#AltDevBlogADay » Raul Aliaga Diaz

Designing “10000000″ as a Free To Play Game

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:38:18 +0000

1000000 [iOS, Android, Steam] is a puzzle-runner-rpg-like game developed by Eightyeight Games. If you haven’t played it, I seriously recommend to check it out since it’s awesome, and its story of development and success is as amazing and inspiring as the game itself.

The game in its PC/Mac port.

What’s also interesting is that the game allows itself to be designed as a Free to play game. It is a particularly good example because is indisputably a great game, is accessible for any platform you’d like to play it and we can use it as an example for this thought experiment of making it Free to play.

So here we will discuss a brief overview on how the game can be tweaked and expanded in its design to suit a Free to play strategy, and what would imply doing so, changing from a defined product to an ongoing service. From this point, we’ll assume you have played the game. If you feel like just reading, check here or here (not recommended).

Design changes and expansions

Using the Free to play triangle lens we can discuss three venues for monetization: Skips, Unlocks and Boosts. They are based on traditional “sim management” games, so we can adapt the triangle here to Content, Unlocks and Boosts.

Content: Pretty much all the game’s content is available behind locks achievable through gameplay and achievements, but the game could include more dungeons, sets of tiles, new achievements, episodic content or new heroes. Also, maybe just selling the music can be a good and simple trick.
Unlocks: All the locks on things that are accessible through “repairs”, the list of upgrades, access to dungeons, the alchemist potions. An additional element could be putting caps or limits on the amount of resources (wood, rock, coins and XP) that can be had at a time and unlock them through monetization/other resources. In 10000000, you can carry at most 4 items on a run: another potential source of revenue could be selling the ability to increase that limit so players can carry more.
Boosts: This is relatively straightforward, since when you’re playing you receive weapons, food, keys, orbs and scrolls that you can carry to the next run and act as boosts. All of these can be sold separately.

There are also two key areas for feature expansion. The first is a storage room that can hold any extra boosts the player found while running or purchased at the store. This causes the player to manage more effectively how they proceed on each run. These limits could be expanded through purchases.

Second, the Alchemist room enables a particular effect at the cost of a trade off. This should be changed to a boost fashion in which these alchemist effects can last only for one run, possibly with less strict tradeoffs and also stored in your storage room.

The Alchemist’s room

A third, possibly controversial expansion would be “crafting”. Retention is a huge issue in mobile, and something that could help to promote players to craft a plan to come back can be precisely the tradeoff of time versus money for alchemist effects, in which traditional game resources can be used so their “resource flow” closes. This is particularly important since puzzle/running games might have good retention but low frequency of use per week. Hence, this add-on would allow players to increase their chances to move through an engagement/monetization funnel in a better way.

However, the Triangle suggests to monetize with at most two of the methods, which is sound advice. Given that 10000000 isn’t a place to “enjoy watching an aquarium” such as DragonVale or Hay Day, the clever thing would be to stick with unlocks and boosts.

So that would be it, if we were only considering monetization aspects of Free to play games. As of now, we have discussed monetization venues for in-app purchases (which many paid games include), but free to play games must include social aspects within their designs. In a nutshell, non-paying players can be your best sources of new players (for another more general discussion, see here).

What social features can we include in this game? Endless runner games usually allow players to share their scores as a text on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, but that’s rather limited given the unique aesthetic of the game, and specially its music. The guys at Nimblebit know this very well with their feature of sharing towers in Tiny Tower, planes on Pocket Planes and now video on their latest game: Nimble Quest, through the Everyplay service. See it at work here.

10000000 is an excellent game to share video replays to feel closer to the excitement of the game itself and sharing amazing feats that can be achieved in it. One additional content tweak would be increasing the animations and “pyrotechnic effects” of achieving chain reactions with the tiles in the running zone. When you’re playing and doing amazing feats, you feel great but you’re focused on the tiles, and when someone else is viewing, it would be nice to have something for other people to watch that is spectacular.

For example in Sonic Dash, they control the pacing of races and allow the player to do some “quick time swipes” for Sonic to breakdance in the air. This looks awesome and also wins some rings if done right.

If we want to go nuts, we can even discuss a room dedicated to store these glorious gameplay images and/or videos so the player herself can revisit them in the game or have it for her friends to see, but that’s a lot of additional work, development-wise.

Execution tradeoffs

We have discussed monetization and social aspects for the game to be considered a Free to play game, is that it? Well, not so much. Free to play games start when the game launches, and operate as a service, not a product. This cannot be stressed enough as it is easy to overlook in practical decisions and prioritizations how to approach the execution of these designs and handling the expectations associated to them.

So what does all this mean? In addition to the elements mentioned above they need to pass a check for game balance from a qualitative perspective and a quantitative one, hopefully informed through analytics -especially when the game is already live. Additional checks must be passed regarding UI, accessibility, and timing of the monetization elements. There’s a huge amount of games that hide away the options to pay more under too many screens, unclear menus or the wrong timing for monetization, making it annoying instead of convenient.

Adjusting the expectations is another important issue. It is fairly easy to fail at Free to play with a great game, even spectacularly. Many times this is because developers fail to see the service aspects and just throw in some IAP without too much thought about them, only to claim foul when they don’t get disgustingly rich overnight.

Then all the work needed with art, programming, balancing and testing needs to be estimated and considered to be split in several iterations that have different tradeoffs on different platforms when they go live. For example, monetization re-designs would allow the game to be set free and include more revenue venues but it would not achieve all of its strength without the social features. On the other hand, working the social features first would put the game in the eyes of more potential players that still would be stopped at a paywall if they’re not willing to pay anyway. However, the social features discussed here can be integrated in the game without making it Free to play at all and it could potentially be a good thing anyway.

In my particular opinion, I would thoroughly design all the aforementioned elements up to a point of actual estimation of the development work needed and consider the tradeoffs with the actual resources available and any other strategic considerations for the game. 10000000 is already present on several platforms and the best course of action would be to set up a minimal analytics service on all platforms to monitor the game’s performance and then decide how to go from there, possibly making it free to play on Android first (and possibly an Asian localization). Then moving these changes to all platforms including the social features, that can be developed for the game to scale once you have data and revenue to support such scaling.

Where do we go from here?

This was a general discussion to a deeper level of how to take an already great game to millions of players through the Free to play model, considering several aspects of the decisions involved.

For more detailed discussions on monetization and Free to play, I recommend to check:

To understand all the nuances involved in the design of a Free to play “casual” successful title, Candy Crush Saga:

The controversial decision made by Candy Crush developers of not to use a virtual currency in their game and going with direct purchase of boosts draws special attention. This was a risky and bold decision (albeit a good one given the game’s performance).

For expectation handling and pitfall avoidance: 7 Ways to Fail at Free-to-Play. On social aspects, a previous post of mine: Some social game design principles before launch. More resources in general, my previous post: Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013.

In summary, 10000000 is a great game, that includes within itself many options to make it a game that allow players themselves to put a better price on the value of the whole experience -a fun, convenient and social experience. When we analyze the tweaks and additions we can make to the game, we must take into consideration the costs and benefits of each improvement and how they can add value to the whole game incrementally. This will change from a finished, bounded product to an ongoing live service dedicated to its community of fans.

Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:20:10 +0000

This is a list of useful resources to help you refine, define, execute and possibly reconsider your decision to enter mobile game development this year. The resources are a little more inclined to the business and game design parts of game development, except for a couple of ones linking other lists.

The executive summary version: It is a very attractive and fast growing market, but the odds are stacked against small, new and indie game developers. Successful games are usually paid, greatly innovative and highly polished casual titles -specially when working with a good publisher or a known brand- or free to play titles that operate as a service, seeing little revenue for a span of at least six months after launch, adding new content and/or further polishing, balancing and optimizing for retention and monetization. The former approach can be a logical step for studios that already have game development expertise, a team already in place and experience working with publishers. The latter is the approach that might yield the greater rewards, but requires a mid to long term vision, and also a tight and strong combination of resources and execution speed to actually pull it off.

What is mobile game development? We’ll consider it as any game focused development for smartphones or tablets running Android or iOS. What does this market look like? Let’s look at some numbers and insights:

[Source: eMarketer]

Looks promising, but it’s not all good:

So, how to make sense of the opportunity? Is it reasonable? Affordable? Worth pursuing? Let’s start with a list of general projections for gaming on 2013 and summaries for 2012:

This is a list of studies, articles and slides worth studying bit by bit to get a clearer picture:

[Source: Lostgarden]

Next, a collection of thoughts from established players in the industry:

Assuming you have a clearer picture now, and you are eager to learn more, what would be good resources to learn about all this?

Business links

[Source: Business Insider]

Game Development links

How does Rage of Bahamut monetizes? Analysing a Top Grossing Game: Rage of Bahamut and How Rage of Bahamut Monetizes.
Clash of Clans – the Winning Formula
Free 2 Play and the Four Currencies
7 Ways to Fail at Free-to-Play
The Free-To-Play Triangle [Game Economics]
The Principles of Game Monetization
The Design of Free-to-Play Games, Part 2 (Part 1)
5 tips for boosting your virtual economy
Which Types Of Mobile Games Are In The Engagement Sweet Spot?
The Ultimate Indie Game Developer Resource List (includes technical tools and software)
The Big List of Game Making Tools (includes technical tools and software)

[Source: What Games Are]

Going live links

[Source: GamesBrief]

Last but not least, Blogs, People and Websites worth following.

Blogs

Deconstructor of Fun: Monetization in Social Games, written by “the evil monetization guy @ Rovio”.
Extra Creditz: Not exactly a blog, but lots of fun and thought provoking videos about gaming, game design and game development in general.
Dr. Serkan Toto: Japan Mobile And Social Games Consulting.
Andrew Chen’s blog: Great insights about startups in general.
What Games Are: Great for game design and production.
Games Brief: Special focus on monetization.
Dave Sirlin’s blog: Great game design blog.
Gameconfs: a directory of game industry events.
Indiebits: Great tips for Indie Game Developers.
Game Design Concepts and Game Balance Concepts.
Raph Koster’s blog: The author of Theory of Fun.

People on Twitter: All of them usually share good insights and links about mobile game development

Devs: Aki Järvinen, Tadhg Kelly, Shawn Foust, Will Luton, Michail Katkoff, Amy Jo Kim, Daniel Cook, Mike Acton, Jesse Schell, Tami Baribeau, Raph Koster.
Executives: Shanti Bergel, Jussi Laakkonen, Lloyd Melnick, Kevin Dent, Ben Cousins, Charles Hudson, Nabeel Hyatt, Giordano Contestabile, Scott Dodson
Press and thought leaders: Christian Nutt, Stephen Totilo, Leigh Alexander, Adrian Crook, Dr. Serkan Toto, Nicholas Lovell, Epona Schweer, Allen Varney, Nicole Lazzaro.

[Source: @BenjaminCousins]

Sites: Good for keeping up with trends, news, good games and stuff

I hope all this serves you as a starting point to learn more about your upcoming adventure on mobile gaming this year. Enjoy!

Bonus Tracks

Starting a new game project? Ask the hard questions first

Raul Aliaga Diaz — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:51:38 +0000

We have all been there. You wanted to start a new game project, and possibly have been dreaming of the possibilities for a long time, crafting stories, drawing sketches, imagining the dazzling effects on that particular epic moment of the game… then you start to talk to some friends about it, they give you feedback, and even might join you in the crazy journey of actually doing something about it.
Fast forward some weeks or months, and you’ve been pulling too many all-nighters, having lots of junk food and heated discussions. You might even have a playable prototype, several character models, animations, a carefully crafted storyline, a website with a logo and everything but… it just doesn’t feel right. It’s not coming together and everyone involved with the project is afraid to say something. What happened? What went wrong? How such an awesome idea became this huge mess?

Usually all game projects emerge from a simple statement that quickly pushes the mind to imagine the possibilities. Depending on your particular tastes, background and peers, these statements can be like: “Ace Attorney, but solving medical cases, like House M.D.!” (Ace House™), “Wario meets Braid!” (Wraid™) , “Starcraft but casual, on a phone!” (Casualcraft™). These ideas can be just fine as starting points, but somewhere down the line the hardest question is: Is this game something worth doing?.

When you work at a game studio and a new idea arises, that’s the first question it faces. And depending on the studio’s strengths, business strategy and past experiences, the definition of “worth” is very, very specific. It usually involves a quick set of constraints such as: time, budget, platforms, audience, team, among others. So for a particular studio that has developed Hidden Object Games and has done work for hire creating art, characters and stories for several other games, an idea like Ace House™ can be a very good fit, something they can quickly prototype and pitch to a publisher with convincing arguments to move it forward. However, in the case of a studio focused solely on casual puzzle games that has just one multi-purposed artist/designer and two programmers, it can be rather unfeasible, much more if all but one says: “What’s Ace Attorney? What’s House M.D.”?

Ok, you might say, “But I’m doing this on my own, so I can fly as free as I want!”. That’s not entirely true. If you want to gather a team behind an idea, all of the team members must agree that the project is worth doing, and even if you do it on your own, you must answer the question to yourself. Having less limitations can positively set you free, but take that freedom to find out your personal definition of worth, not to waste months on something that goes nowhere. Unless you can, like, literally burn money.

The Joker Game Studios

Why is the project worth doing? is the hardest question, and the one that must be answered with the most sincere honesty by everyone involved. The tricky part is that it is widely different for many people working on a game project out of their regular job or studies. It can be to start learning about game development, to improve a particular set of skills, to start an indie game studio, to beef up a portfolio, etc. It is O.K. to have different goals but they all must map to a mutually agreed level of time commitment, priorities and vision. But even if you figured this out, there are still other issues.

All creative projects can be formulated as a set of risks or uncertainties, and the problem with video game development -given its highly multidisciplinary nature- is that is very easy missing to tackle the key uncertainties, and start working on the “easy” parts instead.

So for example, for the Ace House™ project, it can be lots of fun to start imagining characters and doctors, nurses, patients and whatnot; there’s plenty of T.V. series about medical drama to draw inspiration from, and almost surely you can have a good time developing these characters, writing about them, or doing concept art of medical staff in the Ace Attorney style, but, What about the game? How do you precisely translate the mechanics from Ace Attorney to a medical drama? How is this different from a mere re-skin project? Which mechanics can be taken away? What mechanic can be unique given a medical setting? How can you ensure that Capcom won’t sue you? Are there any medic-like games already? How can we blend them? Is it possible? Is this fun at all? Is “fun” a reasonable expectation or should the experience be designed differently?

Let’s talk about Wraid™ now. If Konami pulled off “Parodius” doing a parody from “Gradius”, How cool would it be to do a parody of Braid using the characters from the Wario Ware franchise? Here you have a starting point for lots of laughs remembering playing Braid, and putting there Wario, Mona, Jimmy T. and the rest of the characters on the game, wacky backgrounds, special effects and everything. But: Is this reasonable? Let’s start with the fact that Konami owns the IP of Gradius so they can do whatever they want to it. Can you get away with making a parody of both Nintendo and Jonathan Blow’s IPs? Sure, sure, the possibilities can be awesome but let’s face it: It is not going to happen. What can be a valuable spin-off though? What if Wario Ware games have a time-manipulation mechanic? What if you take Wario’s mini games and shape them around an art style and setting akin to Braid? (Professor Layton? Anyone?) How can you take the “parody” concept to the next level and just make “references” to lots of IP but the game is something completely new in itself?

What about Casualcraft™? Starcraft can be said to have roughly two levels of enjoyment: as an e-sport, and whatever other pleasure the other people draw from it. If we want to make it casual, it should not be an e-sport, should it? If you’re a Starcraft fan and have experience doing stuff for smartphones, you might think “This should be easy, I can make a prototype quickly”, and given that a mouse interface can be reasonably translated to touch, you start coding, and get a lot of fun implementing gameplay features that pumps all your OOP knowledge and creative juices to the roof. But… what does exactly mean “Casual Starcraft”? How can a strategy game be casual? What is the specific thing different from the e-sport experience that we want to bring to a phone? Is it the graphics? Is the unit building-leveling? Is playing with other friends? Which one of those should we aim? Can still be an RTS? What about asynchronous gameplay? Can this be played without a keyboard? Can still be fast? Would it fit on a phone? People that play on a phone: would they play this game?

So, all these are tricky and uncomfortable questions, but they are meant to identify the sources of risk and figure out a way to address them. Maybe the ideas I presented here are plain bad, sure, but they are only for illustrational purposes. Since I started working in games, I’ve seen countless ideas from enthusiasts that are not really too far away from these examples anyway. The usual patterns I’ve seen are:

Not identifying the core valuable innovation, and failing to simplify the rest: It is hard to innovate, much harder to do several innovations at once. Also, people have troubles learning about your game having too much simultaneous innovations and can quickly get lost, rendering your game as something they simply “don’t get”. The key is to identify what’s the core innovation or value of your idea, the one single thing that if done right, can make your game shine and then adjust all the rest to known formulas. And by “key” innovation I mean something important, critical, not stuff like “I won’t use hearts as a health meter but rainbows!”. That can be cute, but it’s not necessarily a “key innovation”.

Putting known techniques and tools over the idea’s requirements: “I only do 3D modeling so it has to be 3D”, “I know how to use Unity so it has to be done in Unity”, “I only know RPG Maker so let’s make an RPG”. It is perfectly O.K. to stick to what you feel comfortable doing, but then choose a different idea. A game way too heavy on 3D might be awesome, but completely out of scope for a side project. Unity can be a great engine, but if all the other team members can work together on Flash on a game that it is completely agreed to live primarily on the web, it can’t hurt to learn Flash. RPG Maker is a great piece of software, but if you can’t really add new mechanics and will concentrate only in creating a story, why not just develop a story then? A comic book project is much more suitable. Why play your particular game when everyone that is into RPG’s surely has at least two awesome ones that they still can’t find the time to play them? Instead of crippling down the value or feasibility of your idea to your skills and resources, change the idea to something that fits.

Obsessing over a particular area of the game (tech, story, etc): This usually happens when the true reason to do the project is to learn. You’re learning how to code graphic effects, or how to effectively use Design Patterns to code gameplay, a new texturing technique, vehicle and machines modeling, a story communicated through all game assets and no words, etc. You can get a huge experience and knowledge doing this. But then it’s not a game meant to be shipped, it is a learning project, or an excuse to fulfill something you feel passionate about.

Failing to define constraints: The romantic idea of developing a game until “it feels right”. If Blizzard or Valve can do it, why can’t you? Well, because at some point, you’ll want to see something done and not feel that your time has gone to waste. The dirty little secret is that constraints almost all the time induce creativity instead of hinder it. So choose a set of constraints to start with, at least a time frame and something you would like to see done at particular milestones: Key concept, Prototype, Expanded Prototype, Game.

Refusing to change the idea: This is usually a sign of failing to realize sunken costs. “I’ve spent so much time on this idea, I must continue until I’m done!”. The ugly truth is that if you’re having serious doubts, those will still be there and will make you feel miserable until you address them, and the sooner you act, the better. It can be that all the time you spent is effectively not wasted, but only when you frame it as your learning source to do the right things.

So if you’re starting a new game project, or are in the middle of one, try asking the tough questions: Do you know why is worth doing? Do all people involved agree on that? Are you making satisfying progress?

Are you sure there isn’t a question about your project you are afraid to ask because you fear that it can render your idea unfeasible, invaluable or messy?

Don’t be frightened, go ahead. If it goes wrong, you will learn, you will improve and the next idea will get to be shaped much better.

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.