Marvel Snap Devs Discuss Player Feedback Influences…

Marvel Snap's Alliances feature enhances social connectivity and rewards players, but has room to grow with player input.
The development team at Second Dinner consistently iterated to fine-tune Alliances, taking player feedback into account for future adjustments.
Future updates for Marvel Snap's Alliances may include features like sharing decks and themed bounties, based on player desires.

The recently added Alliances feature finally brought a new level of social connectivity to Marvel Snap, but the system still has a lot of potential lying in wait. Players can already join or create an Alliance based on their preferred playstyle, message Alliance members via in-game chat, and earn rewards by completing bounties. The whole system adds a new layer to Marvel Snap's existing content, but also lays the foundation for Alliances to grow even more robust as time goes on.

In a recent interview with The Best War Games, Marvel Snap Design Director Kent-Erik Hagman and Senior UX Designer CJ Robinson discussed the development of Alliances, and where they'd like to see the feature go in the future. The devs detailed how the feature went through many different iterations during the design process as they carefully crafted a system that could appeal to all types of players. In the end, Marvel Snap's Alliances strikes a solid balance between casual comradery and hardcore teamwork, but the future of Alliances could be up to player feedback.

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Marvel Snap's Alliance System Has the Potential to Grow with Player Input

Although the Alliance system is in a great state for having just recently launched, there are some features that could be incorporated to better flesh out the possibilities within it, both from the social side and the gameplay side of things. When developing Alliances, the team at Second Dinner notably went through many iterations of the mode in order to fine-tune it into one that fit with the goals they had in mind for Marvel Snap's new mode. When working through this process of iteration, Hagman notes:

"We actually started with some early prototyping that was super fun to kind of play around. It was super fun but also it was like 'Oop not doing that version. Let's take another swing at it.' And we went through a few revisions before finally settling in on 'Okay I think this is the version of Alliances.'"

Internal testing prior to release is nothing new for game development, but Marvel Snap has the benefit of being a live-service game that can take player feedback into account to tweak features once the larger player base gets ahold of them. Hagman notes that the data on player habits within Alliances has already been very useful in planning for future adjustments, saying:

"We get these printout reports of like 'Nobody's taking these bounties,' or 'These are the bounties that frequently get discarded,' or 'These bounties take way too many games to complete.' And so we're taking that back — we have a team with one of our designers and product managers — and they're literally crunching the numbers in a spreadsheet to figure out 'Okay, we've got to re-tune these, change these.'"

With this level of data-driven management, it's easy to see how Second Dinner is setting up Alliances to remain successful in the future based on player participation and feedback.

A Host of New Additions are On the Table for Future Updates to Marvel Snap's Alliances

With Alliances now available for Marvel Snap players to join and participate in bounties, the team at Second Dinner is already looking at player feedback to gauge where the mode should go in the future. One feature that Robinson notes is on the horizon for Marvel Snap players participating in Alliances is the ability to share decks with other members, saying:

"We give you a code that you can share your deck, right? But you can't share that in chat. So in the next release, we are taking care of that. You can paste your deck code and share out your decks in chat."

While nothing is set in stone yet, the team is playing with other ideas surrounding bounties that could potentially change the types of bounties players receive. Currently, the bounties on offer for players are not necessarily tied to the theme of the Alliance they are in, but this could be a potential feature in the future, and Robinson agrees, saying:

"I do love that idea. Maybe we'll take that back to the team."

So, the door seems open for experimentation as Second Dinner continues to update Alliances in the coming seasons to meet the desires of the Marvel Snap community.

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