This week I am prototyping a new narrative system for a puzzle-renovation game like Lily’s Garden. I generated lots of ideas and then I selected the best ones. Now it’s time to translate those ideas to a prototype.
Goals and features
Before of starting sketching a flowchart for our Twine prototype, it’s important to understand why to prepare a prototype in first place. A prototype is not something ready to go out. It is not a product. A prototype is useful to:
Persuade the stakeholders that this step is necessary and invite them to think in its ROI
Align the vision of all the team members that will work on the feature
State all the assumptions, useful to prove with data and analytics the feature’s success
Inspire roadmap updates to fix the feature’s development in the pipeline.
I have very few time to do a proper prototype, I am doing this exercise for “ikigai” (= to do something I enjoy for the sake of it). I need to put some limitations, so that my prototype will feature:
Only 1 event to show how the Player’s journey changes meaningfully thanks to the feature
Player’s development across the journey
Maximum 3 valuable binary choices, in order to avoid too many outcomes. In fact with 3 choices we will get 2^3=8 endings.
The prototype should not be minimum. I am against minimum viable things. The prototype should show all that’s necessary to truly unleash potential, instead! That is why I will use the main idea and the two secondary ones described previously.
Prototype definition
Important for this kind of games is to keep things very linear and straight. Those are not RPG games full of options. The only options that the Player has at every moment is either to start a new task or play a new level.
Glossary
Lilys: the new feature will be called Lilys. Lilys are a resource that the Player accumulates based on creating special tiles (combining 4+ tiles) and/or getting and using power-ups, which are special tiles at the end of the day.
Lily Branches: every Day has a set of choices. Some choice are cosmetic, those are already present in the game. Some other choice can be meaningful story branches. In order to take some of the options, the Player should use Lilys.
Choice Points: Every time the Player makes a choice gets Choice Points which are useful to unlock extra rewards at the end of the day.
Variable Rewards: every time the Player completes one Lilys branch, there is the chance of getting a power-up. Variable rewards are useful to foster engagement. The Players in this way will have reasons to make Lilys Choices.
The Player can choose to Play a level or start a Task
During the Level, the Player will get and use power-ups
At the end of the Level the power-ups and special tiles will be counted and converted in Lilys
During a task, the Player will have to make a meaningful choice
One of the branches will involve the use of Lilys
All the branches will give choice points, useful for the end of the Day to get extra rewards
if the Player uses Lilys, a random reward will pop-out: 30 minutes infinite lives. It is important that the Player feel that there is a random factor there.
Now I can proceed in developing the proper prototype!
This week I decided to prototype a new narrative system for Lily’s Garden using Twine. After deciding the right problem statement, which is:
How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?
I passed to generate a lot of ideas on my notebook. Then I filtered out the best of them.
Ideas classification
Now it’s time to map the ideas in a proper chart. The X axis will represent the engagement, the metric to improve. Engagement is measured with session length and average sessions per day. Those are the KPIs.
On the Y axis consider the motivation to stay longer and open the game more during the day. This article by The Games Refinery will help us.
The two main motivational drivers for this genre are Mastery and Expression. So that we have two possible charts to map out the outcome of our brainstorming.
I classify the ideas in both those maps and see if we spot something in common. Usually this process is a team process and takes time and discussion. Again, in my case is just a quick exercise.
Against mastery we can see that we have 3 possible ideas to build:
Choose your Story: creating and using special tiles/power-ups during the puzzle match, you get points to invest in story branches.
Day Perks: Once a Day ends according to what you used you can get extra rewards (boosters, power-ups, infinite lives, ingots)
Rewards Missions: playing the game and performing positive actions such as buy lives, get extra movements, return every day, you unlock a special currency which can be converted in boosters and power-ups.
Mapping ideas with expression in mind, a single idea is in the hot spot.
We have then selected our main idea: Choose your Story. Secondary ideas: Day Perks and Rewards Missions. On this base we can build our prototype!
This week just for the sake of ikigai I am prototyping a new narrative system for Lily’s Garden. Today I focused my efforts to the idea generation. I wrote down hundreds of ideas and preselected just some of them, which will be shown here.
The narrative of Lily’s Garden
The story is divided into large day arcs with subplots. Each day involves renovating a specific location. In order to do that, the Player has to beat puzzle levels earning Stars. Stars are useful to start tasks.
In the course of the game’s renovations, Lily collects items like keys and photographs, builds her relationships with other characters, and discovers more about the estate and her family history.
We will use those terms in this post:
Day: set of specific tasks that complete a story arc. We can consider a day like a sequence of an episode in TV series.
Positive action: use power-up/boosters, lives refill, use extra movement, complete a goal also if not beating the level, and so on.
In order to better select the ideas, I’ve spent 1 hour reading reviews. Data.ai allows you to filter favorable and critical reviews.
The game let’s you decide the style of your house and decorations. It is fun and easy to play. The perfect experience for when you just want to relax. Engaging and full of power-ups to beat hard levels that you can create on the board or get by using ingots and completing tasks. The main character Lily reacts to everything and completes tasks.
The new system should be built on those strengths. Maybe it is better to have something more specific towards power-ups and tasks completion.
Many levels are hard to beat and some Player feels stuck. The day’s storylines have not always the same quality, probably because of different kind of writers involved in the project. Players lose what they got at the end of some event. Some Player may feel that the game is too greedy in monetizing the puzzle part (extra movements and boosters).
Our system should be able to mitigate the puzzle limitations. The Player should not feel stuck and if they are doing all the efforts to beat a specific level, that should be rewarded somehow.
References
I took some notes on things used in other games with a narrative component. I didn’t looked at top competitors, I just took notes on type of games that I already worked on in the past. This because one of the requirements of this task is agility.
Episode: Choose your Story: Premium choices for premium paths. Great for re-playability, usually something that is not considered in puzzle-renovation games because the days cannot be replayed.
It is interesting to be able to unlock an extra path during a Day, also if some Player may want to get to other outcomes. Branches should always connect again before of the end, to avoid this effect.
Tales: Choose your own Story: Trials and paths according to stats accumulated during the Story like in a roleplaying game. It would be great to connect the puzzle and the story somehow. Maybe associating each character to every level and let them accumulate statistics according to the power-up used and more in general to the positive actions done.
From the other side, this can complicate too much the system and it may become hard to balance and monitor the Player’s progression on the long term.
Fallout Shelter: There are characters to whom the Player can assign specific tasks to get more points and currency. What if during a specific day you can put your characters performing extra tasks to get extra perks?
This adds an idle/farming layer which may be not suitable to the core audience of this kind of games.
Project Makeover: Customize the aesthetics of avatars in order to make them successful for the end of the episode (day). Maybe the characters of a specific day set can strive to arrive perfect to the end of the arc, in order to the ending be more satisfying.
The risk is to fall in the trap of misogynic and racist narratives, thou. While makeover is great, it should be carefully designed to not offend anyone. Especially when something works out and translates to UA creatives it enters in a dangerous territory. Is that what we want as designers? I don’t think so.
Survivor.io: Complete missions and get an extra currency, useful to be exchanged with other resources during a season. It’s a pretty common practice among casual games and gives lots of agency to the Players.
The problem comes when the event end because Players may accumulate a resource and then they lose it or it’s automatically converted in something not valuable to them.
Selected ideas
I wrote down hundreds of ideas and, since I am doing this alone, preselected some of them. The format I use is: title, wireframe and short description. It is the best way of taking them the day after and decide what to do.
How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?
Accumulate perks during a day and collect them based on the positive actions done at the end of the day. Each day has a limited numbers of perks that can be achieved and unlocked at the end.
Everytime you create and use a power-up (selecting it in level intro or creating it during the match), you accumulate points useful to take specific paths. If you want to take a specific path, then, you should create use more boosters in the puzzle game.
Start specific tasks by performing positive actions and get extra perks on completion. If the day ends, all the tasks are immediately completed.
Achievement system for positive actions with special resource to collect and use for special choices during the story.
Obtain extra personalization options if you manage to perform a certain number of positive actions.
At the end of an event, recount all the positive actions done and give extra perks according to the milestone. Giving the premium currency can be extremely valuable for the Players, but it may influence the monetization.
If the Player uses X boosters/power-ups/extra movements to beat a level and still loses, he is allowed to postpone that level for a while.
Conclusion
In a real context with a real team, all this process would be a workshop. Also, the study of top competitors is very important. This exercise is good to keep my mind fresh and to quickly play with narrative techniques I learnt in past weeks.
Puzzle games with renovation mechanic are on top of the charts. They success is tremendous and they are clearly a red ocean market. Many companies try to swim that ocean, so that this week I have decided to make an experiment to celebrate that I got a certification from The Narrative Department.
hooray! I did it! 🙂
The narrative system of Puzzle-Renovation games
The experiment consists of a design iteration to improve the narrative of puzzle-renovation games. I will consider this experiment completed once I have a playable prototype made in Twine featuring the result of this process.
One of the reasons why the Players churn is that they get stuck at some point. The progression curve of levels always goes up, so that with the time the puzzle part gets harder and it’s more difficult to progress through the story.
The issue comes because those games consider a positive outcome the fact of beating a level, but they do not consider all the efforts the Players make at all.
At the start of the level, the Player may decide to use a power-up to get help for the level. The first time, the Player will not know how is the layout. Which is why new games warns when there is a hard level.
The Player needs lives to start a level. In case they have no lives they should wait or get a lives refill. In order to mitigate this friction, most modern games use lives as an engagement tool. Give the Players infinite lives for X minutes and you will get longer sessions.
Puzzle levels are based on a limited number of moves. When they end, the Player can get 2-5 extra moves to beat the level. There is strategy here, in fact the Players study the status of their goals and decide. When the Player is near to the win condition is generally more willing to get extra movements. In order to reach the sweet spot, the number of moves is data driven.
During the level the Players may decide to use boosters which are like power-ups but “live”, because they can be got and used on the fly. The Players know the status of the board when they decide to get and use a booster. Boosters add deepness and strategy, they a great driver for monetization.
The Lens of Problem Statement
When the Player completes all the goals, the story continues and the house can be renovated. If we study this flowchart, thou, we can see that the Players can do a lot of things that can be considered positive toward that goal.
They can use a power-up at level start. Get a lives refill. They can get extra moves if they are near the win condition. They can use boosters. All those things are hardly rewarded by the renovation narrative of those games. This is the problem statement for this week:
How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?
Target: puzzle renovation Players more interested in the story
KPI engagement: average session number/day and average duration / session
What: create new rewards that help the Players get interesting story outcomes based on puzzle efforts
The game I will use for the exercise is Lily’s Garden, by Tactile Games.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary the renovation is the act or process of repairing and improving something, especially a building so that it is in good condition again.
Industry experts don’t stop talking about the trend of renovation mechanics in casual games. Why do they work? According to this brand new video, because they are a driver for Player progression.
Game design disciplines
Renovation mechanic is so popular across teams because gives work to all the design team:
Narrative design plays a critical role in delivering a memorable story
Level designers can use the environment to convey the story (environmental storytelling)
UX Designers are key to deliver a smooth experience, making the switch between puzzle match and renovation as smooth as possible
Systems Designers help find the right economy to support all the actions according to the Players’ session daily number and duration.
Acting for the renovation
In casual games, the act of renovation consists of:
choosing a task to complete
use one or more stars to perform it
introductory dialogue
select a style for the furniture
renovation cutscene
story dialogue
Town Story: Renovation Match-3 Puzzle Game
The story is usually delivered as a consequence of the act of renovation.
Repairing and Improving
Have you ever asked yourself WHY is this mechanic so popular among casual games? To me it is because those games are about putting things in order.
In match-3 games you put things in order, in line
In popper games you clean the patterns that you spot
In merge games you make space on the board
All those games have extra goals that consist often of an obstacle. The frustration of not beating a level for that obstacle is a driver for monetization but also of churning out, as this brilliant LinkedIn post by Yasin Hatiboğlu.
All those levers fit perfectly with repairing and improving, with the metaphor of renovation.
Building
Last but not least, in service games for mobile phones there is something very present in Players’ minds. You have a world waiting for you that you are helping build somehow. You don’t just have a game to complete, those games are infinite.
The fantasy of free-to-play games, the aspirational aspect of those, almost always contains this: it’s your help and your choice that help build the World you have in your pocket.
When you work as game designer for companies you will invest a lot of time studying other games. The best thing you can do is to prepare and evolve a personal framework to optimize this job. This post is to detail what I would focus my efforts on.
Specializations
Game design is a huge word, the word for a container. Jesse Schell writes that game design is “the act of deciding how a game should be”. As you can read, everyone practices that. We, game designers, are facilitators of that act.
To me, game design has four main specializations:
Level design
Narrative/Content design
Gameplay/UX design
Systems design
If you work as a generalist, you should focus on all four. If you are a specialist, it is still good having clear the relationships and overlaps with the others
The Experience
The most important thing for a game designer is NOT the game. Really, it isn’t. The game is a medium to an end. And that end is called: EXPERIENCE.
We can write a book only on this term, but for the sake of the article it is important to mention that we game designers should be able to understand the experience of other games under two lenses:
what is the intention behind them
what does them say actually
Understanding the intention is a matter of dealing with lots of analysis, but nowadays developers publish a lot of content. My suggestion is to watch videos and read articles and hear podcasts to try to spot all that’s possible. Playing the game completes everything, and it is very important to play it deeply. For example, if you are really analysing a free-to-play game you should also buy something to understand how it feels.
In order to really understand what the experience says, the best way is to take notes on everything related with your specialties. And when I say everything I mean absolutely everything.
Record all game sessions and take screens
Copy all texts, level maps and try to empathize with those designers
I discovered recently a great article on how to think in the first steps of the design for a new game. I can’t wait of facilitating some workshop based on this framework.
How to use any framework
First you test it with a workshop facilitation. In this way you can understand how the framework you consider is really useful inside of a team. You will see other people interacting with it, which is great.
Then you use the framework in question to breakdown and deconstruct existing games, especially competitors.
Finally you take notes of all of your learning and create a new framework starting from it. It is almost never a good idea to use a framework in the same way it is. Remember: a specific context and a group of people created that framework, you cannot adapt it to your reality without changes.
Very often we hear about best practices like things we should apply religiously without questioning. That is almost never the case, also because when a practice becomes a best practice, usually it becomes also an old one.
Online discourse regarding the gaming industry is very often monopolized by marketing and business people. Which is normal, since they are “selling” ideas and spreading new and old trends.
What makes me smile often is when I read that a specific genre has died. It is like “hey, everyone! Stop doing this because now people don’t want to play this kind of game anymore.”.
As a designer, anyway, I know that Players look for experiences capable of satisfying fantasies. This has nothing to do with a specific genre. Good games start with an assumption on fantasy. “Be a cat” can be a fantasy (STRAY, an indie game). “Win big at Casino” can be another one (SlotoMania, free to play mobile game). “Dominate your opponent mind” (Chess, classic game).
Starting from fantasy, then you build your actions and mechanics on top. And then you design your economy starting from goals structure. You can eventually add up a setting/world and, finally, the story.
During the process of defining your actions and economy, you should study the market and its trends of course. But I would like to invite you not falling into the trap of riding a trend for the sake of it OR rejecting ideas just because there are not much success cases.
When the market is emptying of a specific genre there are usually a series of reasons. Something that doesn’t work for the most can be a huge opportunity for your reality. Don’t be a follower, write your own story.
When someone asks me for a feedback for their game, I try to never give my opinion. In fact, I believe that working in games makes us liable of huge biases that come from experiences which are subjective.
I try to make them questions, instead. Try to understand really what’s behind their choices. Then I tell them what I would ask to playtesters to challenge their assumptions.
I believe that is the best way of giving feedback. From the other hand, the tendency is to say what one would do instead. And the worst is that then someone may follow blindly your advice. Applying that advice in their understanding, not what you said them in first place.
That is why it’s important be humble, somehow. Being humble is being completely honest. In order to be that, the right start is always a certain amount of questions.
Hello people, I am back from my well deserved vacations ready for a new year full of content for free for you! Hope you all did enjoyed a nice vacations with your families and your best people.
The other day an ex student of mine made a question in a WhatsApp channel we are both in: “Can someone recommend where to create a game design porfolio?”
There is no specialized website, as far as I know, to create a portfolio. That is bad, because of discoverability, but is good because forces us designers in thinking out of the box and not using templates and pre-defined layouts.
I personally use itch.io, also if there are a whole lot of things that I cannot put on my portfolio because they belong to specific companies where I signed NDAs. That’s the eternal issue of our job.
Study your target
When you prepare your portfolio, you should think in WHO will read it. Will it be an HR manager? Maybe a lead game designer? Or a CEO? Every people speaks differently and every company does so, too.
Look at companies you would like to work for
Look at their game designers and try to find their portfolios (you can also ask them on LinkedIn)
Create your porfolio using well your references
At the end of the day doing a portfolio is a for of design!
What to put in a portfolio
As I said before, I think there is NOT a general rule, a template, a standard, a best practice. You should find your way and make your own talents shine!
I can tell you what I would put:
Start with a video gameplay with most meaningful moment of each exercise/job. People don’t want to have to download anything to see what you did.
Add some capture with very special moments, most memorable moments.
Notes on what you learn and on your process. You can use the STARR method that is also used by some recruiter.
Link to external documents and references. I use Google Drive for that!
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