Mythic Minds Devblog 1/4/19 - New Year, New You-ser Interface And More Big Changes!

The Great Leap

Although they are very often completely different schools of thought, UI and game art have so much overlap in game development. The major similarity in the early game dev process is that they both transform the feel of the game in a generally short timeframe. I got the same feeling when the UI got brought in that I did when the tile art got brought in for the first time. In about a week we got Unit artwork on the cards, changed the look of the hand of cards, added a Victory Point scoreboard (oh yeah, we added Victory Points, more on that later probably) and made a bunch of changes to our Unit banners.

Compare the image above to the one below (which is a super early UI mockup that I did) and you can see that there are some similarities in general location but overall a lot has changed. And even more is planned to change in the next few months. At the moment our big push is to just get everything IN the game. Hence the weird space background, kinda goofy looking buttons and lack of card back art and a Mana icon beneath the actual Mana value. 

So Uhhhh, How Do You Win?

Funnily enough, we never really thought actual win conditions in this game. Sure we had an initial system for winning in place, but we never truly, actually THOUGHT about what would be a fun, balanced and engaging way to win in Evocus. We initially had a "control 4 of the 5 Spawn Portals to win" rule. We also toyed with the idea of having destroyable bases like Starcraft (and I guess in some way like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering) but all of those methods kinda felt a bit off. Games often dragged on way too long until one player said "I think there's no way I can win so I'm going to go ahead and just concede" which is not really a fun way to end the game. 

With Victory Points that you accumulate at the start of a turn based on how many Spawn Portals you control, the result of the game may not be known until the very last turn. We tried having the center Portal be worth 2 points a turn but we enjoy having and seeing fights take place on the side portals and having people do sneaky backcaps when their opponent is focused too much on the center Portal. Although it may change as we test it more, our current format is 33 Victory points to win with each Portal generating 1 Victory Point at the start of the controller's turn. So on average the games will be between 8 and 16 turns (for each player) and every control point will hold value. 

Overall, this change should bring down the total game time to something a bit more reasonable. It should also mean games feel closer for longer and allow you to set yourself up for victory through early aggression and control or through slower more methodical retakes of the Portals.

We hope that you'll enjoy playing the game this way and are always welcoming feedback on our rules and mechanics. Feel free to shoot us a tweet @PlayEvocus, an email themythicminds@gmail.com or on Facebook with your thoughts on these changes.