Guest Author: Niek Tuerlings / Writer at Ludocious.com.

Zynga is doing well, very well. Even more so since the first of January this year. This was the date that the Social Game giant had acquired Small Giant Studios, as was announced two weeks earlier. The main reason for this acquisition was the success of Small Giant’s hit game, Empires & Puzzles.

Only five months after being globally launched in March 2017, E&P entered the top 50 grossing games in its category (RPGs/Strategy) on the App Store. It has been there ever since. Especially the last twelve months the game has been thriving, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per day.

What makes this game so successful? What did Small Giant do differently from other developers like King and SEGA who have tried to successfully create a worldwide successor for Puzzles & Dragons, the first game in history to generate $1B in sales?

Guest Author: Niek Tuerlings / Writer at Ludocious.com.
Game Designer on June’s Journey at Wooga, Berlin.
Disclaimer: The article is the author’s own professional view on Empires & Puzzles. Wooga GmbH isn’t affiliated with this assessment in any way.

This deconstruction will cover:

• The game’s core loop
• Why having chosen a basic match-3 mechanic was a safe bet
• What other games have tried
• The game’s features and to which kinds of players it caters
• How time-limited offers and events are run successfully

The Loop

At first glance, the core loop of the game doesn’t look very complicated:

The player’s task is to create the best possible team of five heroes to battle with. Investing in these heroes is needed to level them up, which can be done by merging other unwanted heroes into chosen heroes. New heroes can be trained using recruits, which are collected by winning battles.

The hero roster (top row is the player’s team) and a hero’s detail page.

After carefully composing a balanced team of fighters, the player takes their party of stalwart heroes into battle, which in mobile games means the player is required to do the one and only obvious thing: matching three gems of the same color.

Matching gems in columns sends troops upwards to attack the enemies above.

The player’s team is positioned below the grid, the enemies are above it. Both enemies and the player’s heroes have one out of five elemental types (colors) which are effective to one another in a rock/paper/scissors-like manner. Matched gems turn into troops of the same color which then move straight upwards to attack the enemies above. This is why the position of specifically colored gems in the grid is important when considering which match to make. The designers wisely didn’t go with a 5-dimensional scheme but simply made the other two colors effective against each other to not make it too difficult to remember. Simplicity over Elegance.

Rock/paper/scissors (lizard/spock)

Matching a specific color of gem also fills up the corresponding character’s ability bar (if they are still alive). When full, the player can (without using a turn) trigger the character’s skill. Skills can be anything ranging from offensive to supportive with everything in between. When all enemies are beaten, the battle is won. The player loses when their entire party is killed.

Matchers gonna match

E&P’s core gameplay is carefully designed and balanced. Lots of additions like randomly spawning blockers, supergem combinations or stronger gems with timers could have been made but weren’t. This brings us to the game’s biggest weakness, at least if you’re a seasoned match-3 player.

The entertainment value of E&P’s core-game experience is disputable. It’s interesting enough to hook players and keep them engaged for a while but E&P’s level variation is clearly not what retains players in the long run. Every level in E&P is the same, making the matching gameplay feel tedious and slow. One battle is at least three or four waves of enemies which requires about 4 minutes when played tactically and half this time when grinding easier auto-battles. This means up to 20 minutes of the exact same gameplay, day in day out, multiple sessions per day. And this is only using the default kind of energy, world energy. E&P has two additional energy systems for the social and multiplayer parts of the game. Using these energies the player can battle world bosses or other players together, by doing what? Exactly the same match-3 levels again, but with a different enemy at the top of the screen. Mechanics like auto-win and auto-battle clearly indicate the need for players to shorten their session and “be done” with the matching component of E&P. The first three and most impactful feature suggestions on GameRefinery suggest adding core game variations like blockers and level goals.

The other edge of the sword is that trying to revolutionize match-3 gameplay is about the riskiest thing one can do when trying to make a hit game. Many others, like King’s Legend of Solgard have tried without success because they were too bold in trying to revolutionize the genre, scaring the huge segment of players who want classic match-3 mechanics.

Snowprint Studios’ Legend of Solgard and its refreshing core-game. Unfortunately without much success.

I do see why it’s difficult to scale and balance the matching gameplay with all kinds of level modifiers being present. E&P’s replay value depends on playing lots of levels over different features. Having to take into account which level modifiers the player has been subjected to spanning different lines of progression would be a lot of overhead. Apparently it’s sufficient to have no variation at all, as enough players simply want to match gems.

It is unclear to me why E&P has kept most battles lengthy and multi-wave, at least for features other than the main campaign. Omitting multiple waves of enemies would keep the grind at bay. It would even could keep monetizing off auto-win tickets a possibility, albeit slightly less desirable. The game becomes way too monotonous to say it’s impossible that no one is churning because of it.

Core-game variation

In terms of lifetime revenue, one of the other Puzzle RPGs that has seen moderate success is Marvel Puzzle Quest by Bandai Namco. This game was released in 2013 and is still generating good revenue until this day, although E&P has surpassed it by a couple of factors at this point.

Marvel Puzzle Quest, still alive and somewhat kicking.

E&P and MPQ are similar in terms of hero-focused gameplay & collection, but MPQ’s approach to match-3 is far more complex. Each Marvel character has three elements to benefit from when matched, including one corresponding skill per element. Damage done is linked to the matched color, not to the columns in which the gems are positioned. The game also requires the player to remove specific gems that have been turned into bombs before their countdown finishes, all adding to the dynamic of the matching gameplay.

MPQ’s core-game depth makes it much more varied & enjoyable than E&P but it takes too long to be fully taught and understood by everyone. Most mobile players don’t have the commitment to dig deeper to figure out how it works on their own. Making a puzzle game doesn’t mean you can make the mechanics themselves a puzzle.

E&P’s conservative stance on match-3 has allowed them to be applicable to a wider audience but at the cost of core-game depth. Its old-fashioned matching system doesn’t involve square or synchronous matches, nor does it feature supergem combinations, further removing player agency from the matching board. Disappointingly, E&P’s successor, Puzzle Combat is in technical soft launch in the Philippines right now and the matching gameplay is a direct reskin. I can understand Small Giant’s fear of killing the golden goose, but as a player I would have loved to be presented with a somewhat modernized experience. A little flair never killed anyone, or goose for that matter.

Tickle all the Fancies

What are players subjected to before the core game starts being repetitive? What gives Empires & Puzzles its long-term retention?

When designing any game, it’s essential to analyze its (planned) feature set to try and see in which ways it is designed to keep as many different types of players as engaged as possible. Almost every studios with top-grossing games tries doing this as well as possible. Good examples of this extreme feature-diversity are Kabam or FunPlus and their top games, MARVEL Contest of Champions and Guns of Glory respectively. E&P does the same, making it one of the most complete games in the Puzzle RPG genre.

Lots of research has been done to define possible player motivations. I won’t go in-depth here since many others have explored this psychological terrain in much more detail but I will use some existing taxonomies like the Gamer Motivation Model from Quantic Foundry to illustrate my point. Their model is suitable because it is based on extensive research on player psychology, all without specifying a distinct platform or genre.

Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model, which one are you?

Strategizers

Any game that makes its players “feel smart” will successfully gratify strategizers and keep them engaged. Strategizers are the best catered-to group of players in E&P. Three main features of the game heavily depend on the player making the right choices. The first one is the essence of the meta-game; the player’s base.

A (very progressed) player’s base.

Base building

The base can consist out of 10 different kinds of buildings which can be placed on its 34 building plots. Mostly, the player will use these plots to create buildings that increase their food & iron production or storage. Iron is used to upgrade all buildings, including the ones that ultimately gate the player by limiting the amount of food they provide to upgrade their heroes. Filling up the entire base with fully upgraded buildings takes years of upgrades.

How many buildings of a kind to construct and in which order can be strategized on but not to a large extent. As more of the base’s plots get unlocked, the player gets more possibilities to either upgrade their buildings or build new ones. The game’s resource pool is split up between resources gained from winning battles and resources collected from buildings. The first part is gained by playing the core game (limited by the player’s engagement) and the other part is a steady and consistent flow, making sure also less engaged players are able to progress at a specific pace. The choice which buildings to build gives the player just enough feeling of agency over that latter part of resources. It’s a fenced playground where the player has space to feel smart about their choice and positioning of buildings.

Hero collection

The most influential feature of the game that gives the strategic players the most food for thought is the ability to compose a team of heroes they like. At the time of writing, the game contains 182 heroes spanning 5 rarity levels and 10 classes. Most heroes (especially the more rare ones) have specific skill sets, making them truly unique. Some heroes have skills that influence only adjacent heroes, making the placement order of heroes in the party a factor to take into account as well. The way E&P heroes function in the core game is most certainly one of its biggest differentiators.

Examples of different hero skills

The third strategizer feature to highlight is one that speaks for itself but shouldn’t be forgotten. The game’s core-game provides the biggest chunk of challenge. Choosing which match to make where heavily influences a battle’s outcome.

Heroes: the way E&P scales content

Completionists

Completionists have a lot to do in E&P. There is the main campaign that takes care of the player’s long-term progression. It’s not much else than a saga map with chains of levels that increase in difficulty so the player has a measurement of how far and fast they are progressing.

The (saga) map. Overworld on the left, zoomed in province view on the right.

The game offers an elaborate quest system that has different branches of time-limited quests, providing more bite-size objectives to complete. Every quest line caters to different player needs within the feature. Players can grind for specific resources, recruits or class-specific power-ups.

Time-limited quests offering short-term progression.

Collectors

As mentioned, the game contains a lot of heroes to be collected. Heroes of the highest rarity are extremely difficult to acquire because of the game’s relatively wide gacha system. Any time a hero is either summoned or trained, the player gets a random drop. The cheapest, earliest summons and trainings only reward common and uncommon heroes. Later in the game, or during seasonal events, the player unlocks more chances to draw rare, epic and ultimately legendary gacha. Even though the majority of the heroes in the game are legendary (68) or epic (46), drawing gacha practically always rewards common and uncommon heroes. Even the most expensive summon (available only by paying hard currency) provides just ~25% chance of getting an epic hero while legendary heroes drop 2.5% of the time.

Hero rarity comparison; rare (3/5) on the left, legendary (5/5) on the right

The higher a hero’s rarity, the higher its potential. Less rare heroes can’t scale as much, have less interesting skills and have a lower base power. As mentioned, Small Giant scales E&P’s content by adding heroes (that all have to be balanced), which is the reason why acquiring the strongest heroes is such a rare event. Essential to creating an engaging gacha is desirability of its collectables. The need for specific heroes to compose the perfect team is a perfect and meaningful link to the core game.

Hero summoning and training (epic and elemental summons not pictured).

But what happens when the player has found their favorite team? What stops players from using the same team throughout the entire game? When starting specific quests and trials, the player can only use one class of hero, like Paladin for example. Every class has specific talents that can be configured when a player’s hero reaches max level. The player also benefits from having a more diverse roster of heroes in the competitive parts of the game, where specific heroes have the potential to counter others more or less efficiently. E&P only makes the player aware of hero classes much further in the game when their heroes are fully leveled up and ascended. By doing so the game opens up a whole new reason to collect different heroes when the player needs it.

Tactical breakdown of Trial of Serenity (fan made) and a character’s talent grid.

Socializers

E&P gives its players the possibility to form Alliances; groups of players able to chat, organize and work together on common goals. These common goals can include collectively attacking one very strong Titan on the map (PvE) or fighting a War with another alliance (PvP).

Player-versus-Environment & Player-versus-”Player”

In War battles, players can pick opponents with similar strength from the other alliance and attack their team. The battles are not real-time, the player is matched up against the other player’s AI-controlled team. Fighting wars or titans does not use the same energy as the other features, this is smart so that the player doesn’t have to choose between being social or grinding the single-player features of the game.

Competitors

As mentioned above, social players can work together to try and eliminate players of another alliance in the War feature, but there is also a single player combat feature called Raids. This is the main competitive feature of E&P. Players get matched with another player’s team to fight an AI-controlled battle against it. It would be much cooler to fight real-time against a human player, but for this to become reality, lots of technical and synchronicity issues will undoubtedly have to be tackled, not to mention it’s probably too big of a risk at this point.

The battle awards trophies to the winner and deducts some from the loser. Trophies are tallied into a global leaderboard for single players, as well as cumulative trophies of alliances.

The start screen before a raid battle and the screen that pops up when starting the game after being attacked.

When looking at the motivation model posed earlier, it’s clear that E&P caters heavily to the Social, Mastery, Achievement and Creativity categories. The other two (Action & Immersion) are generally not categories that thrive on mobile platforms anyways, which means E&P is practically the most complete game it can be.

Having handled all this, the game’s loop suddenly looks a bit more interesting:

A more thorough look at the game’s loop. (excludes social & compounds quests with battles)

Looking at E&P’s entire feature set, one can conclude the game provides features for everything and everyone. Strategizers, Completionists, Collectors, Socializers and Competitors alike are kept engaged at the time they have become (too) comfortable with the core-game. The coherent way in which all of these features are built to feed into the game’s thrifty hero gacha is the reason for E&P’s long-term success.

Merchandising

Having created such a complete game, the last thing to do is market and sell it for the right price:

Driving First Conversion

The ease of making purchases in a game can be directly compared to a person’s brain and the neural pathways that are created within. Doing something for the first time is by far the most difficult. Recurring events are much easier to perform and justify. For this reason, converting a player’s initial purchasing caution into necessity is pivotal to ‘unlock’ their potential Lifetime Value.

The way E&P converts players is ruthless and childishly simple. The player’s building construction timers ramp up with every upgrade until soon the player has to wait more than 10 hours to sometimes even days for a building to complete. But buildings need to be upgraded a lot. Every building has about 20 stages which means the player has to start these lengthy upgrades about 700 times to reach the end of content. This would all be not such a big deal if they would be able to upgrade multiple buildings at once. When trying to, the game throws the following pop-up:

That derpy pet dragon though.

When tapping the button to get a second builder, one is presented the VIP pass. For any player with a bit of sense how long it takes to complete just one build timer, this 30 day pass is a no-brainer. That second builder alone is what anyone would want since it effectively doubles construction efficiency. On top of that comes a good amount of gems and even more! VIP memberships are an amazing way to retain players since they pre-purchase rewards they won’t even get when failing to log back into the game. Linking it to something as desirable as that second builder to convert is a genius move.

In case the builder scenario didn’t work, the game continuously offers time-limited conversion deals to players. These deals all advertise something desirable for a low real-money-purchase in combination with gems. This way the player gets their desired product and additional freedom to spend currency the way they prefer.

A healthy reward space provides infinite possibilities to keep selling goods.

Retention through Live-ops

On top of the VIP membership lots of players will have felt inclined to buy, there are lots of reasons to check  back into the game. The daily free hero summon is probably the most tempting one. On top of that, everything else has a timer. Quests reset at different rates, huge amounts of building resources need to be collected every couple of hours, a titan spawns every day and guild wars need attending to. On top of all that the elemental summon provides a time-limited chance to draw an element-specific gacha every 30 hours, which is very tempting if your team’s 5th hero isn’t optimally synergizing and you have some gems saved up.

Everyday I’m summonin’

Since so much is happening and the game’s three different energies all replenish at different rates it’s very tempting to quickly check back into the game to see if one of these countdowns hasn’t reset in the meantime. When this game hooks you, it hooks you good.

Monetization

The game has enough to offer for players with deeper pockets as well; themed packs for rushy players (the fast lane pack), packages to buff specific heroes or elemental-themed sales are a common sight in the shop. Featured deals come and go and have a prominent placement in the shop.

Make it rain

There is one feature related to the game’s monetization that can easily be ignored: the incentivized ads. They seem tacked on later as they are entirely outside the core loop. The rewards are also slim pickings: 2 diamonds and a weapon of which I don’t see its immediate use don’t provide a high “wow” factor.

Adds, not ads

It would be more alluring to offer another gacha draw in the daily summon in exchange for watching an ad since it provides a reward that can immediately be used. Providing a reward that in most cases will just be used to ‘save up’ is less effective. On top of that, adding the chance of finding a rare hero to the equation should get more people excited.

Conclusion

Empires & Puzzles is an example to be studied when working on your next hit game. Wrapping your head around the intricate balancing of their systems and feature set might take some effort but it’s surely worth the trouble. Studying the quest, sales and event cadence makes it look so easy while in fact one shouldn’t forget a game with substantial economic depth is required to be able to replicate what E&P manages to offer.

In summary, these three things are what E&P makes it the success it is:

• An extremely rich feature set catering to all different types of players
• A highly scalable & desirable collection with ultra rare content that links back adamantly to its core gameplay
• Its irrefutable conversion offer linked to its rewarding VIP system

After having seen how this game has been performing and analyzing their core success factors, my big question is, who can do this better?

The post Deconstructing Empires & Puzzles appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

This is a follow up to our Top 10 Game Mechanics for Hyper Casual Games article that you might also enjoy

Idle game mechanics are nothing new. Anthony Pecorella of Kongregate diving in deep into the trend back in GDC 2015, but moving into 2019 we’re seeing some advancements in the trend.

I remember playing Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Tap Titans, and the mountains of clones of the simple idle game landed in 2014, but then the trend died out.  Yet something changed. Starting in 2016, we’ve actually seen a big resurgence of the mobile idle game genre:

Aggregate downloads and revenue growth for mobile idle game genre from Q3 2016 to Q2 2018
Source: Sensor Tower Estimates

Looking at  idle games from 2014 to 2018, we can see a growing trend for both downloads and revenue in this genre. This is not the case for most of the mature genres on mobile. Puzzle, Simulation, Casino, and Strategy all have stabilized or declined in downloads, and seen slow growth in revenue. These genres are locked up, but Idle remains a hotbed of innovation on the mobile market.

In the last years we’ve seen a lot of completely new styles of idle game mechanics hit the market and see success: Merge Town by Gram Games challenged the assumption that idle games were only for spreadsheet-savvy mathematicians, Trailer Park Boys by East Side Games shows a path where Idle games can actually host a compelling narrative, and Idle Miner by Kolibri (previously Fluffy Fairy) shows that idle games can create compelling traditional simulation-style game loops.

For this post, I’d like to showcase the variety of paths to success that an idle game can have. While this may be focusing solely on the past, the hope is that this can inspire you to create better idle game ideas for the future.

What is Idle? how does it work?

If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand what idle is, we’ve covered it a number of times: (we’re fans here at MFTP)

Related Read

Idle Games, Everything You Need to know!

Idle games have risen on mobile because it 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.

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Why you should care about Idle Games

In Retention, Design

Adam Telfer

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of income. 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

The key to the genre: no matter what you choose, you will make progress. But optimizing your decision about what upgrades to purchase next is the core of the strategy and what drives long-term interest in the genre.  Because the core of the game is focused on long-term purchasing decisions, retention is built in. Because progress is always felt, it always feels rewarding to come back.

Let’s now dive into the variety of mechanics within the idle genre.

#1 Linear/Clicker Idle

The core of these games are usually insanely simple: tap as fast as you can to generate income. This starts off as fun, but gets pretty tiring and uninteresting quickly. So it quickly shifts into deciding over which upgrades to spend that cash on:

• Do you want to generate more money while you’re away?
• Do you want to generate more income from your own taps?
• Do you want to save up for the big purchase that will increase your income tenfold?
• Or continue to purchase cheap upgrades for small income gains?

This decision-making structure has stuck with idle, but the core gameplay of tapping as fast as you can has not.

Over time, developers tried changes to the core gameplay to make it last a bit longer: Make it Rain! and Farm Away used swipe controls instead of tap to make it more mobile friendly. However, the core mechanic always quickly became a bore, and the appeal of just swiping or tapping as fast as you can to progress is only appealing to some.

Also, due to the nature of the game, prestige mechanics became a necessity. Pushing the player to reset their progress back to the beginning in order to make the growth more manageable and ensure the player still felt growth in the slower endgame. This was never all that appealing to players — so developers had to find clever ways to sidestep the issue and incentivize the full reset.

It’s important to note that this style of game has gone out of fashion. Besides Partymasters (pictured), there haven’t been many successful new titles that only use clicker gameplay or similar. The resurgence of the genre has actually been on taking the progression mechanics learned in this genre and applying it to whole new mechanics, whole new audiences.

#2 Arcade Idle

So what do you do when clicking style gameplay is uninteresting? Take the same progression system mechanics you know work well, and graft it onto more compelling core gameplay. Enter Voodoo, who mastered this approach throughout 2017 and early 2018.

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Everything you want to know about Voodoo – An Interview with Voodoo Games

In Growth & Marketing, Industry & Market Trends

Tom Kinniburgh

Instead of asking the player to tap to earn their coins, Voodoo asked them to play simple arcade games that have mass appeal. Games like “Idle Invaders” used classic shoot-em-up gameplay (ex. Space Invaders, 1942) to earn their income manually. Shoot down incoming invaders as fast as you can to earn your manual income, and then purchase and upgrade computer-controlled allied fighters to fight alongside you. This made for a compelling formula, that was easily replicated across multiple genres. “Idle Sweeper” took Pac-Man, “Idle Flipper” took flipping style gameplay.

Any simple arcade gameplay which had an opportunity for scaling health/damage and computer-controlled assists could create a compelling new idle game.

Planet Bomber was the first to expand on this formula, adding more depth to the game by adding more types of upgrades. Before, games would offer linear upgrades to damage dealt, or income generated. Planet Bomber now offers upgrades across a number of parallel vectors, all with a variety of importance to the core gameplay. This creates a far more compelling long term strategy, and is what future idle games will need to focus on. How do you find core gameplay that can offer a variety of upgrades that are equally visible and impactful to progress?

#3 Merge Idle

The merge mechanic was first pioneered by games like Triple Town, but turned commercially successful by Gram with Merge Dragons and Merge Town.

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Deconstructing Merge Town: The Rise of Hyper Casual

In Deconstructions, Monetization

Adam Telfer

Merge style games take out the tiring clicker gameplay and swap it for merging items: drag and drop duplicate items on top of each other to increase their level. What’s a simple premise turns into an addicting experience, because the game always feels like there is something to do. Sessions are impressively long because it’s just so compelling to constantly build up your houses towards the next goal. The next goal is so clear (I want to upgrade my best house), and the path is clear (merge until I get a duplicate) — yet as soon as I complete a goal, I’m compelled to start the next path.

What Merge Town did more than just increase the session length was bring in an entirely different audience. No longer are idle games just about increasing numbers, but giving clear visual progress. This type of gameplay is for a much broader audience than most idle games, yet kept all the engagement mechanics intact.

#4 Idle Simulation

Simulation has been on the decline on mobile for years, with Sim City Build It and Fallout Shelter (arguably) being the last big games in the space. Yet on Idle, in the last year we’ve seen a new face of simulation games: Idle Simulation. Wheras Sim City Build It, Farmville, Hay Day may appeal to a older, broader demographic, Kolibri’s “Idle Miner Tycoon” and “Idle Factory Tycoon” have shown a compelling business case for using classic simulation game loops.

Unlike the previous idle game mechanics, idle simulation games don’t innovate in the core gameplay. In fact, with Idle Miner and Idle Factory — they remove a core mechanic altogether. Tapping fast no longer helps you — the game stays compelling by asking you only to be managing your upgrades, and managing what boosters to start. This used to be an issue for idle games — since idle games typically had to start slow and progress quickly in order to give you a sense of progress, tapping gameplay was an easy out for designers to give a player something to do between upgrades. With simulation games, the upgrades are fast, but also far more strategic. As such, it doesn’t need tapping style gameplay as a crutch.

These games rely on a traditional simulation game loop, similar to compulsion loops you felt in games like Sim City (the original) and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Purchasing one upgrade will strain another system. In Idle Miner, purchasing an upgrade for a mine will mean that mine generates more income per second. This puts a strain on your elevator — the elevator then needs to be upgraded in order to hold on to more resources. Upgrading that elevator will put a strain on your surface level extraction… This goes round and round straining each system giving you new goals with each step and avoiding upgrades feeling stale.

Idle Miner and Idle Factory aren’t the only games that have attempted this and succeeded. I’d recommend playing Crafting Idle Clicker, Reactor Idle, and Factory Idle on Kongregate. This genre has seen the biggest surge in downloads, and there is plenty of room for innovation to come. This is the category to watch for new developers.

#5 Idle Management

One mechanic that hasn’t been done often on mobile, but more often on Kongregate is more “Management” style sims. Check out a game called “Groundhog Life”: this is a life management simulator, with obvious idle characteristics.

The core gameplay is replaced with choosing which system to boost. In Groundhog Life, you can choose how you want to spend your 24 hours each day: spend 8 hours or 2 hours sleeping? Spend more time at work, or studying? While your character is always making progress, whether they are progressing in learning a new skill, earning money, or being happy is down to the decisions you make. Each time you die, you pass on your traits to your next life — giving you a boost depending on your choices in the previous life. While there haven’t been many mobile idle games that have used this mechanic, this is by far the most addictive idle game that I’ve ever played.

#6 Story-driven Idle

Going in a different direction, there’s also innovation happening in how idle games have made prestige (resetting your progress) less punishing and more relevant. Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money by East Side games is a masterclass in this. Many developers have attempted to graft licensed IP onto idle games, but none fit so well as Trailer Park Boys — in the last episode of every TV season, they end up in jail losing everything. East Side baked this into the game design: at the end of each season of generating a ton of cash from idle systems, the boys are caught by the cops and you lose all your money.

Related Read

Designer Diary – Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money

In Design, Deconstructions

Dave Rohrl

This creates a strong narrative arc in the game that makes sense in the idle game loop. Each prestige (which happens more often), the player gets a drip of story. This creates a more interesting long-term goal for the player besides just increasing their numbers.

The game has been a breakout success for East Side Games, and it’s why they’ve been slowly bringing on more licensed IP to work with. Their current game, “The Gang Goes Mobile” based on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is currently in soft launch.

#7 Idle RPG

Lastly, is most likely the biggest in-app purchase revenue generating idle category: RPG.

Clicker Heroes and Tap Titans were arguably the first games in the genre — showing that you can add battle mechanics with an idle progression, but both games actually fit more into category #1 based on their real mechanics. RPG can offer more than just a facade for progress.

Non-stop Knight was the first to break into this space, by adding automatic RPG gameplay as the core, while asking the player to choose when to use their boosters. Instead of linear upgrades, the character then started collecting loot from random drops (thank you Diablo), collecting pets and unlocking new boosts. Non-stop Knight was revolutionary in its time, but in retrospect leaned too heavily on idle progression to make a compelling long-term engagement loop.

The king of Idle RPG is without a doubt Idle Heroes. Instead of leaving too heavily on Idle Progression, they took many of the progression systems from Heroes’ Charge and Galaxy of Heroes. More focus is on a gacha-infused progression system: collect a team of heroes, outfit them with the best possible gear, and compete in limited time events for the currencies you desperately need.

This level of complexity is likely the next step for Idle RPG games. Keeping the compelling simple core gameplay, but creating more strategy in how you create and manage a team of heroes, and building upon an economy which events are necessary to be competitive.

In Summary

As you can see, idle game mechanics support a wide variety of game designs. Don’t just assume the tried-and-tested clicker gameplay is the only option when coming up with idle game ideas.

Idle, unlike most genres on mobile, has a lot of room for innovation. It’s created compelling business cases for many successful gaming companies on mobile, and as a genre has plenty of room for newcomers to enter into. As a designer in this space, I would take a look at what has been done and predict what will come into the future:

• Don’t stick with traditional core gameplay: find new core gameplays that will let you reach new audiences like Merge Town and Idle Invaders
• Add more strategy to the progression: create compelling game loops by using upgrade stats that actually lean on each other. Buying an upgrade in one area will drive you to upgrade in another.
• The market is maturing quickly: don’t underestimate the value of licensed IP or building out a events framework for your live operations.

If you keep this mind, my hope is that the idle market will continue to innovate for years to come!

The post Top 7 Idle Game Mechanics appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

In this deconstruction we will cover:

• Disney heroes core gameplay and metagame
  
• The heroes in the game and why they are so important
• Daily quests, live ops and events
• Game modes and their dependancies on one another
• Campaign and game progression analysis
• And game monetization

Can Disney’s crossover live up to expectations?

From a gameplay perspective, the game is inspired by earlier casual hero brawlers like Heroes Charge (2014) and Soul Hunters (2015) and caters to a more casual to mid-core audience. The characters are the selling point of the game (which can be said for every Disney product) and it’s clear that was the intention.

The game makes the entire cast of heroes visible from the beginning, showing the player the carrots: their favorite characters. It even discloses the length of the stick by telling the player exactly what to do to collect every hero. Hero accessibility ranges from easily acquirable to practically premium, but even these can drop for very lucky players.

Guest Autor: Niek Tuerlings Game Designer on June’s Journey at Wooga, Berlin.Disclaimer: The article is the author’s own professional view on Disney Heroes. Wooga GmbH. isn’t affiliated with this assessment in any way.

Disney Heroes’ Core Gameplay

The player starts off with a handful of heroes and by engaging with the single player campaign, they quickly start collecting enough different heroes to be able to create a team of their five favorites.

The core gameplay consists of selecting a team, starting a level where this team fights against other teams of AI controlled opponents. After winning the fight, the player is rewarded with rewards, depending on the game mode.

During the fight, the only agency the player has is choosing when to activate each hero’s first and main skill when their energy bar is full. When getting stronger, heroes gain three more skills but these are activated automatically.

In the meta-game, the player is gated by two things, stamina and what the game calls team level. Stamina generates with time. Team level is generated by player engagement. All hero levels are limited by the team level, hence the name. New heroes can be collected by finding an initial amount of hero chips. After acquiring, heroes can be improved in four different ways:

• Rising their star level by collecting more chips
• Increasing their level by earning XP in battles
• Promoting them by equipping them with badges
• Improving their skill levels using gold

It’s interesting that improving hero skills is the only significant gold sink. Gold is also used to promote heroes after finding enough badges but the amount is substantially lower than the amount that is needed for the skills. The reason for this that Disney Heroes lets the player upgrade hero skills from the get go. Other games like for example Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes require time-limited event currencies for this. Assumingly a decision made for simplicity reasons and the different age groups for both games.

Motivational Pinches – The Heroes

Currently, Disney Heroes features 42 heroes, a decent but not copious amount for a game in this genre. Each hero has a different skill set and a team always consists of 5 heroes. This means players have more than enough potential team compositions to experiment with, although not every team is viable. Balanced teams usually have at least one and sometimes two heroes of each type (Support, Control, Tank & Damage). This is the core of the game’s fun, which is why strategic and competitive players are the main audience Disney Heroes caters to. Next to this, the ability to chat, cooperative or competitive combat and the ability to form guilds cater to player’s social desires. The storytelling isn’t the game’s strongest suit, but it can initially tickle the player’s explorative cravings.

Desire for Heroes

Each battle generates random drops of badges and hero chips. Together with potential hero drops from different kinds of loot boxes, these variable rewards create the desire to keep playing. The hero collection screen neatly exposes all available heroes to players, which is especially attractive to the ones with strong collecting ambitions.

The game has a Daily Quest system, and since this provides the bulk of the player’s team level experience, this should be the biggest reason to come back every day. It works for a while, but Disney Heroes keeps offering the same quests each day. It’s a list of quest that asks players to engage with practically every game mode, and always in the exact same way, day in day out. This sets the precedent for players to find the most effective routine, which then becomes boring and presumingly hurts the game’s long-term retention. A more varied quest system with a random selection of daily quests (as opposed to just showing all of them) should be able to reduce this monotonous daily ritual.

Game Progression

Disney Heroes offers an abundance of game modes which all use the same brawler mechanic. At first glance, it’s strange to call a game that has one single core mechanic ‘varied’, but when looking closer at the characteristics of each game mode, one can see that each mode has its own specific purpose. What the game does well is using its different currency rewards to make all game modes dependant on each other, ultimately feeding into the same goal; leveling up the ultimate team.

Loot boxes, competitive PvP with global leaderboard, tournaments, guilds, daily events, a collection system with upgradable powerups and a synchronous cooperative multiplayer mode, it’s all there.

Campaign Progression analysis

To understand the intricacies of the game’s engagement potential, a study of its progression is required, which can seem pretty complex at first glance. For clarity, an infographic is included at the end of this paragraph, outlying the main features, their interdependencies and the currencies they use and generate.

The campaign is the main storyline of the game. Beating new levels progresses the story and replaying beaten levels is the main source of badges. This feature also offers an elite campaign where next to the badges, new hero chips can be acquired. The friend campaign is a game mode where heroes are paired with another hero to beat levels that require a specific kind of stamina. Beating a hero’s friend campaign unlocks another (fifth) way to improve heroes; equipping them with Memory Disks. Episodes in the friend campaign are gated by the hero pair’s relationship, which can be improved by sending these heroes on missions together. Missions are nothing but a timer started by the player which rewards friend experience when it runs out. Heroes sent out on a mission can still be used in other game modes.

After the player has battled their way up through 2 campaign chapters the market opens up. The market is the place where earned currencies can be traded for hero chips and badges. During the day at specific times, players are incentivized to check back into the game and review the newly refreshed products in the market, next to claiming some free stamina.

Disney Heroes offers six game modes that unlock at different times during its progression which reward currencies to buy specific hero chips in the market. This means that if a player chooses a hero to be on their team, there is a big chance they need to engage with one of these features to be able to purchase the chips needed to upgrade this hero. The arena is the place where players can match their favorite team composition against other players in a single battle. The coliseum does a similar thing but requires three teams of heroes. Creep surge is a cooperative mode with the player’s guild members, happening during a fixed 4-hour window every day. Then there is the city watch, a single player mode where the player’s entire hero collection has to be used to win 15 battles without hero HP and energy being replenished. Then there is the heist, a real-time cooperative multiplayer mode where players can join 4 others to hunt down a thief that’s trying to steal the city’s treasure. Lastly, the recently released guild war makes guilds-versus-guild battles possible by asking other guild members to submit their best team compositions and letting them all fight in a battle every couple of days.
These six game modes cover all possible applications of the core gameplay and make sure to give the player a nice vertical slice of the game. The currencies that flow out tie back directly into the Market.

Disney Heroes also offers two game modes that are built to strengthen the daily retention cycle. These modes don’t require anything to be played but have a limited amount of tries each day. The first is trials where, depending on the day of the week, a subset of the player’s heroes perform battles five times a day. Trial battles guarantee a drop of useful rare badges that would otherwise take stamina and multiple tries to acquire in a campaign mode level. After a battle, the player has to wait 10 minutes to be able to start the next. This restriction makes the player feel smart by letting them sequence and organise their session by engaging with other modes during these 10-minute timers.
The port has the same timer but only two tries per day and doesn’t reward badges but experience boosters to level up heroes of the player’s choice.

The game also includes a social system with guilds, groups of players working together trying to beat the surge mode every day and battling each other in guild war every couple of days. A daily check-in is included as well, which simply requires everyone to tap a button once a day. The more guild members who do this, the higher everyone’s rewards. Simple and effective. Guildies can also post (copies of) their heroes to others to be used as mercenaries in the city watch and the surge. Now there’s something called guild influence, a currency that is earned next to team experience when completing daily quests.

This is a shared currency that the officers and president of the club can use to unlock perks for all guild members. What the game doesn’t do very well is expose these perks. It’s likely that many players who have been in guilds for a while and never look at the relatively hidden perks section don’t know all the extras they receive by being in that guild, since it’s not exposed within the features themselves.

Another notable feature is enhancements, which provides the player with a way to convert the huge amount of badges they don’t need into boosts for the badges they do need for their heroes. Lastly, two exclusive market categories with slightly better deals (available from team level 31 and 41) can be unlocked by random chance and only for a short period of time.

Game Mode Dependencies

As mentioned, one of the biggest strengths of Disney Heroes is how every feature is interwoven into the others. Ignoring one mode is detrimental to the player’s progress and oftentimes disqualifies the player from optimizing their team in some way.

For example, at team level 25, the player is introduced to the aforementioned friend campaigns. Because of the initially awkward gameplay where it’s for once not possible to influence the hero composition of the battles, this game mode is likely to be ignored by players who like to have agency here. However, after discovering the existence of Memory Disks (which boost one of a hero’s skills), these players might change their minds, but will then realize that completing a friend campaign requires hero friendship to progress. This is generated by sending these two heroes on specific missions repeatedly. This is a good example of how the game’s high amount of currencies and statistics give the game designers the possibility to increase feature engagement by creating interdependencies like these.

The only modes that are outside the loop are the heist, the challenges and the guild war, which is logical since they have been released only recently, months after the game’s global launch. While all three modes struggle to find a meaningful spot inside the game’s loop, challenges is having a particularly hard time since it offers only a cosmetic reward for a heavy hard currency price.

Less and less gameplay

One interesting thing about Disney Heroes is the more players engage with it, the more it steers their focus away from the core gameplay. Tapping the right skill at the right time is only fun for so long and the game averts the player from it after the meta-game has hooked them. At team level 30, fast forward is unlocked, which increases the speed of the battles to a higher (but still manageable) speed. Combine this with auto-mode (a premium feature) which automatically triggers the manual skill of the characters, and we now have a mostly self-playing game where the only tactical choice is starting the right battles.

By analyzing the infographic above one can discover a currency called Raid Tickets. These tickers make it possible to skip grinding through campaign- and trial battles by simply giving the rewards. It would be logical to assume that this currency is a rare good given its ability to save loads of time, which in free-to-play usually means you have to pay for it, but nothing is further from the truth. Paying players are drowning in them. The drop chance for raid tickets is pretty high during the the campaign missions and even after having bought the smallest currency package with real money only once, players get plenty of tickets every day. Generous, but also a missed opportunity to monetize further.

Monetization

Before diving in more detail about Disney Heroes’ monetization potential, it’s important to note that it has an elaborate VIP system. It offers 20 levels which unlock numerous options, some of which are a given in other games, like the ability to buy more stamina for diamonds or skip timers for diamonds. With every VIP level the player reaches, the premium properties increase gradually and sometimes even unlock quality of life features that reduce the need to engage with some of the single player modes.

Looking at the game’s currencies, all speedups and premium purchases require one hard currency; diamonds. Packages of diamonds can be bought instantly as usual, but subscription models are also on offer. Their top 3 most purchased products are the Pouch of Diamonds, the Fistful of Diamonds and the 30 day deal. Especially this last purchase offers a lot of bang for the player’s buck but it requires commitment to keep playing for 30 days. Not a bad way to increase retention, but only when players are able to keep intrinsic motivation to use these diamonds.

Although the game has a huge amount of diamond sinks, conservatively spending players can easily rack up a nice balance of these glinstering gems since quite a lot are given away as well, especially to people who sign in and engage with the competitive features every day. It does a good job making the player consider spending diamonds every day, and since the stamina bar takes ages to fill fully (6 hours at game start and up to 16 hours for high-level players) it’s very attractive and almost required to use the “Get More Stamina” function to exchange diamonds for stamina. After getting used to this, the step towards buying a steady influx of 120 diamonds per day is easily done. So it seems that having a slowly replenishing chrono-currency can create a shortage that is not going to increase the amount of sessions per day but can greatly increase buyer conversion if the game is centered around grinding to progress. A classic example of scarcity creates demand.

The fact that progression can be bought so easily defines the game as pay-to-win. Disney Heroes cleverly masks this by placing players in a vast amount of competitive tiers (leagues) that are easily progressed through at first because they are filled with many players who are not engaged or have churned already. The power gap between payers and non-payers only becomes visible in the highest leagues, which (when played at a regular, engaged pace) are reached after weeks if not months of play.

Something that can be questioned about the game’s monetization strategy is the lack of a feature that uses loss-aversion. Failing a campaign battle refunds all sunk stamina but 1, for some reason. Badges, Gold and other rewards earned during the battle are also lost, but this isn’t shown on the loss screen. This removes all excitement from trying to progress the campaign, although it probably also reduces churn. In the end it’s a matter of consideration what’s more valuable. Since Disney Heroes doesn’t have move-based gameplay either, it is more challenging to give the player a way to cheat in case of losing and still give them a possibility to win after paying some diamonds.

Read more about game monetization in our designing for free to play monetization section of our free to play bible 

Liveops and Events

Successful games feel fresh and well-maintained. Therefore it’s crucial to add events that change frequently and follow common trends like seasonal content and daily deals. Disney Heroes contains an elegant but relatively cookie-cutter event system with little surprises in its design. Sales can be ignored easily and aren’t shoved in the player’s face, although a more subtle encouragement to take a look is created by putting giveaways in between.

An example of a good Disney Heroes sale is one that is targeted to players at a specific time of their life cycle; the Badge Buster Bundle. For this example it’s important to note that badges become more and more tedious to grind nearing the end of the game’s content. One purple badge (like the Mickey Mouse Club one pictured below) requires 50 bits (parts) to be grinded in campaign levels. The drop chance is about 25%, which means at a cost of 12 stamina per gameplay, one badge costs about 2400 stamina. This takes players about 4 days if they spend about 300 diamonds per day on buying additional stamina (or about 2 weeks if they don’t).

Usually, every hero requires different badges to promote tiers, but in Purple 4 which is the highest tier at this point, out of the six badges they can have equipped, one they have all in common is the Mickey Mouse Club badge. Since every hero needs this badge it’s easy to sell and has amazing value to players since it offers them to skip the grind of spending about 10k stamina to collect the bits for these 4 badges manually. Of course they sell four badges per bundle, so players who want to supply their full team of five heroes with this badge have to buy the bundle twice.

Conclusion

Disney Heroes plays all the tricks in the book regarding player engagement and executes these with mixed results. All the ingredients of success are there; a strong IP, a great (although long) first-time-user experience, a great feature unlock pacing, a super-scalable asset pipeline making it very easy to add content (heroes) every couple of weeks, Disney’s deep pockets for increasing User Acquisition spend and on top of everything else, a healthy reward-space with enough resources and currencies to keep on selling.
Regardless off these factors, the game’s long-term retention is low compared to others in the same genre, which is most likely caused by putting too little focus on gameplay and too much on statistics and grinding in the late game. The more players engage (time-wise and especially money-wise) less use for the battle gameplay is needed. Facilitated by the monotonous quest system, all that is left is a dreary daily routine that revolves around finishing daily quests, without creating enough meaning for the rewards this provides. Depending on the player’s dedication to keep staying on the maximum team level, they might stick around for a while longer, but will eventually start feeling the lack of incentive to use what they have worked for.

It’s difficult to know the necessary User Acquisition investment, but the game’s asset pipeline is compact enough to not need the entire staff of PerBlue Entertainment to keep maintaining it. Looking at the revenue it’s making monthly and trusting that a sufficient amount of players stick around at least long enough to convert, Disney Heroes shouldn’t have too much trouble breaking even. But becoming top-grossing like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is most likely out of reach.

The post Deconstructing Disney Heroes: Battle Mode appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

Here’s a breakdown of the current top 10 game mechanics for hyper casual gaming on the app store and what to remember when building a game using them.

You might also enjoy our follow up article to this, in our Top 7 Idle Game Mechanics article.

Tap / Timing Mechanics

Tap and Timing games are the most popular form of mechanics for hyper casual games. Most of the other mechanics use tapping or timing as an input method for their particular gameplay. In a game that is pure tap and timing gameplay, the mechanic relies upon an exact tap or an exact timing.  Precision is the most important aspect of the action and the focus for the user is perfection.  Only the perfect tap will bring the maximum score. The rest of the games feel and creativity relies on exploiting small inaccuracies in the tap to reduce the player’s ability to win, usually in the form of a high score. The game Baseball Boy by Voodoo focus’ a players attention on a single baseball bat hit as the only action the player has. Every hit is exhilarating, but the perfect hit is dramatically better.

When thinking of tap and timing mechanics you must strip away any external or confusing factors for the player and provide a clear visual objective for a player to achieve. Visual feedback is extremely important here with a clear representation of a bad shot, but also a large positive reinforcement for the Perfect Shot.  The clearer the goal, and the harder the perfect shot, the more fun it is when you hit it.

Stacking Mechanics

Stacking mechanics take the tap/timing mechanic further by adding your previous taps outcome to the progress of the round.  The game The Tower by Ketchapp is a good example where the Tower itself is made up of the previously stacked squares. Every time a player fails to get a perfect stack, the tower itself shrinks, making it harder and smaller for the next stack.

Stacking mechanics provide more points of failure for the players, with each failure having a smaller effect than a Pure Tap game. They soften the failure by allowing you to continue, but they maintain the clear visual clarity of how that failure occurred. The less punishing failure the longer the round, but long rounds also signify a sense of ease.

When thinking how to design with a stack game in mind, make sure players have enough points of failure (5-10) before you end the round, but make sure the difficulty is hard enough that players get non-perfect timings at least 20-40% of the time.  Too few points of failure the game is too hard and too many perfect timings the game is too easy.

Turning Mechanics

Turning is the last of the tap and timing themed mechanics. It adds a further complication to each tap by adding a confusing visual perception. Humans visual cortex has an in built weakness at judging lengths between horizontal and vertical shapes in a 3D space. The visual cortex can be tricked quite easily and many visual illusions demonstrate it, The Ponzo Illusion, is a good example. As a designer you’re still only asking the player to time a single tap but with the added confusion of the 3D space players are more likely to get this wrong. This is much harder to master than the 2D Stack-based approach.

Good turning based gameplay is usually more forgiving than stack-based gameplay, resetting the player more frequently and letting them get back into a perfect streak even after making mistakes. As a designer you want your players to make clear mistakes that end in failure, the more obvious those mistakes the less frustrated a player becomes. Turning games also work best when the angles are 90 degrees or repeating sharp angles, simply because the brain can learn to overcome it’s own weakness, through trial and error! You must be more lenient than other hypercasual game mechanics because people simply don’t believe their own eyes! Oh the power of the mind

Dexterity Mechanics

These games mainly focus on a player having a very simple and repeating action that they must perform many hundreds of times. With enough practice, these mechanics can be mastered by dextrous players and so the highest score is a fair representation of dexterity and skill.  For these games to be fun the game must usually speed up, taking a mechanic that might be easy to slowly, but when pressurised by a time becomes more and more likely you will make a mistake.

You still need a clear hard limit to success usually a single life or single mistake ends the round and you start from the beginning. Timberman by Digital Melody is a great example of taking a player’s full attention, timing and dexterity to create a challenging points based challenge.  When designing these sort of games you must make sure the controls and input sensitivity is the highest priority. There can be no lag and no grey areas, a players action will directly affect the character immediately. A player will be inputting many hundreds of taps per round, each tap must be accurate for it to be fun, any inaccuracies or lag are multiplied by the number of times you input it.

Rising / Falling Mechanics 

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Rising and falling mechanics provide interesting journeys for their players. The constant progression of the level leads to the feeling of progression without a change in the mechanic or goal. To keep people entertained the level itself must develop. Rise Up by Serkan Özyılmaz and Helix Jump by Voodoo show how progression develops as you traverse up or down the game.

The player’s focus is on dealing with the next challenge along the progression and less about accuracy.  There are many ways to win these levels, a little luck is often needed over timing or skill. Your only goal is to protect an object from a single point of failure.

The journey develops pressurising environments and the players end up  creating lots of self-inflicted problems. Small issues early on can cause much harder moves later. Good design here focus’ on players have 1 or possibly 2 problems to deal with at a time, but the nature of the problem changes as you rise or fall through the gameplay. Try to think in stages and work on each stage being fun on it’s own, adding them together creates the dynamic journey.

Swerve Mechanics

The final arcade based hypercasual mechanic is the swerve mechanic.  These games focus on using the drag of a finger to avoid obstacles. Most of the time they are avoidance based mechanics in a similar vein to rising and falling, but they also focus more on dexterity than timing. Swerve games maximise the touch screen controls and are hard to recreate on other devices. This gives them an original feeling and a cool use of touch inputs.

What’s important here is that the game focus’ on a player accuracy of input from dragging and sweeping a finger, rather than timing a tap. The size of the object, the speed of the object has a big effect on what people are able to do with their fingers.

In the same way, as dextrous games focus on removing inaccuracies, swerve games need to focus on the input feel of your finger. Players will play for longer if the game feels fun and the near misses feel, super near. Work on making the game reward players for near misses and replay their errors to show just how close they were to almost avoiding death to make the game more fun.

Merging Mechanics

Merging mechanics are very easy for players to understand. Similar things combine, different things don’t. The game then becomes very easy for people to get right and with each subsequent merge, a new piece of understanding and a strong sense of progression is conveyed to players. Complexity and challenge in this game usually come in the form of a metagame, something that non-casual games rely on, but for the casual audience, the metagame can be divisive, making the game too complex and turning people away from playing.

Merge games do well because the metagame is incorporated into the main game. The mechanic is very visual and you can see how your action is causing the merged units to be different from one another. For a merging game to be successful, don’t break the golden rule, embrace the golden rule – Similar things combine, different things don’t. You then need to make merging feel fun, animate, excite and surprise players with each new find. The clear sense of progression along with the ever-increasing challenge,  due to exponential growth, of merging to the next stage will keep people playing for longer.

Idle Mechanics

Idle as a mechanic has been used in hyper casual to mid-core games for a number of years. The complexity and reliance on the mechanic is a choice by each game designer. At its core, it is any mechanic that doesn’t require input from a player in order to progress. Obviously, no input at all is a very casual experience, but also one that without an objective becomes boring. Most of the time idle mechanics form a secondary mechanic attached to a soft currency.  This works well because over time players earn more money which they can spend in their core game experience.

Adventure Capitalist by Hyper Hippo made the idle mechanic the core focus of the gameplay and built a game around repeating the mechanic with different growth rates. It became successful because of the interplay between the rates and the addition of ascension mechanics which force a player to lose all of their progress in the current game for increase speed of progress in the next game.

For idle mechanics to be fun, they need to be balanced. The biggest issue with the genre is bad maths. Either the game reaches incredibly hard to overcome peaks of progress or totally boring plateaus of progression where the numbers and growth mean nothing in the real game.  Be careful and make sure you use your excel skills to their max if you want to rely on idle mechanics.

Growing Mechanics

Growing mechanics are very similar to idle mechanics in that they are usually independent of the core control input but do form the core gameplay objective. Winners in this hyper casual genre are always the largest and in some cases can eat other players, in essence ending a round.  The gameplay mechanics themselves are very clear, yet developing a fun experience and one that scales is reasonably difficult for this genre.

You need to think a lot about player density when designing games that grow. Obviously, all players want to grow, but not all can. Starting the correct number of players in the correct space and with the correct amount of food is what makes this genre fun. These games also become exponentially more fun with other real people playing them and have so far formed the .io genre on the store. The number of fitting gameplay mechanics for this genre is limited but the games have a longer lifespan than other hypercasual games because of the interactions with other players.

Puzzle Mechanics

Puzzle is a genre in itself, but hyper casual puzzle games focus on simplicity rather than complexity. A good hyper casual puzzle game usually has no end. Players are simply asked to continue to play the puzzle for as long as possible and the game will not increase the difficulty.  The mechanic itself must grow in complexity via the users’ actions. Good examples are 1010! By Gram Games or 2048 by Ketchapp. In both cases, the puzzle rules are set at the beginning and the board develops as you play. Unlike other board games such as Chess or Chequers which have clear end goals, hypercasual puzzle games usually have no clear end and it’s simply a case of lasting as long as you can.

These are the hardest genre of hypercasual games to develop because they are usually very clear and defined mechanics that are unique to the game itself. This is because it is very hard to create a mechanic that over time doesn’t change the gameboard into something that is too easy or too hard. Board Games are usually a great place to look for tried and tested mechanics, but make sure you chose ones that require very few rules otherwise you will lose your audience in the explanation.

Please share in the comments if you feel there are any other hyper casual game mechanics worth mentioning or any other hyper casual games ideas that you like and we’ll update the article!

The post Top 10 Game Mechanics for Hyper Casual Games appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

The market for location-based gaming is heating up this summer. We’re finally starting to see some major developers come out with an answer to Niantic’s Pokemon Go, a game that is now nearly 2 years old and going stronger than ever. Pokemon Go is a staple in the Top Grossing Charts, and with user numbers reaching an all-time high this month, it’s likely to continue. As such, there are many attempting to repeat its success. Niantic plan another title this summer, “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite”. NEXT Games have soft launched their “Walking Dead: Our World”. Ludia + Universal just launched “Jurassic World Alive” in tandem with the new movie launch.

Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here

Three Location-based games launch this summer, can any repeat the success of Pokemon Go?

But many in mobile questioned how repeatable the success of Pokemon Go is. Most would say it’s success is heavily based on the Pokemon brand. So what chance do other Location-based games have?

Location-Based Gaming: The New Frontier for Retention

Location based gaming has been around since 2008. Games like Parallel Kingdoms by Per Blue

Location-based gaming has been public for awhile. Since smartphones had GPS, game developers have used location in their games. Parallel Kingdom, a game by Per Blue back in 2008 was one of the pioneers of this genre. Niantic’s Ingress in 2012 is an obvious iteration upon this genre. None of these games did remarkably well. So if all those games failed, and Pokemon Go succeeded, was it just the license or was it something else? What changed in 2016?

AR mode is more of a hinderance than a key gameplay element. Most players turn this off.

Some have pointed to the rise of Augmented Reality as a reason for Pokemon Go’s success — but this isn’t really true. While Pokemon Go does have Augmented Reality components to it, its novelty wears off fast. Many players report turning off AR mode pretty quickly after playing. True AR (using visual recognition to superimpose virtual items onto the real world) isn’t a major component of Pokemon Go. It’s just allowing players to play the catching mode using their camera. AR-mode actually just makes the catching gameplay harder and more inconvenient. AR was used for marketing rather than as a retention mechanic. So what really drives Pokemon Go’s staggering retention curve? (Seen below)

My hypothesis is that the success of Pokemon Go was partly based on branding, partly based on virality, but mostly because of the retention differences when using location as a trigger for gameplay.

What I mean by trigger here comes from psychology. Taken from “Hooked” a book by Nir Eyal, we have a framework for what drives retention in apps and games.

To drive players to come back often:

• a player sees a visual trigger to enter the game (a player is bored, sees the icon on their phone)
• which has short, effective sessions (playing a quick match 3 level)
• with variable rewards (sometimes I win, sometimes I lose)
• that build long-term investment (reaching level 1000+ on a saga map)

All successful games use this loop to drive long-term retention. What changes in location-based gaming is the Trigger — the first step — pulling players into the game.

In typical mobile games, the trigger can be external (a push notification telling you your energy has refilled) or internal (I’m bored, let’s see if I can beat this level now). A location-based game has a new type of trigger — walking around in the world, being in a new place. Players that are stuck to games like Pokemon Go will tell you their trigger points — every time they’re getting a coffee, they check for Pokemon. Every time they are out at a restaurant, they check for pokemon. On their commute to work, they’re checking for pokemon.

If a game can attach itself to a commonly felt stimuli and use it as a trigger to play a game — this is an effective retention driver.

So location-based games, when they’re working, will build psychological triggers to play the game when you’re commuting, driving more repeat sessions and higher long-term retention. But do players have an appetite for multiples of these games?

Can a game with a lesser brand compete in this category? (sorry Jurassic Park, I love you but Pokemon is bigger)

Pokemon (Blue) vs Jurassic Park (Red) in Google Trends in the last 12 months. Even with the recent movie, Pokemon is a bigger brand.

Deconstructing Jurassic World Alive

Enter Ludia, a company that has proven over the last years to be confident in entering new genres and succeeding. Founded in 2007, they’ve focused on Facebook and mobile licensed games. They were acquired by Freemantle media in 2010, and have seen continued success since then. Associating with big brands, they’ve gone on to build consistent successes on mobile. Recently, they’ve built up the Jurassic Park games on mobile. Leveraging the brand and combining with the Dragonvale framework, they’ve carved out a success on mobile within a genre (Dragon Breeding) which has been out of the spotlight for years.

Their approach to taking the Jurassic Park brand and associating it with location-based gaming looks based upon Pokemon Go, but clearly trying to fix the aspects that were missing from the experience. Where Pokemon Go is a collector’s game, Jurassic Park is a competitive battle game.

The Core Loop

The core loop of Jurassic World Alive is simple yet effective. It builds upon the working framework of Pokemon Go, and adds a key element: battling.

1. Find dinosaurs on your map, and send a drone to collect DNA from it. Based on how well you play the mini-game, the more DNA you collect.
2. This DNA is converted into dinosaurs in a Clash Royale style system. The more DNA you collect, the faster you can unlock a dino and upgrade it.
3. Using your upgraded dinos, you can battle other players, which rewards players with chests. These chests contain everything you need to restart the loop: coins and darts.

The keys here are the currency sources & sinks:

• Finding dinos takes darts, which can only be collected from battling and a daily free chest. So you need to battle to collect and upgrade.
• Coins are needed to upgrade, unlock, and fuse dinosaurs. Coins start off plentiful but become tighter and more strategic as you reach the end game.
• XP is gained only from unlock & upgrading. So levelling up is relative to how big & high levelled your collection is. Collecting & upgrading any dinosaur is helpful.
• Upgrading your dinosaurs is needed to keep battling. As you battle, your elo rating is improving, forcing you to match against more and more difficult players. In order to keep up with the matchmaking, you need to be constantly upgrading your dinosaurs.

Let’s go into each step in more detail:

Collecting Dinosaurs

The game’s main screen is the map. It takes a perspective view of a typical google map and shows you the locations of dinosaurs currently wandering your city. If you’re close enough to a dinosaur, you can send a drone out to collect DNA from it. If you’re not, you’re going to have to move closer.

For this mechanic, Ludia creates an upsell mechanic. The radius of being able to capture a dinosaur is pretty small for free players, but if you pay into their VIP system, you get an increased radius for collecting. A compelling reason for beginning + lazy players (like myself) to commit to playing the game. Very smart!

Besides this, Jurassic World Alive conveniently places a few dinosaurs near you every session. So even as a lazy player that mostly checks their devices in similar to locations, you can still make good progress. A must for location-based games.

If you’re in radius, you can send a drone to pick up DNA from the dinosaur. This is a pretty compelling minigame of aiming with your drone and sending darts to collect DNA. A bit of timing, prediction and control wonkiness make it a pretty exciting minigame. Direct hits can get you large amounts of DNA, so being more accurate pays off big time.

DNA is a precious resource, it’s similar to cards in Clash Royale. The more DNA you collect, the faster you can unlock and evolve a monster. Giving a very compelling reason to play well in the mini-game. This makes their progression significantly more skill-based than most, makes it more difficult to balance for different play types, but makes the DNA collecting minigame much more compelling. As you progress and start wanting to collect rarer and rarer dinos, you only have limited chances to collect the DNA, adding further pressure to be on the lookout for the best dinosaurs.

Long Term Retention: Fusion System

One interesting addition Ludia have added to the Pokemon Go/Clash Royale style system is the addition of Fusion:

The fusion system allows players to create specific hybrids of dinosaurs. There are a number of pre-designed recipes which require you to combine two dinos (ex. Combining t-rex and raptor to create indominus, just like the movie). This typically requires both to be a high enough level as well as a modest fusion cost. This is how you can create legendary level dinosaurs.

It’s a smart tie in from the movie that adds significant depth to their chase for the best dinosaurs.

In the case of Clash Royale, it can get frustrating with some of those early cards not being of use in the endgame. Also having no visual change to a character after unlocking it feels less powerful. With the fusion system, having a goal to level up a set of characters to unlock a more powerful character is a good long term retention system.

So overall, Jurassic World Alive has a nice mix between Clash Royale and Pokemon Go, with some interesting additions. Being able to influence how much DNA/Duplicates you collect is great for players (less so for balancers), and adding the fusion system creates a visible long term goal.

The Battle

JW:Alive significantly builds upon Pokemon Go’s simplistic battle system.

Comparing Jurassic World Alive’s battle system to Pokemon Go’s, you can clearly see that Ludia took the weakest system from Niantic and improved on it substantially.

Pokemon Go opted for a system that is centered around their experience — location-based design. Instead of making battles central to their core loop, battles can only be done at certain locations (gyms), making battling tied to an overall social goal (take gyms for your team), and make it very asynchronous (the winner leaves a defending team for attackers to try to beat). The actual battle mechanic itself is really simplistic — bring 6 of your best pokemon in, and just tap madly on the screen to try to damage them as much as possible. There’s some skill in dodging and in selecting pokemon, but Pokemon Go’s battle system is very shallow that’s gotten plenty of criticism from their fanbase.

The Challenge of a 1v1 Battle

To be honest, Pokemon’s original battle mechanic wasn’t that great either. Since it was single player experience, the original Pokemon games were balanced very much in favour of the player. So they could get away with the game being pretty simplistic. When players started battling pokemon in PvP, there wasn’t alot of depth. The strategy usually was to keep swapping pokemon until you had the advantage on the field. Because it was a 1 on 1 turn-based battle, it didn’t leave a lot of room for countering and strategy. It’s why most turn-based PvP RPG games today typically have more fighters on the field (ex. 3v3 in Summoner’s War) or add a grid to move around units to create interesting countering tactics (ex. Fire Emblem Heroes).

Jurassic World Alive seems to have taken the original Pokemon style battling system and built it out so that it actually can function as a 1v1 PvP RPG battle with a healthy meta. Instead of dinosaurs having clear explicit strengths and weaknesses (ex. Water dinosaurs and weak against flying dinosaurs?) they’ve gone for a system where dinosaurs have much less obvious strengths and weaknesses. There’s no explicit rock-paper-scissors strategy, and it makes for a better game.

There are many types of dinosaurs, some with high health, some with quick attacks, some with high damage, some with status effects, and some as a hybrid. The strategy becomes trying to use your dinosaurs to the best of their abilities: having your high health dinos suck up damage, high attack dinos rip through without taking damage, and having your speedy dinos to do the final blow, preventing the opponent from attacking back. Overall, I counted 19 different attack types. This creates a nice base layer of strategy for a 1v1 game.

With status effects this also means that a dino’s strengths and weaknesses can change through a battle. Remember “Tail whip” from Pokemon? A useless move to increase damage taken by your opponent? — here in Jurassic World Alive it actually makes strategic sense. These moves have enough impact to make you second guess leaving your dinos in a weakened state.

Take out 3 dinos before your opponent does

The goal of the battle is to take down 3 opposing dinosaurs before your opponent does. You bring in 4 dinosaurs, and can switch as often as you’d like. Similar to pokemon however, swapping out your dino leaves them susceptible to a free attack by the opponent.

So typically what happens is there’s some mind reading of your opponent. You make assumptions when they will swap out their dinos and try to take advantage of them losing a move.

Overall this gives the PvP battles a good level strategy. You’re trying to counter the opponent’s, while preventing swapping at the wrong time. You’re trying to avoid your opponent from saving their speedier dinos, who can take down your weaker dinos without being hit back. The upgrades and matchmaking also keep battles intense — most battles feel like you lost because of skill.

However, some of the battle’s elements show that they can’t break away from the innate issues of a Pokemon style battle: a core strategy of the game is to try to guess what your opponent will switch to. Guess that your opponent will start with a heavy armor dino? Then start with an armor piercing one. Guess that your opponent will swap a weak dino before you can kill it? Then make them pay by using your special attack rather than your weaker one. This is fun to pull off, but call-your-bluff/mind-reading strategy isn’t going to last for the long term.

On top of this, your battle team is made up of 8 dinos, yet when you battle, it randomly selects 4 out of the 8. This feels like a tacked-on system to increase the pressure to upgrade more dinosaurs rather than increasing the strategy before the battle. As a player it means you have some arbitrary randomness about whether the strategy you wanted to use will pay off, and can mean that right from the onset of the battle you already feel like you’ve lost (you got a bad draw from move 1). While randomness can be good, this much pre-determined luck can make players feel helpless early in battle.

This points to an issue that the 1v1 gameplay has. It’s just too limiting. The in-game strategy hits a cap which turns into a mind-reading battle, and the out-of-game strategy is limited so they had to tack on a “random 4” system.

I wonder if the game’s battle system would have been better if they’d broken from the pokemon style design and instead gone with something like a 3v3 battle system. Increasing complexity, but increasing the depth substantially. There would be substantially more attack types, more in-game strategy. Makes swapping dinos a far more interesting choice, and makes directly countering a more nuanced strategy.

Regardless, the Jurassic World Alive battle system is far better than the tap fest that is Pokemon Go — I just wonder if it could have been even stronger with a 3v3 system.

Pacing & Progression

And just for good measure, to pace the battle system, Jurassic World Alive relies on the good ol’ chest system from Clash Royale. Instead of pacing you based on energy, players can only have 4 chests at a time, and each chest must be opened one at a time. Because of matchmaking and the importance of stats in the outcome of a battle, it prevents players from rushing too far ahead by winning too many battles. Eventually, you will need what’s in the chests in order to compete.

From Clash Royale: Chest Slots and Arena Tiers

Arena tiers are another borrowed feature from Clash Royale. Players earn trophies for victories, which unlock higher and higher tiers which contain bigger prizes and better dino DNA each time you win. This gives a clear, compelling reason to keep playing.

Comparing to Pokemon Go, my goal in the game is far more explicit and I can make progress towards it immediately: reach the next arena.

3 Reasons why it’s Working

Regardless of your thoughts of Jurassic Park IP or Location-based gaming, Jurassic World Alive is within the Top 100 grossing, and has sustained there since launch. While I think many would dismiss this as a “lesser Pokemon Go” — it clearly has done something right.

I believe that there are 3 key reasons why Jurassic World Alive has seen success so far:

#1 – Smart Merchandising

Merchandising — the features of a game that are typically there to upsell players towards spending money — are top notch in Jurassic World Alive. Ludia consistently have launched games that have taken the best merchandising practices and executed on them well. In Jurassic World Alive this really is showcased in their VIP System:

Jurassic World Alive showcases throughout the game the value of their VIP system. From the onset, you are constantly shown that a dinosaur is just out of reach on your map — the cure? Join VIP! This is an excellent conversion leverage point. On top of this, getting an epic incubator and increased supply drops makes the progression far easier.

The VIP system is also a subscription. Utilizing the latest trends in F2P, which is now even a common tactic in Hyper Casual games. The power of committing players to an ongoing subscription seems to be driving a lot of revenue these days (hopefully not too much off the back of forgetful users…).

#2 – Clear Progression & Goals

As mentioned above, one aspect I think Jurassic World Alive does far better than Pokemon Go is the visibility and clarity of their progression system and goal systems.

For Pokemon Go, the goal is mostly focused on completing your Pokedex. This is alright for collectors, but it doesn’t hit all player types. Jurassic World includes the Battle loop + arenas, which give a clear focus for battling your dinosaurs. Now there’s a way to clearly show off my progress and a competition I can engage in that will give me clear progress & clear recognition.

Comparing this to Pokemon Go, having to go to Gyms, and choosing a team which is far too large to feel impactful within makes the competitive goals far too end-game heavy. In the beginning, the goal is just to collect — and this is only compelling for so long.

#3 – Less Reliant on Location-Based Gameplay

Lastly, I think it was a smart choice for Jurassic World Alive to make their systems less dependant on the location-based gameplay. In Jurassic World Alive you can have many sessions without ever really caring about the map or moving to different locations.

Within Jurassic World Alive, usually there are a number of dinosaurs directly near me that helps me progress. These “freebies” may not be the optimal path, but still help me progress faster and give a reason to check my phone even when I’ve been in the same location for awhile (which, if you’re like lazy me, is common).

On top of this, the battle system & chest system not being location specific means that throughout the day when I’m not walking around I can still complete a meaningful session. I can open up chests, start the opening of the remaining. I can win some battles and fill up my slots. I can open up my free incubator.

Comparing to Pokemon Go, it instead relies a lot on location-based design. Incubators require you to remember to walk around with them on (which is a pain). Gyms are at specific locations, making you need to remember to check your phone at that location to make meaningful progress. While this is great for getting some location-based retention, it can make “regular” mobile sessions a pain in Pokemon Go.

Jurassic World Alive, on the other hand, is stronger because it has location-based elements, but you can still play the game often without needing to worry about where you are.

But can it hold up?

Looking at the grossing charts now, it looks like it will stabilize within the Top 150 grossing. While the movie is still in theatres and advertisements are running daily, they should be able to sustain here.

By prediction however is that it will fall, and will be tough to retain within the Top 250. This bump from movie goers and IP is inevitable, but sustaining at this level will still be difficult. This is partially because of the brand — its not Marvel — there isn’t a new movie every 6 months. It’s not Harry Potter — the fanbase isn’t nearly as large. The simple nature of the IP will be resistance for Jurassic World Alive.

From the design side there are also some issues:

The battle is effective, yet still too simple. Building out a lasting meta should be priority. Driving players to collect and upgrade a wider range of dinosaurs is crucial, and the current system of randomly picking 4 out of 8 isn’t strong enough. They could drive this width from some PvE gameplay, shifting the meta more explicitly in events, or from shifting the PvP to 3v3. Either can be a way to drive players to collecting & upgrading a wider range of dinosaurs to compete.

The social component is lacking. Where pokemon go has built this up over time, Alive still has ways to g and launched with less features than Pokemon did at launch. No lures, no chat, no clans. For now this is fine, but to take advantage of the location-based gameplay and drive local players to work together like Pokemon Go does, adding some ways for players to communicate & strategize locally would be simple but great addition.

Ludia is an excellent company which has proven time and time again to break into new categories with confidence and deliver on the live operations side. This game should be no different. I have no doubt that Ludia will be able to take the strong base of this game, respond to player feedback, extend the battle gameplay to last longer, design events that drive players back, and develop social features which will build up over time.

I expect this to be a staple on the Top Grossing chart, just not one to beat Pokemon Go. However, I don’t think that’s necessary for success here — what we should all take from this is that location-based games may be more interesting than we all once thought.

Summer of 2016 was the summer of Clash Royale’s gacha.
2017 was the summer of Battle Royale gameplay.
2018 may be the summer of location-based gaming.

The post Can Jurassic World Alive stand up to Pokemon Go? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Sims Mobile has big shoes to fill. Everyone knows The Sims. The sandbox life simulation has not only defined its own genre but counts among the top selling game series ever. After four major releases on PC/consoles and countless DLCs, EA and Maxis come with a second big attempt to succeed in the mobile sphere. Sims Mobile (Android, iOS) launched globally early March 2018. It’s hard to avoid comparison to the original PC game given it was made by the same developer and publisher, as well as visual style and gameplay elements.

What makes The Sims franchise stand out is by far the freedom of choice in playing out your personal story. Therefore it’s interesting to take a look what kind of changes are introduced in transition to a free-to-play model, and whether these changes are successful.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here

LOOKING BACK AT PC SIMS

The genius of the original Sims PC franchise lies in it’s approachability. It is easy to understand what is expected from the player and the Sim alike: The actions and choices are intuitive, learned from our own life experiences. The metrics of success do not have to be explained, because they are inherently ours: Make more money, get a promotion, get married. The game builds on our own fantasies how how we live our lives.

Matt Brown, current studio technical director of EA Maxis, spoke at this year’s GDC about emergent narrative in the original Sims, and how the game combines a natural human tendency to nurture for others with the Maslow hierarchy of needs.

Each character has needs. Social doesn’t matter if your bladder is full! (Sims 3)

These needs create the baseline structure of the game:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job!

Furthermore, a Sim has some automated behaviour that tries to address pressing needs and loosely following on whatever actions they’ve been doing before. A Sim who wants to become a chef and has a career in a restaurant is more likely to start cooking on his own. If you have a house with multiple Sims, this is the developers helping you to keep the Sims on the path you’ve chosen for them without having to control every moment of their lives.

Example of choices when it comes to food and cooking

At the same time, the feedback to any action is visible and gives it meaning and progress:

Sim fishing and improving his fishing skill

Tracking actions rewards you for taking them while in real life these are not nearly as gratifying. For example:

Read a book → See the Sim’s “logic” skill go up
Talk to a person → Watch your relationship level with this person increase

This mechanic also builds an immediate next goal: Read books to level up your logic skill to get a better career. Talk to a person until their relationship reaches a high level, so you can get married and have kids.

All in all, the game is a great combination of actions you can control and those you have to respond to (burglar in your house). Regardless of your story: freedom, feedback and intuitive goals are the trademark features of the brand and the design principles on which the narrative is built.

Does free-to-play versions achieve this?

THE SIMS GO FREE TO PLAY

As a shift to F2P, The Sims actually had two previous attempts:

1. The Sims FreePlay launched 2011 for mobile
2. The Sims Social launched 2011 on Facebook

The Sims Social (the Facebook game) ruled the top charts for a bit but then quickly fell off.

Sims FreePlay (mobile game) is still being updated and has been a staple of the top games on mobile since 2011. The mobile version used timers to break up the sessions and provide progress in times of player’s absence. These timers break the flow and make the game feel very different from the original, but it keeps its stable audience, presumably because the it stays quite true to the brand’s principles, keeping the narrative choices similar as in The Sims.

Use of timers in Sims: FreePlay. Each Sim’s action takes time.

The new Sims Mobile game was soft launched in May 2017 in Brazil, and launched globally this year in March. From very first moment you notice how different the game’s visuals are. It walked a long way from the quirky, robotic animations in Sims FreePlay into a very polished, full 3D experience with a wide range of animations and short loading times, resembling the Sims 4 PC game.

The Latest Sims Mobile: It Looks almost like the PC game!

So how did the latest Sims Mobile game do?

In the past weeks, the old game, Sims FreePlay, kept its position in the Top 100 grossing. The new Sims Mobile hasn’t maintained a rank in the top grossing, roughly flattening at $50K/day according to Sensor Tower across Android + iOS.

Such numbers are far from stellar for a game with such high visual polish that spent almost a year in soft launch and taps into the faithful audience of the franchise. So what happened? Why didn’t the Sims Mobile leapfrog Sims Freeplay?

Let’s first dive into the game, and then talk about the issues.

FOCUS ON FEWER SIMS: FAMILY AND HEIRLOOMS

Instead of controlling an unlimited amount of characters and houses like in The Sims and Sims FreePlay, here you can control only up to four characters that share one house.

Town in Sims FreePlay: Each house is controlled by the player

In Sims Mobile, you start with two Sims, two other slots can be purchased.

However to keep things interesting and let the player live different stories, at some point Sims can retire. This frees a slot for a new generation. If you choose to retire the Sim, they will hang out around the house, offering special actions rewarding Heirloom tokens (family currency), and eventually will be “moved out” (to a farm upstate) and permanently gone.

If you have a baby, similar process happens for it to grow up: From a toddler to a baby to a teenager to an adult.

Heirloom tokens allow you to purchase lucky charms that unlock and boost traits you can assign to your Sims.

Retirement and new Heirloom

The system works well: Player doesn’t get overwhelmed by controlling too many Sims, exploring differently flavoured stories comes naturally with new characters, and last but not least there is a tangible heritage from the previous generation, which is a great metaphor. It also serves as a retention mechanic for achievement-focused players.

Focusing player’s attention on a limited amount of characters and creating a heritage achievement system is definitely a good step for a mobile game.

SIM PROGRESSION THROUGH STORIES AND EVENTS

As a player, you can assign your Sims to events, which are basically quests with different duration. Events are part of Stories: Career, hobby and relationships. For hobbies and careers, only one can be active at a time for each Sim and switching costs Simoleons, but relationships can be explored in parallel, which keeps the game to one of the most cherished traits of the original. The only limited resource here is player’s time.

Each Sim can be assigned to one event at a time, and it will finish itself. This lets you progress without actively playing.

Stories serve as achievements; finishing one will require significant player dedication

Selecting an event: The longer, the bigger rewards

To give player a chance to act, each Sim also has energy that can be used to perform optional actions within the event to speed up the timer and finish earlier. Player chooses the actions through interaction points that are only available during the event.

The events feed both into the player progression and the Sim progression. It ties the two loops together: Completing an event means XP for the player, and a progression in the story for the Sim.

DECORATING YOUR HOME

Built on top is the decoration loop, which loosely connects to the overall progression loop described above. There are two progression tracks: Player level and Vanity level:

Player’s XP comes mainly from completing events. They unlock new parts of town and careers, furniture, building blocks and outfits. Decorating and buying clothes increases vanity level, which serves as a visible comparison between you and your in-game friends and unlocks more space in the house.

The whole loop then looks like this:

From this graph: the two loops (sim progress and player progress) feed into decorating. Therefore the player’s motivation should lie mainly there. The motivation to complete the loop is tied to the social driver of comparing houses and clothes with other players.

DECORATING YOUR SIM

Clothes and cosmetics for your Sims are different than decorations. These cost Simoleons (soft currency) or hard currency and add to your overall Vanity level… but do not have game effect.

To get clothes with an in-game effect you have to go to a special designer that will generate random — and very unique — clothes, giving you a boost for an activity and usually highlighted with particles.

Izzy’s fashion studio

These outfits tend to catch most attention from other players and feed into its own tiny loop of social encounters:

• Being seen by other players can earn you Stickers (that are basically likes)
• those are transferred into fashion tokens
• Fashion tokens can be traded in Izzy’s studios for different/better designs

To make your Sim visible to other players, you have to attend parties.

You can throw and visit thematic parties (wedding party when you get married, music party when you play guitar as a hobby etc.). These happen in parallel with other players. While the actions you perform are asynchronous (and act same as actions within an event), you do have some option to interact, such as a real time chat with all the participants.

SOCIAL SIMS: MEETING STRANGERS

No Sim game would be complete without all the wonderful strangers you can meet and Sims Mobile take some steps out of the single player by introducing an asynchronous system in which your neighbourhood is populated partly by NPCs and partly by other players’ Sims.

You are assigned to a group of players and for you, your neighbourhood is frequented by the same characters: allowing you to slowly build relationships with them.

This resembles well a live neighbourhood. Sims you befriend will stick around, being more likely to pass by your house. Sims you don’t care about you will stop seeing — and you won’t care. It would be interesting to know how these neighbourhoods are updated over time; whether new players are added when the old ones churn.

Map of the locations

It is here, at the end of the loop, where the real issues with Sims Mobile start to emerge:

The social loop doesn’t feed strongly back into the core loop and leaves the player feeling unrewarded
The social loop is way too far from the core to serve as motivation, and as I’ll show, it’s not sufficient to drive player through the game.

Let’s summarize the collected issues and go deeper into them.

THE 3 REASONS WHY SIMS MOBILE IS STRUGGLING

While the first part focused on visible systemic changes that were introduced to streamline the game for f2p and mobile, in this part I will talk more about design under the hood in order to get to the answer for our initial question: Why is the game not performing well.

I want to post a hypothesis: We’re seeing the game struggling because it lacks meaningful choices or goals, it mechanises motivations, and it doesn’t reward the player.

It becomes clear soon after few days of playing: The core design of the mobile game is at odds with what made the PC game so successful.

What do I mean by that?

1. The nurturing and narrative aspects are suppressed
2. The progression doesn’t validate player’s time and investment
3. The core loop is broken

These issues do not exist in vacuum, but they are the biggest part of the systemic oversight of player motivation. As I’ll show, the lack of meaningful, immediate actions diminishes ability to care for your Sims. Hard-to-read progression defies a will to grind for better objects. Funneling the core loop into social leaves the player out to dry without feeling rewarded.

Let’s look at these issues from the ground up; from the small things to the biggest one.

ISSUE #1: NURTURING AND NARRATIVE

When sims have needs… The nurturing aspect from the original Sims game was excellent. The needs system in The Sims have three main benefits:

They give players immediate call to actions
They build narrative
They create need for better items

These combine into the loop I described earlier:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job

Through intrinsic motivation (Sim is hungry) comes care (I need to care) and attachment. Caring for the needs is the building block of the game, like swapping candies in CCS, you’ll repeat this action again and again, driven by curiosity what happens next.

By completing these steps more complex needs emerge for the Sim and the player alike: What about relationships or career? How do I afford a better house?

Because Sims need the player, the player cares for the Sims. This is where nurturing builds the narrative: Completing these steps naturally tells the story. Because of the combination of intuitive, human needs, the ability to fulfill them through game mechanics and a clear feedback, the game doesn’t need to take the player by the hand.

And when they don’t have needs…

Originally, setting up your house is finding an intersection of affordability, function and personal expression. Furniture caters the needs or improves skills (learning). Better furniture makes for faster progression, and granular improvements to your house also improve your Sims’ overall well-being; Sims want to live in nice houses.

In Sims Mobile, players can still interact with the furniture but since no needs are present, the interaction doesn’t provide any feedback, neither for the Sim or the player.

Player is therefore left with limited motivation to purchase furniture. The only game accepted push to decorate comes from the need to improve their vanity. Dropping stats and gameplay impact from furniture for the sake of a simplified experience cuts a major value of the experience.

Without feedback, doing these actions is unnecessary

Without this rewarding loop from furniture, a whole part of the game disappears that could have served as a compelling experience for a casual audience. Watching TV while playing Candy Crush is a good example, however games with metagame (building on ownership and personalisation) are even a better one: Interacting with your game with a slight sense of progress can be a great and rewarding activity. It further fosters the ownership of the space you’ve built. Having a reason to stick around meaningfully makes you retain better.

In Sims Mobile this leads to players coming in only for short, effective sessions. The intrinsic narrative of building up your sim and collecting furniture is replaced with the extrinsic motivation of just completing the the stories/quests for rewards and progress. Players that are coming in just for extrinsic motivation (rewards and coins) won’t stick around for long. They eventually need intrinsic motivation (social proof) to retain for the long haul.

THE STORIES ARE PRE-TOLD

Stories are the building blocks of Sims’ lives. Looking at an example of a relationship story: When you meet a new Sim, you choose one of three introductions: Friendly, romantic or confrontational. This determines your whole story with this particular Sim:

Choosing a story for two Sims

Each story is pre-scripted which lowers its replayability

Here The Sims Mobile misses out on what made the PC version of The Sims so successful: it’s accurate portrayal of relationships in real life. Relationships are ever changing and it’s unclear where things are going. Locking down a relationship into a pre-set story pushes you down a path with no option to take a side road apart from abandoning the progress in the story.

Through this, the motivation to progress becomes extrinsic since the choice of what happens next has been taken away. There is no surprise, no option to grab the steering wheel and have a fight in a romantic relationship. Pursuing achievements also takes away the option to play freely: Instead of playing what I want, I play what I want to complete, creating a detachment to my Sim.

The removal of the nurture aspect has huge impact both on the system and the player. It takes away natural onboarding and therefore complicates a relationship you could have built to your characters. It reduces the internal motivation by making the play aspect insignificant.

By attaching story progression to events only, the game builds a pre-set habit of collecting rewards, assigning events and leaving the session. A player never builds up a connection to their Sims which is not healthy for long term retention.

ISSUE #2: THE PUNISHING PROGRESSION

After playing the game for some time, you may start feeling like you’re not progressing. Only after looking closer at the event system it starts to be apparent why. The game includes clear progression, but they are not intuitive and make it hard for players to perceive their progression.

ENERGY: PROGRESSION WITHIN EVENTS

To recap: Events have varied durations that player can choose from. While in an event, they can use energy to perform actions and speed up the timer.

The event system is a main source of the player progression and coins

The energy is bound to the events: Using more energy means the player can finish more events and progress faster.

Each Sim has their own energy

Doing that sounds like a good idea: the player can engage with the game with visible progress in the event, and they overall get more done in the same time. But, it doesn’t feel good.

Here’s the first problematic part: You can select actions that are meaningful to you, but the result of a story event is the same regardless of the input. You will level up a relationship with your sweetheart whether you are cooking, watching TV, or talking about romantic plans. Or if you leave the game and come back later. Within each event the relationship between energy and time discount is the same. That further undermines player’s choice of actions (from event’s perspective they are all the same).

Next to actions with no game impact (outside of event) we now have mechanical actions. You’re bound to the result from the start. It’s like sitting at a math test, knowing that you can wait it out without writing anything, because in the end you will pass.

The result is: Energy doesn’t have story value. Or, to put it differently, energy is merely a means to grind.

Second problematic part is hidden in how relationship between energy and event XP.

For this action, player earns 20 event XP

While events in different career levels have same duration, using energy provides smaller discount on higher levels as the absolute amount of event XP grows. It’s an invisible cost to your progression.

At the same time, it’s not clear if your energy will be enough to get through an event as the absolute amount of event XP needed isn’t shown. In reality, the game value of energy is determined by the event type (typically family events go very fast), career level and quest duration. As a result, player has no idea what progress to expect in a session, which undermines their will to plan and set goals.

Even when this behaviour is not technically in a way of playing the game, it shows that energy is designed and implemented into other systems only for gating and pacing: It only really starts to matter if you push for event completion in a given time (in live operations for example).

LEVELLING UP EVENTS

In quest based games, reward is usually a function of game progression and duration of the quest.

Simple progression can expand rewards: With player’s level the reward grows. Or it can grow the quest timers: Players need to come back less often, which is a common practice in F2P games to lower session amount over time and not wear the retaining player out.

To visualise this:

The area of the rectangle defines the reward size

In reality it’s usually a mix of both and either of these gives player a good understanding of their progression, since there’s always a tangible gain.

In Sims Mobile, the progression works differently, and far less intuitively. Playing events unlocks pieces of furniture that discount the timer on quests. At the same time, regardless of your progression in the game (player level) and in the story (career level), your rewards stay similar:

Note the level difference in two different stories, yet the Simoleons earned are the same

To display it as above, the progression in Sims Mobile works like this:

The progression comes in a form of time discount. The result then looks like this:

As a result, player can do more quests and earn more rewards within the same time. This decision is interesting because this is not how we talk about getting a raise in real life. “I’m earning $200 per hour instead of $100 per hour”. In Sims Mobile it’s “I’m earning 200 simoleons in 1 hour instead of in 2 hours”.

We use time, the most stable, straightforward, linear measure as comparison. Relating to different time slots doesn’t feel as an intuitive progression. The different careers also don’t differ enough in earnings (which you would expect with being a barista versus being a top chef) and throughout them, players do not get significantly better off with coins either. This is particularly apparent later in the game when furniture and clothes become gradually more expensive and the player is less and less able to purchase them or complete sets.

From system perspective, the flattened progression is likely trying to balance leveled up Sims with new Sims at the beginning of their careers. This approach doesn’t disadvantage starting new stories, but at the same time also doesn’t validate progression. Comparing rewards of two Sims in the same household at different career stages can feel demotivating.

Would players keep their old Sims forever if the difference would be more significant? Do players value Simoleons higher than story progression?

The combination of predictability of the actions, the lack of story meaning and the fact you don’t need it to play makes energy redundant.

The design of events doesn’t communicate progression naturally. This seems to be a pattern in Sims Mobile: Instead of asking what player cares about, there’s an artificial measurement claiming player that should care… just because.

ISSUE #3: THE CORE LOOP IS BROKEN

When it comes to long term retention, it’s hard not to mention one more substantial shortcomings of Sims Mobile. From a systems perspective, most of the progression feeds into the party loop:

• Parties are where other players can see your home
• Leveling up in hobbies and careers rewards additional furniture that offers new opportunities at parties and allow the parties to reach higher level
• To be seen and rewarded for original clothes also requires to host / visit parties

Systemically you are rewarded through the parties, but it is anticlimactic. There is nothing substantial that you could gain in the party system that you can’t gain somewhere else (XP, Simoleons). Everything about a party is mechanical: The amount of parties you can visit per day, The amount of parties you can host, The amount of energy you have at a party. There is no status to earn, no best-party-host leaderboard. Nothing to push me to become the party master.

Providing social proof at the end of a loop to drive all motivations is good design. However, in this case it is executed poorly by not tying it to some kind of ladder or leaderboard.

The party system isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t justify the existence of all the other loops. Its progress is very far away from day to day activity, and participating in them is optional.

CHARGING INTO THE SOFT LAUNCH

When the game first came out, the gameplay was actually much more similar to Sims: FreePlay. This article is worth checking for an early review. From screenshots and App Store versions we can get an idea how the game looked when first released and what were the major changes.

Energy, hygiene, hunger and happiness were the needs in the early version

A Sim had a set of needs that gets refilled when performing actions. Timers, that lasted hours in the Sims: FreePlay are shortened, yet present. This leads me to assume that Sims Mobile didn’t start from scratch, but took mechanics from Sims: FreePlay for granted.

Looking at the how the versions evolved, we see several trends:

• Most of the design features I described were not present in the soft launch (Events, stories, retirement, Izzy’s store)
• Core loop kept being updated (Party system tied tighter into the core loop, vanity and player level were decoupled at some point)
• Further trickling of the changes (Daily to-do list instead of goals and wishes, adding new currencies)

My theory is that because EA used Sims: FreePlay as a basis, the design was already doomed. They attempted to patch what was there, rather than modernize the design.

FINAL WORD

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if Sims Mobile was instead a port of Sims 4. My designer brain drools with joy over such challenge: Would players enjoy the game? Would the brand be strong enough to rely on vanity only to monetize? Would it be possible to build a system that parallels passive and active gameplay meaningfully?

Instead, with Sims Mobile we end up with a hybrid that tries to achieve everything and nothing.

The Sims is a brand building on freedom of choice. As Matt Brown mentions in his GDC talk, a Sims’ actions and goals are built on improvisation theater’s “Yes and” principle: One thing always leads to next, there is no wrong move, there is no end goal to strive for, and things constantly change. Just like life.

Instead of that, EA Mobile’s latest take on Sims Mobile is constantly afraid to give players space to act on their free will. Intrinsic motivation is replaced with simple reward structures, likely out of fear of losing players without rewarding their every step. Goals are unclear and sessions unrewarding.

As a result, EA Mobile lost both the Sims fanbase and casual players alike.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

The post Deconstructing Sims Mobile appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

YouTube Views for multiple top PvP games

Clan Wars – What is it?

A clan war is split into two phases. The first is a 24h period called “collection” in which each clan member has the ability to play 2-3 different match types against a random selection of players.  These match types will be familiar to anyone who has been following Clash Royale for the past year or so in that they mirror the common challenges that are sometimes used for events. So far I’ve seen, double elixir, draft and 2v2 and in each case you can pick from your own cards or draft although they use Tournament level stats.  If you win your match you win a Clan Chest that opens into a central “clan deck” of cards that the clan can then level up and use to build a deck for Battle Day. The more players that compete in the collection phase the better the card selection and the higher levelled the cards.

The second day is called Battle Day and now players may only select from the cards they have won at the level that each card is currently levelled up to.  This creates a tactical discussion session where deck crafting from the cards that have dropped can be aided by the clan themselves. You only have one chance to succeed, with each clan member having a single battle.  If they win, they add a sword to their leaderboard and of the 5 competing clan, one clan will be the overall winner and gets a larger chest. Each clan war lasts around 2 days.

Clan Wars – Why do it?

Market share of downloads on the iOS app store US

Clash Royale is a mature product and with it there is a mature audience. Most of the players with over 3000 crowns or more will have been playing Clash Royale for 1 or more years. They will probably have somewhere between 80-100% of the cards unlocked and will be grinding the top levels of those cards. This can take months per card. At this point there is a large amount of player fatigue and moving people from new or different challenge keep people entertained. As I spoke about in my GDC talk a game team wants to establish a Lord of the Rings Metric (one KPI to rule them all). An update at this stage should focus on driving the most interaction with that metric as by improving this all other metrics will tend to trend upwards. For Clash Royale I would argue it is Battles per DAU which leads to more engagement in all their other systems, spenders will most likely have a high battle count.

As well as trying to improve your internal KPIs, the mobile marketing is a constantly changing battleground. External factors can have huge effects on your games bottom line and although unpredictable the one thing you do know is that changes will happen.  Just before this update released – Fornites launch has disrupted and captured 80-90% of the market share relative to the previously steady state.

Problems it could solve

Clash Royale is a fantastic mobile game. It creates subtle depth in it’s characters along complex strategic decisions which requiring a low number of active touch inputs but precise timing. This is what makes it so playable on mobile.  However when a game is designed to for many years there are often issues that long term players get stuck in that are not apparent in the short or mid term. Clans Wars has the potential to alleviate some of the more complex issues that most long term players of the game might be familiar with these are:

1. The Archetype Problem
2. The Yoyo Effect
3. Clan Engagement

1. The Archetype Problem

In all competitive games balance becomes one of the major discussion areas for players. Balance issues usually involve overpowers stats of a single gameplay element, a broken combination of 2 or more elements or a game-breaking unforseen bug when using the element.  In each case the collective of gamers dissect and discuss how to gain micro-competitive advantages with their setups – we call this the metagame (the game outside of the game).

An Archetype is usually a combination of cards that all work well together and therefore commonly get picked and combined together.  They are the most powerful implementation of cards and so by using them you are more likely to beat your opponent. Some decks that a Clash Royale player might recognise would be Lavaloon, Mortar-Hog, Bridgespam etc. When you’re a new player you strive to be able to make certain decks that contain legendary cards that you might not own and this drives you to engage more fully.  In each case the decks usually feature 6 core cards and then rotate 2 cards depending on the players taste. However from a long term players perspective, the issue is the boredom of playing the same archetype again and again.  

The challenge for the designer is to provide enough viable archetypes that during a play session of 10 or more rounds you are unlikely to meet the same deck. Currently in Clash Royale I would argue this is not the case, there are around 5-10 common archetypes and at the top end of the game, you see these decks almost every round. This is not an issue only for Clash Royale, but all online PvP games feature this to some extent.

Providing interesting tools to the community to enable quick counters and evolving strategies. This common archetype problem is exacerbated in Clash Royale because of the very short game sessions, meaning you encounter more decks in the same period of time. The Archetype problem isn’t a direct gameplay issue because it provides interesting content for players to talk about, this is one of the reasons why Clash Royale has been so popular on YouTube and Twitch. However, without enough variety in rulesets you can grind yourself out of enjoying the experience.

2. The YoYo Effect

Any person who plays competitive 1 on 1 games will know the YoYo effect. When placed in a competitive ladder where your opponents are matched by a ranking formula, such as ELO, the YoYo effect occurs. You yoyo between a high and low point on the ladder as you win one, lose one in a repeating sequence. In my case I can’t break the 4000 cap and I yoyo between 3600-4000.  This becomes immensely frustrating as no matter what I do I can’t maintain my progress. It also means that if I am at 4000 trophies I don’t want to play more as I fear a loss more than I want a win.

Levelling up a single card has no real difference to your position post 3000 trophies and so rank becomes a measure of skill. If this we’re the only mode in Clash Royale it is likely that I would have churned out a long time ago, but what kept me in was the events. Events applied new rules, new deck combinations and restrictions on the gameplay. This often levelled the playing field. The challenge was then to try to beat 12 individuals in a row with only 3 lives. This removes yoyoing entirely as now it’s simply a challenge to continue your winning streak. A new event happened every week and each week it would engage me to compete.  I personally drifted from the ladder climbing and focussed on perfecting the events with 2 or 3 that I got all 12 wins. Clan Wars could provide a more detailed structure for events, and pit not just player vs player, but clan vs clan in a clan winning streak.

3. Clan Engagement

I would estimate a very large proportion of players in clash royale are in a clan. The clan provides a group of people who share your passion and you can talk tactics and share replays. The most used feature within the clan would be the Clan requests where you can ask for cards from your clanmates. Within this interface currently there is a large stagnation of content. In my clan I would say there is a core of 8-10 people that actively chat or engage in conversations and discussion, with the majority of people including myself who simply make card request.

The more active and engaged a community the more likely they are to stick, spend and promote your game to their friends. From a long tail perspective providing engagement, challenge and motivation to these players is what sustains longer term revenues. However, without an evolving or changing metagame, a variety of weekly challenges or a global event the clan chat can become dull and boring. I feel that the clan structure within Clash Royale provides all the tools adequate to really helping people to share and strategise but I felt the strategy of the game had tailed off due to the archetype problem in recent months.

Clan Wars – The Update

Let’s think about each of the problems above and how the update attempted to solve them. Whether it was a success or how it could be improved.

1. Archetype Solution

Clan Wars made a valiant attempt to remove the archetype problem from the discussion. As the war is split into a collection day vs a battle day.  The collection day is an ability for players to find cards and then level them up for the clan. This is a beautiful solution as it tries to solve the Archetype problem in 3 ways

Firstly, it adds chance of which cards you find. You no longer have a reliable card collection, each Clan War forces you to look at the cards your clan has found and create a well rounded deck.

Secondly the cards you do find level up depending on the number of wins. This creates a wider range of stats with which to vary your deck playing abilities. The decision to take Goblin Barrel level 3 or Knight level 11 can affect your decks build.  

Finally your opponents are doing the same collection phase. This creates a more asymmetrical hidden information that means your deck cannot be built to easily counter.

Each of these 3 factors mean that wilder and less common card combinations are used and sometimes picking the most OP card in your collection (level 12 Barbarians) can truly beat opponents through sheer power. This plays out quite well as each clan war my clan has played a much wider range of decks.

Going Further

I think the solution doesn’t go far enough.  It should be tweaked to put even more pressure on the harvesting day and provide more depth in the War day for clans to strategise. Currently the number of cards dropped and number of level ups needed is the same as the main game. There is no reason to use these numbers apart from familiarity and in this particular game mode you never get enough cards to even see level 11. I would actually adjust the balance of the common and rare drops to provide even more “going for it” level ups, making the choice not just on strategy but stats as well.

Currently a player gets 2 attacks in order to earn cards and then their collecting abilities are capped. It would be more interesting if players had a number of lives in collection day, rather than a number of battles. This means that any player could earn exponentially more cards if their skills was high.  In order to limit players who are very skilled at the game the more wins you get the more levelled up an opponent’s King towers could becoming. In a way handicapping the victor.  This would then provide a range between 3-10 matches for each player depending on their skill.

The Clan War battle is also a single battle against a random opponent. In some cases you may have 2 battles, but this is only when the clan sizes are mismatched and you are on the lower tiered clan. You and your clan have no way to discuss or tweak your plays, based on learning from previous battles. It’s an all or nothing affair where winner takes all. What if the clan was given secret information or could earn the rights to see the opponents War Deck by winning challenges. By understanding the cards available for opponents you could again strategise more particularly on your clans deck crafting.

2. Yoyo Solution

Clan Wars does provide an alternative challenge to the ladder. It’s one more thing to do and I believe it would improve the total number of battles each user takes part in each week. However the ladder problem still exists in the single player game. For Clan Wars to be a truly successful update is should actually try to create a larger inter-clan ladder that all clans compete on worldwide ensuring that your personal ladder is of less important than your clans ladder position and you spend more time perfecting your skills for the Clan War.

At the moment this doesn’t feel the case as we’re still establishing clan win rates. However, I dont see a clear display of the Clan Wars leaderboard and no prestige is provided for those who are ontop. This means that overtime the wars fought will become less meaningful and apathy towards the wars might continue. Clan War leagues might be a better solution here, read the C.A.T.S review to understand the promotion and demotion for players and how it drives engagement.

3. Clan Engagement Solution

There is certainly more clan activity since the update. More communication, more replay sharing and an increased discussion about the game itself.  We’ve seen more clan leaders send messages to the group to get people involved and the social dynamics it creates are important. I also was personally congratulated for winning my particular fights in the war and that felt good. People within the group are responding and pushing each other to perform at their best and this is very healthy for the game in general.

Another suggestion here is that rather than creating multiple decks per clan for each war, the clans should craft a single war deck that all clan members would fight with. Clan members could each submit their own deck creations along with a name, and the top picks could be voted on for the war.  You could then imagine clan discussions recounting previous wars and how certain clan mates created crazy but powerful combinations that helped the clan succeed. You would also face the same deck with your opponents and therefore clan members could coach you through each war day.

War Day

For me the actual weakest aspect of Clan Wars is war day itself.  The collection mechanics and the strategic clan chats have geared you up for an epic battle against 5 other clans. However, what actually occurs is a single match against a random opponent.  Once you’ve played this round, the war is over.

The fact that the decks you spent so long collecting and crafting are only used in a single match. War Day feel more like a game of chance rather than skill. I felt this acutely on my first war when I won quickly because I was matched with a poor opponent.  It had built up, to a single battle that was a poor experience even though I had won and then I was left waiting for the next war.

The war could be expanded with a clan tournament.  Taking 8 clans and facing them in a 3 tier round robin tournament where if your clan wins you would obtain even more cards, dynamically shifting your war deck.  A clan would then spend 1 day collecting and 3 days battling to become the ultimate clan of the 8. Also rather than a single battle, each player should have 3 fights with opposing teams giving a bigger range for skill. The further a clan progressed the more involved in chat and strategy they would become. The Archetype issue would actually become a strategic point of discussion as you played more battles you could feedback to clan mates to let them know the opponent is like to drop a pekka. by giving the clan more and more to think about as results pour in.

Conclusion

Clan Wars is a well designed update aimed at solving some of the more complex design issues that occur in older free to play titles. It’s a great solution at solving the Archetype issue that is very apparent in the core game. We’ve also see that it provides some remedy to both the YoYo problem and clan engagement but these are likely to be short term fixes. My largest criticism is that the collecting mechanic and “Going for it” feeling are both underutilised and less important that simply turning up and having your battle with any deck. The clan as a whole feels united during collection day and disjointed in war day. I believe the team should go further to create memorable clan wars that are talked about for weeks or months after the event. Players who create the war deck that win wars will feel proud and acknowledged by the clan and could go down in clan history.  For me this is the weakness with the current Clan Wars update. It’s provided a new game mode that creates a dynamic and interesting deck building environment, but it doesn’t create memorable clan battle or stories. Each clan war fades quickly into the background and the next war takes its place. The more planning, strategy and interaction the clan takes in each war, the stronger the emotional connection will be towards the event and this is what will make players stick for the longer term.

The post Clash Royale Clan Wars – An update to re-engage its loyal fans? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

I have $100 worth of Goflam. I’m going to give it to you for just $2! That’s an amazing price, right? Well, no, because you – I would hope – have attached no worth to whatever a Goflam is. It doesn’t matter how much I cut the price of one – you’re not going to buy something that means nothing, because if it means nothing, it’s worth nothing. Everything that exists in your game, from the beautifully animated assets to the clever stat balancing you spent months putting together, holds literally zero value to a player when they first start the app.

To create that value you’ll have to ensure your economy loops and design, not to mention the UX and UI, help to accentuate and create the value in the player’s heads as quickly and painlessly as possible.

There are four main components to help that along:

• Utility
• Exclusivity
• Familiarity
• Uniqueness.

Ensuring that all items satisfy at least one (preferably more) of these core components is the solid foundation that underpins great economy and systems design.

#1 Utility

The most basic way of creating value is Utility. This doesn’t just mean that an item is useful because it does x, but also creating the understanding of what, how and why the item is used. How to establish that cause/effect baseline to items and currencies, then, should be the number one question for designers as early as when the first economic flows. Merely showing a number going up as a consequence of an action can work with certain groups of players (there is a reason why Clicker games have a fanbase), but it’s far more effective to show a state change – an undesirable outcome is now a desirable outcome.

A great example of this is deployed by CSR Racing (1 and 2)’s FTUE, which deliberately forces the player to lose a race prior to introducing the concept of upgrades to them. This is not accidental – by teaching the player that this action (upgrading) results in an alternative conclusion (a loss is now a win), they instinctively link the benefits of upgrading to overcoming difficulty in the game.

CSR Racing takes a massive risk in failing the player as part of the FTUE. But it also effectively teaches the value of upgrades well beyond a simple textbox

But that’s a simple core loop demonstration – what about something more complex like an RPG with a rune or gear system? Again, it’s about ensuring that communication of why and how you can create a strong character or item is as clearly demonstrated as possible. This doesn’t mean putting tutorials and question marks everywhere for the player to tap, though. In fact, some of the best examples of helping players to see the value in items use the player-base itself to promote them. Summoner’s War, for instance uses a player-run forum for every character that let’s people quickly see who or what they need, as well as – most importantly – what runes and other latter systems they should aim to get for the character to make them even better. Contextualising the value of potentially complicated games systems for other players.

Summoners War has a full tutorial for its systems, but also has a one-button access to user-created builds and strategies for every monster you find. Because these are from ‘real’ people (aka. not the developers), they come across as much more genuine (because, well, they are!)

There is one last consideration when it comes to establishing utility – does usage of the item change over time? Ensuring that something can be always used and help the player, no matter how far they may be in the game, is vital for creating a well-rounded economy. Take FIFA Ultimate Team’s Squad Builder mode – what good is a Bronze tier player after the initial few hours of gameplay, when the player has a full squad or three filled to the brim with Gold (and even rarer) players?

Instead of letting these cards clog up the inventory, the player is given the opportunity to ‘trash’ sets of cards (for example, a Bronze League 2 team) for either limited edition or higher-tier players, thus ensuring that even when they have a core team, there is still a desire to collect more from all rarities in order to advance their squad.

By ensuring the weaker cards are always able to be used in a way that furthers the goal of the player, FIFA’s Ultimate team creates demand on what otherwise would be ‘undesirable’ players. It also manages to create a clever and compelling puzzle game in the process.

The more traditional way of ensuring commons and ‘poor’ cards or items are still useful is the classic ‘feeder’ mechanic employed by classics like Puzzles & Dragons, but while it does make sense on paper, the exponential nature of XP requirements devalues these items over time and eventually results in them losing their value.

Hearthstone takes a more basic approach to useless cards, allowing players to ‘dust’ them to gain a universal currency for creating any other card in the game

#2 Exclusivity

So you’ve established how useful that item is and the player has a good grasp on why they should care about obtaining it. Now to establish its relative worth in the game, and the key lever for that is Exclusivity.

This exclusivity is established via the taps and sinks in the economy – if the former is greater than the latter the item is of low value, and visa versa when you want to create something of high value. Ultimately the more of said item that ends up sitting the player’s inventory, the harder it is to convince them that they need more. This is a particular problem with Hard Currency, and the reason why a number of games, like Marvel: Strike Force, seem to have almost limitless ways to spend it.

Almost every screen in Marvel: Strike Force has at least one, usually more, ways of spending Hard Currency, reducing the risk of ‘hoarding’ and devaluing the currency in the process.

Exclusivity can be established in other ways, too. A limited time-frame or limited run of an item or character creates an artificial demand that can be completely disconnected from the utility of said item, although in these instances the item must have something else about it to generate value (a time-limited opportunity to earn an item that can be earned normally via gameplay is not going to suddenly make it more valuable).

It’s also worth considering the effort the player must make to activating either the taps or sinks of that item in the first place. Hearthstone‘s Dust, for instance, is earned at a painfully slow rate, which in turn helps reinforce the value of the Legendary cards by allowing the player to put an estimate of how much time it would take to obtain them, even if – on a paper loop – these cards can simply be obtained through gameplay.

#3 Familiarity

One benefit licensed games have is that their items often come with value attached to them – the characters, locations, and other elements are things fans of the franchises are already familiar with. A great example of this is Daryl in The Walking Dead: No-Man’s Land or Darth Vader in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Both are used as powerful retention devices, earned via gameplay (in the case of Vader, this is the only way he can be earned).

Daryl in Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is used as a compelling D7 retention device for fans of the show. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you have to have him…

…meanwhile, Galaxy of Heroes uses the iconic Darth Vader as their long-term achievement reward. If you’re an original trilogy Star Wars fan, you have to have him.

Even when it comes to non-licensed titles, though, do not underestimate the power of pre-existing biases when it comes to how players see value. In Best Fiends Forever we switched from collecting and spending ‘mites’ (the original game’s currency) to coins prior to launch, simply because getting coins ‘felt’ better internally, and testers had an immediate understanding of why they want more of the item. In another unrelated title we switched out from the fictionally more relevant ‘plasma’ as our hard currency, purely because testers were left utterly confused as to what it was. Despite Diamonds not making any sense in that game’s world, it solved the problem immediately.

Coins and other items with real-world value connotations are instantly more compelling to collect. Don’t pass up on opportunities to leverage existing biases when it comes to creating a sense of value.

#4 Uniqueness

In multiplayer or social-focused games, standing out from the crowd is one of the most compelling motivators for obtaining an item. But even when contact with other players is primarily limited to 30 seconds in a lobby (as with current chart-topper Fortnite), the main goal for players beyond winning is obtaining unique and cool cosmetic items to show off, whether as part of a retention-focused soft subscription or as one-off purchases in-store.

While cosmetic rewards may not influence the mechanics of gameplay, they most certainly do have an effect on how someone feels when playing the game and how they’re seen by others. A unique skin can make you feel special, while a generic skin everyone is walking around in feels terrible.

The amount of time you actually see others’ skins may be all of 30 seconds in the lobby and a split second in-game, but that’s plenty of time to show off my limited-time purchase-only Raven skin (complete with Electro-shuffle emote) to this non-paying player.

In fact, Fornite goes one step beyond most other games with a cosmetic economy by stopping the player from having control over how they look entirely until they have at least one unlocked or purchased skin. This lack of choice coupled with the lack of uniqueness or exclusivity is a powerful driver to persuade them to purchase V-Bucks for the in-game store, and gives the cosmetics even more value than other similar titles.

Fortnite goes one step further than other cosmetic-based economies by not allowing the player to select their character unless they own a skin, thereby depriving them both of choice and style if they don’t pay

In Summary

So when drawing out the taps/sinks economy flow, be sure to sit down and write up the thought process of the player when it comes to valuing the parts of the loop.

Utility: Why is said item or currency now important to the player and how can that value be clearly shown and demonstrated?

Exclusivity: Are the taps and sinks of this currency balanced? Do players have an abundance or a shortage of this currency most of the time?

Familiarity: Are the currencies and items using established mental models for players? Or are you fighting against what might be familiar to players?

Uniqueness: Are there items which are more exclusive to players? Are players able to show off this exclusivity?

By answering these questions when designing the game economy, you can more easily identify what players will want to purchase when it comes to your monetisation design and what goals players are likely to set for themselves outside of tutorials and challenges.

The post The Value Economy: How to create compelling virtual items appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

Instant Games – Facebook’s new developer platform for games on messenger and News Feed – isn’t like most new platform transitions, so for most, this meant a more cautious approach. For one, messenger games are built on HTML5. HTML5 as a technology doesn’t have the best track record for creating great games. Messenger also isn’t necessarily a new platform either – more like a platform within a platform. The platform comes with challenges that come with working within Apple and Google’s ecosystems.

Roll a year on, however, and the platform is showing signs of strength. Games are getting massive growth, developers have competitive eCPMs for advertising, and there is promise of in-app purchases coming in the future. Facebook Messenger continues to grow in user base numbers, reaching more than 1.3 billion monthly users in late 2017. Looking at public user base data that is surfaced on the splash screen for games that load in messenger, the top 10 games have between 3 million and 10 million players. Growth has been unprecedented. A game “Snake Mania” grew by 2.2 million players in seven days during February 2018. Messenger is fast becoming a viable platform.

Player base delta from Feb 19 to Feb 26, 2018
Source: Data as displayed via Instant Games loading screens

However, approaching the messenger platform isn’t the same as mobile design or social web games. Many mobile devs are trying direct ports of their mobile games over to messenger. Some have succeeded with this method (Cut the Rope and Adventure Capitalist) but most have failed. It seems that this isn’t a straight-technical platform change, design needs to change as well.

I believe that moving to Instant Games will be a product and design shift similar to what mobile was in 2010-2011. While many of the same gameplay interactions and UX learnings can be applied to Instant Games on messenger (it still is a mobile platform with touch controls), to drive retention on the platform is not a simple port. Re-thinking core loops, progression, interactions from the ground up is necessary to reach the full potential of the platform.

This is something that we’ve learned at Chatterbox Games over the last year of developing games for Facebook Instant Games and iMessage – that many of the best practices of mobile don’t apply to messenger games, and to overcome the initial challenges you really have to think about the opportunities that only exist in the messenger context.

It’s not a Marketing Channel

Thinking messenger is a marketing channel is commonly how many mobile game developers will approach the platform. I don’t blame them – mobile is a highly competitive battlefield and developers are desperate for any leg up they can for getting installs. However, developers who think messenger games are a free place to get new players are mistaken.

While messenger games can gain insane levels of growth, they are all limited to playing within messenger itself. Facebook has worked aggressively to build Instant Games on messenger as a platform on its own. One of Facebook goals is most likely to drive increased engagement within messenger, not drive players into your games, so attempting to use the platform to pull players away from the platform won’t work – nor will you need to. Games can work and be profitable as its own business unit, so why fight against it?

That being said, Instant Games can be used for branding. Nordeus and ZeptoLab have done a great job at this; Golden Boot by Nordeus has Top Eleven branding all over the game, but does not directly link to the game or push players outside the platform, while ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope Instant re-creates the same feeling of playing a native mobile version. This can drive organic installs to their mobile game, but regardless both of these games have a substantial user base on Instant Games and can build a business case on its own. Branding has its benefits, but revenue generating games are always better.

If messenger is not an acquisition channel, then the games built for it have to stand on its own in terms of retention and monetization. It’s possible, but only if you think critically of how retention can be sustained within a chat app.

Retention is Difficult

As we’ve mentioned before, retention on messenger platforms is lower than native mobile – indeed it’s more similar to Facebook canvas than it is to native mobile. This is intuitive: Most users are going into messenger to chat with their friends, not to play games. Messenger games don’t install to your phone – there’s no icon on the home screen, no push notifications, no red dots to let you know when to come back. Messenger games have to drive retention in other ways.

Having no install is great for discoverability, but not great for retention

Retention instead has to come from what’s unique about the platform: social interactions. Retention is driven by friends pulling you back to play against them, or working together.

On native mobile, Facebook adoption has become tougher. Most developers would rather push players to play in guilds with other active players than real friends, yet knowing from launching countless mobile games in the past, players that connect to Facebook and actively play with friends retain far better. With messenger, this social connection is no longer an option – Facebook connection is a natural part of the user experience. Right from the start you have access to friends that are playing the game, displaying them in a leaderboard, challenging them, gifting them.

Social Contexts & Bots are Imperative

Messenger’s first priority is still to be a chat app, so real estate for games isn’t limitless. In order to have a path to your game and retain players, you have to fight to stay relevant in a player’s chat application. Facebook has the games tab along the bottom for finding new games to play, but to retain players you’re going to have to go farther than that.

This is done through creating social contexts and by maintaining a bot channel:

Social contexts are chats with friends or groups which your game is relevant to the conversation. You can see from the image above, in both a group chat and a one-on-one conversation, a player has posted to this chat and now there’s a clear call to action to start the game.

Your Bot channel is the other method – think of this as your home screen icon within the Messenger app. However, it functions more like a chat with a friend. This allows you to communicate via messages to your players, giving out rewards and notifying them when things are happening within your game:

However, bot channels can quickly become spammy, and Facebook is very restrictive over how often games can send messages. If players don’t engage with your bot, it will quickly drop off their messenger home page. If players don’t want to be bugged by your game, muting the channel is a quick button press away. Facebook has learned from their early gaming days to prevent game developers from ruining the user experience of their platform.

As a result, this is the real design challenge for a messenger game:

• How do you design games that can naturally stay relevant in both friend’s chats and group’s?
• How do you design mechanics so that bots that aren’t spam and remain relevant to players?
• How does the design of your games make the bot and social contexts compelling to return?

These aren’t normal design problems for a native mobile game.

Creating Social Interactions

The best games on the platform will attempt to create the strongest social interactions. This will both be great for the game’s virality and their retention, so let’s just push players to spam their friends in order to play, right?

This has led to many of the initial interactions on the platform to be straight from the playbook of old Facebook social games:

• Gifting Lives between friends in Cookie Crush
• Getting “Honor Points” for sending messages to friends in Everwing
• Forcing players to play with friends even in single player experiences

However, this isn’t really leveraging the platform for what it does best, and isn’t sustainable.

What has stood out as new to messenger games are group chat dynamics: a game pushes players to engage with their group chats: working together to solve a problem or competing against each other.

The strongest implementation of social interactions are “group raids” – the idea that you can start a challenging level that can be only completed if you work together with others in a group chat. The more powerful the members are, the more difficult the challenge you can complete, and the bigger the rewards.

Games: Quest Friends by Mojiworks and Everwing by Game Closure

This system allows players of all progress levels to work together, prod each other to play more, and feel rewarding to play with friends. However, this is limited to games that can give a similar depth of rewards as an RPG game, not all games can work with a system like this.

Other games attempt to use turn-based gameplay. That after each turn a player would send you their move. We’ve attempted a couple times last year to focus on turn-based interactions with your friends in messenger games, but we found it isn’t the best for retention. The key reason: if players can’t keep playing because they’re waiting for friends, they will leave the game. In the same way that “Words with Friends” or “Draw Something” from native mobile were interesting only while your friends played the game, as soon as your friends stopped responding, you had no reason to come back. Some games have gotten this to work (8 Ball Pool by Miniclip and Words with Friends), but these were launched very early on the platform and have sustained a large critical mass of players. New developers to messenger will have a harder time to reach that critical mass.

For some games, to solve this means adding more modes where you can play against strangers as well.  When looking at Golden Boot from Nordeus, this most likely drove a lot of its success. You can match with strangers when friends aren’t active. In the case of Snake Mania, the top growing game mentioned above, focuses solely on playing with strangers.

However, I believe this starts to water down what separates messenger games from native mobile games. While this is currently working – by mimicking what is already retaining well on native mobile – the future for messenger games will do a better job of integrating social interactions with friends. Making playing with your friends the optimal way to progress.

As discoverability becomes an issue on the platform, developers will need to rely more heavily on social contexts to drive retention and installs. Games that are able to integrate social interactions smartly will be the winners.

Conclusions

Instant Games are still in their infancy, but the marketplace is maturing very quickly. Within a year, there already has been big shifts in what games work on the platform. Many games that were big on the platform a year ago are no longer (Galaga, Space Invaders, PAC-Man), and plenty of new hits have moved up the charts within the last months (Snake Mania, Cookie Crush).

Instant Games games will be the “Wild West” for some time. As more developers join the fray and discoverability becomes an issue, the games’ design will need move towards making social-focused games on the platform. My recommendations for anyone looking to join the messenger gaming market:

• • This isn’t about UA for your mobile game: Instant Games is a platform on its own and can be a viable business model. Work with the platform holders and build an audience on messenger, don’t think of it as a new way to acquire users.
  • Retention isn’t easy: Without the install, its hard to stay relevant to your players. You have to stay on the player’s mind and drive social interactions to stay relevant.
  • Design for a useful Bot & a variety of Social Channels: Bots and social contexts are the only way to drive players back to your game, so create lots of ways your friends can work together and ensure your bot stays useful.
  • Don’t let social interactions get in the way of engagement: While social interactions are useful for pulling players back, don’t use social interactions to pace players. Don’t make players wait for their friends to play the game.
  • Social interactions between friends is where to focus: Despite many games success so far focusing on strangers, as the platform becomes more competitive the area to focus will be on strong social interactions between friends. This channel will drive sustained retention and engagement.

I’m really looking forward to the year ahead for messaging games – it’s going to be a wild one. I can assure you one thing for those who are building messenger games: It won’t be boring.

The post Getting the Message: Game design for Facebook Instant appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

In most markets, the concept of ‘pay to win’ is not acceptable, and players need to feel they can compete or progress whether they choose to spend nothing, something, or a lot. At the same time, those players who do choose to pay need to feel that they’re getting value for money – there’s nothing more dangerous to your game than paying players feeling short-changed.

We’ve recently beta launched Dragon’s Watch – a tactical battle RPG for mobile. It uses the collection/gacha/fusion system seen in many Asian and, increasingly, western games. Players spend either soft or hard currency to summon new heroes, which can be fused and evolved before taking them into battles.

The roots of the gacha system can be traced back to collectible trading cards – I remember, as a child, collecting Panini football stickers, despite having zero interest in sport. Why? The excitement of collecting, trading, completing sets, getting hold of a rare, metallic team badge made the hobby worthwhile to me, despite having no interest in the subject matter. In the digital realm, we can go further to make sure players always feel they’re getting good value.

We’re still at the beginning of our journey with our game, learning each week what players do and don’t like. We know there’s a huge amount more we can do, but below are some of the key pillars we’ve built our game on and lessons we’ve learned so far.

1. A prize every time

We put a huge amount of time, effort and love into creating beautifully animated characters, with their own backstories, stats, and skills. Each one is unique, both in appearance and gameplay and, hopefully, collecting one gives value to players over and above their use in the game. We love to see our players proudly curating and displaying their hero collections (just like in the video below, where one of our loyal players does a gacha and is rewarded with a really rare event hero first time – which he totally wasn’t expecting), as much for the artwork as for the gameplay value.  

2. Completion is a reward

Football stickers work well as a collectible because players are naturally organised into teams. Completing a team is a much more achievable goal than completing an entire sticker album – if the only goal is completing a near-unachievable set, then players are bound to get bored quickly. We split our heroes into themed sets – some small, some big, so players can frequently get the buzz of completing one.

3. Exclusivity, rarity, and power

It’s important to distinguish between rarity – how likely a player is to summon a certain hero – from power – how strong that hero is in play. If the rarest characters are also the most powerful, you run the risk of making players who don’t get them feel their gameplay experience has been compromised as a result.

Similarly, we periodically run live events where a new hero is introduced, that can only be summoned during that event. Again, if that hero is overpowered, players without it will be at a major disadvantage – which is neither fun nor fair. If you’re making a hero extraordinary in one way, that needs to be balanced with some corresponding weakness. In this way, those players who choose to pay, and so to collect a broader set of heroes don’t end up with a more powerful squad, rather a more flexible set of heroes to build with, giving them more tactical and strategic choices in play.

4. Waste not, want not

It’s inevitable that, in a random system, players won’t always get the item they were hoping for – the excitement of summoning a rare hero relies on that rarity being real. Collecting football stickers would be no fun if you just bought whatever player you wanted, and filled up your album accordingly. The ‘game’ is all about chance. Try playing Monopoly or Cluedo without a dice and you’ll soon realise that the random element is what makes many games fun.

While a duplicate football sticker can be traded with friends, the nature of variable rarity always means players all end up with the same second division players, and nobody to trade them with. Digital goods can be traded with others worldwide, or somehow used in game to give players good value even when they’ve received something they weren’t hoping for.

The fusion system allows players to fuse unwanted heroes into preferred ones, leveling them up to be more powerful in battle and, eventually, ready to evolve into a new type of hero. Recognising that players would be particularly disappointed if they receive a hero they already own, we make that leveling up extra generous if you fuse two heroes of the same type together. In that way, even the most disappointing summon (getting something you already have) gives you an additional benefit, giving each cloud a silver lining.

5. Be upfront, respect your players

Apple recently updated their terms to require developers to make clear the odds of receiving randomised items. We publish these, both in game and on our wiki and Discord channel. The nature of completely random drops is that some players will get what they want immediately while others might keep summoning and never get there.

Inevitably, despite publishing the odds and trying to make every purchase feel worthwhile, the occasional player will conclude the game is fixed against them and complain – what we’re seeing from our early players is that enough people do win the heroes they’re looking for to rise to our defence anytime someone feels the tables are stacked. All you can do here is be upfront and honest about how the game systems work.

We’ve been surprised by just how clued in players are about these things – they know more about the drop rates in our, and competitors’ games than we do, and are quick to point out not only where they think we are being too aggressive, but also where we should be charging more/giving less in order to keep the balance between happy players and a viable game economy.

This is just a glimpse into some of the most potent points that are top of mind following the beta launch of Dragon’s Watch – a list we can expect to swell further in the coming months. You never stop learning, which is why any resource like Mobile Free to Play that adds to your library of knowledge is worth its weight in gold.

Harry Holmwood is the co-founder of London-based mobile studio The Secret Police and European GM of Japanese animation, music, video games, television series specialist Marvelous Entertainment.

The post Getting Back to the Roots of Gacha: 5 Things We Learned Developing Dragon’s Watch appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer