From BioShock to gardening to Card Hunter

"It just kept getting bigger and bigger," Chey says. The studio grew to more than 100 developers for BioShock, and Irrational's upcoming BioShock Infinite had upwards of 300 people working on it.

"Management is OK, but it's not really what I got into the industry for," he says. "I think this is true of a lot of indie developers. They actually like programming and designing and drawing pictures."

Chey left 2K not sure of what he was going to do next. He was only sure that he didn’t want to work for a large company anymore, channeling his creative energy into managing hundreds of people. For a year after his resignation he was on gardening leave — a business term that describes when a company pays for an outgoing executive to stay at home and not work so they can be phased out of the business. The year after that, a non-compete clause meant he couldn't work on anything even if he wanted to.

Chey spent the first six months catching up on video games. When he tired of that, he travelled. He tried a yoga class. He actually took up gardening.

"I grew tomatoes," he says. "Chickens. We had five chickens in the backyard."

Gardening was a change of pace, but it wasn't video games.

"I didn't do very much," he says. "It was a very weird period in my life because I'm a very career-focused person. That's what I do. I work on games. It's my job and it's my hobby. When you go from working more than full-time and your work is your life, and then you have two years when you don't have any job, it's actually a really weird thing."

In between watering tomatoes and feeding chickens Chey was not able to do much, but he was able to think of what he could do next. He knew he wanted to do something small, something independent; perhaps a small game with a small number of people. Maybe that game would be a marriage of some of his geekiest hobbies. Free from the big business pressures to make a game that appealed to everyone, he could now indulge his inner geek — the same kind of unabashed geek who would wear a cape while poring over a deck of cards. Maybe his new studio should have a silly-sounding name that had personal meaning to him. (Chey's father was Manchurian and belonged to the Blue Banner clan, hence Blue Manchu.)

In 2010 2K's non-compete clause ended. Blue Manchu and Card Hunter began.

Card games look so simple on the surface. Whether it's Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or even traditional decks used in Poker and Blackjack, the premise is simple: there are cards with images or text and an accompanying set of rules to follow. By this reasoning, card games should be easy to make and market.

Having spent most of his game development career working on the interactive equivalent of Hollywood blockbusters, Chey looked to card and board games in the hope of creating something smaller, more focused. Card Hunter was significantly less taxing when it came to the technical side of things — there was nothing to animate, no 3D spaces to build and no complex levels to design. Yes, it was smaller. Yes, it was more focused. But as he soon realized, it was not easier. Not by a long shot.

"When people tell us they're working on a card game, in general we think they're crazy," says Skaff Elias, one of the first playtesters and developers of Magic: The Gathering, who now runs a consulting business with Magic creator Richard Garfield. Both are working with Chey on Card Hunter. "It takes a lot of work," Elias says. "It's almost like the creativity behind making a good card game is the easiest part, then comes the amount of work you have to put in to refine it, which is very daunting.

The list of challenges that face a game like Card Hunter seems endless. First, a good card game has to have the illusion of presenting seemingly infinite options. The developer can't guide the player through the game, it can't be a linear experience, and the developer must relinquish power and control to the player. Second, when the player is in control, the game must be so well-designed that it can't be broken or played unfairly. It has to allow for players to do the unpredictable without the game falling apart.

Then there are the challenges specific to trading card games.

"In a trading card game, you're going to begin with at least 100 different objects and people will only be playing with their choice of, say, 30 of them, and they'll have duplicates," Garfield says. "So most of the combinations they run into and most of the orders they come out with need to give you different, varied and exciting games, and that is several magnitudes more difficult than making a traditional game."

Card Hunter is not a traditional trading card game, but it's not exempt from the challenges a game like Magic faced.

To get to a point where the game was balanced, with balanced meaning that every card has a place and purpose, the math is carefully considered so no cards are outrageously overpowered or pathetically underpowered, that matches can be varied and dynamic regardless of the card combinations used, Magic: The Gathering took two years of solid playtesting before it was released. And even when it was released, Elias says it wasn't what anyone would call by today's standards "balanced."

"If a card game came out today that was as balanced as Magic was when it first came out, you would say it was not finished," he says.

Magic spent the next year being playtested and balanced live, and it has now had 20 years to be perfected. Card Hunter has had a little more than two.

Most of Card Hunter had already been designed by the time the masters of Magic were brought on board. Elias and Garfield played the game over two months and wrote up a long report detailing their recommendations. They had good news: Card Hunter — at six months into development — was a good game. They loved Lee's art direction. The concept was interesting. The cards and systems were well on their way to being balanced. They also had bad news: a major feature of the game was making it so complicated and slow to play that it could potentially turn lots of players away. It was a feature adopted from traditional trading card games like Magic, but unlike physical card games, it did not translate well into the virtual space.

In a game like Magic, when a player casts a spell or performs an action, the opponent that interrupts can cancel it by playing another card. This counter can be countered, which can again be countered and then countered some more. "They call it a stack," says Chey, which is a term that was adopted from computer science to refer to an abstract data collection. "It's that geeky."

In Magic, stacks can go on endlessly, which can result in fascinating matches for hardcore players. But in a virtual game like Card Hunter, it can be tedious. Every time a player put down a card early on, the opponent would be asked whether they wished to counter it. Often, this resulted in repeated clicks of No, No, No, No, No, Yes. It also didn't take into account whether a player could counter an attack. In a traditional card game, a player has to pore over his or her cards because no one else is going to tell them whether or not they have the right cards to perform certain actions. If a game is on a computer, why not automate that process and get on with it?

Chey and his team discussed the feedback from Elias and Garfield. The debate went back and forth, and they agreed that as difficult as it was to kill a feature they'd put so much work into, it was best for the game.

"It's very hard to give up your baby sometimes," Chey says. "You've created this thing and, I don't like where I'm going with this analogy, but it's like you go, 'This is kind of an ugly baby; I don't really want it. Let's get a better one.'"

While it hurts Chey to see his ugly babies tossed out for the good of the game, Elias says Chey's openness to change has been impressive and is driving the game to a promising place.

"There have been a lot of changes to Card Hunter over the course of development and it's all basically Jon's initial idea and his initial rule set — it's extremely rare to find someone that's as creative and successful as him who is as open to changing things on the basis of other people's ideas," Elias says. "He's sort of the driving force because he's super smart; he takes in with an open mind all sorts of data from all different quarters and all different people on the team. And even though it's his baby on the operating table, he's able to make really good, creative, rational decisions at the same time. That part is extremely impressive."