Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has 50 million registered players, making it the biggest hit in which players on PC and mobile are playing each other in the same game (this will eventually come to certain versions of Minecraft, which has 100 million in sales). But how do you make a user interface work for a game where you have people playing it on a powerful PC and a cramped iPhone screen — and against each other?
Jason Chayes is about to show us how.
The production director for Hearthstone breaks down how Blizzard’s engineers tackle how to get a game’s interface work for both PC and mobile — and tweaking it to work on these different platforms (including tablet, which is different from a PC and from a smartphone). Here is an edited transcript of GamesBeat’s interview.
GamesBeat: People were wanting deck slots for a long time. Was mobile a roadblock to doing this, making it harder to code those additional deck slots in?
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Jason Chayes: I wouldn’t say that was the biggest factor. It was a factor in that there’s a bigger challenge with how we make a UI that can accommodate the smaller amount of real estate on mobile devices. But I wouldn’t say that mobile by itself was why it took a little longer to get the deck slots feature out. What that came down to—we were never opposed to the idea of deck slots. For us the challenge was how to come up with an implementation that we were happy with that was still consistent with the values of Hearthstone. Meaning the charm and the accessibility of the game.
When we think about any of the features we’re working on, we think about them through those two lenses. How can we add this thing into the game that isn’t going to add so much additional complexity, so much additional overhead to the experience of playing that it starts to detract from the essence of what Hearthstone is all about? Finding the right way to do deck slots and making sure it was something that made sense was more of why it took the time it did to get there. I think we found a great solution. Players are going to be pretty excited when it comes out.
GamesBeat: I consider Blizzard’s programmers, coders, designers, some of the best in the business. How do they approach the challenge of making an app work both on the PC side and the mobile side in one game?
Chayes: That’s a big question. The way we approached it is we wanted to make the best possible experience on both platforms, or actually on all three platforms when you think about PC, tablet, and phones, all of which have slightly different UIs and different input mechanisms. We really think about what’s the best implementation of Hearthstone that we can make that works individually on each of those things.
We don’t want the version of Hearthstone that exists on the phone to just be a straight port of the PC version. We don’t think that would be the best experience. People who discover Hearthstone for the first time on a phone should have as good a response as if they’re discovering it through the PC. That was one of the major guiding philosophies. This is actually why it took an extra year after we shipped on tablet to get the phone version out.
Frankly, we didn’t know if we could make a phone version of Hearthstone at first. A lot of the initial few months was just doing prototypes to try to prove to ourselves that if we did a phone version of Hearthstone, it was going to be as good as all the other versions. We got to a point where we were happy with it. We had to make a lot of changes to the design, taking off a couple of corners, having the cards up on the board itself, changing the way the collection manager is represented. There’s a lot of little details there.
That all said, given that we have those three separate platforms to work on, we still wanted the game to feel like one integrated experience. If I’m used to playing on my PC, and I switch to playing on my phone, it should feel like the same game. It should feel like the same Hearthstone. We didn’t want it to be the case that people couldn’t continue moving forward with their adventure progress or matchmake against the same people on their phone that they’re used to playing against on the PC. Our goal was to have them be customized per platform, but still have feature parity across all the platforms as well.