MPQ Developer Q&A #2 – November - Answer Time!

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Welcome to the November Marvel Puzzle Quest Community-Developer Q&A!

Members of the MPQ community had a ton of great questions for the developers at Demiurge this month. We hope you enjoy reading the team’s answers. If your exact question wasn't addressed - please remember that we'll be holding these Question and Answer sessions on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future. You'll have the opportunity to submit further inquiries for our December session soon. Thanks to everyone in the community who submitted questions and thanks to the devs at Demiurge for taking time out of their busy schedules to share some insights. Let’s get right to it!

Q: Could you share with us some info on the new Story mode or the new game mode? There's no need to tell us the expected date, but sharing some info will get us excited. Maybe like telling us the new antagonist (Apocalypse, Sentinel, etc.)?

A: Just a couple hints on the new Event and game mode rolling out in December:
1. You’ve seen one of the antagonists in the game already.
2. There’s a new minion group, with Red and Black abilities.
3. There are a lot of them.

Q: Is there any possibility of adding PVE aspects to Seasons, possibly as a second award track?

A: The idea of a PVE Season is a very cool one. What would a meta PVE Event look like? There’s a lot to think about and design for something like that. We’re definitely interested in making PVE Events more awesome, but there’s a lot of other aspects of the game that we want to make more awesome too. All we can say for now is that the idea of a PVE “Season” has come up in design discussions more than once, so who knows?

Q: Why so many new characters lately?

A: OK, so we’ve definitely stepped up the number of characters that are coming out recently. We’ve had a lot of characters requested this year, and on top of that, we’ve had our own pet characters to work on. We tend to get a bit excited about making new characters, but that’s because we think new characters are awesome! Having such a wide array of playable characters is one of the things that makes Marvel Puzzle Quest stand out. New characters means new allies, new enemies, new abilities! New characters inspire new PVE and Versus Events and spice up older ones.

The Marvel Universe is enormous and encompasses an insane variety of characters and we want to make sure our game has that same feeling.

Q: Has the lack of active Purple powers been noticed? Are there plans of correcting that?

A: Part of the process for developing an ability is coming up with what story the ability is telling: What is the Super Hero doing when they fire this ability? It’s part of the design that we think adds a lot of the flavor to the game and really makes the characters feel like their comic book selves.

Purple is a sneaky, subtle kind of color, so we aim to tell stories of subversion and intrigue with those abilities. As a result, a lot of them end up with passive or reactionary triggers. Having said all that, we are aware that there are some colors that are more prominent than others and keep that in mind when designing new abilities or revisiting old ones.

Q: Which characters do you think are underrated and why? (Looking at the forum voted character rankings - viewtopic.php?f=14&t=18101)

A: I’ve always felt Moonstone was an undervalued character. Her Photon Blast gets wildly more powerful the more Red tiles are on the board. If you use Iron Man Model 40’s Recharge, you can generate enough Red AP to fire this ability without diluting the amount of Red on the board. Gravity Warp is extremely useful for dealing with powerful enemy special tiles. For the most part, characters only make special tiles on one color, so you can frequently force that tile to move into an auto-match. Control Shift is very expensive, but I’ve found there’s nothing more satisfying than stealing X-Force’s Recovery Countdown tile.


Q: Anniversary Week was amazing. Are there plans to implement any of the changes that occurred in that week on a more regular basis? It was the first time I had tried Lightning Rounds in about six months.

A: As much as we’d like to have an anniversary every week, it only happens once a year! This year we tried out some new things we’ve never done before and it’s great how much everyone enjoyed it. The Thor, Goddess of Thunder Lightning Rounds were one such example and we’re definitely going to be using things we’ve learned there when designing new features and Events.


Q: I really liked the answer on the AV Club interview about coolest idea that you didn't implement for practical reasons (i.e., Deadpool messing with the App store). Can you give us another story or weird idea that just wasn't feasible?

A: Here’s another Deadpool one. One of the goals we originally had with Deadpool (and eventually set aside) was to do something so big that it would be worth talking about by itself.
For example, the first sketch of WHALES! WHALES! WHALES! involved spending real dollars to drop all the whales on the enemy team. The plan there was: satire & controversy -> articles with epic comment threads on Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun -> we go on The Daily Show -> more players check out the game -> not actually a good idea.

That wasn’t the front-runner for Deadpool’s Purple power at the time, though. We had a detailed paper design and estimates for the server work required for a power with the working title - Twitch Plays Deadpool.

Whenever you fired this ability, you’d make a match. If you made the match by moving a tile left, an avatar of Deadpool, shared by everyone playing Marvel Puzzle Quest, would move west through a maze. If you moved a tile up, he’d move north. If he bumped into an Iron Man suit (lying around in the maze for some reason), you’d fire off a Repulsor Blast. If he bumped into some Hero Points, you’d get some Hero Points. If he bumped into some cheese, awesome, a cheese thing happens. You’d be able to go to our website and watch Deadpool moving around and bumping into things, controlled by every player in the world who was firing this ability. Players would work together to throw Deadpool off the edge of the world or get him through rooms full of spikes in order to bump into the cloning machine that gave out more Deadpools to everyone.

RIP, Twitch Plays Deadpool. You were too beautiful for this world.

Q: Are you going to expand Alliance functionality more? I.e. more ranks, better chat, more sharing, the ability to demote someone.

A: So by now you know about some of the recent Alliance & chat improvements we’ve made, like improved support for a bunch of Android keyboards and letting all Alliances have 20 players in them. We’ve got more planned out on paper, both the sort of quality of life improvements you’re talking about, and more ambitious features. No ETA on any of those, but we know that Alliances are a really important part of what has given the game such longevity for so many players.

Q: What am I doing wrong in PVP? I'm building up my roster, some 2 stars in the mid-levels, and I seem to get one extreme or the other. First opponents are way under my level, some level 1s through 10s. I beat these matches easily, then when I come back, my options are all level 95+ Hard or Deadly match-ups I have no chance of beating.

A: Yeah! This is one of the problems that we took a shot at addressing recently, when we tested a few different versions of Versus matchmaking during the Nefarious Foes Event. We’re actively working on smoothing out this difficulty ramp while keeping other aspects of matchmaking working well.

Q: With 4* Thor’s "Charged Tiles" in place can we expect more "new" things that could affect the gameplay?

A: Of course! While we can’t promise “new” things with every new character, rest assured that “new” things are always on the table when designing new characters. On top of that, we’re always looking for ways to leverage old ideas in ways we haven’t done before. Using existing tile or ability types in previously unexplored ways (like Colossus’s Countdown Tile!) Every time we add a “new” thing to the game, it opens many new possibilities to leverage old things in cool new ways.

Q: Doc Ock's Armed and Dangerous, Nick Fury's Escape Plan, Wolverine X-Force's Surgical Strike, Blade's Nightstalker, and Black Panther's Rage of the Panther all work on the mechanic enemy's strongest color. Can a color dot or something be added to the enemy status bar to indicate their strongest color?

A: That’s a cool idea! We’ve overhauled the Game Board UI a few times over the lifetime of the game, and we know it’s still not perfect. The main problem we’re trying to tackle right now is letting players know when and how enemies gain AP. There are other equally and less important problems that we’ll tackle in the future, and making a character’s strongest color more apparent will be one of them. No firm plans right now, though. The challenge is finding the right level of putting enough and not too much information on the Game Board.


Q: Will players be able to share, transfer or link Steam and mobile accounts?

A: We offered this very early on, but found that some people were using it to cheat. We already spend a lot of development time preventing cheating that could be spent working on features, so we decided to just disable the feature. It’s too bad, as the PC version has some cool stuff. If there’s a way to make this work in the future, we’ll try it.

Bonus Question:
Q: Choose one: Pancakes, French Toast, Waffles.

A: Waffles. No questions asked.
A2: I’m actually more of an oatmeal person, sorry.