Where we’re at and where we’re headed - a TCG update

Hi! Nicole here. Game Producer and Delivery Director on Parallel TCG. A little about me, in case we haven’t met; I have been with Parallel since 2022, managing projects for the engineering team on Pack Drops, Web Development, Back-End Game Servers, Infrastructure, and now, yours truly, our Parallel TCG client.

I wanted to address the understandable, public concerns on the progress of our game and its trajectory. In doing so, I’d also like to show how far this game has come over the last year of becoming our very own in-house studio, while showing you what we have planned for the future.

Migrating Internally (Q2 2024-Q4 2024)

Before diving in, I want to bring attention to how much our team of developers, designers, UI, marketing, QA and playtesters have rallied together to improve this game. We have a larger team than ever internally, and everyone has been working hard to make your experience better. As you may know, we inherited a game that was developed by an external company. Yes, Parallel had a part to play in design, Art, and back-end systems with that third-party early on, but the client and server was written and coded by an entirely different company.

Taking over a product that wasn’t built by you or any one on your team is a huge undertaking - and we have managed to not only migrate everything internally and not only build a team that gels, but also drill down on the glaring things that needed to be addressed first and foremost, while simultaneously optimizing it to work on mobile, improve the UI, and make strides towards new offerings (in just about 1 years time). We needed to migrate code, deployment pipelines, and all logistics, internally. For context, our first deployment using our own build pipeline was in October of 2024. Although the migration began in Springtime of 2024, the end of 2024 was when I could say we were fully in-house in terms of people, processes, and systems.

Big things we’ve worked on

Matchmaking (Q4 2024 - Q1 2025)

Matchmaking Service and Matchmaking MMR Algorithm

Before:

• Matchmaking Service: Matchmaking was using a different back-end service than today; seeing potential outages and less control available to our team.

• MMR Algo: The Matchmaking algorithm was matching players with quite disparate ranks.

After:

• Matchmaking Service: Matchmaking has migrated to a new service, seeing less outages and more control for our team.

• MMR Algo: The matchmaking algorithm has drastically improved, with the community happy with fair, better match-ups.

Future:

• We continue to monitor and address discrepancies in the code of the new service. Things are continuing to be fixed to ensure matches are found, made, and opened properly in the back-end. Some bugs related to connectivity when matchmaking are currently being addressed and should be mitigated in the next few weeks (Early June 2025)

• We continue to monitor the matchmaking algorithm for players. The bigger the player-base gets, the better we can be at better match-ups overall (Ongoing).

Aftermath (Q4 2024)

Before:

• Aftermath Expansion was delivered in November, which was the team’s first deployment of a new expansion into the client.

• About 40% of the Aftermath set was coded by our in-house team. The rest was done by Electric Square.

• The Aftermath patch saw 3 subsequent hot fixes to fix Soft Locks on cards (addressed below).

Future:

• Deception Expansion is entirely coded by the Parallel engineering team and tested with our QA teams (Scheduled to be available in-client August 2025).

• Deception testing will be available months in advance of release date for longer internal testing. (End of May 2025).

• The Public Test Server with Deception will be available to a sub-set of users, and eventually the entire public, for playtesting about 1.5 months before release (Forecast for end of June 2025).

Soft Locks (Q3 2024-Q4 2024)

Before:

• If one can recall, last year of Summer (Post Planetfall) and Fall 2024, the stability of the game was put into question in regards to soft locks.

After:

• Our soft lock and in-match freezing and desyncs have drastically reduced with each new patch.

Future:

• We have more extensive card playtesting and auto-testing to trigger warnings of soft locks in lower environments.

• The underlying logic for why these occurred had been mostly caught and mitigated; giving us more confidence in patches moving forward.

• Although we still find these once in a while, the frequency and likelihood is much lower, and we continue to be agile and address these as soon as possible.

Mobile (Q3 2024 - Q4 2025+)

Mobile Optimizing the Client

Before:

• Our new internal team was greeted with a difficult task to “get the game running on a phone.” On April 24th, the first Slack message greeted us from our Lead Client Developer that the game had officially been built to Android and it made it to the boot-up screen. HAH.

• The team needed to reduce the number of calls, strip away code and some screens, change the way things were loading, optimize, profile, optimize, profile, optimize to get a match running successfully.

After:

• Since then, the game is now running on Mobile on Android and iPhones with compatibility tests saying acceptable to flawless and consistent framerates on 10/15 Android device tests and 15/15 iOS device tests.

• Some screens and scenes needed to be left out to ensure the game ran smoothly on device, including Deckbuilder and collections screens. These parts of the game were originally left out as it was a much bigger refactor of how assets were loaded into the game, and navigation to these screens.

• Draw-calls in the playing field have been reduced for better performance. From our Tech Artist, “The overall draw calls on mobile are now 240. Last year in November when I was last checking, it was at around 490. The new Playing Field, even without changes to the timer module, is now reduced to 29 draw calls.”

Future:

• Any screens and scenes that are product must-haves, but were much bigger refactors, are now being optimized to get running properly on mobile devices. Our biggest focus is Deckbuilder.

• Deckbuilder in Mobile is forecasted for July 2025, currently.

• The more the playing field and other screens are worked on in mobile, the further optimization will be done on calls and Tech Artistry, which will help with performance.

• Our next three patches have major updates to mobile that will deliver the sort of experience we know you've been waiting for in the client.

Mobile UI-Ing the Client (Q4 2024 - present)

With a focus on getting mobile to our community, we had to drastically change the User-Interface of the game. Although some mixed reviews have come in regarding our UI changes, it is a reminder that we are constantly changing and embracing agility. When people are used to a certain look or muscle memory of experience, it’s hard to break that change without push-back. We are looking to constantly improve the UI, but our first focus was ensuring you could actually functionally play a match on mobile. Some of that may have come at a cost to the visuals of the game at the beginning. This is a reminder that not everything (UI, buttons, experience) has changed yet. We still have what I call, “legacy screens” and UI that still impairs a player from tapping or reading well-enough on a mobile device that is being done in incremental steps.

Let’s have a look at how far we’ve come:

Login:

• Now available through Social Sign-On using Google & Apple.

• Authentication and Login Flows are so cumbersome. I’ll just say that.

Future:

• Potential to have login flow completely built into the client as a “Native Login” method. Currently it is an embedded browser.

• Discussions revolving around signing in as Guest for ease of access for first time users is still underway but nothing is on the roadmap as of yet for this.

October 2024

March 2025

Playing Field:

The Playing Field has been worked, re-worked, and re-worked again to see how we could fit such a beautifully complex game onto our devices. As a reminder, we are not building from scratch, but rather retro-fitting a game that was built for PC controls and big monitors, to now work and operate properly on a small device. The amount of work that has gone into, and is continuing to go into, making the Playing Field WORK not only functionally, but visually, and with touch input, has been a major undertaking.

We are constantly pivoting and making adjustments based on feedback, knowing we still have a ways to go to compare against the fluidity and grace of MTG: Arena, or Hearthstone on Mobile. YES, we look at these games for inspiration in design and input, and YES, we are still working on it. We know there are still sticky points and difficulty in dragging and playing cards in the field.

I have assigned a task to our team called: “Make card dragging feel like Butter.” BUT before we fiddle with controls once more, we also need to unify the entire experience in the playing field through our new Prompts system, whereby the actions on the field have an easily-accessible, legible, and consistent UI and UX for the player. You can see snippets of what’s to come and scoped for July/August 2025 after extensive internal testing. This will be available for you to try out in our Public Test Server. This will also be the new playing field on PC, which we are prepared to get all the commentary and potential push-back on; to challenge our players and ourselves to make changes for the better, even if slightly painful, come first adoption.

Finally, discussions around a drag and drop card, opposed to a fishing line, is much in favour. There could be hurdles in developing this, but we know this is an amazing path forward, so I will ensure this is forecasted for sometime by the end of 2025.

Original Playing Field Concept

December 2024 in Game

April 2025 in Game

July/August 2025 New Playing Field and Prompts

note: The designs shown below are concept-only and not reflective of accurate scenarios/card combinations in match

Battle Pass

As mentioned, some screens were intentionally left out of our first iteration of mobile to ensure the game would run smoothly. Efforts are currently underway to get the Battle Pass in by June 2025, using our legacy screen first. We are making only slight modifications to the current UI to work on Mobile, which means increasing button and text sizes, trying for a lean approach with minimal intervention, so we can get it out to players as soon as possible on mobile. We are willing to live with slightly larger and scaled-up text and buttons in these screens on PC, knowing that we will have a new UI for the Battle Pass by Q4 2025, if timing permits. New and improved designs for the Battle Pass, (subject to change!) are available for preview below.

Battle Pass Design Concept

Subject to change

Deckbuilder

Optimizing Collections screens on Mobile has been a big feat, conducted by one of our most talented Lead Engineers. He needed to ensure that assets were being loaded efficiently, on boot-up of the game, and upon entering each of these screens. We are very close to having these screens run properly, and now we need to have proper UI in place so that people can read and operate the deckbuilder effectively on mobile devices. The Deckbuilder is ideally forecasted to get into the mobile client for July or August of 2025.

Deckbuilder Design Concept

Subject to change

Better Game Experience

The part everyone’s been waiting for: improving our game experience.

First Time User Experience

Tutorial

Before:

• Our old tutorial system was quite long, and we found it hand-held the player through the process so much that they didn’t know why they were playing what they were told to. We called this an “on-rails” system, where players weren’t able to do anything else besides what the tutorial said to do.

After:

• Our new tutorial system is an actual match to be played. It has no intervention on how the player plays, and in effect, needs them to pay attention and play their cards appropriately.

• Feedback has suggested, however, that the pendulum has swung a bit too far to the other side. The new tutorial needs a bit more hand-holding to explain mechanics of the game, so new people can learn how to play.

Future:

• We are adding incremental improvements to the tutorial as feedback comes in. This may include better reference to zones on the playing field when tooltips show up, and a bit more direction for the player, while trying to maintain more freedom for the player to play as they wish. Tutorial improvements will be appropriately scoped with each set of feedback that we get.

Quickplay

Quickplay is a new queue that will replace Rookie Queue and Unranked, with the aim of improving new user experience. This queue unlocks Paragons, Starter Decks, and additional rewards the more the player progresses, including Card Choices and Apparition Packs. After each match, they can continue playing without returning to the main menu, keeping our players locked-in and enjoying themselves match-after-match.

This queue not only challenged us to re-create an onboarding experience for players, but also had us visit rewards experiences, end of match screens, dopamine hits, animations, and more, to get the game feeling… well, more fun. This wasn’t just introducing different rewards in between matches in a new queue, this was starting to adapt our UI to feel more fluid and exciting for new players. There is no doubt that Quickplay will continue to be iterated on once it arrives. But we hope for existing players, they will have something fun to go to if they want something more casual to than Competitive/Ranked play. Quickplay is currently scoped for June or July 2025.

Quickplay and Match End Screen Progress

Subject to change

Elephant in the Room - Game Speed

And now, I’m ready to address the elephant in the room: the speed of our game. Here we go.

As mentioned, without pointing blame in any direction, we’ve inherited a game that was already built in a certain way. Therefore, we’re working with what we already have in place to improve our game; knowing that the big, underlying system is not using queued actions in a match. This means we rely on the server to tell us, “Yes, this is good, continue” for each move being done. While this is an evident issue, this wasn’t the only issue we needed to address. We have had a talented engineer focus on serialization of our game server, bringing the speed of our server response down from 300 ms to 0.6 ms. This has just recently been worked on, and is now in testing, as it involved a lot of in-depth changes in code. As a result, we will see and feel much snappier and faster responses when playing a match. Two side-by-side videos can be shown on the speed comparison.

Playing to the Bank Comparison

Top Video: With serialization fixes.

Bottom Video: Current state.

Playing to the Field Comparison

Top Video: With serialization fixes.

Bottom Video: Current state.

A seed has been planted in regards to queued actions in gameplay. This is a large re-factor to how the game runs, so we will need to think strategically on how to incorporate this, with an ideal timeline of End of 2025 to have something in place.

What's coming? What does this all mean?

Here is a glimpse of our Highest priorities for the next 3 months:

Within the months of June, July, August

Game Experience/Fun

• New Playing Field UI and UX

• Deception Testing and Balancing

• End of Match Screens

• Quickplay Queue

• Mobile Controls Fluidity

• Battle Pass in Mobile (Legacy Screen)

• Battle Pass “Claim All”

• Improved Conceal and Reveal Animation

• Welcome Bundles

• Deckbuilder in Mobile

• Tutorial Improvements

Game Stability/Speed

• Connectivity in Matchmaking fixes

• Match Reconnection Logic

• Game Server Serialization

• Match Start Speed Up

• Action Queueing Proof of Concept and Ideation

Updated Roadmap

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate you taking the time and commitment to Parallel TCG’s success. I hope to provide more insight in the future, as a lead on this project, working alongside amazing folks in amazing ways. We’re listening.

Love, Nicole