On a roll.
The only thing harder than making a hit video game is making a hit video game twice.
Sweden’s Mojang has ridden the truly phenomenal success of Minecraft — their first and only commercial game release, originally the project of solo coder Markus “Notch” Persson — all the way to a $2.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft last month. Following up on a hit is tough (Rovio and OMGPOP and Vanilla Ice all nod somewhere), but following up on what might be the biggest hit in history… how do you do that?
Last week, I spoke with three of the folks at Mojang who are charged with that very task. Owen Hill, Måns Olson, and Henrik Pettersson who are working on Scrolls, Mojang’s sophomore effort — a fantasy card game that they plan to release on PC, Android tablets, and iPad simultaneously next month.
“There’s a big Studio Ghibli influence in Scrolls’ art,” Petterson says, “but we wanted to make something that felt unique.”
I’ve been playing Scrolls for about a week now. Scrolls is a collectible card game where you build a deck of units and structures that you draw from in battles against other players, trying to outmanoeuvre them in lane-based combat with the aim of destroying the idols in the back rows of their lanes. It’s a highly polished experience with a lavish amount of content; a game that looks like it’s taken full advantage of the time and space that Minecraft’s success has afforded it.
Though it’s been in development for over three years, even dedicated followers of the games industry might not know all that much about Scrolls. Mojang’s approach to its development has been a low-key, head-down process; no PR charm offensive, no big press events. I don’t interpret that as naïveté (“Scrolls is very streaming-friendly,” Hill told me, demonstrating a savvy grasp of how to sell games in 2014), but as Protestant work ethic. Multi-billion-dollar acquisition or no, the House that Notch Built still seems to be a little indie shop; when my conversation with them started last week, the devs gave me their business titles in a halting, almost apologetic way.
“We’re not a huge company,” Mojang’s ‘Chief Word Officer’ Owen Hill tells me. “Including all the business team, all the guys working on Minecraft and Scrolls and the web and infrastructure guys, I think Mojang is about 36 guys.”
“I was employee number eight,” says Henrik Pettersson, Scrolls’ producer. “Back when I joined, three years ago, they told me that I would be the last one.”
“I was number seventeen, they told me the same thing,” says Måns Olson, the lead designer on Scrolls. Reneged-upon promises like this would cause resentment in a lot of other offices, but with these guys it’s a laugh line. I was left with the impression that Mojang (pronounced moe-yang, by the by) feels like a family more than a workplace. The company certainly could afford to add a lot more heads to the 36-person count even before the acquisition, when Minecraft was generating hundreds of millions in revenue every year — but it didn’t.
“There’s constant development on the Pocket Edition of Minecraft, and we’ve got [Scrolls] as well,” says Hill, “but we’ve never been the kind of company to have loads of projects on the go.”
Scrolls’ factions aren’t just visually distinct — they play quite differently from one another.
You can see that slow and methodical approach in what Pettersson tells me about Scrolls’ inception. “Scrolls was in Markus and Jakob [Porsér, Mojang co-founder]‘s mind from the start. It was a game that they sat in Markus’ kitchen play-testing with paper mockups every night. By the time I joined, there was a Flash prototype of it going around the office.”
“When they brought it into the studio, it was already quite developed in terms of systems and mechanics,” says Hill, “but I think everybody who’s worked on it over the years has left an impression on the design. We’ve made changes over the years but it’s still the game Jakob and Markus created at its core.”
In Scrolls, your cards are both the pieces you place on the board and your primary currency: you can opt each turn to burn a card to generate more resources (which let you place more powerful cards) or draw more cards out of your deck. Cards have a countdown value that determines how quickly and how often they can attack, so being able to think several turns ahead is crucial. Like building geodesic domes in Minecraft, Scrolls rewards logic and right-brained thinking, but it’s also immediately intelligible and easy to pick up. “It’s a card game,” says Pettersson, “and the benefit of card games is that you only need to learn the rules of the cards in your deck, piece by piece.”
“Clearly we took inspiration from CCGs that have come before, but we have simplified a lot of the rules in comparison to, say, Magic. There’s no interrupts for the other player’s turns, for example. I love Magic but its not really suited to play digitally.”
Being suited to play digitally is only the half of it — Scrolls was planned for tablets almost from its inception. Mojang are true believers in bringing deeper, thoughtful games to mobile.
“I’ve been playing games on iPad for years,” Olson says, “and the arrival of hugely successful games like Hearthstone onto mobile, it can only help other games — like ours — that have similar sensibilities.”
“I know loads of people who have iPads just to play games,” says Hill, “and we are hardcore gamers. We haven’t even scratched the very surface of what games on mobile can be.”
Besides online play against other players, there’s a long single-player campaign in Scrolls.
You can see that mobile bias right away. There’s no right-clicking or other vestiges of desktop UIs in Scrolls — not even in the PC version. Both editions of the game provide a continuous experience, and Mojang plan that if you buy the game on one platform, you get the other version as well. And as in Hearthstone, there will be online cross-platform play.
“We saw that the tablet simplified things, made the input more immediate and more comprehensible,” says Olson. “I actually prefer the UI without the right-click. For me, the tactile experience of playing a card game on a tablet is so vital, so important. Your cards feel alive when you touch them, it really feels like a collection when you can touch the cards and move them around.”
There’s a big emphasis on the width and breadth of cards available in Scrolls. At the moment there’s 360 different ones, Mojang tell me, spread across the game’s four opposing factions: Energy, Order, Growth, and Decay. The factions play genuinely differently from one another; Growth is a slow-burn side that eventually builds up to swing big knock-out haymakers, for example, where as a Decay player floods the field with cheap units who empower the team as they die. It’s in the card variety where the years of work are most evident — every single card sports unique portrait art, but also an animated model that jukes and attacks on the board.
Unlike Hearthstone, you’re going to have to pay to get into Scrolls — though there will be a free trial of the game to give you a taster next month. “We have a secondary currency called ‘shards’, but we’re significantly limiting the ways you can use those,” says Pettersen. “We want to make sure that you don’t have to pay to see everything in the game.”
I must have made a skeptical noise at this, because Olson started to laugh. “I know everyone says that their CCG isn’t pay-to-win but ours genuinely isn’t at all. We started giving everybody one starter deck. Everybody gets two hundred cards from the starter decks, and you’ll earn so much in-game currency from playing ranked online matches and matches against the AI and even against your friends.”
“You can spend more money if you want, but you don’t need to,” Olson continues, “and the vast majority of players in the beta don’t.” (“I haven’t,” Pettersen admits at this point.)
New scrolls are bought in blind packs from the shop. The shopkeeper changes every time you visit, but they always look that grumpy.
“We could have charged fifteen or twenty dollars up front,” says Hill, “but we know that mobile is more price-sensitive and we wanted as many people as possible to play it. So you’ll pay five dollars to unlock everything after the demo, and that’s really everything you need. We’ve made every attempt to not piss people off.”
I ask the Mojang guys if they think Scrolls can equal the Earth-shaking success of Minecraft, but they’re quite sanguine about that. “We know there’s a big market for a game like this,” says Olson. “Millions of people play Magic. That’s relatively niche compared to Minecraft, I guess.”
Everything is niche compared to Minecraft, I offer.
“That’s true!” Olson laughs. “But we’ve got a really nice community here already just with the beta. I’d love to still be working on this in five years, like we are with Minecraft. We’ll just have to see how it does.”
Scrolls will be out for PC, Mac, and tablets in November. Card City Nights makers Ludosity are helping Mojang with the mobile edition.
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