#AltDevBlogADay » Raul Aliaga Diaz

Triple Town: A Social Game Design Analysis

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:20:43 +0000

Triple Town is a puzzle game developed by Spry Fox, originally for Kindle and then Facebook and Google+. There are several reviews out there, but chances are you already played it, and if you haven’t, try it or check this video to see how it flows.

Source: www.lostgarden.com

We’ll discuss the set of game design decisions that are interesting in the mindset of social games. Spry Fox’s Daniel Cook himself wrote about designing to find emotional resonance choosing the right setting from the systems design, so we’ll concentrate on other design issues.

Comparable games are other puzzle games with match-3 mechanics such as Bejeweled Blitz, Diamond Dash, among others, but Triple Town promotes a “city building”, following match-3 mechanics. Social games take advantage of limiting the game session length to fit into the expectation of visiting the social network for a short break -after all, social games compete for people’s time. Also, in the context of something-building social games, the session length is limited by the almost pervasive “Energy mechanic”, but puzzle games can not directly use this, so what we can found here is: (a) limiting game session to a fixed time and to get the most points possible within that time (b) Just like (a) but the number of game sessions take each one “a life” or energy, refilling over time with a relatively low max cap around five.

In any case, playing a puzzle game constrained by a clock on an environment in which not all browsers perform at the same speed, pacing and responsiveness suffer, and if you’re already used to play at another, quicker pace, adjusting to play like that might not be accepted.

Therefore, a key innovation is to change the mechanics and pacing of the puzzle in turns, translating those turns to a familiar Energy mechanic.

A second important element is the monetization strategy. As pioneered by Nexon, microtransactions were originally conceived to enhance players’ experience through content to express themselves. An important distinction was to have two currencies, one in-game and another payable with real money. This way communication to the player of how to spend their money can be clarified, it separates possible inflation issues and other players might not feel unfair competition from paying players ensuring there are no gameplay advantages because of paying, specially since Nexon games were mainly in the high peak of MMO’s, games in which that concern is extremely important.

Traditional gamers saw this monetization model as a deep flaw in social games, as much of the progress is: through the platform’s viralization channels, grinding or paying, considering grinding the only possible acceptable option, then unacceptable anyway because is done without (directly perceivable) skills involved.

Since Triple Town doesn’t have avatars neither any expensive-to-produce-continually content, the option is to sell more turns (energy). But why not one currency for turns and another in-game currency for the pieces on the market?

Triple Town's Market.

Well, in my opinion the genius move here is to have only one currency. This is at first perceived counter intuitive, because in this case, What’s the point of achieving high scores if paying players can buy their way in gameplay? The answer to this question is not unique, and it depends on the type of player asking it.

If you’re a typical social network player, and assuming you don’t play other traditional games, the fact of having only one currency instead of two isn’t necessarily perceived as something wrong because you don’t care, you’re used to it or even better, it’s simpler. For a hardcore player of traditional games, the answer to the question “What’s the point of this if you can pay?”, the game designer has to ask first “Is this a real problem?”. Given that the audience that generally play social games can be designated as the primary target, the fact that some people might dismiss the game at all because of this perceived flaw at first can be considered not that important. But if those players end up actually playing it against their initial doubts, thanks to the gameplay’s balance they’ll eventually know that the advantage of payable gameplay progress is negligible.

Money won’t get you out of this, because even though you can have infinite money, the pieces you can buy at the market have very low limits.

The game can satisfy both type of players, through familiarity and simplicity to the feeling of outsmarting others, whether they’re paying or not. Also, the fact that there’s only one currency carefully balanced masks the one who pays with the one who plays a lot earning currency finishing cities, having a direct trade-off in time in the context of games that again, compete for their players’ time. Moreover, satisfying both type of players and having a great amount of depth supports to satisfy everyone in between nurturing them to become expert players from any point they might be in the video games-familiarity spectrum.

Which brings us to my third point: the depth of the game. If you start to play and engage regularly, you’ll notice that there are some patterns to play more effectively, at first sight. But later on your friends share stories with you of gameplay cliffhangers in which they accomplish crazy things or discover new stuff such as different uses for the “match anything” crystal, and then you’ll wonder which things you want to try differently next time.

The board is fairly balanced, and the amount of turns give you room to move quickly if you feel smart enough, and then you draw a mental picture of what’s your grand strategy to play the game: “I’m going for castles”, “I’m creating cathedrals”, etc, but once the turns run out and you come back in a few minutes/hours, chances are you forgot what you were doing! This is because the game offers several competing styles of play that unfold gradually as you play it and learn its depth, usually by sharing your experience with friends or other engaged players on social networks.

All this gives you enough incentives to either pay for more turns -and don’t forget what you were doing- or to think and debate about what style of play to choose when you’re not in the game, ideally discussing it with other friends and people already playing it. Thus, you end up paying for more turns, staying on the game long enough to wait for just those couple of turns to finish your current strategy or thinking what moves support the playing style you want to use, discussing them with friends and others in any platform you engage with them.

Therefore, the game’s depth drive monetization, retention and viralization.

Does the game have room for improvements? Lots of it. It’s a risky move to have an insufficiently clear -or insufficiently graphical- tutorial for your traditional Facebook player, a bold move to not use known viralization channels and to rely purely on word of mouth -though differentiating the game from all the “noise”- and a controversial move to have only one currency, despite the fact that metrics don’t support such controversy. There have been some updates featuring pumpkins and now pines, addition of cute villagers that talk to each other, and the removal of the annoying language question each time you opened the game. Nevertheless, more features are coming for sure, but sticking to the smallest shippable game, allowed Triple Town developers to focus on their game’s strengths, to test their hypotheses and leave room to focus future developments based on player’s feedback, as every social game should.

Villagers talking about the threat of Ninja Bears.

In summary, even though the game isn’t perfect, it doesn’t have flaws that blocked it from achieving the Best Facebook Game Award 2011, and some key lessons to learn from it are the adaptation of pace to the environment and context of the platform, relying on players familiarity with competing games to support bold game design moves such as only one currency that embraces all kinds of players through careful balance and to design for depth to enhance your core metrics and greater emergent game experience.

Six elemental questions to find out just about everything

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:07:43 +0000

When I was in third grade I belonged to a little group of kids called “Kid Journalists”, in which we crafted weekly articles on Saturday morning to post them on a big canvas on a wall somewhere at my elementary school. I say “craft” because usually the images weren’t photos but pictures drawn by the journalists themselves :P.

And I learned something great. Our teacher leading the group taught us that every news article must answer six elemental questions: What?, Who? When? Where? How? & Why?. As I grew up it never ceased to amaze me that even high profile news articles or clips don’t answer all of them. I mean, is almost like a checklist isn’t it? How hard it can be?

But what’s truly even more great is that those questions can be wielded by anyone on different situations to wrap their heads around anything they want to handle effectively.

Let’s take, for a example, a job interview. The applicant has the job description and research about the company done while preparing the interview. Usually job descriptions include responsibilities, skills and qualifications and some company context. Those should cover about the job for the applicant questions What and Where, even When probably if a starting date or urgency is stated. But it would probably not cover well Who, How and Why. So reasonable questions to bring up to the interview are “Who will I work with?”, “Which methodologies, procedures and logistics are implemented to work at this job”, and more importantly, “What’s the big picture of this job?”, “Why are we doing this and how can I align my efforts to accomplish that high level goal?”.

In the other hand, the interviewer has a CV and/or a Cover letter. That should cover, about the matter of filling that job post, at least Who, What and Where, but in the interview questions When, How and Why must be addressed. So the job applicant should at least expect questions like “When can you start?”, “How do you handle conflict? pressure? delegation? peer collaboration?”, “Why do you want to work with us?”.

The key is to be able to see which things intuitively each party is trying to grasp and frame the six elemental questions for those things accordingly.

Let’s take another example. Ever been trapped in a difficult decision? That question is usually a really big “What should I do!?”. Well, let’s find it out! Difficult decisions are hard because it’s not easy to relate all things involved in the decision and weigh the trade offs involved, specially when that decision must be communicated to several parties. Let’s assume you’re handling the issue of whether to cut off a particular feature for your game or not.

What?: To cut or not to cut.
Who: In this case, who are the people involved? Your team? the publisher? external contractors? a client? Define each party involved and which goals each one of them is pursuing in this decision.
When: Do you have a ticking clock behind you? Do you have unlimited time? Does it depend on other sub decisions? Does a party have a power to frame and constrain the time for the decision?
Where: Sometimes there’s no sense of “physical place”, but there is indeed some sort of “topology” and a sense of where. Are we cutting this feature on all of our games? on all the platforms? on all the countries? on this stage of development?
How: Will it be easy to cut it off? How much do we “pay” to cut it? Will it break something else? Are there contract liabilities? How much work will each party on their different time frames will need to do?
Why: Why are we doing this? Are these reasons valid on all the times and places we can take this decision? Are all parties aware of these reasons? How do each one of them weigh in all the reasons?

For any particular example, some questions will be covered quickly and other will be the tough ones. But almost all the time, difficult decisions are different people, looking for different things, with different times, at different places with different methods and with different purposes. So with the Six Elemental Questions™ you just can find out about all of those and be fully aware of What to do!.

Some social game design principles before launch

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:09:24 +0000

What’s generally regarded as one of the biggest advantages of developing social games, meaning that they run on a social network like environment, is that you can measure whatever you like. Thus, the design challenges shouldn’t be that hard because… “just try a few options, measure, and then keep what sticks”.

That approach would be like “let’s just perform clinical trials on several drugs without basic biochemistry analysis and see what sticks”. The truth is that in order to perform such tests, you need to have a reasonable infrastructure, and be willing to alienate some players a little with those things you’re not so sure about. This is especially true when you’re developing a new game because, well, you don’t actually have metrics yet.

It’s not like you can learn to design games at the players experience expense, but to learn how to please them even more with an already carefully designed game.

So designing a social game before launch requires a good balance of game design and good practices, and the knowledge that you’ll actually have game metrics and live feedback afterwards. Some principles to have in mind when discussing features and several design related issues are discussed below.

Design for multiple styles of play. You may have a niche audience, or a very broad one, but given your game’s setting and core mechanics, and the whole experience it can bring based on its platform, different styles of play can co-exist, and you don’t know yet which one will serve the game best. For example, some players will try to optimize the use of resources of your game, other might just enjoy expressing themselves through it, others will brag heavily to their friends about their achievements, etc. Try to think of the several things players might enjoy at a high level view and keep them in mind when design changes might affect the balance among them. You don’t necessarily have to satisfy all play styles at once all the time, but be aware of the trade-offs involved in your decisions, so you can allow players to feel a variety of ways to enjoy your game, and then adjust and balance them better.

Design for social. Without entering in the whole “these games aren’t really social” debate, this is just to remind you that usually these games are best enjoyed with friends, and while these games often have in-game mechanisms to allow players to help each other, to compete, to cooperate, there’s usually something more to it. Consider your players asking themselves: “If my friends know I play this game, what it will say about me?” Usually your players’ peers are not necessarily game developers or gamers, which means your art style, characters, jokes, and all the details you design to surprise and delight your players might be your most powerful viral tools. It will all depend on how your players define their social experiences, and not how social experiences should be bounded within a game.

Design to scale. Sometimes your features are awesome, giving strong ties among players with lots of rewards that make them feel unique and special. But when you ask yourself, “What if 10, 100, 1000, 10000 players are doing this?” all those benefits seem to disappear, or they’re still there but your content pipeline or tech specs won’t support your idea beyond a limited number of players. Your features and design decisions should be independent of the number of players that experience them, and hopefully also independent on how heavily they play them.

Design to expand. You might have a cool idea, and then you come up with improvements, and then more, and more, and more. Conversely, you might have a clever twist for a mechanic, but it somehow breaks the balance with the other ones, and you can’t possibly find ways to expand that idea. When your players approach your game, they will come with lots of expectations from other social games, “traditional” games, or other applications, and they will also have expectations about “what feels natural” regarding your setting, and you must address those expectations in the way you teach your players your core mechanics. But once they have learned these basics, and if you want to keep them engaged for some more time, you’ll need to surprise them, to challenge their new knowledge, and add more subtle complexities to your mechanics. So don’t give it all away at the beginning — you’ll overwhelm your players. Save some stuff for later and surprise them.

Design to measure. This one might seem rather obvious, but it’s not. You’ll want the maximum amount of information from the minimum set of data streams of your game. When designing without considering this goal, you might see later on social media networks and forums that people like your new features, and it will definitely feel like it, but remember to not forget your silent majority for the vocal minority. If some content twist is enjoyable, figure out an special way to “frame it” within your game in a way it can be measured, and hopefully useful to provide data for several things to measure. Just don’t assume that because it’s not a number, you can’t figure out a way to measure your players engagement with it. Unless, of course, you’re afraid your unmeasurable quirks are not that funny .

Design for asynchronous play. A key aspect of social games is that they embed in players lives, not the other way around. This is why ‘crops’ and all their friends are so popular, these are appointments players make with the game allowing them to plan their schedule to play it, and not feel overwhelmed by having to actually be at an specific time playing it. Usually multiplayer-like ideas require synchronous play, but that might just seem to hard to achieve in these games, that are already loaded with the expectation of asynchronous play. Try decoupling the synchronicity of your ideas by keeping a high level view of that multiplayer experience and figuring out a way to make it asynchronous, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t feel natural — players’ suspension of disbelief in these games will make up for it .

Design for long term. If your background and experience with games focuses on single player games for consoles or PC, it’s usually easy to come up with ideas that work for those kinds of titles, but they often don’t make sense within a social game. For example, you might want to create a whole story arc that has players unravel a mystery within your game, but once they solve it, it just becomes a story in the past. What if players come to play afterwards? Will they enjoy the mystery knowing the answer before playing? It’s not that you can’t possibly add such things to your game — do it, but just on a small scale to surprise and delight your current players. Don’t let future players feel like they’ve lost everything you have to offer.

In summary, these are just some useful ways I have learned to frame design decisions balancing the tension before launch, giving you enough flexibility to have a carefully crafted experience that gives you freedom later to adjust the game smoothly for your dedicated player base.