.

Fellfrosch: Your leveling system is unique in that it does not increase the overall power level of a unit. How did you arrive at a system like that?

Paul: Careful work and lots of testing. We’ve tried a couple different versions of this system before we found one that worked very well. I believe its strongest point is that upgrading a Champion increases its cost. This is what allows lower-level decks to fight: a low-level deck plays its units faster because they’re cheaper. Cooldowns to re-deploy a unit are based on Nora cost, too, so cheap units come back out faster. The secret to the leveling system is in its strategy: you power up your Champion as much as you dare, knowing that if you overdo it you over-cost the Champion.

Fellfrosch: I noticed that you’re planning to build bot AI and single player campaigns—hooray! Will these battles be integrated into the PvP portions of the game, or will they just be for fun and experience?

Paul: We have a team working hard on the AI both for player-v-computer and for a campaign mode. One thing we may explore in the future with this is certainly adding some AI-controlled units to the PvP games, although that’s not an immediate goal. I feel that the main purpose of the AI is to help you practice and give you a place to try out your decks before you take them into ranked games against brutal players.

Fellfrosch: Do you have plans to expand the game through new maps or new mission types? Will you be releasing expansion packs of new runes? Will you be adding new factions?

Paul: We are releasing our first expansion in October – The Savage Tundra. The name also belongs to our new Faction, and there are some previews on fan.poxnora.com that you can check out. We will have at least one new map for the expansion, and are hoping to be releasing maps between expansions in the future. This expansion has about 70 runes, including some with awesome new mechanics.

Fellfrosch: Do you plan to add true multiplayer scenarios, such as team games or massive free-for alls?

Paul: We have discussed adding more players to the game, but not in the immediate future. This is certainly a long-term goal which will necessarily require team of programmers and a lot of time. It’s something which would broaden our game, but we want to work on the two-player game we have before we go down that road.

Fellfrosch: Thanks for your time, Paul, and thanks for making such a great game. It's good to know the turn-based action point genre isn't dead—that there are people out there who are as enthusiastic about it as I am.

Look for the review next week, and between now and then check it out at poxnora.com; you can play through the web with only a small java download, and your starter army is free.

Discuss it in our forum.

Written by Fellfrosch on September 29th, 2006