DevLog #13 - Hand Simulation

Welcome to our DevLog for MTG Doctor Phoenix, the next generation of MTG Doctor. If you’ve been a member of the MTG Doctor community all these years, thank you for your support and if you are not familiar with MTG Doctor thanks for taking the time to read our log. This time we are introducing all the new experiences in the hand simulation feature in MTG Doctor.

Re-Design

We began our redesign by moving the controls from buttons to actions in the app bar. This allowed us to have more screen real-estate to show the card and at the same time expose more actions.

This then allowed us to include additional functionality include information about the different features available increasing their visibility.

Improved Simulation

During this work we also took the opportunity to improve from just simulating drawing cards to something closer to a full game simulation by allowing for the placement of cards into any of the valid regions in Magic: The Gathering.

Cards moved to a given region are available under that specific region moving forward and remain there until a new simulation is started.

Once in a zone we also added the ability to move the cards to any other zone in order to simulate the use of spells or abilities that allow for this behavior.

Lastly we also took this opportunity to improve the usability of this feature while in portrait mode. Although this is a feature that we expect will be mostly used in landscape mode we decided to make it more accessible by moving the main action button to the bottom center of the screen so it is equally accessible to both left-handed and right-handed players. We also ensure that each card fits the screen width so we don’t have to scale them down to see the full picture while in portrait.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this far and for using MTG Doctor all these years. Whether it has been one year or the entire 12+ years MTG Doctor would not have grown into such a great tool as it has. Join us during future DevLogs as we continue to share the next generation of MTG Doctor built on over 12 years of experiences and lessons. 

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