DevLog #4 - Battle Helper

Welcome our MTG Doctor DevLogs where we cover the changes that are being made to MTG Doctor as part of our Phoenix release coming later this year. Today we’ll be going over the new experiences we are adding to the Battle Helper. 

Battle Helper

For our revision of the Battle Helper we aimed at keeping the experiences that were working well the same while replacing those experiences that weren’t with improved or new versions. As such the main battle interface remains the familiar interface we know and love with minor tweaks.

However, that’s where the similarities end, the other side of the Battle Helper, the Player Settings panel has been completely redone to improve the usability.

Player Settings Panel

For the player settings panels we aimed at making it more glanceable. In this new version we have done away with the previous appearance of buttons and replaced them with both text and iconography.

We did not just add some icons to the existing features but also increased the depths of tools available to you under each of these features.

Player Edit

The player edit for example has been extended from just allowing you to configure the name of the player to also now allowing the toggling of trackers so you can keep track of as many as 14 pieces of information. From poison to energy and even planeswalking attempts for those of us who enjoy Planechase you are now able to select the level of information you keep track of during each game.

Manage Players

We have renamed “Add Players” to “Manage Players” as we felt this was more descriptive for the feature as well as improved the experience by having more knowledge in the world when it comes to interacting with it.

A new addition in this version is that selecting a play format also toggles some of the most common trackers for the given format for you in addition to setting up their default settings like each player starting with 40 life in a commander game.

Randomizers

Those of us who use the Battle Helper extensively likely noticed that “Roll Die” and “Flip Coin” were not present on this new interface. For this rework we have decided to bring all these into a single interface we call “Random” that provides access to these features with a single tap lowering the previous interaction cost from at times three down to one.

In addition to that we also added a new randomizer to help you decide who should go first on a given game, all within a single tap interaction cost. 

Scratchpad

Last but not least on our list of new experiences we are adding to the Battle Helper is the Scratchpad. With this feature you can see all the changes to each player throughout the game at any point. We track the when, the what, by whom and by how much, of events throughout the entire game for a given session allowing you to quickly refer to it at any time. 

Closing Thoughts

And with that we have reached the end of today’s DevLog. Thank you for reading this far and for being a member of the MTG Doctor community all these years. Subscribe to get the latest updates on all the new experiences we are bringing to MTG Doctor as part of our Phoenix update.

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