Might & Magic Chess Royale | Lead Game Designer Damien Yvray

you hello everybody I'm here today with Damien y'avait who is lead game designer at Ubisoft Paris mobile and lead on the latest entry in the auto chest John rrah might magic chest well welcome Damien hello Josef and you know it's been a while since we met back in Beijing when we were both at fun plus really yeah but really glad to see you're now at Ubisoft and working on a very interesting project so just to kick things off maybe can you talk to us a little bit about your role at Ubisoft and the auto chest in you have recently launched yeah sure so in a nutshell Andy as you said the lead designer on Might and Magic chess raion so it was actually launched in lifedesk like soft launch in November and then we

did the worldwide release at the end of January we had like some significant updates since then so basically chess raion imagine might add magic yes where is there three things the first one is the Might & Magic Band first it was important to to try to revive this brand because it's a very good one like everyone in the team really like this brand and on top of that it's two major tweaks for the auto battle genre the first one is we made it for mobile first so what was very clear since the beginning was that it had to be extremely fast like much faster than any auto battle in the market at the moment so it's in average 10 minutes when you do a top one is more around the 15 but in average it's around 10 minutes so extremely fast compared to our competitors which are like 4050 minutes and the second thing the the second major tweak tweak is the 100 players so

you don't fight against seven other players it's actually a pool of 100 players and you have to be the top one like in a better way oh great and just to get to dig a little bit deeper in terms of your kind of journey and how you wound up at UB softest to take a little bit of a setback could you talk to us about that journey as a game designer to where you are today yeah sure so ugly everything started in the nine years ago I started directly in the in the mobile markets I never did like HD or Triple A games it was social game since the beginning actually bags back then it was not mobile games it was mostly on Facebook but most of the people on Facebook were like quickly moved to iOS and mobile in general and so I started in digital chocolates where I mostly significantly worked on the galaxy life who was a kind

of crash of ground but a bit earlier then I moved to googa where I worked on an amazing project which was called bar sprout which is still live in performing super amazing project like a extremely healthy amazing team amazing company as well guys super super nice with a lot of tourism people so then after we we met in Beijing at fun plus I didn't stay for a long time only a year because China was like China extremely interesting but very intense as a personal experience and I also wanted to get back in Europe so so then I moved back to Barcelona which was actually with the former colleagues from digital chocolates so I made a Agana loop so it was in an elite one where we worked on so the most significant project was titled wall which was a MOBA like lights MOBA I

stayed there for two years and then I just join you Bischoff something like two years ago almost two years ago I think I mostly came for the amazing eye piece they have also the they of course resonate to me because it's it's French IP so you know I know them super well Ubisoft is in my mind since I'm a kid like I think any French designer so I mostly came for the for the IPS and also super super cool feeling with other people in the studio so Damien speaking about we'd be softened about some of the IPS that Ubisoft has when I think about movie soft at least on the console side I think of shooter titles like division 2 Ghost Recon in games like watchdogs assassin's creed 4 honor and games like that so definitely a really solid lineup on that side and then on the mobile side I feel like there's been a lot of titles but really the ones that come to mind at least for me are hungry shark growtopia

because at the time it was so unique south park then there was the news about the acquisition of green panda on the hyper casual side and I actually got a chance to meet Reyes from Green Canada during the Iron Horse game press conference but could you tell us more about that side the mobile portfolio in terms of like investment general strategy that ubi has or mobile kind of moving into the future hmm yeah so actually I don't think I'm the good person to talk about strategy in general just because it's not my area of expertise and and we prefer to have these topics to be held but by the people in the edit oh and so on but the only thing I can tell is that Ubisoft in triple-a or in mobile is mostly meant to have games for a very wide wide range of people in genres and I mean yeah that's that the only real strategy I can

tell you about what's that that can be a very interesting topic but gets to do with some people who are war a bit more into these these topics ya know is can you talk more about let's say the mobile development side in terms of let's say number of studios or team sizes or things like that yeah I hope I will not forget any bets Ubisoft has studios in most parts of the world so our CEOs in Shanghai last year's in Abu Dhabi some small studios in in San Francisco of course lots of Steel Arena and France Paris Moberly and so on some big studios as well in and of course like for two future games of London which are working on hungry shockers as you said so it's I would say around the 10 studios I don't know the workforce in mind I don't have this in

mind but yeah it's around 10 studios all around the world oh great yeah that's that sounds pretty pretty ambitious with so moving back to let's say that the game it'd be great to talk more about might magic chest Royale and for me one of the most interesting aspects of games has always liked the origin story so maybe we can start there where did the idea come from to actually work on this kind of game with this kind of combination and how did the project get off the ground at boobies off so actually everything happened pretty pretty naturally so on one side the like so the organization in Ubisoft is you have a big HQ team who is like a very like like managing different order portfolio okay and although all the production teams like pretty classic and then what happened basically was that in

Sadr muds in dota 2 came out in nineteen of January I think or 2nd of January around these those lines in 2019 at this one I think the week after everyone in the in the team we had at the moment was playing the game and what we realized was that's actually a lot of people in the H she was also playing playing the mod so everyone was actually looking at this and and seeing all my like this there was something cool there's something nice in this in this project and basically what happened was on one sides we were in different projects and on the other side the issue was also really looking at this genre so basically back then nothing was really sure like with this genre become extremely big the this is this we we never knew because is was just the beginning of a genre but

what we agreed with the issue was that at least there was something that we could pray so maybe it's gonna be big maybe it's gonna fade but at least we'll give it a shot and that's how we we all align to say okay let's try something as quick as possible let's try to to make it happen if it fails too bad but at least we'll give it a shot so so everything was pretty pretty natural actually compared to other project also in other companies were you have a lot of gating process for us we since everybody knew the noodle genre knew the game everything was natural Johnny and so you had a lot of people within the company and you know there who liked the game who liked playing the game but was there any specific opportunity that you saw in terms of like a plus one or any specific sort of change that you thought you could bring to the genre yes what was

very clear at the beginning was that we wanted to be mobile first and by being mobile first the the first thing we had to tackle was to make the game much shorter actually that was the biggest challenge because also back then we we didn't know if we could make it happen because when you have something 40 minutes to make sure it's also it's it's a great challenge like many people try for instance in in the Indo MOBA genre many people try to make it to make move as much shorter but so far only really Tencent managed to do this so back then it was one challenge that's actually we overcame pretty quickly it was pretty pretty fast but yeah it was mobile first like ten minutes was the the very first thing that came to our mind and so you have folks at the studio that like this this new genre you had folks at HQ that liked it so can you tell us a little bit about how the greenlight process works a newbie software how it worked for you what was sort of management's reactions

our HQ reaction for this and how did that kind of play out in terms of getting everything moving yeah so I can't tell for the for the other teams and other studios like every project is very different some projects are more ambitious some projects are meant to be faster and we're mostly on the on the fast track so what we as I said what one module was minimize the risk why while we saw a great potential so minimizing the risk was also meaning we had to be much faster in the production process and that meant also in the greenlight process we had to be a bit like faster and try to not have a lots of processes you know like in most of the companies you have very clear gating processes and that's most of the case at Ubisoft but for us since we wanted to be that fast we had to tube it bypassed this process and be as fast and smooth as possible so

the team could focus on just making the game as fast as possible and by the way I think you guys did an excellent job from a production perspective and I personally really enjoy the game but I think the big question on everyone's mind that's sort of you know from a p.m. and sort of exact perspective is has to do with the current competitive landscape in what my magic is bringing to the table and you kind of alluded to some of the differences but do you dive a little bit deeper in terms of the big differences in terms of the game design choices you made relative to the other auto chess games yeah first you are right because the to say that it's very competitive it's really big companies and big big projects and big brands in front of us so it's definitely extremely challenging but so far I think we nailed something with the ten minutes think on mobile I think it's it's crucial we saw it on on many on many games it has to be extremely fast and I think that's really

the main thing that makes us very different from any other competitor it's extremely fast and most importantly it's meant to be very fast since the beginning you know it's not cutting half of the experience you know right from the beginning we knew it had to be ten minutes where it was not like cutting the ends or cutting the beginning or make things artificially faster we wanted to have exactly the same experience but more concentrated in a way so having these 10 minutes I think on mobile it's it's the the number one thing which is the more powerful at least on our side also beside this we have the fact that it's a hundred players and actually it sounds like just a marketing thing at the at first but actually it makes everything very very different we used to have the game as ten players and then we just try just for fun we try to have a hundred players just to to a test and it really blew up

like the fun all the excitement it became really really different you know it was not just the HP bar going down and so it was about being the the last one you know these very better way are feeling so these two thing I think they make a very very big difference for from our competitors got it and you know you mentioned that one of the the biggest innovations was taking about 40 minutes to ten minutes and so for some of the folks in the audience you haven't had a chance to play the game in you know for those who just want a little bit more insight from a gameplay perspective how did you do this what did you do specifically to take that 48 down to ten actually it's it's not one thing in particular I think it's the combination of many many many many tweaks so one thing you have you need to have in mind is that's everything we do in production is very data-driven and when I say data

I mean like actual data of the game which means that's extremely quickly we can iterate on many many rules so although you I all the older systems will adapt to this new data which means that we can really desperate so what we could what we could do was changing the the amount of units changing your HP changing the amount of players changing the the the DPS of units so we could make all these very very small changes extremely fast and what really helped us as well was that the whole team wasn't born so the team exactly understood what we were going and why were what why we're doing things so that could help us to have feedback group like very very quickly for instance like very one thing in particular for instance we could tweak the gold extremely quickly and we could do this because okay we're data driven

but also because all the team wasn't born so I could get the feedback extremely in a very fast iteration process and all these things together we could try them because it was that add ribbon we could try them because we could get the feedback very quickly and that made us like progress extremely fast but yeah to answer you are your your question it's it's a mix of many things we have less units the gold is do we have less gold management's we have shorter fights we have only 3 HP against the hundreds so it's a mix of all these things together in Auto chest really sort of burst onto the seaming and grew really quickly both as a mod to go to you and then especially once these other companies started building the game like riot launching teamfight tactics what do you think it is about auto chest up there's love so much why do they why does

everyone love this John they're so much well I think Jesse's is working on one thing which is very powerful which is basically draft mode you can see you're also a lot of different games like this I have sled this by in mind for instance or submerged in the hearthstone this draft mode is this kind of trendy I think it's also because on top of that other chest does one thing which is very smart which is you have all these draft so you have to adapt your strategy which also means that it makes the the gameplay very playable because one game is always different and on top of this you also kind of control the the randomness of the game you know with the pool of units you have some some choices to make and so it's not only randomness but it's about mastering the randomness basically so all these

draft world I think it's it's a concept or at least a pattern in game design which is 620 power for these days because it's very replayable very playable and uh you know it brings all this excitement of randomness and all we did here to tr3 it's it just blows up with a video to chess I think so Damon given the competitive nature of this Auto chess Auto battler type of genre what do you think it's going to take to unseat the current players in the market tough question I'm not I'm not and doing this kind of thing it's mostly Eric I think Eric could answer this I I can't because I'm so much in Tuesday's jaanwar that I don't know but I think at least with the fact that it's 10 minutes and the fact that it's 100 players I think at least we we give it a good good shots but you know how to twin-seat EFT or under Lords I have no idea okay and what

do you think about some of those key competitors in the marketplace is there a favorite or do you have any specific thoughts on those guys actually I think all of them are have something very very unique for instance TFT they have pretty a very good idea so they have a amazing brands that the they capitalize on it the brain is amazing and and also have some pretty cool features like like the carousel the I'm very excited but the galaxies as well so they definitely have some very cool ideas and irad has amazing UX they also have a pretty good pretty good IP the introduction of the the internal is also very interesting the the last day they made is is quite impressive and then on mobile only auto chase origins is doing a lots of good thing in UX they have very good ideas as well in the meta

lots of customization so like which one is my favorite with it be hard to pick because they they all have very very different ideas which are all very very interesting so I couldn't find one but they definitely have or they're there they're cool things like to compete and speaking of the current market leader riot with TFT I think they announced that mobile launches this month any any forecasts or any thoughts on on the mobile well I think they're gonna fail of course but but given the brand given the brand I yeah it's it's we'll probably yeah I'm very interested interested to see their to see what they will do because when I when I look at tryouts for all these these years I was waiting and expecting them to do something on mobile so know that the they take the step to do it I'm very interesting to see how it's

gonna work I have no idea because I'm really not into a forecasting that's not my thing but I'm really looking forward because there there is this huge market and I think in China for instance they have a huge community and mobile is very very strong in China so I'm I'm really looking forward to see what they do in mobile but they will probably discover a new really a new market for them so very interesting to watch it yeah you know I know you don't like forecasting but just to push you a little bit more on this in terms of like longer-term and in the future who do you think do you have any thoughts on who wins out or what does it take to win out in the in the longer term sort of a long game as this John Ragan sorts of plays out on mobile yeah actually when one thing to notice that I think this genre by by nature is very it's pretty niche compared to many other many other genres so if we're gonna see someone winning the fights I don't think it will be in the next few weeks or

months it's gonna it's gonna take time because it's it's the type of game which will grow and grow and grow over time but I will not do any forecasts because I cigarettes but but I don't think we will see this we will not see the winner in a month or two I think it will take at least to see someone really dominating the markets if actually someone really really performs with very well because as I as I said in the beginning it's a risky market we don't know how many players are interested by this so maybe there will be no me no winner maybe there will be a one big but it's still really unsure I think it's it's still very open I thought we could talk about the the big question mark from a business perspective that everyone's talking about which is really about monetization and it seems like I mean you know many of these games in this auto chess Auto battler category aren't making much money despite the popularity

and the downloaded volume certainly so team fight tactics as an example massive player base they just haven't been able to monetize strongly hearthstone seems to have actually cannibalized its audience so can you talk about the monetization strategy strategy or the eventual monetization strategy for my magic chess trial or of course I can go to the into details now obviously actually we could we could even consider doing a again another and another podcast about monetization in in six months after but but yeah monetization is a huge challenge and I think even riots involved didn't know how to answer yet you can see in terms of monetization I think no one nailed it yet yeah it's very hard to talk about this because I can say much but it's it's a very huge challenge the way we we we we saw this

was we knew that we had challenges at least in the gameplay so since we wanted to be fast and we wanted to be very focused the team is not so great like so big so monetization was definitely not the priority for the first release so that's why we wanted to first focus on the gameplay doing something great that the player would like and focus on retention KPIs and then move on to monetization when we have something very stable because because yeah as you said it's really a huge topic it's definitely one which is the other trickiest in the general in you know just be just having the opportunity to talk to someone like you as a lead game designer in this category I know you don't like predictions but talk about so we can avoid the monetization stuff but in terms of maybe other innovations that you might expect to see or other influences that you might expect to see in terms of this genre in the future do

you have any thoughts on that yeah it's also hard to to talk about this without giving information about our future update but I think monetization will be the key all the what what I saw in the with the with the competitors that's the they had big fights of cool feature and we engaging features you know and Donald like pushed so many interesting feature and same for for TFT but then what what will make the difference will be monetization so I think the first who will really nail this will nail the market it's not it's not so much but about trends I think we'll keep seeing updates about like new units new contents some new features like galaxies and so on but at the end of the day the one who will win will probably be the one who will really nail how to monetize this genre because that's the main challenge got it

and then just maybe more from a broad game design perspective since you know you are a league game designer can you talk to us about maybe any other mobile gaming trends that we should be watching for or looking at that you're seeing in the market right now yes so last year I think for me one really big how to say like yeah kind of shifts happens was the was yeah to me it was mostly one thing which is our cheer up so it's only a game but to me it's it's a game that shows a trend so I don't know if it's a trend I I don't know if they found the markets I don't know I don't know if they created the markets but what I saw was that with the worthy positions in the market was very unique very new and I it showed everyone that these markets existed to me and to me what is interesting is that it's it can be it looks like it's the the the the the

merge of two kind of people to me people interested in our Shira are games into the like super casual markets can come from being like a hardcore midco player but willing to have something a bit more simple I think I was into this kind of like these kind of audience like playing very mid core games and at some point I couldn't I didn't have time but then I found something which was kind of similar to this and in the other and I think there are many people who never played like two or three years ago who played a lot of hyper casual but at some point got to be born of the this very very simple mechanics so they went to kind of super casual so to me these these kind of having super casual games really in between mid corn or even casual in he he / casual I think this will be a huge group of players that's almost for sure to me got it

and then maybe just bringing it back to Ubisoft can you speak to what we can expect from Ubisoft at least in terms of on the mobile side in the future not much it's yeah I would love to you I would really love to because there are very exciting things coming out but yeah I can I cannot tell much I would love to okay and finally just to wrap up our conversation do you have any shoutouts announcements or you know anything you'd like to say to the audience first play chess right yeah because I think it's it's a very very good game super well design not super well-balanced but super well design and and second thing is war recruiting a lots of people on every area so I sure interested in interested in working in the very cool projects very cool IPS then just go to you be so calm and you will share

of opportunities very good teams and then if anyone wanted to reach out to you specifically are there any future conferences or events or ways in which people can contact you I think conferences are a bit compare compromise for the next year but no nothing behind the planter at the moment okay all right great well in that case thank you very much for your time Damien and I will also ask you in the future to see if we can follow up on a month yeah I would love to I would love to you're thinking behind is very interesting so and I will be able to tell a bit more so it's gonna be less frustrating bye Thank You Joseph right