We had the opportunity to trade e-mail with Chris Barret of Mage Warfare. We had inane questions, Chris humored us and gave us great answers in return.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about how your latest convention/event is going/went for you including highlights, disappointments, anecdotes, etc
Mage Warefare: Our most recent convention was a smaller one called OGC Con, which is held in New Hampshire. Player-wise we had quite a minimal turnout. However, we did get to meet up with one of our artists there, as well as talk to Lee Valentine of Veritas Games Company, whom had some interesting advice on things we could tweak about the card layout and the game itself.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about your target event(s) and how you decide what events to attend
Mage Warefare: The next two events we'll be attending are demo/tournament days in New Hampshire (9/16) and Connecticut (9/23) to continue trying to raise awareness about the game. We've been finding that even in our first store that we've been in for nearly a year now, A to Z Sports Cards in New Hampshire, there are a fair number of card gamers that don't even know our game exists. We attend nearly everything we can afford to, we even drove out to the last Origins and Connecticon. We've been finding this well worth it, especially since Connecticon has been our best event so far, nearly doubling the amount of players that have our game and getting a pretty fair amount of attention, even if they did forget to put us in the program.
9/16/06: Collectible's Unlimited in New Hampshire
9/23/06: Sarge's Comics in Connecticut
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about you company including size, principals, outlook, etc.
Mage Warefare: Haha, company size. Well, there's officially 4 'Officers' of our little LLC, Gogra Games. About 95% of the actual game development itself is done by myself (rules, card stats and abilities, card concepts, et cetera) and my father, Kevin Barrett (story, card concepts, et cetera). However, in the future we plan to bring on one of our official tournament-runners who has some really great card ideas. Being originally from Japan his cards tend to have a subtle Japanese 'feel' to them, so we'd like to do something like 25%-33% of any given future release being his concepts, and the rest being ours, to get a nice Japanese-American feel to the game.
Hmm, our principals and outlook aren't exactly written out or anything, but I'd say we simply want to make games for gamers. We're not going completely Korean MMO-hardcore with anything, but we want the core concepts and styles of our games to have a familiar feel to existing gamers while having ample complexity to keep them from finding the 'ultimate' setup like many of them can do in simpler games. Essentially, I've been gaming since I was about three years old, and I like complexity and depth in my games. I simply make games that I would want to play, and if I don't want to play a game I've made then something's wrong, so I go back and fix it until I do like it.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about your product(s) including when it/they was/were developed/released, how many releases, updates, etc.
Mage Warefare: Right now our only real product is Mage Warfare, a TCG. Right now it has your standard money-sink randomized-packs setup, but we're aiming to drop that and have every card available in pre-constructed packs to make the game more accessible to players who can't spend tons of money on another card game. The concept in a nutshell is that players play as/control a Mage. Mages do battle what we call the 'Exocosm', which surrounds and connects all Realities. A Reality is everything that a given sentient can possibly conceive of, so our heaven and hell, parallel universes, other galaxies, everything, is our Reality. So, with that concept we can have everything and anything we want in our game (hence why in our first release we have things like Samurai, Vampire and MechaClowns). Any given player's deck typically aims to have between one and three Realities in it. Decks are 50 cards (in tournament play), so we've decided to sell only two full starter decks (Samurai and Vampire), and the rest of the cards in Reality Packs of 25 cards. Each Reality Pack is oriented around one Reality, and any two different Reality packs you want combined makes one tournament-legal deck (and a pretty decent one at that). So you can just go and pick up, say, the MechaClown and Demon Reality Packs, and have yourself a nice deck that plays to permission-style (from the MechaClowns) and stat-boosters (from the Demons).
Some other quick things about Mage Warfare; the deck is split into 3 piles; Barracks (Creatures and Guards, being your 'soldiers'), Armory (Shields and Devices, which Equip to Creatures and Guards) and the Spellbook (Spells and Hexes). There's also Quest cards (in the next printing) which can go into the Barracks or Armory. The Spellbook 'cycles', so you don't actually have to draw from it to play cards from it, and when you draw you draw 2 cards from where you want, depending on what you need. Cards also have 3 attacks, Long Range, Medium Range and Close Range. The resulting 'feel' is somewhere between your standard card game's 1-on-1 combat system and a tabletop system. On that note, we're also developing a system of rules to play the game like a tabletop, as the same rules and stats can function in both systems quite well. Devices can have certain Armor values, which is essentially damage-reduction at no cost to the Device. Devices can be shifted about your Creatures and Guards at no cost, and can be Looted from fallen enemies. Since you can mix any Realities, you can have everything from a Vampire in a Battle Suit to some MechaClowns wielding Samurai Katana. The game has a number of systems in place (such as Class and per-card limits to the number of copies of a card you can have in your deck) to maintain balance between players that own everything and players that only have a deck or two, aiming more of the game to skill and strategy instead of who has the deepest pockets.
Mage Warfare began when I was sitting in study hall fairly bored in my Freshman year of High School. I'd already read the library out of books to my liking, so typically during study hall I'd end up writing down random game ideas and other things that simply came to mind. I started conceptualizing a card game system that allowed for things like archers to function like archers (for two reasons: 1; I love sniping in games, and 2; I didn't like it that an un-armored mace-wielding punk would tend to beat up an elven archer or something of the sort in other card games). After that I'd try and add more concepts to the game that would break the game's rules, then fix the rules so they could contain everything I'd thought of so far, and continue along that cycle until I was happy with the expandability of the game and its compatibility between very conceptually different things. After this we play-tested the game in a local card shop with home-printed text-only cards slipped into card sleeves with Magic cards for thickness for about 3-4 years, then finally printed the game in October of '05. That release is sort of a test-run, as we could only afford to print 100 of the 280 cards in our first release, titled Maelstrom. Thus, it's known as Maelstrom-FP (or Maelstrom-First Printing). So far this has been the only release, but we are very much looking to our next release, as we've worked out a few bugs both in the system and in the cards. Plus, it's quite easy for players to exhaust interest in only 100 cards.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about your target audience and how you determined your product fit
Mage Warefare: Our target audience is roughly 16 year old card gamers. We figure on 16 since the game is more complex than the standard card games, and it's somewhat 'dark' and 'gory'. I say this because the main resource in the game is Flesh, which you gain on every turn as well as every time you kill an opposing Creature or Guard (you gain whatever they cost, as you're putting their corpse into your Flesh Pool for later use). The whole game also invokes interesting images, such as a Samurai running up to a Vampire in a Battle Suit, cutting up the Vampire, throwing its corpse back into your Flesh Pool, jumping into the Battle Suit, and continuing onto the next opponent. We also have a couple of images some parents may find questionable, such as Bed of Nails, which displays a person's face being shoved into a bed of nails. As well as card concepts, like Mark of the Beast (increases ability costs), that some parents aren't going to agree with. However, there's no real aim at excessive violence or demonic this-or-that, it's simply whatever comes to mind that seems like it'd be fun to use in the game or hasn't been done yet.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about your views of the state of your target industry, the good, the bad, the annoying, the inspiring, etc
Mage Warefare: Hmm... I'd say the good on the industry is that more and more card games are coming out, so there's apparently more attention being paid to the viability of non-Magic, non-Yu-Gi-Oh card games. However, the bad is that there's more card games coming out, meaning a lesser signal-noise ratio, which makes it a lot harder for us to get noticed. The annoying is definitely the way some players seem to have really closed minds. They're playing one game and that's all they'll play. For reasons such as the cost of another game I can certainly understand, but either because they want to be the 'ultimate' in it, getting one-turn kills and such, or because "oh, your game has the play phase after the attack phase instead of before, that's different from Magic, good-bye." Things like that really annoy me. The inspiring, however, is watching how once a player opens up to a new game and gets into it enough to get a feel for what it is and where it can go, they can get so carried away with themselves thinking up combos, new cards, and many different strategies all at once. I really like seeing that sort of thing, that light bulb turning on.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about your distribution channel(s), local, retail, Internet, etc and how it/they is/are working for you
Mage Warefare: Our primary form of distribution is simply going to a local store ourselves and seeing if they'll carry the game. This ends up both good and bad. If we get a store owner who really loves the game they'll talk it up and get people into it. However, if we get one that isn't, since so far nearly everything's on commission, the product just sits there doing absolutely nothing. Since we have such a limited set of these first cards we're aiming to stay pretty much within New England, so we don't end up with 100 players each 100 miles away from each other. However, with the new deck builder I'm working on (Flash-based, accessible on our website, though the current one is version 1 and I'm rather ashamed of it now that I'm almost finished with version 2) we hope to have a service where players can build legal decks, then order that custom deck. We'll hand-assemble it (as everything at this stage is being done by hand) and mail it out.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us about personal views, background, inspiration that drove you to start your company or create your product(s) or choose it/them for distribution.
Mage Warefare: Hmm... well I've not much of a background, this is my first game of any real significance so far. I've been programming since I was 11 and I'm going to college right now for a degree in Animations and Graphic Game Programming, and fully intend to get into video game development as both hobby and career. My inspiration is really game design in general, I simply enjoy designing systems of rules that create interesting little 'puzzles' for people to figure out, while still doing so much more than fitting jigsaw pieces together, as in a game you have so many directions and you can go in and so many different goals you can aim for (depending on the game). Though overall, I have to say Blizzard is a good chunk of my inspiration (especially StarCraft, I find the unit balance and uniqueness in that game simply beautiful, in the mathematical/artistic sense). I've found a number of times that I'll start conceptualizing a game, then two or three years later Blizzard will release a game/expansion/patch that covers a few of my ideas and sometimes expands on them in different directions. For Mage Warfare in particular, I have to say my primary inspiration was that I played Magic from about Fourth Edition to the end of the Urza set, then when they started release instant-win cards and re-releasing old cards with lower mana costs (rules-wise, not concept-wise) I just got really tired of Magic really fast. So I decided to figure out what I'd do to make a game that could expand better in the directions I wanted to go in, since Magic didn't go in those directions. I often find that my inspiration for something is my disappointment with something else, I feel that if I can't join something I should beat it. Healthy competition and choices for the consumer and such.
Spewgilist.com: Tell us a little about your job and life history
Mage Warefare: Hmm... sorry, not terribly interesting in my case. I've only officially worked at a retirement home, a LAN gaming center, and as a peer tutor for the degree program I'm currently going for at college. I've already mentioned a few other job/life history things in previous questions as the cause before the effect, so really all that's left is that I've been using computers for as long as I can remember. When I wanted to start creating things outside what the tools I had at my disposal could do (StarCraft map editor and such) I picked up Sam's Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours one Saturday morning, read it straight through until the same time Sunday morning, got some sleep, and started programming. Then when VB6 ran out of power for what I wanted to do, I went on to the next thing. That cycle just sort of continues in anything, be it a programming language, game or other system of concrete rules. I'm really eager to back into class so I can have more tools at my disposal (and looking forward to that XNA thing Microsoft is doing to let hobbyists develop games for the 360).
Spewgilist.com: Is there anything else you'd like to share with folks?
Mage Warefare: Nothing too spectacular, just that our website is http://www.magewarfare.com/ . We have a forum on there that we watch fairly regularly and love to get feedback on anything, we also have the formerly-mentioned tournament-runner on there, whom writes deck building articles. Currently there's also the formerly-mentioned version 1 of the deck builder which only lets you use the 100 cards currently in print, but version 2 (which is nearly finished) loads everything it needs from our database, giving you access to far more cards. I'm also working on a Flash-based walk through of how to play the game. At some point in the relatively near future when I'm comfortable with my ability to do it right the first time, I'll make an online version of the game. Ah, also, if anyone wants to contact me, akai.to@gmail.com is far more reliable than this address, since this one gets so much spam.
Spewgilist.com: Thank you Chris for taking the time to answer our questions and provide us with your insight. This is one of the reasons we truly enjoy working with emerging companies. Good luck and we look forward to MageWarfare.