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.
I loved this NoClip documentary on the making of Dishonored.
I believe that in terms of narrative there are a lot of interesting aspects that can be taken from this concept. Take the match-3 with decoration genre for a moment. You earn a star beating a level and you use that star to complete the next task. A cutscene with dialogues is shown and then new tasks are opened. You have to play more levels and see how the story goes on.
What if:
we can make the environment speak more about what’s happening
we can let the Players explore better and interact with environment discovering where to use the stars to fix things
we can deliver the story reacting to the Player’s actions instead than stop it to show a cutscene or a dialogue
I am completing this week the fall edition of The Narrative Department, by Susan ‘O Connor. Each Wednesday we have a writing prompt from her. I want to share with you the result of yesterday’s writing prompt.
Prompt
Write about why you like stories in games! You can talk generally, talk about a specific game, talk about what you like about writing, etc. Think of it like talking with a friend who shares your enthusiasm.
Text
I like stories because they make me connect with the activity that I am doing while playing. Every game, also Tetris, tells a story to me. But when I see a written story I can appreciate the dedication of human beings behind that craft. I appreciate that because I admire other human beings like me at the end. I believe that these abilities are Gifts so that make me connect more with God and all creation.
When I see a bad story or a story badly delivered, somehow I am happy that the story is still there. For example, in the mobile games that I play often I skip dialogues entirely and I feel that I lose part of the story somehow. That feeling can be a little frustrating, too. I do it anyway, but with the sensation that something is missing from my experience. Which tells me that the story is still important to me.
I am playing Horizon Forbidden West now. At the start I followed all the branches in dialogues with NPCs, now I want to complete the game so that I am skipping most of the optional dialogues. I have to say that part could be improved a lot, because the dialogues do not add too much to the experience. I like more when a dialogue has a meaning and delivers me something apart from just more context. Often it is better to deliver a story with less words, to me. Also if I imagine that there is a type of Player who likes to read everything and hear a lot. I respect that, but still I think that there is a margin of improvement.
I like when the game is delivering you a story, because oftentimes you are not interacting with the game during the delivery itself. In dialogues, cutscenes and so on. It’s a way to distress my brain, and I like to have that moment of breath. A game to be memorable should offer many levels of intensity at any moment.
I remember in The Last of Us the feelings that I had moment to moment. Appreciating all that work was great, made me love even more video games. Made me feel more engaged with the team that made that game.
Today I woke up with this simple question. Maybe it’s just me wanting to work on something different than simply think in engagement, retention and monetization mechanics. Which is typical in mobile free-to-play.
I am 40 years old now and I grew up with consoles and PC. Industry experts say that immersion is only possible on a sofa looking at a TV screen. I feel really immersed with my right hand on a mouse and the left one on WASD.
Teenagers today, anyway, have always a device in their hands: the mobile phone. They are immersed in social activities and networks and they spend almost 10 hours per day swiping, liking, sharing and so on.
I hear often that mobile players look for engagement, not immersion. Still I believe that great adventures like the games we play on console can be possible to achieve on new mobile devices.
What if the time is now? Maybe the average age of hardcore players is gone up only because teens prefer to interact with another device.
If you are Picasso, you can share just two lines on a blank page and the people will feel the meaning of your art. I ask you: are you like Picasso?
I write this because junior game designers willing to join the industry often do this: they share uncompleted things or just some capture with a game engine opened and two blocks in the Scene. This is NOT how you show your talent to the World out there. This is noise, ego and insecurity.
I know you are struggling because it is very hard to get a job as junior. Believe me, I lived the same years ago. You want to get noticed by recruiters and maybe managers and CEOs. Sharing the first draft of a level means that you opened the engine and you put blocks in a scene. Just this.
What’s your reasoning behind that level?
The beat sequence?
What are the design goals?
The mechanics involved?
I can see nothing interesting in those posts.
The worst happens when social challenges like Blocktober appear. I am completely in favor of those challenges! I took those challenges in the past and I will probably take them in the next future who knows. But the results of those challenges are not something worth sharing on a professional network nor on your portfolio. Those are for you to improve, not for the others to see. If you are junior you should work hard everyday on your talent. Do not complete tasks just for the sake of showing off.
I did the same, years ago. It meant nothing. Believe me.
As a great percentage of game designers out there, I really admire and respect Hideo Kojima. He has a big ego, he doesn’t speak one word outside Japanese but still he managed to introduce many innovations to the medium.
The main advantage of mister Kojima is probably also his greatest weakness. He didn’t managed to become a movie director and he adapted many things from movies and books to the games mediums.
Today the first episode of his new podcast was published on Spotify:
I like that he explains exactly WHY he helped creating the stealth genre. It is very interesting to hear his chain of thoughts. He acted like a true designer: he understood a genre (shooters or shooting games) and he had a personal tought on storytelling . Shooters of the time, in fact, had no story. No reason why to kill enemies.
Plus, technical limitations on MSX gaming system made impossible having many shots at the same time. So that Mr. Kojima, starting from a personal thought and using the limitation as creative leverage, created the perfect excuse to eliminate enemies: infiltration, heroism.
I like a lot that, before of answering the question regarding the secret of MGS’s success, first thing he says is: I don’t know. Then he starts to reason. Very humble attitude, hard to see out there.
I would like to wish huge success to this new initiative by Mr. Kojima!
I have a secret to buildthe next Supercell. Really, I have it! Have I ever built a company like Supercell? Of course not, but I mean: we live in the age of suggestions, advices, best practices, influence, likes, follows… So why shouldn’t I write some wise article about how to do things, right?
As any secret, this one is very easy to understand too: stop treating people like children. Easy, right? Let’s see three common ways in which you are treating your people like babies, including before they join your company.
Technical tests and assessments
In some case those are necessary, especially for junior talent or for talent that is switching radically the sector. For instance, passing from free-to-play to AAA. Anyway, if you are hiring a person in his forties please: give me a break!
Our curriculum, carreer and our ex colleagues speak from themselves. We have nothing to demonstrate anymore and we are completely capable of doing the job at a technical level. Do I really need to show you how I structure an economy in a spreadsheet? Do i really need to demonstrate my presentation skills? Do you want me to create a flow and a wireframe? Or worst, a single GDD bible? Please, I do this since probably before you joined that company. Again: give me a break!
Do this instead:
Interview for cultural fit
Review in detail past experiences
Ask for referrals of ex colleagues and employers
When I see a test proposal I just think: “ok, you are not capable of evaluating my kind of profile. Next.”
Show me the next things to do with no context
I remember when I was a little dude asking to my father: “Why should I do that?”.
“Because I say so”, was his answer.
35 years later, history repeats. And I am very tired of that. You give a task and a deadline, with no perspective. I will do that for you the best I can. I swear. But I will never understand anything like this. Why is this important for the project? And how will we demonstrate that in fact it was? When we shoud have some learning? What about the past iteration? How did it go?
Maybe you are too busy to explain well the vision behind any choice. That means that you are not doing the job you should, to me. Because if you are my manager, you should be focused on manage my team and myself. Not the game. Not the code. Not the art.
Put your hands on my work
This is tipically something that you do to game designers. And tipically something that occurs in small-mid sized companies. We spent weeks designing something, researching, getting the problem right, sync with all the people involved. And then you decide to change everything because you have your own idea in mind. You are the founder or the leader of the project and you have the last word.
I could be wrong and you right, of course. Still, you are stealing my opportunity to learn more about the audience and the kind of product we are doing together. I just feel that my solution will never be tested on the field. Your solution maybe can be successful. And probably you will be happy and still will recognize my work. But you stole my opportunity of seeing a design I made going out there.
Stop play with my toys, those are mine!
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