As one of the main and founding game designers for South Park: Phone Destroyer, Reina Magica is responsible for expanding, balancing, and testing the real-time strategy card game. It's a role that suits the strengths of the avid South Park fan perfectly. Before joining the team at Ubisoft Redlynx, Magica was a media studies major in her native New Zealand, then moved to Finland to become the only woman in her game design master's program at Aalto University. After grad school, she worked the university researching cruise ship design, all while competing in professional Magic: The Gathering competitions.
Magica joined the Phone Destroyer team four years ago, early on in the development process, and worked with the creative director and line producer to design how all the characters, cards, and classes would be used in-game. Today, she continues working on the game post-launch, balancing and introducing new characters into the fold.
Coming from New Zealand, why did you want to study game design in Finland?
Reina Magica: I spent a couple months traveling Europe when I was 18, and I really enjoyed the peaceful atmosphere of Scandinavia. So, when I was in university, I decided to study abroad in Sweden, and that was when I visited Finland for the first time. I later moved to Finland from Sweden, and during that time I was thinking about what I wanted to study further. I noticed a new Master's program called Game Design and Production, and I thought back to how much I loved playing games as a kid and teenager, and it seemed to make sense to try to learn and work on something that I enjoy.
How did you come to join Ubisoft?
RM: It felt like the perfect fit, really. They were looking for someone with my exact experience, and it's quite niche to have a background in competitive card game, while also being a game designer with a background in UX. I actually had a competing offer working in UX, but the reason I took the job at Redlynx was because I felt there was a big opportunity for this game to be something new and exciting at the time I joined. I saw the project as a place to develop my own skills, but also to build this vision with an IP with as much humor and character as South Park.
I was actually leaning toward the other job until I realized this was an opportunity to work on a South Park game. I've watched South Park since I was in high school, and realized that this would be the South Park mobile game, and I've always had a special place in my heart for strategy card games like Magic and Hearthstone. I felt this was a real chance to build something special.
What does a game designer for South Park: Phone Destroyer do?
RM: Personally, my biggest contribution has been the battle system, including design the powers and abilities of the characters, and the tools to work with programming these characters. Once the battle system was keyed in, I started working on creating characters, balancing the game, and adding new features. Game design in general, is very wide, and game designers can have many roles touching different aspects like economy, feature design, systems design, game narrative design. All of it unified by a creative vision. It's a mixture of working on systems and player experience, because you have to know what the player wants, what they expect, and what motivates them to play more or achieve something. That's one of the most difficult parts of game design: you need to get a feeling for what players want. You have to iterate to get the best version of your game. Game designers come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but a good game designer needs to be multidisciplined and very systematic, because everything has to work together smoothly as a system. You have to imagine and calculate how so many moving parts come together. If you're not careful, things can snowball out of control from a slight imbalance.
Game designers don't code straight up, but you have to understand the logic behind the code. You don't always need to write the code yourself, but especially as a battle system designer, you need to be able to use tools where you can write the logic for a character. As a game designer, it's hardly ever you telling someone "This needs to be more or less powerful." It's a very hands-on role, very DIY and get-stuff done. The creative director is the one ensuring that everything is meeting up to their vision, but everyone basically handles all their own moving parts, with feedback from the rest of the team and from the creative director.
When did you first start playing videogames and card games?
RM: The first game I played was Tetris when I was about four years old. All throughout my childhood I played games, everything from DOS games, to Minesweeper on Windows 3.1. I played a lot of classic PlayStation games, like Final Fantasy 7, Spyro, and Ape Escape. I also played a lot of point-and-click adventure games from Lucas.
I first started playing Magic when I was around 13, but I only played with my best friend at the time because I was too shy to play with the boys. Later, when I was 21, I picked it back up and realized that there were tournaments, and I started to go to those. I was doing pretty well in local tournaments and winning some of them, some of which qualified me to pro tour tournaments with prize money.
"For me, being able to make the game, and make it as good as it is, it proves to me that I have skills no one can doubt. I have living proof that I can do this job, and that's all the confidence I need."
At what point did you decide you wanted to make videogames?
RM: It was actually much later on in life. When I was an undergrad, I was still trying to decide what to do, but when I found this master's program in game design, I thought, "Why didn't I ever think of this?" I had a lot of knowledge and skill in videogames, and thought that I could actually make them. In reality, you need much more skill than just being able to play them, but I was able to pick them up and combine them with my passion. It's really rewarding to have a job where you can keep learning and things are always interesting. It is quite complex to make games and systems in the games, so it provides enough challenge to keep my interest.
Did your Magic experience and skill help you design Phone Destroyer?
RM: Yeah, I think it definitely helped. It provided a really good base for me. From those tournaments, I met a lot of pro players, and we would practice together. I learned a lot from them about balance, and how they viewed certain cards, and how to exploit anything that was too powerful to get an edge. That's really important to consider when balancing a game. At the same time, we have the real-time aspect to our game, so I have to manage mana (called energy in our game) and speed, and that added another layer of complexity. I didn't have as much experience with real-time games, like MOBAs, but I had to figure out how to make something like Magic work in real time. It took quite a while to distill it down into what it is today.
There are so many moving parts and systems at play, so it's really important to test and tune to continue to make it better. Originally, Phone Destroyer matches were nearly 20 minutes long; we had to get that down to a mobile-friendly time while still having the same level of challenge, excitement, and strategy.
You mentioned you were the only woman in your game design program. What was that experience like?
RM: I didn't feel intimated or anything. I've been in the game design community for the last decade here in Finland, and the industry has developed a lot in that time. Back then, there were very few women. I've watched the game-developer community grow over time, and now there are more women than ever before. I like that about Ubisoft and Redlynx; it really feels like we have a good gender balance, especially on the mobile side.
Before my time here, I had been in some situations where I felt like I wasn't respected, and I suspected it was because I was a woman. Throughout my career, I've felt like there can be managers or other people who might not see you as equal, and that can be a problem at other companies because of the gender imbalance they have. I really hope that the industry is developing and getting away from that kind of toxicity. For me, being able to make the game, and make it as good as it is, it proves to me that I have skills no one can doubt. I have living proof that I can do this job, and that's all the confidence I need.
Generally, I would hope that women aren't the only ones that have to prove themselves like this. Male designers are more common, so people expect that they're good at what they do, and they don't have to prove it as much. At Redlynx, we have people of all genders in all roles, so I think in general, it creates an atmosphere where people don't feel singled out, and they are more respected for their work.
Is there anything you know now that you wish you could tell yourself when you first started?
RM: I would've tried to tell myself how to communicate more effectively through the process of working. You need to be brief and concise, while making the message strong and clear. Communication is key to game development, because there are so many different departments working together. To make sure that everyone is understanding the same message clearly, and that your instructions as a designer are clear, is really important. When I worked at a smaller company, I didn't have to worry about it as much as everyone was more directly connected to each other. With a big team, you need to make sure everyone is on the same page, through your written and spoken communication.
What are your career goals? Where do you want to be in five or 10 years?
RM: I'd like to be overseeing a game on the whole by then. I would really like to challenge myself to create something from my own vision, like a creative director. I also want to elevate my skills as a game designer so that I'm at the peak of what I can be. I'm also really interested in AI and self-learning systems, so I'd also like to branch out to working with that more.
For more interviews like this, check out our past entries in the Women of Ubisoft series.
