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New Magic Online Prototype

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ October 19, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

One of the perks of being a Magic Jour­nal­ist is that we get sneak peaks. Peaks into the new sets, upcom­ing news, and in this case a sweep­ing change to the Magic Online soft­ware. Now I must stress the fol­low­ing: This is an EARLY pro­to­type. It’s not even an Alpha. Nowhere near a beta. It’s proof of con­cepts really. So what you’re about to see is quite likely to change and shift before it ever hits your desktop.

Wiz­ards is going to make Magic Online amaz­ing. It’s okay right now, it does what it needs to do but it has so many prob­lems and glitches that I don’t play it as much as I want to. Some of these issues are on their server side, but largely it rests in the client. The client soft­ware is buggy to say the least. It’s clunky and most impor­tantly (as Wiz­ards has dis­cov­ered) it’s extremely counter-intuitive to the naive user. And all of that is about to change.

Wiz­ards has brought in sev­eral new staffers includ­ing a UI expert, Adri­ana Moscatelli. She is a UI expert com­ing from com­pa­nies like Nokia and she is quite the expert. She has also taken the game of Magic to heart. The other staffers present at the pre­view, Gils, Ryan Dhuse, and a few oth­ers were shar­ing sto­ries of how she had come to Wiz­ards and dove into Magic — tak­ing it home as it were. She plays it reg­u­larly and under­stands how the card ver­sion works and how it should be rep­re­sented on the com­puter. She also has taken her UI expe­ri­ence and done some in depth User-Centered Design stud­ies to find how to best help users.

These changes to the UI also come with a major change to the appli­ca­tion as a whole. The new ver­sion is being built on Sil­verlight, Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Air which means it will be run in your browser (Inter­net Explorer, Fire­fox, Chrome etc.) It also means that it is now OS inde­pen­dent being able to run on Win­dows and Mac, and to some extent Linux natively! This is a huge change and will open the door for many more Magic fans to play online. They are not 100% com­mit­ted to the Sil­verlight base, as there are still some reser­va­tions (such as its cur­rent lack for right-click sup­port) but they feel con­fi­dent than can fix these problems.

Enough chat­ter, let’s show some of the pic­tures! Click on each pic­ture to load up a big­ger ver­sion of them.

As you can see, I used my odd screen size to an advan­tage. It stretches the play area out. I didn’t get cap­tures of it, but almost all the areas are resiz­able. The bot­tom, left and right zones are all drag­gable to change their size. Also note that the chat is no longer the thin ver­ti­cal abom­i­na­tion. It’s now in the lower right cor­ner. It will allow you to carry on mul­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions dur­ing the games. The right is hid­den in the pic­ture but it will con­tain the revealed cards and the Exiled cards in a sin­gle loca­tion instead of the win­dows that pop up and must be hidden.

One of the fea­tures that most peo­ple don’t even know about is the zoom capa­bil­ity in the cur­rent Magic Online. Here is an exam­ple of it in place in the new inter­face. One thing they high­lighted is that they were avoid­ing the jagged, unpleas­ant text they are cur­rently using. Every card is a vec­tor image, com­posed of only two non-vectors: the card image itself, and the card’s col­ored back­ground. Oth­er­wise the font, the expan­sion sym­bols, etc are all vec­tor based and able to resize smoothly and cleanly for dif­fer­ent screens and resolutions.

If you look up at the table view you’ll see a thin red strip split­ting the screen. When you enter com­bat that line expands and cre­ates the epit­o­mous red zone. As you declare attack­ers they tap (or stay untapped if they have Vig­i­lance) and move to slightly over­lap the red zone. When you pick a blocker and declare who it is block­ing it rearranges your field to line them up with that card, rather than using the jum­ble of arrows that can some­times occur in the cur­rent Magic Online.

The arrows, Adri­ana noted, were some­times con­fus­ing to new play­ers as they could become jum­bled and over­lap­ping so they are doing away with the arrows. They may make a return before the new MODO is released, but they were not to be found in the cur­rent preview.

Here is an exam­ple of the stack, and how it would work in a cur­rent early pro­to­type (this is very con­cep­tual, it had almost no functionality.)

As you can see, there are cards and there are effects, each ren­dered clearly dif­fer­ent. This is an exam­ple con­cocted by R&D’s Erik Lauer to show a com­plex exam­ple that would require a very clear and easy to fol­low stack.

The three guests in this group pre­view all left quite excited. Evan tweeted about it as soon as twit­ter came back up. And the PureMTGO writer also seemed quite inter­ested about the poten­tial we saw in the pro­to­types. Wiz­ards was also hav­ing the judg­ing staff come and see the pro­to­type, explore and play around with it, to gain their feed­back on how it feels and how clear it was to fol­low. As an early pro­to­type, I asked the obvi­ous ques­tion: “When?” Their tar­get is the end of 2010. While that seems like a long ways away, it speaks to just how much is being changed. Their chang­ing the entire expe­ri­ence of the appli­ca­tion, mim­ic­k­ing Xbox’s Duels of the Planeswalk­ers in many ways, but also main­tain the clear and robust capa­bil­i­ties Magic Online offers.

As I said ear­lier, this is a very early pro­to­type. It was not fully func­tional as for the game and was just meant as a pre­view into the inter­face. Things are likely to change, and I per­son­ally see the tar­get of late 2010 as extremely aggres­sive. I won’t expect it until mid-2011, but we’ll see. The changes are gigan­tic and pose a huge oppor­tu­nity for the next stage of Magic Online.

Thanks to Wiz­ards for their time and allow­ing us this sneak peek into their progress, and to their staff for all the hard work on this next gen­er­a­tion piece of software.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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