When freemium games started being successful in the late 2000s, the industry began to search for new job roles. Roles that are focussed on understanding data on in-game player behavior. New jobs like business performance manager, data scientist, data analyst and business intelligence manager were created. Initially, there were no tools and standards, but as the industry matured, so did the practices. Now there is a relatively standardized understanding of what it means to be a producer versus a business performance manager versus a data scientist, as well as what good use of in-game data looks like.

I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designer jobs: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems.

Article written by Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King

The unique problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

Review a game economy early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

• Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
• Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game economies

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

Simulating players’ journeys allows us to see how game logic decisions impact player experience.

Game economy designers become increasingly important

The mobile gaming industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, gaming companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more A simulation specialists in this role.

If you’re interested in working with King on Economy design, take a look at their jobs board here.

By Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King
Originally posted on Gamasutra

For many developers, player retention is considered the most important metric for a free to play game.  Every game company obsesses about reaching higher and higher retention to ensure their user base grows and grows.

On a weekly basis, I hear developers asking “What level of retention should I be aiming for?”, or “What day seven (D7) retention is needed for us to get a publishing deal?” However, the real question they should be asking is, should a single number decide the fate of your latest prototype?

When I think about retention, I like to think of the analogy of Miles per Gallon (MPG) in a car engine: the higher your retention, the higher your MPG, the more efficient your game’s engine. Revenues and marketing are the fuel that power this engine, so my advice is, be sure before you slam your foot on the accelerator.

The key lesson is, games with higher retention get further for less. However, just as there are cars built for many different purposes intended for different users, there are many games for many gamers – not all cars need high MPGs. A hot-rod, might be the fastest car on earth, but it requires a small oil well to keep it running. A family SUV serves multiple purposes at the cost of its efficiency, and a Tesla Model 3 does away with MPG’s entirely.

It is much the same with free to play games: different genres have different retention profiles, and different games monetise at different points in the funnel. Likewise, different business models rely on different audiences engaging for different periods of time.  

In each case, there’s not a single retention curve that is the correct model, merely a retention profile that gives signals to where your game is weakest.  So, rather than focusing on the numbers themselves, look for the days of the curve which have the biggest relative drop, as this can be the point where you lose people fastest. During a soft launch is the critical point where major decisions to carry on can be decided – it is often retention metrics that decide the fate of your game, but too little focus is given to the even fainter monetisation signals.

Source – GameAnalytics Mobile Gaming Benchmarks 2016-2017

Monetisation matters

For a free to play game to be a successful product it has to monetize. During the first few days of a new prototype’s launch you will have very few data points to make a call, but you must see some monetisation from some individuals. Focus on the conversion rate and the ARPPU you receive: it’s these two factors help to give a sense of what might happen if the game we’re to scale.  

Monetisation only occurs when your game’s system is appealing enough for someone to spend, and the amount they spend is the only real signal you have to how much value your product could create. Spend doesn’t need to equate directly to an IAP, but also how many unique players watched an ad or signed up to a subscription. In each case, the number itself isn’t as valuable as what it results in: Gross Revenue. I would argue that the more important metrics to consider when evaluating early prototypes are Conversion Rate (CR) and Revenue per paying user (ARPPU) as these small signals show that your engine is working.

Returning to the analogy of Miles per Gallon, increased MPGs are a result of a more efficient engine. Conversion Rate and ARPPU are like fueling the tank with gas – the more gas you get the less efficient you need to be.  However, it’s admittedly difficult to work out early on just when your engine is ready to take to the streets.

Each metric is only a signal: it gives you a rough overview of your games abilities. In order to build better games, you must focus on the components, not the metrics that show the signal. Only if each component is optimised to its specific goal will you start to see improvements in your metrics, the most general of which is retention.  Just like a car engine has pistons, turbos and exhausts that contribute to its overall efficiency, your game has FTUE, Clear UIs and Desirable characters to collect. A real jump in MPGs comes when as a game designer you appreciate the interplay between these features, and realise which of your designs is weakest.

Don’t get me wrong – retention is a fundamental driver of success on any app store, but this obsession with the number your game needs to hit is not how you build a better game. Indeed, improving retention is something we’ve written about it on multiple occasions.  

Life Time Value

LTV (Life Time Value) of a gamer is fundamentally what allows you to call a game a success or failure – a high enough LTV allows profitable marketing and growth of your game. However, by its very nature it is an estimation of future value – it can give horribly inaccurate signals early on during testing. There are also many different methods used to calculate it across large time periods.

The equation above focuses on 30D, simplified LTV – LTV is driven on the one hand by revenues (fuel) and on the other side retention (efficiency) with a time estimation for the future value of a player (discount rate). You can read more about methods for calculating LTV here.  Too much focus is given to the early retention metrics of the equation, because it’s easiest to gather with small amounts of data, but without any revenue signals being present there is no fuel to grow the LTV.  

CR and ARPPU are not accurate measures for generating robust models, but they do provide simple signals for game designers.

Conversion Rate is a clear indication of necessity and desire – it’s a signal showing just how many players want to invest in your product, understanding exactly when they bought and what they bought can help you optimise your design funnels to make purchasing clearer for future players.  

ARPPU is a strong indicator of pricing and value. You need to ensure that when someone does convert they are giving you the most that they would be willing to pay for content in your game, not converting for an overly generous bargain.  Quickly testing multiple price points for your game’s economy can greatly increase your gross revenue.

If you take a look at games with low retention but high CR and high ARPPU then you can still have a workable product on your hands because you’ve seen your gameplay converting players into payers.  There may be a huge host of other issues with your funnels and your onboarding, but the fundamental pinch within your system has led to a willing payer.  Observing these weak signals early on can give you faith in your early prototype

What retention metrics do tell you

Retention is a fundamental factor in LTV calculations – higher values are always better – but, as we’ve seen, exact figures vary greatly per genre. No matter what your retention curve looks like it won’t directly affect your monetization design.  What you ask a player to buy and whether they buy it is a personal decision for each and every gamer. Making that decision clear, simple, desirable and valuable will maximise your conversion.

So what can retention tell you?

Retention metrics are still incredibly useful as gauges for assessing where to focus your game design time.  Let’s take D1, D7 and D30 – the most common metrics:

• D1 retention shows me the desirability of your game – fun games are desirable, and people will happily play again tomorrow without the need of much investment or prompting.
• D7 retention shows me the core loop in your game – do they have a clear goal? Do they engage with your systems? Do they form strategies?
• D30 retention shows me whether your core loop scales – Do people have enough content?  Can they set long-term goals? Do they get stuck and still want to play more?

In each case, it’s not just the number that’s important, it’s the speed at which the retention drops – the steepness of the curve, if you will. Wherever the steepest drop descends, is where your game is currently weakest. The ideal scenarios is to reach a flat and stable base that is maintained for 60, 90, 180 or even 360 days into the future. When you predict revenues for the long term, even a significantly lower starting retention provides much higher gross revenue over the long term.

The early ‘wobbles’ in a retention curve point to gameplay issues. For example, your economy may have expanded too much, or the players might simply have reached the end of your content more quickly than you expected. In these cases, you can use these drop off points in the profile to go back and add in more depth to your designs.

Retention is one of the easiest and most reliable metrics to obtain during a soft launch, but don’t let it rule your development, creativity or decision-making abilities – use retention as a barometer to point to deeper issues in your game design. In essence, focus on understanding what is driving your players to spend money. Even the weakest signals can prove that you have a potential product on your hands, so stop focussing on the numbers directly and look for the broader trends – the patterns or fluctuations in the figures –  to aid your game design planning. The last thing you want to do is send a great game to the scrap yard.

This post is co-authored between Adam Telfer and Michail Katkoff of Deconstructor Of Fun.

Since Facebook fully embraced free-to-play, Crowdstar and others have strove to get to grips with what’s perhaps rather crudely been referred to as “female first” gaming – to make their name as a company that truly understands and delivers on an underserved demographic in the market.

In practice, what this translated to was – at least initially – a series of “cute” style games; taking care of sweet animals, managing a farm packed full of farm animals with massive eyes, or dressing up games with way too much glitter and pink everywhere. It ended up with studio creating games for a stereotype: a fictitious and overly simplistic view of what might interest  women, with very little understanding of the nuances the chosen demographic actually wanted.

Worst still, not all too many developers successfully went much deeper than that, believing that focusing a title on cute animals with big eyes was how you made a games ‘female friendly’.

Crowdstar challenged that assumption with the creation of the Covet Fashion and Design Home games, and it paid off. The game is one of the first of its kind to truly create a social network-game hybrid that recreates the feeling of being a professional in fashion design and interior decoration. It’s also one of the few games to really deliver on the actual professions of interior design or fashion without feeling cutesy.

Not only that, Crowdstar has managed to deliver a strong core loop built around equally strong principles of great F2P design – a core loop that, dare I say it, has never before been seen on the App Store. So, why was it so successful?

A Brief History of Glu & Crowdstar

Crowdstar was founded back in 2008, first focusing on free-to-play titles for Facebook Canvas before a shift to mobile in 2012. Crowdstar initially raised a $23 Million Series A in May 2011 on the back of the company’s success on Facebook success, raising an additional round of $11 Million in May 2012 to finance a pivot to mobile.

The company has always focused on female first games, beginning by focusing on animal care based games on Facebook – Happy Aquarium, Fish with Attitude – before eventually moving towards Fashion and now finally interior decorating.

source: AppAnnie

Covet Fashion was launched in 2013 and has remained within the Top 200 grossing since launch, although it has been in a slow and steady decline since Fall 2016. Design Home launched during this period and has remained within the Top 100 grossing since launch, despite having a smaller feature set compared to Covet Fashion. Delivering on these games, Crowdstar cemented itself as a top developer, catching the eyes of the bigger players on the App Store.

source: PocketGamer.biz

As a result, Glu acquired controlling interest in Crowdstar just before the release of Design Home in 2016, mostly due to Glu’s decline in its licensed celebrity IP stardom style games – Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Katy Perry Pop games some of the most notable. Glu’s network of players from its stardom game network was a strong cross-promotion platform for the Crowdstar games, which made it a clear better-than-the-sum-of-its-parts acquisition. Crowdstar now has dominant control of the fashion and interior decorator network audience, alongside Glu’s strength in marketing, analytics, UA and live operations experience.

Core Loop

Design Home’s core loop is straightforward. Players participate in timed Challenges that ask them to design spaces with certain requisites.

1. Player Selects a Challenge from a List
2. Completes the Design Challenge by selecting furniture from their personal collection
3. Submit their Challenge and wait for other players to vote on it.  Rewards are based on how well their creation was rated by the community.
4. In order to start the next competition, the player needs to collect Keys. Keys are earned by voting on other player’s creations.

Let’s break down each step in a bit more detail:

Step 1: Selecting a Challenge

The core of the game is about selecting from a list of limited time events, which challenge the player to design for a specific style of home. For example, the “Tropical Heaven” event requires players to furnish a tropical living room so that it ‘feels like heaven’ at a resort in Fiji’s Yasawa Islands

Events can be from any location around the world, with vastly different requirements from one event to the next. Some events can be “key daily events”, while others can be included as part of wider, themed seasonal events. For example, the game has played host to an event for home improvement TV channel HGTV. As part of the tie up, players could enter “HGTV themed” competitions and have their respective scores tallied there.

When a player has selected an event they want to take part in, they pay the entry fee – in this case, keys – and then start designing.

Step 2: Designing

After a player has selected their Challenge, they are given a short fictional brief before entering a room devoid of furniture and decorations. All but the Daily Challenges come with unique requirements, such as furniture of certain style or color.

Each Challenge is a room filled with two kinds of ‘spots’: one spot where the player is required to fill with certain type of items, and a second spot ones where what they can place is optional. Player can’t change the colors of the wall or move the spots where items are placed, meaning play takes the form of a very simple placement puzzle that limits the creativity but also makes it easy for anyone to complete a Challenge.

Players can place items they own as well as pieces that they don’t own. If a player doesn’t have the necessary items, they can purchase or borrow them on-the-spot to fulfill requirements or make the room come together. After all of the required items have been placed, player submits the Challenge for other players to review. Submitting the Challenge rewards player immediately with Coins and XP.

It’s important to notice that once player has submitted their Challenge, they also lose the ability to use those items in other challenges until the submitted Challenge is over. This forces player to have bigger collections and multiples of the same item.

Step 3: Waiting for Results

After a player has completed their Challenge, they receive a Cash and XP reward. However, this is just the base reward. They need to wait for all other players to vote on their creation to get a final rating.

After the voting time is over, a player also receives a bonus reward based on how their design was perceived by the community. The verdict comes in form of a five star rating and if a player exceeds four stars, they will receive a piece of furniture as a reward.

Step 4: Vote to Earn Keys

Pacing in Design Home is handled partially through Keys – Keys that, quite literally, unlock events. Each time a player votes for a few other player’s designs, they are given keys, with five votes awarding three keys. In practice that means a player needs to vote on 45 different designs in order to enter a Challenge.

This forces players to not only be a part of the design creation, but also encourages them to constantly vote and legitimize the ratings they receive.

Besides keys, players are also paced by their collection of furniture. Each piece of furniture they purchase has a limit of one to three pieces, so players with smaller collections can’t enter in as many competitions. Also players are incentivized to have a wider collection of pieces, since using up all your best furniture in one event is not wise.

3 Keys to Design Home’s Success

#1: Events at the Core

The first key reason for Design Home’s success is the way that their core gameplay is wrapped around constantly changing events.

This is a design that’s now being replicated outside of Crowdstar’s lineup. Finnish giant Supercell used a similar design in Brawl Stars, while Seriously used a similar design in their upcoming game Best Fiends Rivals. Like Crowdstar, they’ve all realised it’s a great way to create a constantly changing core.

Why it’s so effective:

• The game almost simulates the social media ‘feeds’ of the likes of Facebook and Instagram, making the player feels like there’s always be something new, something interesting going on with the game. It’s a strategy that pulls the player back throughout the day to see what new modes, what new events are happening
• This gives the developer an easy way to change up the gameplay over time through live ops; introduce new modes, limited time events, to drive interesting changes to the game. This is the key to long term retention. Events are increasingly the most important feature within a game which can make all the difference when the game is live. As reported in the “Toon blast” article, competitive events which change up the core slightly and add variety are proven to drive engagement and revenue. It can turn a good game into a great game

#2: Monetizing On Emotion

Design Home doesn’t follow a lot of recent trends in monetization. It doesn’t have gacha, it doesn’t use a lot of timers, it doesn’t even allow players to skip the voting timers to get their rewards early. So, just how does it succeed?

Crowdstar monetizes from two key systems; slowly pushing players to care about their overall rating, and creating an emotional connection to what you’re creating. As a result, they monetize like no one else does.

The base of monetization in Design Home is the slowing of progress – specifically the overall score of the players’ accounts. After each event, your voting results impact what your account’s overall score is. In short, to increase your score, you need to get great results.

Design Home’s rating algorithm is set up in a way such that the voting results ratings typically fall between 3.0 and 5.0 rating. Getting lower than 3.5 rating seems to be a very rare occurrence. To begin with, your account’s overall score is 2.0. So, as a player first joins, each result from voting is guaranteed to make major progress to their review score.

When a player reaches a 3.5+ rating, this progress significantly slows down. In order to reach a 4+ rating they need to be consistently getting a voter rating of over 4. This requires a large collection of furniture alongside a sense of what will rate highest in a given event.
As a player hits this 4+ tipping point, their progress significantly slows once more and the easiest way to make progress is to buy the newest, best valued furniture & equipment.

In short, Crowdstar has created a system where players actively care about their overall score, and so only want to submit designs that will increase it. As a result, the second major monetization point comes from the just-in-time purchasing of items and emotional connection.

On this emotional score, each player lives out the fantasy of being a Interior Decorator in play. When decorating a room, the  motivation stems from creating the space they envision will win the competition. However, especially early in the game, they have very limited access to the most desirable furniture.

This is where the “just-in-time” purchasing is impactful. Players can preview how amazing a new piece of furniture would look in their design, and purchasing with Cash or Diamonds is just a quick tap away.

As the player progresses, inevitably they will need to grind for major resources. Cash and Diamonds will become strapped as they progress due to how expensive the furniture is and how low each competition pays out. So over time, players will have to decide if they grind events by putting any possible furniture into it – wait a long time for their furniture to return to their collection – or spend.

Crowdstar really preys on the player’s internal drive to create only great things. No one wants to feel like they are submitting a design to a social competition that is sub par, especially when your Facebook profile associated with it.

The key learning here is, players are willing to spend both to maximize their chance of a high rating and because no one likes submitting something that they aren’t proud of.

By combining these two systems, Crowdstar has created the perfect storm – it’s whipped up a great way to monetize off players purchasing decorations directly, which is a system that no other developer in the top grossing uses to this degree.

#3: Professional Visuals & Real-Life Brands

Lastly, what key aspect I believe that drove the success of Covet Fashion and Design Home is that these games aren’t designed to look like a usual cutesy free to play game – they are styled like a professionally designed app.

If you look at many of the Fashion Styling and Interior Decorating games created before it, they all resembled over the top pink, cartoony, and pretty gaudy color selection. Design Home’s look and feel is closer to a furniture magazine or professional software for interior decorating compared to a game. This both reinforces the fantasy and I believe strikes a chord with the audience – it’s a game for mature designers, not for kids.

Of course what really ties this all together is the use of brands within the game  it’s a win-win situation for both Crowdstar and the brands involved. Design Home is seen as a professional designing game by the game’s audience – a game where players get to place real furniture that they could feasibly buy in real life, and can even within the app.

On top of this, brands get exposure within the app to their target audience: people that love designer furniture. Brands like HGTV sponsor events, furniture brands can pay Crowdstar to increase the sorting rank of the furniture they put in game. Brands can even pay Crowdstar to have “brand exclusive” events — ex. one where only “Blink Home” furniture is allowed.

Conclusions

Design Home and Covet Fashion before it are key games for Glu + Crowdstar. The company has created a successful hybrid of a social network and a game, and delivered a competitive PvP environment for a traditionally competition-lite market – fashion and interior decorating. It creates strong long term retention and plenty of outlets for Crowdstar + Glu to build upon for the years to come.

My keys for their success:

• Event-driven core loop which gives enough variety that player’s collections are constantly challenged and giving Crowdstar an outlet to build limited time events and interesting new competitions to drive long term play
• The core loop monetizes strongly on player’s key emotions: that they want to reach the top of the leaderboard by creating the best possible designs + that they never want to publish anything that they don’t believe is quality
• That the game is designed as a professional design app rather than a cutesy game. This is a game that fully understands its market

At the beginning of this year, Peak games soft-launched a game called “Toon Blast”. Some developers took a look, but most pushed it aside. The game appeared to be a direct re-skin of Toy Blast, Peak games’ original hit game.

Time went on, and Toon Blast was finally globally launched in August 2017. Again, most developers took a look, dismissed it as a re-skin, then walked away. But under the surface Peak Games was testing a key change within the game that is a true sign of the times: they removed the Saga Map:

Two versions that Peak Games was testing in August. One version with the Saga map, another without it.

For those creating matching games, this has been a slow but obvious change. Since King dominated the puzzle game genre starting in 2012/2013 developers in the space have been actively trying to differentiate themselves from the dominant players.

The Evolution of the Matching Genre & Toy Blast

In 2014 there was Gummy Drop by Big Fish Games, which added a dash of resource management to the saga framework. Players collected resources to eventually be able to afford to move through gates.  Also in 2014, Seriously launched Best Fiends, which added a light RPG upgrade system on top of the core mechanic. In 2015 Playrix launched Fishdom, where players could collect fish and decorate their fish tanks. In 2016 Playrix launched Gardenscapes, already deconstructed here, which added narrative and decoration to the saga metagame. The biggest games in the genre managed to add new elements to the metagame to separate themselves from the usual Saga-based model.

But during that time, most matching game companies stuck to the pure Saga framework. Some saw modest success with it, while others did not. Peak Games was one of the few who did see success with the Saga framework. Toy Blast, launched in 2015, featured a pure saga model, but with a new yet familiar take on the core mechanic.

Toy Blast, Peak Games big hit, was one of the last games to see success with a pure saga based model.

Toy Blast’s main mechanic was similar to older games like Collapse, Diamond Dash or Pet Rescue Saga. Instead of asking players to swap, players simply had to tap individual groups of gems. Any group of 2 or more pieces could be removed instantly, but each costs a move. Similar to Candy Crush in terms of strategy, but feels very different. While the interaction itself is fast, as you get into the more difficult levels you start to see that this mechanic can be far more punishing if you’re not paying attention, and rewarding if you’re planning a few moves ahead.

Still, most developers dismissed Toy Blast initially as “just another Candy Crush clone” — but this is definitely not reflected in the numbers. Looking at net monthly revenue from Sensor Tower, Toy Blast has grown into a massive revenue driver:

source: Sensor Tower Estimates

Toy Blast grew to be a sticky top grossing puzzle game. But unlike most top grossing games, it was clear that Peak Games had a slow and steady growth to the top. Much to the credit of their team, they managed through methodical improvements and strong performance marketing to build Toy Blast into the success it is today.

After the success of Toy Blast, it was no wonder that Peak Games started work on Toon Blast. It’s an obvious safe bet to repurpose the gameplay they already have. King and Playrix have done the same with their top franchises with clear success. Being able to retain players that lapse from your hit games by cross-promoting them to your new exciting games is powerful.

But why is it that Peak Games, the last developer to have found success with the “pure” saga model, opted for a radically different design in Toon Blast?

 

Why are top developers are abandoning the pure Saga model?

There are 2 key reasons for this.

Reason 1: Facebook doesn’t matter

The biggest shift that has changed since Candy Crush Saga first came out is that friends within games, especially through facebook connect, have become decreasingly important.

For one, facebook connection has gone steadily down since 2012. Players are less likely to connect their games, even when games offer big rewards for connecting. While socially connected players tend to retain longer (they see their friends progress) — players are less and less likely to opt-in to that kind of peer pressure on mobile. Especially in puzzle environments.

The first factor here is Facebook. Facebook’s strategy dramatically shifted for games after Candy Crush. Instead of allowing games to post spam all over walls and notify other players freely of every small bit of activity, Facebook has scaled down over the last 4 years the impact of facebook connect. They’ve seen the negative impact it has on their user experience, and slowly made changes to avoid games from taking advantage of their platform with spam. Adding to this, they shifted their revenue strategy to ads. Giving free virality to games, cuts into Facebook’s main revenue source. Instead of offering free virality, Facebook has gradually shut down their virality and instead sells the users to publishers through ads.

So with connection rates down and much of the importance of Facebook virality gone, puzzle games, which typically depended on this model to be successful, have turned to other sources to drive new users and retain their players.

For Toon Blast, this means that instead of only allowing players to play together with their friends, they can now join guilds, which are made up of other active players in the game. Instead of players slowly becoming less engaged as their friends drop off in engagement, players are actively pushed to join together with other active players in the game. With Toon Blast, players send lives and earn coins based on how active their guild is. This is obviously taken out of the playbook of Clash Royale and most mid-core games on the AppStore. Many games have had guild features for years, and many have gone deeper with the mechanics. Yet this is a casual matching game — this is a bold choice.

Toon Blast’s addition of clans and guilds is a sign of the times that free facebook virality is gone, and that games can’t rely solely on a player’s group of friends to give reasons to come back and progress in a game.

With facebook gone, developers need to push players to create their own bonds with other players that are active in the game

The standard guild system in Toon Blast accomplishes this.

Reason 2: Events are more Important

The second reason why Saga has been cut from Toon Blast, is Peak Game’s experience with what drives meaningful revenue growth: Events.

If you look back and the timeline of Toy Blast, and what drove the growth of their revenue from 2015 to 2016: it’s a clear focus on engagement events and competitive events.

Looking at how King, Playrix, Wooga and Peak have managed to drive stronger retention in their games, it’s not from adding social features. It has been from adding features to the game that push players to complete more levels, faster. Features like the “Star Chest” in Toon Bast: each star you gain on a level fills up a bar which grows towards a chest. A chest that rewards a player with boosts and coins to help them through tough levels.

Or features like the “Crown Rush” event in Toy Blast: which demands that players complete certain levels before a time limit counts down.

These type of single-player, goal-driven engagement events drive retention and drive monetization in players. Looking at the UI/UX of Toon Blast, now with the Saga map removed, these can now be far more centre stage, and feel far less “tacked on” than the usual Saga Map:

But besides engagement events, Peak Games’ prominent form of revenue growth comes from competitive events within the game. Events which pull players together and ask them to compete against each other for prizes. This is usually just reinforcing the core loop: asking players to progress as fast as they can within a limited time for access to great prizes. Best shown in games like Gardenscapes’ Fireworks Festival:

Engagement + Competitive events are what drove Toy Blasts’ growth, so of course, Peak Games would want to double down on that with Toon Blast. By adjusting away from the simple saga map model, they now have a method to make this far more a part of the core. Mimicking the same UX patterns as Clash Royale, to put events as the core focus for players.

In Conclusion

Peak Game’s decision to move Toon Blast away from a typical Saga map UI was a bold choice, but one that clearly is a sign of the times.

• The importance of Facebook has faded to a point that even puzzle/casual developers are leaning on guild-like structures to retain players
• Since events are the major revenue driver for puzzle games, toon blast puts its UI focus much more on events than on the saga progress

With everything in life and in video games, what goes up must eventually come down.

Saga was one of those trends that has been up for so long that many of us were asking when would it ever fade. What would come next. We now have our answer.

What does Splatoon, a paid game for consoles have to do with mobile free to play?

Well, you can find inspiration and clever design in any medium. Just so happens I’m a massive fanboy of Nintendo, and after playing their game for months it was inspiring to spot some really interesting design bits that can be applied to any free-to-play game.

Just to give you some background, Splatoon is a multiplayer 3rd person shooter for Wii U.

Splatoon of course isn’t just your run of the mill shooter however. Nintendo re-invented this genre from the ground up. The focus isn’t on kills, instead it is on covering the arena with as much of your team’s colour as possible. Kills can help slow down the opposition, but it is more about controlling territory than it is about camping for kills. As a result the game feels much more casual for players that aren’t interested in getting headshots, yet strategically deep for players that want to compete.

The core gameplay aside though, Nintendo did something I don’t think many designers expected. They built a masterful metagame outside the battle which drives strong long term retention. Instead of just taking the tried and true Call of Duty perk & leveling system, they’ve built something that feels great and keeps players coming back. This is something that all F2P games strive for.

Today I’d like to focus on 2 mechanics in Splatoon that can be applied to any F2P game:

#1 Splatoon Clothing

The part that binds the entire metagame together for Splatoon is the clothes. Nintendo’s design of how players get clothes, unlock clothes and level up clothes makes this game work. It makes this game last.

Nintendo could have decided to go with the tried and true method that many shooters and skill based games go with. Call of Duty pioneered a system in 2007 which many online focused games have used since. Players gain levels by playing games and gaining XP. Levels unlock new guns, new perks and new gadgets to play with in the multiplayer game. As you progress up the levels you’re rewarded with more options to choose from. This system is simple and effective, which is why most multiplayer games have used this method over and over.

The original system that everyone uses. Levels unlock new options for the player.

But this Call of Duty system also has its disadvantages. Each player unlocks equipment and upgrades in the exact same way. So while it allows players complete flexibility in choosing their loadout, there’s very little choice in the grind. Players just seek to optimize their XP growth.

Splatoon approached this in a completely different way. Splatoon instead ties perks and abilities to clothes. Instead of players being able to freely decide which perks they want, players need to choose clothes, upgrade them, and hope that they contain the perks and abilities that they want.

Each piece of clothing has random abilities that you must discover by playing matches with the item equipped.

On the surface this isn’t a massive difference from most MMOs or Multiplayer games. Some games decide to tie aesthetics to special abilities in a game. The key difference that Nintendo makes is that the abilities of a new item are random. When you buy a new piece of clothing, only one perk is shown. The remaining perks are slowly discovered the more you play with the item.

The result is that this system feels like each piece of clothing is like a trading card booster pack — that you slowly open the more you play the game.

This means in theory buying multiple of the exact same pair of shoes can result in different perks awarded. This system results in players opting in to grinding for the gear that both looks good on their character and has the abilities which work well with their play style. This combination makes for a very powerful long term retention driver.

The 2 key reasons that make this system work:

There is no right answer

What’s important about this system is that the abilities are designed and balanced properly so that there is no set of abilities that dominate over all others. A must in any skill-based PvP game. Each ability benefits different play types equally.

Because there is no dominant play style, players are more likely to experiment. Players naturally will experiment with different perks, seek out cooler clothing, and as a result opt-in to playing with a ton of clothes that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Just in efforts to discover new abilities and experiment with different perks.

Just like Hearthstone, or any game with a strong meta-game balance, there should not be a dominant strategy. The more intrigue that goes into players debating over the optimal strategy, the more likely that players at the high level will be happy to experiment and try out new builds.

The clothes don’t give everything away from the start

Nintendo could have simply shown all abilities on the item from the point of purchase. Because they chose both to hide the abilities and force the player to play to discover them, they created a strong drive to keep playing.

F2P designers should seek to find similar systems in their own games. In any loot-based game or gacha-style system, do you need to give away all information about an item from the start? Can you ask the player to play before they discover any special abilities?

By asking the player to play instead of immediately get the benefit, you’ve asked them to invest in your item. Just as psychology teaches us, by making the player work for the benefits, they are more likely to find higher value in the outcome.

They will be more likely to “grind” (level up) multiple versions of the same item to get the benefits they want. They will be more likely to feel really smart when they’ve lucked out and found an item that randomly had a unique ability. This will build investment in the player and drive a long lasting metagame.

As a result Splatoon’s meta game is a longer lasting system than Call of Duty’s, despite having less perks, less guns and more casual gameplay.

#2 Special Order Queue

The second interesting system in Splatoon is the clothes ordering queue. Now that you know why clothes are important and why players happily grind for them, there’s an additional system which drives players back to the game.

Players in Splatoon can walk around the lobby area and see different avatars from around the world. You can walk up to anyone and see their clothes, which perks are on them, and how cool they look. This is a good system for driving desire (“I want that hat! With those abilities!”). Nintendo doesn’t stop there though — it also allows players to order clothes they see from other players. So if you really like that hat, order it!

Your queue is only filled once per day. Spyke will retrieve the item for you, but with some hidden abilities.

But ordering is not immediate. Instead Spyke (a character which you order from) needs some time to get the item. To order you have to add it to your queue. An item from your queue is delivered once per day. When that day is over, if you haven’t purchased it, the item is gone. The next day you return the next item in your queue is available.

So this means:

• You as a player opt-in to coming back tomorrow to buy the item (or the days after depending on your queue)
• The rarer the item, the more likely you are to commit to returning
• When you arrive the following day, you’ve committed to purchasing this item within the time limit. You ordered it!
• If you can’t purchase the item by the end of the day, then only you are to blame. Pushing players to create a goal to play enough to purchase the item within the time frame (“I only have today to buy that cool hat! I have to get the coins!”)
• If you don’t come back to the game at all that day, the item is lost off the queue. Again, only you are to blame. You opted-in to this purchase window.

This system is interesting for free-to-play for 3 reasons:

Using the daily pacing feels natural: There’s no timer in my face, yet still paces the player. Daily cycles feel more natural to a player compared to a long timer (ex. “come back in 24 hours!”)

It builds commitment in the player: The player is now committed to come back to purchase the item, and to play the game enough to be able to purchase the item in the time it is available.

Punishment is fair: The player completely opted-in for this restriction, making the player more likely to accept the punishment if they fail. This also means that they are more likely to spend to avoid the punishment (“It’s my fault! but if I just pay $x I can avoid the punishment…”)

These 3 ingredients make for a very compelling F2P mechanic for both retention and monetization. This can be applied to any game that has a wide variety of items and gear to give away. Characters in Contest of Champions, Gear in Fallout Shelter, or maybe even cards in Hearthstone. Having an order queue which is filled on a daily basis can be a strong daily session driver. It drives strong commitment, feels natural, and feels fair.

In Summary for Splatoon

Splatoon is a very interesting game. If you have a chance to play it, I highly recommend it.

Besides the usual Nintendo charm, Splatoon managed to inspire me with a couple very interesting F2P systems:

• They drive me back to the game to find the best clothing and abilities
• I’m committed to come back to the game and play a few rounds each day to pick up my orders for clothes

These 2 key systems that can be applied to many F2P games to drive what’s most important: long term retention.

Supercell’s most recent soft launch is called Smash Land. It’s been in soft launch phase in Canada and Australia since March 31st 2015 (About 2 months from this post). There is no doubt that Supercell’s soft launches are huge news for the mobile free to play industry. Supercell is notoriously picky about what games that make it to soft launch. Each new game goes through rigorous internal feedback, and only the best games survive. The games that hit soft launch are games that Supercell genuinely believes have a shot at the Top Grossing charts.

Smash Land is based on “Monster Strike”, a massive mobile free to play game in Japan. In December 2014 it took over Puzzles and Dragons’ top spot in the Japanese charts. Similar to how Supercell started Clash of Clans with looking at Backyard Monsters, Supercell now looks to simplify the design of Monster Strike so that it could work in the Western markets. But in Supercell’s simplification of a game that performs so well in Japan, has the game stayed intact?

Has what remains kept what is required to be a successful game?

Smash Land’s Core Battle

Supercell decided to keep core battle game the same as Monster Strike. The core battle mechanic is a Physics-based RPG battle. Almost like a game of pool, the game is mostly about predicting how balls on a flat surface will bump and move to create a preferred outcome. In Smash Land, the game is about lining up one of your characters so that it bounces between walls, enemy characters and your own characters as many times as possible. The player then collects up to 10 different heroes, each with their own special ability. For an overview of the mechanic, watch this video:

Overall the core battle feels smoother, cleaner and is much easier to understand than Monster Strike. Each character feels unique because of their special abilities which feels great.

The gameplay is very strong for a mobile F2P game. Its easy to pick up and understand for any player. The feeling of skill is strong — I can predict a few bumps and feel smart about setting up strong combos. On top of this, because of the nature of physics, Luck comes into play. Like Peggle, physics is usually pretty easy to predict after the first shot, but after the first few collisions it becomes almost impossible to predict the outcome. As a result each move can result in some “Post-Action Luck” which is critical for casual games.  Players feel smart and each shot is unpredictable.

Overall they’ve taken the best bits of Monster Strike and applied it to a more focused experience. It’s a great battle system that is easy to get addicted to.

Heroes

Outside of the battle, players can also engage in upgrading their heroes stats. This is really where Smash Land departs from Monster Strike.

Monster Strike contains far more variety of stats for each character:

Just comparing these two screens you can see the dramatic comparison between the games. Its much easier to understand Smash Land compared to Monster Strike.

However, at what cost is this simplicity? In Smash Land the major differences between the characters are special abilities and their health to damage ratio. In Monster Strike, the team you bring into battle requires far more strategy as you progress in the game.

You need a balance of elemental types on top of ensuring you’ve got strong special abilities that are complementary. My guess is that while Supercell’s game clearly scores points for understandability, it will seriously limit the long term replayability of the game compared to Monster Strike. Players just won’t have nearly as much to strategize about in the long run.

Smash Land also departs from Monster Strike in how upgrades are handled.

Heroes are upgraded with gold and time. So the player collects gold from playing matches or collecting them from treasure hunts, and turns this gold into upgrades to their heroes. The cost of each upgrade escalates very quickly. As a result, the game really starts to require many, many battles before you can afford a single upgrade.

Smash Land’s system is far simpler than Monster Strike. Monster Strike takes cues from Japanese Gatcha games like Puzzles and Dragons. To upgrade your heroes you must collect hundreds of characters and consume them to give experience points to your heroes. For a great overview of Gacha, read here.

Leaving the Gatcha system out for Smash Land is a big risk, what remains is a far too simple economy that quickly becomes a grind.

Monster Strike’s system with consuming & collecting monsters has a massive advantage in the long run compared to Smash Land. Instead of just 10 heroes, Monster Strike has almost 1000 collectable monsters in the game (source). With this massive set of monsters, they have created a system where players have much more excitement for the long run.

As I’ve spoken about before, to alleviate the feeling of grinding it’s all about creating random spikes of progression. Similar to games like Diablo you need to find ways to add luck to your progression. Ensure that each battle can result in a lucky outcome which could dramatically increase their pace of progression. In Diablo this could be finding a legendary weapon on the ground which makes it a breeze to beat the enemies following.

In Monster Strike, instead of powerful rare swords, players can randomly get awarded rare monsters from the gatcha system. The player now feels lucky, like the game gave them something for free that should have cost them real money or a lot of time. Because the player got this rare monster, they can rush through previously hard levels and feel great.

Overall the rate of progression may be slow, but because there are these moments where progression randomly spikes, players are far more likely to engage for a long time.

This variable progression is missing in Smash Land. To progress, you must upgrade your  heroes in a linear path. Each victory gives you a calculated amount of rewards. The cost of upgrading a hero grows each time.

Overall, with only 10 heroes and very limiting upgrades, the metagame is just too simple. I have the same heroes as everyone else, the same upgrades as everyone else, so there is no moment where I feel like I’ve got a really unique set of heroes that are more amazing than my opponents. Without this unique feeling, it is hard to get attached to my characters or get attached in the long run.

Desirable Stats

Smash Land removed plenty from Monster Strike when they simplified the heroes/monster collection structure. But regardless of how many collectable characters you have in your game, if you want players to engage in an upgrade system you need to ensure that those upgrades are desirable.

In Smash Land my drive to upgrade is very weak. The battle overall feels very Skill & Luck driven (as I described above). The outcome of battles has more to do with getting repeated bounces over how much each player’s heroes had levelled up. In many cases I won with far fewer levels than my opponent, or I lost at the hands of an opponent that had far fewer hero levels than me. This translates in less player demand for upgrading their heroes. Instead of having a strong desire to have the strongest possible team, players will blame victories on their skill or luck and will more likely be content with their team as is. This is a difficult balance to get right in any game. For more on Stats vs Luck vs Skill, read on here.

But for this game, where its whole monetization plan is dependant on players upgrading their characters, Stats must take more precedence in the outcome of a battle.

If the player has a decreased desire to upgrade their heroes, then this will break how the game monetizes. Hero upgrades are at the core of how this game makes money. Players grind for coins (or spend money), on top of have long timers (8 hours or more) to upgrade their characters. After spending money in the game, speeding up the upgrades all of my characters substantially, I really didn’t feel any more powerful in the game. I lost subsequent multiplayer battles, and was now facing an even higher upgrade cost for my heroes. In the end spending money in the game really just didn’t feel worthwhile.

Overall Thoughts

If this wasn’t launched by Supercell, this game would never have gone under so much scrutiny. The game on its own is polished, fun to play, and ticks all the boxes for being a successful free to play game:

• Strong Pacing of content
• Multiplayer gameplay to provide long tail retention
• Guilds to bring players together without requiring Facebook
• A simple game mechanic that’s easy to pick up and play, hard to master

But when you put them all together in this game, the metagame is too simple:

• There is not enough variety or strategy in choosing heroes
• Upgrading quickly becomes tedious and a long grind
• There is not enough desire to upgrade your team to compete at the highest level

So how will this do on the market?

So far it seems Supercell is keeping this game in a quiet soft launch. Comparing this soft launch to Boom Beach, by 2 months Boom Beach was higher in both the download charts and grossing charts within Canada (source:AppAnnie). That points to Supercell keeping the marketing costs & number of new users down for the time being while they improve the game. Supercell is very rigorous with their soft launch games. Just last year they released “Spooky Pop” which failed to hit their targets. As a result they decided to cancel the game.

Can Supercell turn this game around during the soft launch? I think it will be difficult. They cut so much away from what made Monster Strike work, its hard to see if small feature additions will be able to rebuild what’s necessary. It will only happen if they completely rebuild their Hero progression systems.

I think Smash Land should be an example for all future mobile game designers. Simplicity can open up to wider markets, but the focus on Free to Play must be on long term retention, not the widest audience. Game designers must strive to create enough longterm depth in their metagames, or else they will fail.

Idle games are an exciting new genre that I expect to expand greatly in the coming years on mobile. Idle games, Clicker games, or “games that play themselves” is a baffling genre. Inexplicably these games are dominating many of the popular flash portals and shooting up the charts on mobile. Make it Rain by 337 Games, Tap Titans by Game Hive and now AdVenture Capitalist by Kongregate have all shown that this genre has a rightful place on the AppStore.

But why is this genre so popular? Why does this genre even exist? Why even discuss games that people don’t really play?

Idle games have risen on mobile because this is a genre that is perfect for modern mobile free-to-play design. The mechanics of idle games create perfect mobile sessions and drive strong long term retention.

What is an Idle Game?

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of revenue streams. Similar to simulation games, their main differentiator is the focus on revenue growth decisions.

For some examples:

• Idle Games on Kongregate
• Reddit’s Guide to Idle Games

Cookie Clicker : http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

Cookie Clicker is the best example of an idle game. Each time you tap the cookie, you gain 1 cookie. You use cookies to purchase upgrades. Upgrades increase either the rate of tapping the cookie (now you get 2 cookies per click!) or increases the rate of cookies generated automatically (Grandmas will make 1 cookie per second). These automatic cookies are generated whether you are tapping or not. They are generated even if you’re away from the game.

On paper this sounds too simple to be fun. But try for yourself. The simple act of purchasing an upgrade always feels great. The growth curve is so fast it gets very addictive, very quickly.

Progress just for the sake of progress is fun. Even if it only means a virtual number increases faster.

Rate of resource generation is the core of the game. But an economy that inflates so quickly with a single currency has flaws. Very quickly, the game’s upgrade costs skyrocket. Starting off with nice low numbers the game quickly skyrockets into costs of trillions just a few sessions in. Most designers would cringe at this type of growth curve. What kind of player wants to worry about numbers in the trillions? In AdVenture Capitalist, your costs will eventually reach more than 1 Tretrigintillion (10 to the power of 102). Yet, players love this. Progress always feels good. Players playing for long enough to reach these ridiculous numbers feel like it is a real accomplishment.

As a result, Idle games have claimed 3 of the top 10 most played games on Kongregate (source: here). There are even Twitch channels dedicated to watching a computer play a game itself. Inexplicably, this genre has seen incredible growth.

Regardless of your stance of whether or not this is a “real” game genre, the mechanics in Idle games are perfectly realized for mobile. Idle games can teach mobile game designers a lot about creating a game that has strong session design. Idle games are so strong because:

1. It always feels good to come back.
2. Sessions naturally ease the player to leave
3. The mechanics ease the player from micro to macro gameplay

#1: It always feels good to come back

Many mobile games suffer gameplay mechanics that feel punishing on returning to the game after leaving for a few days.

In FarmVille: crops wither. If you do not come back to the game in time, your crops are worthless. In Clash of Clans: resources are stolen. The longer you are away from the game, the more likely a majority of your precious resources are stolen. Your rank on the leaderboard could be lowered. Your Clan becomes upset that you haven’t donated enough troops. These mechanics are all strong at driving reasons to come back, but also creates reasons for players to quit.

Idle games don’t suffer from this problem. Each time the player returns to the game, they are left with a massive stockpile of cash. It always feels like a bonus that they left the game. If a player leaves for a day, a week, or a month it only increases the amount of currency in their stockpile. In most economies this would be troublesome. Not in Idle games. Because the growth curves are exponential, leaving a game to infinitely generate a low income rate is absolutely fine.

Player A grows faster from Day 1. Player B waits until Day 7, but gains a massive stockpile.

For example, lets take 2 players. Player A comes back every day. Player B skips a week of play. Both players are generating 1 million cookies per day at this point in time. Player A, the active player, returns day 2 and receives 1 million cookies. Player B, who skipped the week, returns to have 7 million cookies. Player B can clearly purchase far more upgrades than Player A. Player B actually feels very rewarded for leaving for so long — they are rewarded with a very long session which they can purchase many things. However, comparing the growth curves Player A purchased many upgrades on that second day. So Player A by day 2 is already at a new growth rate of 10 million cookies a day. Player A is clearly growing far faster than Player B, but both players (because its a single player game) feel they made a smart choice. Player A is rewarded with faster progression. Player B is rewarded for waiting so long. It always feels good to return, but returning more often gives you faster progression.

Mobile games should strive to create this feeling. It should never feel like a punishment to come back to the game.

Players should be reminded that coming back often is a benefit, but coming back at all is always a bonus.

For this reason most farming games have shifted away from FarmVille’s model. Instead of withered crops, there’s low storage limits. In Clash of Clans, they incorporate shields and enforce looting limits to make sure players dont feel that not coming back feel too badly.

#2: Sessions ease the player away

Coming from my previous post on Flexible Sessions, the perfect mobile session finds a way to naturally push players out of the game. This is necessary for pacing and long term retention. Strong mobile games give strong reasons to come back (see above!) and strong reasons to leave the game. Idle games have mastered this natural prod of players out of the game.

Offering lots of purchasing options creates the session design. There is always something to purchase, but eventually the smart choice is the one where the player must wait.

As Idle games push players to invest in automatic revenue generators (ex. Grandmas in Cookie Clicker) over manual revenue generators (manually tapping on the cookie), players inevitably will reach a point in the game when they just have to wait. The player can purchase small upgrades fairly rapidly, but they know to make the next big leap of progression its smarter to purchase the more expensive upgrades. So, they leave the game feeling smart about their decision.

This is the exact point which the player, themselves, have opted-in to leaving the game. Naturally, the game has prodded the player to leave. Mobile games must strive for this. Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game. Idle games have even managed to do this without timers, without social appointments or any other tacked on system as discussed in Player Commitments.

Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game.

#3: It eases the player from core to meta gameplay

The first experience of a new player is very simple. In Clicker Heroes: A player just madly taps an enemy monster. In Make it rain: A player flicks heaps of money into the air. The first experience is addictive and immediately fun. Its obvious how to get better – tap or swipe faster. Players quickly master this mechanic and it feels natural. However, this mechanic’s interest quickly burns out. After the first few sessions, players are quickly tired of having to manually collect.

This is when the game offers a bait and switch. You came for the simplicty of tapping, but what you’ve been given is a game that is all about managing resources and upgrades. Players shift from tapping to managing which upgrade to purchase next. This clever switch means players that would have been burnt out from the simple mechanic are now thinking about long term decisions in the game. Which upgrade is the best value? How do I optimize my growth?

Mobile games must master this bait and switch. Players expecting to come into any mobile game will expect some core gameplay that mimics what they’ve played in the past. Playing bejeweled for Candy Crush, playing command and conquer for Clash of Clans, or platforming for King of Thieves. However, as a free-to-play designer your job isn’t to just hook these players with fun intial mechanics. You need to find ways to retain these players for years. The best way to do this is to switch the player from focusing on second-to-second core gameplay (tapping cookies) into longer term decisions (optimizing progression). Idle games clearly show a blueprint of how to accomplish this, regardless of the core gameplay.

Looking to the Future

Idle games are big and going to get bigger.

Anthony Pecorella gave an excellent talk at GDC 2015 on Idle Games summarized here. Clearly with the success of AdVenture Capitalist, Tap Titans and Make it Rain, more developers are taking notice.

The genre is ripe for innovation. Recently CivCrafter came out. A take on the idle genre with multiple resources and battles. Tap Titans has shown that the genre can apply to the auto-rpg genre. I believe that the progression systems in these games can really be applied to any genre. Replacing the core game play with a puzzle mechanic, an RPG battle mechanic, a Simulation theme, Arcade gameplay are all possible angles.

The key is to design the bait and switch: give the players the game play that is addictive and fun in the beginning, but eventually nudge them into purchasing the automatic resource generators. Players can then make the choice between grinding the core gameplay, or leaving and gaining the benefit just by waiting.

Get ready: the future will be all about games you don’t play.

We don’t tend to typically think about games as emotional experiences, and perhaps because of this, the most interesting talks I saw at GDC 2013 were about games that had made people cry. Crying is not something that we expect from games, yet if a book, film or play made us cry we would think that a great achievement. Instead, we expect games to be fun, which whilst pleasant, is not a deep emotional experience. However, the games that do go beyond fun to deliver real drama are some of the most interesting, memorable and successful games out there.

Here are some four techniques that games can use to deliver hugely engaging, dramatic experiences.

Jeopardy

One of those talks at GDC 2013 was on DayZ (the other was about Journey). Dean Hall, the lead designer talked about creating a consistent world where things had value. The game is an FPS in a zombie apocalypse setting – so far, so generic. But the game is also permadeath, has scant supplies, and as well as zombies, has other players who may or may not be friendly. As well as avoiding zombies and bullets, you have to keep your character fed, watered and warm.

The zombie apocalypse does not itself generate tension and danger, it just provides the backdrop for this. The game boasts incredible levels of tension from the unpredictable way that other humans will act in a world without strict rules, and where killing you for ammo is just as likely as agreeing to team up. Staying alive is a painstaking process of amassing equipment from match boxes up, and all of which can be snuffed out in a moment from a sniper you never saw.

Players have been quick to share their stories on the forums. Many are the early triumphs of new players surviving more than a few minutes to gather some food and set up camp. Others are more heroic, inflicting revenge or justice on rogue players. Most make some reference to the feelings and ethical dilemmas that players experience – how a miscommunication can lead to unintended bloodbaths, or the acceptability of sniping noobs.

As with so many other Rogue-like games, it’s the danger of loss, the jeopardy, that makes the experience so rewarding. When things in the game are hard to come by and easy to lose, players place a huge amount of value on them. It’s the same reason that players love FTL or Dark Souls, where every encounter is a story and a chance to be a hero, because the risk of failure is so real and tangible. (Here is another great review on DayZ).

Empathy

A sense of loss is also prevalent in X-Com, though to a lesser degree. Here your inevitable squad casualties from taking on alien invaders can be replaced for the next mission. However, a number of details make you feel each death of a soldier under your command more keenly. Some of this is down to the mechanics – troops gain experience and become more powerful as they survive longer, gaining unique special abilities that are crucial to your long term success. But beyond that each solider has a name, a nationality, and their own physical appearance.

These cosmetic details build on their varying stats to give a surprising amount of individuality that you empathise with, even in the absence of scripted dialogue. Pierre from France might be a craven sure to break at the first sign of danger, whilst Brad from the US is your favored sniper with a history of saving you from impossible situations. As a player you start to fill in the gaps and elaborate on their characters and backstories. If your troops survived long enough they also earn a nickname that further endears them to you, and if they die, their names are remembered in the in game memorial.

These details mean that when a soldier dies, it is not only a setback in your progression to build up an experienced team. It is a much more personal testament to your personal failure to protect your squad mates, who trusted you to command their every move. X-Com is a great example not because it is the best game at showcasing empathy for digital entities, but because it manages to achieve so much with so little.

Context : Half Life

When you start Half Life, you don’t get a gun, and you don’t kill anyone. It’s an incredibly mundane start to an FPS, as you walk around a research facility going through the daily routine of the protagonist Gordon Freeman. But few games are as feted as much as Half Life for their quality of narrative. The slow start has a couple of beneficial effects on the rest of the game.

Firstly, you know that at some point, very shortly, Bad Things will happen. Just as Tarantino cranks up the tension with long, drawn out conversations that you know will eventually end in a blood bath, anticipating the upcoming excitement is every bit as good as actually experiencing it.

Secondly, once the facility is infested with aliens trying to chew your face off, there is an added gravity to the drama that you are going through. The dead bodies aren’t just decorative as in so many other games. Here they are fellow scientists you were exchanging pleasantries with a short while ago. You haven’t been born into carnage a hero, but thrust into the role of a reluctant hero as a survivor of an attack on the world you knew.

Agency : Game of Thrones

Telltale have been making games giving player big choices for 10 years. Their games are dialogue heavy, with players deciding how to respond to other characters from a range of predefined options. Their latest offering, Game of Thrones, has some exquisite moments, such as when you are interviewed by Queen Cersei. Squirming through her questioning was on a par with any similar scene from the TV series where some piteous underling is pulled apart, and I found new sympathy for the impossible situations that minor characters often find themselves in.

This scene works so well for the same reasons that many game choices of this nature fail. As an avid fan of the franchise I knew the political landscape and dangers I was traversing, and also had strong views on the type of character I wanted to play. Without this background knowledge and the sense that the choices offered would actually make a difference, my choices would have felt hollow.

In the same game there are breaks in conversation where as the player you are given the choice to say the same thing in three different ways. This adds nothing to the experience apart from slowing it down, and in reminding you that you should be identifying with one of the characters, that in actual fact you’re not.

I recently came across the other problem, of insufficient knowledge to inform a decision, in the otherwise excellent Dragon Age Inquisition. Here I had to choose between allying with one faction or another, but could explicitly not choose both. Although both factions were well known to me I felt I was still getting to grips with the world lore, and could not fully grasp the potential implications of the choice I was being given. Frustrated I resorted to the internet to understand what I was getting myself into in each case. Again, instead of deepening my immersion in the experience, poor agency had broken it.

Giving players choice to direct the story in a game is one of the defining attributes of the medium, and can be extremely powerful. However, it needs to be both a genuine choice and the player must understand the choice they are being given, or it can risk backfiring.

Conclusion

Games are often thought of solely in terms of fun. But engagement and memorability often peak when there is more than just fun, and they deliver real drama. Increasing the drama in games can be achieved by making things have value, getting players to empathise with the characters, giving the story context and allowing the player agency.

Why is it that in the Top Grossing Charts on mobile there are no games with high amounts of player skill?

Where are the Marios? The games that tested your abilities right to the last boss?
Where are the Call of Duties? Games that allow you to play competitively online for hundreds of hours?
Where are the Street Fighters? Games with so much emergence and depth there are books on how to master the controls for the game…

Mobile renditions of these genres may have found a way to get a decent amount of downloads, but none of them have found a sustained spot on the Top Grossing.

Why?

In order to be successful in free to play you need to pace a player’s progression so that they can play your game for months.
For a game to enforce slow progression for all player types,  you need to be able to balance with high precision.

The more player skill effects the outcome of your game – the harder it is to balance for optimal monetization.

How Candy Crush handles Skill

If Candy Crush was balanced to have less luck and more skill, the game wouldn’t be nearly as successful.

For one, it would not have broad appeal. Players without the necessary skill levels would drag behind and leave because of the difficulty, while players of high skill would rip through the content without spending a dime.

But the major reason why Candy Crush Saga is successful is the way that the game paces its content. Candy Crush has a lot of levels, but with 300+ levels, it still takes you months of engaged play to even dent the map. This stalled speed of progression is exactly what is required to be successful in Mobile Free to Play. A game that lasts for months (better yet, years) with a healthy pace of content to keep players engaged. This drives a strong long term retention: a large percentage of players returning to the game after hundreds of days. This KPI is the most important measure when evaluating a games success, we have seen this time and time again at Wooga.

So how does King do it? How do they pace the content so well so that players only reach the 100th level after playing for a month? They do this by varying up the difficulty. The difficulty of levels is not a steady linear increase like in most classic games. Level 55 is not necessarily easier than level 56, level 100 is not necessarily easier than level 200. In Candy Crush (and all of the games that copied the formula thereafter) there are levels that are meant to be easy, and levels that are meant to be hard. A set of levels are designed as easy to make sure that you have moments when you are loving the game and feeling smart/powerful. However, there are also levels that happen more sporadically which ramp up the difficulty exponentially. These levels are “blocking” levels — they are there to be extremely difficult. These levels are required to convert players to payers (give them reasons to use all those boosts), reinforce that the game is not a cakewalk, and that level progression should be celebrated, (see twitter…) but mostly so that there are levels which have to be played over and over and over and over again before you progress – pacing the content.

Florian Steinhoff did a wonderful GDC presentation about this exact balance when he discussed Jelly Splash. I’d really recommend watching it if you have vault access.

The problem facing game designers looking to create new genres in Free to Play comes back to Player Skill. How do you build these blocking levels that are so important to your retention & monetization? If a player has a huge influence on the result of the round (whether they progress or not) then balancing for a skilled player versus an unskilled gamer would be impossible. I can beat the new Super Mario Bros. in a few hours, it takes others with less experience years to do the same. How Candy Crush builds these levels is by making the chance of winning, regardless of your skill, low. Like 5 to 10% (sometimes I’ve heard numbers even lower). But isn’t this frustrating? No! Since the game has so little skill (in comparison to other genres), they can balance these levels to make sure that players consistently come close to reaching the goal. Those near misses everyone talks about. These keep the player feeling like they can beat the level, they just need to play a few more times or convert. With higher player skill, this becomes much more difficult to achieve.

Super Mario Saga

So let’s go with a little bit of an experiment. Let’s take a game that has high amounts of skill and try to pace it without resorting to “dumbing down” the mechanics.

Super Mario is a game everyone loves – lets assume (for this experiment) that you could actually get the same level of control and ease of use out of a mobile version of Mario.

To play the game, the player progresses along a map, working between worlds which have unique content in each world. It takes months of time for artists, designers and developers to build each world. We need to try to make this amount of content last for months in the hands of players as well.

First off – we ramp up the difficulty on some levels like Candy Crush did. This will prevent players from progressing too quickly and force them to master the game. However, then we’d have a retention issue. The game only appeals to a small niche, and most players are dropping out because the game is too punishing and unrewarding to play.

So let’s add an upgrade system! You collect coins from playing, and then you can use those to improve the runners abilities to pass those levels. For unskilled players – they can grind on previous levels if they need the boost, but now they can progress! Games like CSR and Deer Hunter do this very well. Players can upgrade their weapons or car to improve their chances of winning. Blocking levels are directly tied to your upgrade level, and grinding is a core part of the game loop. However, in our Mario game we start to get some issues. Compared to CSR and Deer Hunter, there is substantially more skill in our game. So a player beating a level has a lot more to do with their current skill level than over how much they’ve upgraded. Those blocking levels are not forcing you to upgrade at all, it’s just demanding more skill. So in the end we have no control over the pace of skilled players, and unskilled players are forced to grind. No fun.

Here in the bottom right you can see the recommended gear for completing a level. In order to actually ensure a player NEEDS this upgrade — you need to make sure their skill isn’t overpowered and they can beat the level regardless.

What else can we do?

Games like Hearthstone and Diamond Dash are games of high skill and have performed very well in the Top Grossing charts. These games use Multiplayer PvP to control the player skill.

Tying PvP (Multiplayer) to your progression is one way that high skill games can pace their content. Ranked Mode in Hearthstone is an excellent example of how to do this. You may be a highly skilled player, but matching you against an equally skilled player and tying the result of this match to your progression allows High Skill games to balance out.

Games like Brave Frontier put most of their Skill into the decisions made in the metagame/elder game. The skill from Brave Frontier is not in the battle. Players are asked to mindlessly tap to fight against opponents. In later stages they even have an automated mode when you bore from mindlessly tapping. The skill in Brave Frontier comes from the choices you make as a player about which monsters/fighters you want to upgrade and which ones you take away. These types of mechanics certainly take much longer for players to appreciate and master, but in the end these are the mechanics that drive players to play these games for months rather than put the game down because they’ve bored of the core mechanic.

Takeaways

So what’s your take away? You can say two things –

1. I’m going to be that crazy game designer that cracks this nut. I’m going to go out and design a game with high skill that will dominate the marketplace that has strong retention and amazing monetization to shoot up the top grossing.

2. Or I will sit back with most free to play designers and continue to find ways to subtly water down skill based mechanics so that we can keep players in the game long enough to monetize and turn them into dedicated players.

I strongly believe that the mobile marketplace is maturing. The current marketplace is slowly demanding more skill from their games. Players are becoming fed up with re-hashed mechanics from a couple years ago. Players can see through Candy Crush’s mechanics and are not sticking to these types of games like they used to.

Finding ways to smartly add skill to games will be the key to opening up new genres on mobile.

Games that are designed specifically for mobile must always realize one thing :
Your users are distracted

This is sometimes counter productive to the true reason behind most game design. We want to create an immersive environment which the user enters this fantasy and is compelled to stay within the circle. This isn’t always possible with mobile games. Trying to force a user to stay within this circle and never break out is an uphill struggle.

The major restraint with working with mobile, is that it is in fact… mobile. They may not be sitting quietly in a chair, at home with minimal distractions playing your game. You can’t design your game around this ideal circumstance. You have to create that immersive environment so that it wraps neatly around the player’s day to day activities.

You have to design your game with distractions in mind.

Mobile Game Design must account for a player with distractions. Specifically when they come back into a game. It’s all about managing a player’s flow state, and bringing them back into the “flow channel” (the balance between boredom and anxiety, building up their skills over time) as quickly as possible.

Immersion is still very possible in this mobile environment, but it takes on different forms. You have to design your game in such a way that at any time the user can leave, come back and still understand what it is they are supposed to be doing.

Dealing with distractions also means catering to your audience. You have to design game mechanics that adapt to the player’s life style. If your target audience is casual, then they have a smaller average session length then a core gamer. You have to design your game mechanics around getting your player in and out of the game within that average session length. They need to be able to get in, reach a high value part of the game quickly, then have the opportunity to leave without pain.

This is sometimes hard to incorporate in games that :

⦁ Depend on a strong narrative to lead the player
⦁ Require many complex steps which require the user to remember ongoing information
⦁ Push the player to play for long periods of time (5 minutes+ required to play)

Taking many cues from casual games, it is important that you design with intermittent play in mind.

Building a mechanic that allows the player to quickly enter the game. A game design that enables the player to quickly understand the game state as soon as possible.

Building a mechanic that allows the player to leave at any moment is imperative. You can’t assume the player will stay in your game for very long, life will usually take priority over playing a game for the player.

It’s important to not disrespect your players at this point. A great game will create a lot of depth and strategy while keeping within these constraints. Many games on the AppStore will dumb down their concept for mobile to a point that it lacks depth.

As always, it is important to understand and know who you’re targeting. If you’re targeting core gamers and want to introduce a lot of complex depth in the gameplay, then you can expect that your user base will be more likely to have higher play session lengths and minimize distractions. Games are higher priority for them (then life).

But even core gamers have distractions — and allowing them to play with depth while balancing these distractions will create an immersive game.

Easy In

Phone calls, texts, life will get in the way of your game — so make sure that your game can adapt to the player’s distractions. Easy In is about having an appropriate strategy for your player’s when they return from distractions. When the player returns to the game they should have as few clicks/steps as possible to return to the optimal game flow (the most exciting part of the game).

Turn-Based Games

The ideal design for a mobile game handling distractions is for the player to be able to exit the game whenever they want, and upon returning they are returned to the exact state they were in. Games that are turn-based can execute on this very easily. In a typical turn-based board game each turn has infinite time. So in the event the player leaves because of a distraction in the middle of game, has unlimited time to get ramped back into the game. The game would return right to game board, where the game’s optimal flow takes place. The player is quickly shown the game’s current state (the entire game board) and can easily think through their move. This is the ideal, since the gameplay is simple enough that the game state can be shown within one screen (the board) and the player has unlimited time to make the choice. Casual Games like Bejeweled do this well : even with a more arcade mechanic, each move the player makes has unlimited time for them to do so. This allows the player to put down their device, not worry about pausing the game, and return without worry. When returning, they can quickly understand the game state (all the jewel placement) and make a move at their leisure.

Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and Where’s my Water all have unlimited turn times for a very good reason. The player can return to the game from distractions and reach optimal game flow as quickly as possible.

Sometimes a player will need a little nudge. You want them to return to the optimal game flow as quickly and delicately as possible. So if the player just can’t spot the next move quick enough, it may be a good idea to “nudge” them to the right answer, so they can get back into the game quickly as possible. Bejeweled does this nicely. When a player hasn’t responded to the game in a few seconds, they add a nudge to show the player where a move is. Sometimes this can be disrespectful and insulting to the player, so use with caution. As always, understand your audience and decide how best to nudge without insulting their problem solving skills.

This ideal situation does not work for all games however. If your mechanic requires the player to make very quick responding moves or make a move within a specific amount of time, then a player coming back in the middle of a game move will cause panic. This isn’t the optimal game flow state. The casual player will panic.

Reaction Games

In arcade games, creating unlimited timed moves would absolutely kill the nature of the game. Timing, speed and panic are the core components of these games. So how do we ramp the player up quickly?

Well a naive solution is to cancel the previous game session they were having. When a player returns from a distraction, they must start from the beginning of the level. This is possible if your game sessions are 20 seconds or less. While the player will feel frustrated their 20 seconds of effort was wasted, this is a minimal punishment… but is still punishment.

The other solution is a pause menu. The player is able to pause the game at any point in the chaotic gameplay. This isn’t new. There was a reason why home console games had the “start” button in all games do this. I’m sure most parents would never had bought consoles for their kids if the pause button wasn’t invented. Many dinners would be skipped without pause menus.

It’s important to use the pause menu for a real purpose.

Cows vs Aliens used the pause menu to display briefly the game state (the player’s points, wave) and give them opportunity to trigger powerups. This doesn’t help the player return to the optimal game flow at all.

Here is how a casual player would return to Cows vs Aliens :

How a player would enter Cows vs Aliens upon returning to the game (locked screen, re enter the app)

⦁ Navigate the menu and try to find the resume button
⦁ Press the resume button

Instant Panic as the player returns to the game

⦁ Instant panic as the game snaps back to the game, there are aliens headed towards the barn.
⦁ As a casual player, they don’t respond in time, they don’t have enough time to get back into the game flow.
⦁ Game over screen.
⦁ Navigate the main menu to restart the game.

This is just an example, but in this case it would have been better for this player to just restart the whole game and start from the beginning again. The player wasn’t able to ramp up quickly enough, and because of that it took 6+ steps to get back into the optimal game flow, with a few steps making them feel inadequate of playing the game. Some players would drop out by this point.

Instead, allowing the player some ramp up time would be more ideal.

The Pause Screen is transparent

Notice in Inspector Gadget’s Mad Dash, the pause menu is transparent overlaying the actual gameplay. This is essential. Immediately when the player returns to the game, they can see the game state, can take their time, take a deep breath, then plunge back into the game flow. Just this basic design decision makes a massive difference in how players can come back into the game. In the event that the game is much further down the track, the player has a difficult jump to make, or returning to the game would cause a game over, the player can predict this when returning, and at least make the decision whether to give up and try again, or try it out. At least they are aware of their fault, and will try to fix it next time they get a distraction.

Taking this a step further, it’s important to nudge the player into the mechanic on a return as soon as possible. For more casual audiences, it may be more important to change the mechanic when the player returns from distraction to ease the player back into the mechanic. In an arcade situation, slow down the generation of obstacles, slow down the gameplay, and gradually speed the game back to its original state. Of course, close attention to exploits is important. You don’t want your player to use the pause menu to make the game easier.

Management Games

Management games, which involve the player managing their time, their town, their bakery shop, their pet shop, have challenges with managing easing a player back into the game play.

In a game like FarmVille, it can be overwhelming for a player when they come back into a game to understand what they should be doing. They have to water their crops, plant new ones, gift their friends, add more friends, purchase that new item, there’s that sale on that barn… do I need it? etc. etc. etc.

It can be a bit overwhelming. Especially as you add more steps and concurrent tasks to the player. Hyper-engaged players will not have a problem navigating this ocean of tasks, but many casual players, which you want to slowly ramp up to being more engaged can walk away when they are presented with so much choice.

In this case it’s important to think of how a returning user can be quickly ramped up in the game. The optimal player flow is for them to work through a step by step process, doing each of their required actions, then leaving the game. But that’s not fun. That’s too restrictive and requires no thought by the player. However, you can help the player organize their required tasks in a convenient list, and allow them to opt-in to following the list of steps in whatever order they choose.

When the player returns to the game, allowing them to press a button, or automatically bringing up their task list is a good idea. Each task should be a bite sized chunk of gameplay (collect all your plants, build a building, etc.). You can include some long term goals which require multiple sessions, but its important to hide these or allow the player to see them only when they’ve completed their short-term bite-sized goals first. Making these bite-sized and manageable within a few seconds allows the player to be nudged back into the core gameplay as soon as possible. It gives them a sense of accomplishment, and pushes them forward. Prioritizing quick wins over long-term victories is a great way to motivate people and to create habits.

Full Reset

Some games will restart the entire game from scratch every time the player opens the game. This is a terrible idea. While this will simplify the game start-up : the player will immediately understand what they need to do to continue (press play, start game from scratch) it clearly means that the game isn’t built with distractions in mind. If the player has to back-track and repeat more then a few steps of work to get them back to the game step they were at then this is just frustrating.

If your game can’t adapt to a player’s life then a player won’t adapt their life to play your game.

The only time which “restart completely” makes sense is when the player’s necessary steps to reach optimal flow is less if they just restarted from the beginning.

Easy Out

Easy out is all about making sure the player feels no remorse for leaving the game.

A big part to make sure this happens is having a good strategy for their return. Allowing the player to leave whenever they only works if the player knows that when they return it will be easy to get back into the game.

It’s also important to find ways to add hooks to the game so that the player has clear areas of the gameplay that they can leave without feeling like they are going to be punished on their return. Classic arcade games and the original console games were terrible at this. If you ever had to shut down your console, leave the arcade machine, you knew that your game state would be lost forever. The day your parents accidently unplugged your Nintendo console while you were in world 8 of mario surely caused scarring effects on your psyche. The day that you wrote down your MegaMan password wrong, and ended up back at the beginning made you throw the controller through the wall.

With mobile, we’ve evolved. We have far better solutions to this. Make sure your game does this as well. Easy Out is making sure that the player feels no remorse leaving the game flow. They can leave the game flow as often and as quickly as they need to.

No Penalty for Leaving

The biggest rule of easy out, is making sure there is no penalty for leaving.

This includes making sure that when they come back their difficulty does not spike. This happens inadvertently many times. Pausing during an intense arcade game will put the player back in the middle of the fray, this time without time to react to the game. This spikes the difficulty and punishes the player for leaving. Makke sure the game has an effective easy in strategy to manage this punishment.

Some games will pull the player back in the game allowing them to ramp up in the game easier. This is great to ramp up the player but has to be balanced with feeling like a punishment for leaving.

Have Coffee Breaks

The other important idea for easy out is to make sure you have plenty of “coffee breaks”. Every so often, the player should be able to take a break from the intensity and feel “OK” with leaving. Counter-intuitive when you want to create an immersive environment, but it depends on how you portray it to the user. You want to try to influence the player so that they leave at good areas of your game. This allows you to better design their return. In an arcade platformer game, It’s better for a player to stop playing your game between levels, than during. If a player exits your game during a level, they are far more likely to return to the game at a point that will confuse them. Having “safe zones” as often as possible allows the player to return to a point in which you as a designer can ramp them up as smoothly as possible. If a player feels like the next coffee break is too distant in the future, they are more likely to exit the game in an awkward area, then when you intend them to.

Do’s and Don’ts for Easy In, Easy Out

DO

⦁ Remind the user what it is they are supposed to do when they return
⦁ Have access to reference for information they are required to remember from previous sessions.
⦁ Have a clear “task list” which pushes the user to complete as many small chunks of gameplay they can
⦁ Have constant small chunks of gameplay actions with breaks which allow the player to leave at opportune times
⦁ When returning to the game, pause the action and allow the player to ease back into the game

DO NOT

⦁ Require the player to remember things from previous sessions
⦁ Have a long intricate story the user is required to remember each time they play
⦁ Have many complex steps for each step in the gameplay
⦁ Penalise the player for leaving in any way
⦁ Require the player to play for over 1 minute continuously