Hey! Nice meme template. I also wanted to complement you on the AI work for sparky. During discussions about integrating a practice AI for this game, I had theorized that the difficulty of the AI would need to intentionally be lower than a human opponent such that while it still presents a decent challenge for the player, it would be easy enough to remain approachable for beginners. What were your thoughts when designing the systems for sparky? Did you want to make it as close to a human opponent as possible? Or were there any exploitable mechanics intentionally left in to lower the difficulty?
Thanks! You are right that the philosophy is to have it be on the same level of a new player coming out of the tutorial, so we definitely skewed towards that. In fact, we gave opportunities for Sparky to "mess up", especially during combat. This is because new players are very protective of their creatures. Even if a win is a few turns away with a few creatures dying during combat, many new players would still hold back to keep their creatures alive. We took this into account when designing Sparky. Other than that, most difficulty came from the decks Sparky pilots. By neutering her decks, we could have Sparky be better for new players, but still make the "best" plays given her deck.