Interview With Gary Weis, CTO of Playdek

Since 2011, Playdek has established a reputation as being one of the premiere companies for porting board and card games to the iOS platform. Shortly after the release of their exceptional port of Lords of Waterdeep, we sat down with CTO Gary Weis to find out a bit more about how the game came to be, what we can expect in the future, and what it’s like being the publisher of some of the best the iOS has to offer.

iPBG: There wasn’t a lot of time between the announcement of this app and its appearance in the App Store. How long did it take you guys to put this together? How long were you sitting on the announcement?

Gary Weis: Playdek and Wizards of the Coast announced the partnership in March of 2013, and then announced the title, Lords of Waterdeep, at Wizard’s Dungeons & Dragons® event during Gen Con, 2013. We started working on Lords of Waterdeep around the time Agricola was wrapping up. It was a small team to start on a design for the interface and to get the rules implemented. When we announced the game at GenCon, we had just completed our first playable and were starting to receive feedback on that from WotC.

iPBG: Lords of Waterdeep represents something of an evolution from the pure card games Playdek used to build its reputation. How did the different design considerations affect how you approached this project?

GW: We had a good head start into this genre with the work we had done on Agricola, but honestly there isn’t that big of a difference from some of the games we’ve done in the past. The focus of play is obviously shifted to the main game board, but the way we implement the rules is very similar to previous titles. AI is probably the biggest departure, since so much of the long term planning is dependent on predicting which actions your opponent(s) will take. A board game presents a greater numbers of UI/UX (user interface/user experience) challenges, of course, but having started that with one of the biggest of worker-placement games, Lords of Waterdeep really presented us with the opportunity to iterate and sharpen those design decisions.

iPBG: Aside from those player decisions, there’s a lot of randomness to Lords of Waterdeep, which can make a long-term strategy difficult to realize. How did that play in to the creation of the different AI levels?

GW: Your long term strategy is usually dependent on which Lord card you’re dealt and which quests are in your hand or at Cliffwatch Inn to start the game. While there is some randomness that will affect that, it’s not too different from the randomness in a game like Ascension, where a new card is revealed each time you acquire a card. The AI has to make allowances for the fact that it doesn’t know which cards will be revealed next from each of the decks. This made evaluating the “Reset Quest” action difficult, since it had to determine the quests that it had a chance of acquiring in four random draws from the deck was better than what was already shown.

iPBG: We were surprised to see that this game doesn’t support landscape mode – since zooming and scrolling will pretty much be required, one orientation over the other doesn’t seem like it would matter. What led to that decision?

GW: Vertical is the natural orientation for the game board when you play the game on the tabletop, so that factored into the design of the digital version. It was an added benefit that the iPhone version can be played with one hand using just your thumb, which wasn’t possible on most of our previous titles. A landscape presentation would have exacerbated the pan/scroll challenge, unless we completely re-designed the play-space. Going too far from the original wasn’t that appealing to us, as the first and most important customers are those that love the original. We did add zooming to the play space, which lets a player choose their view, and subsequently the amount of panning and scrolling they do.

iPBG: The ambient animations on the game board are a nice touch, as is the day/night cycle for Waterdeep as the game progresses. Most of the pure card games you translate don’t have room for those kind of extras – where do you draw inspiration for these aesthetic touches?

GW: Our design team and art staff put countless extra hours into building the atmosphere of the game. We’re a video game studio, so we want to do everything we can to enhance the user’s engagement with the game. It’s been a focus within the studio to improve the tools that our team has to build content, and our last couple of titles have shown the results of that effort.

iPBG: Any chance of a Skullport expansion in the future?

GW: Once you’ve played the Undermountain or Skullport expansions, the base game feels incomplete, so there’s a very good chance you’ll see additional content added to app.

iPBG: Not to put down any of the fantastic work you guys have done to date, but Lords of Waterdeep represents arguably one of the biggest intellectual properties you’ve worked with – what’s next on the horizon?

GW: We’ll continue to work with Wizards of the Coast, of course, as well as supporting our existing games. We have also announced Unsung Story, an original game and game world developed with Yasumi Matsuno at Tokyo Game Show in September.