Character Balance in Skylanders: More than the Numbers

[Music] all right so to kind of dig into it this talk is about the character balance that we did in Skylanders swap force a little bit more about me I actually originally had an animation background about 15 years ago but that's kind of how I started in the industry Skylanders was my 26th ship title and included in those were all kinds of crazy genres from Tony Hawk's to Guitar Hero's you know sandbox style games of spider-man 2d 3d Kout platformers but really my focus for at least half of that and up to now is has been a combat design so for those of you who don't know what Skylanders is I just wanted to do a little bit hopefully a lot of you know what it is but it was released in 2011 as a reinvention of the spiral franchise it was a dungeon crawler for kids pretty much and it really started the whole toys to life kind of genre of which we have lots of nowadays over the course of the titles they added a bunch

of category left characters so the first one had 32 characters Giants added 16 and then swap force we had 32 characters on top of that that brings it to 80 whole unique characters and when I mean unique I mean very unique characters on top of that in swamp force we you know didn't want to do anything easy so we said 16 of those new characters could be broken in half reassembled and made into 256 possible combinations so we kind of had to say well how are we going to attempt to balance all of these things into one game so I just want to tell you guys a little bit of what we're going to cover today this way if you're you know getting hungry you can know how close you are to the end but also just a way to track how we're moving along so starting with kind of balanced priorities different players have different balanced priorities with Skylanders they have a certain set for example League of Legends is a pretty

different set if you take a look at who a Skylander fan is it's usually boys two girls ages six to ten as well as some of their parents now Skylanders is a game for every but when you try to start balancing something for everybody you're going to have a whole lot of oh well what about this individual so we really had to target so we targeted the six to ten age range the types of bounce that I'm going to talk about today because there is lots of types of balance all of which is relevant to most games but in the case of today I'm going to talk about player versus player now player versus player is the actual human being I must have a really talented pet versus another human being and so this is me playing against you and we would kind of like a fair fight so games like checkers chess where they're completely symmetrical those games are obviously very balanced with the exception of who goes first so that's what I'm talking about what player versus player character versus character even though characters are

typically used in a PvP situation it is why would I choose this character over another character now in the case of Team Fortress there are roles in the game and so you have more reasons to pick one particular character over another even in League of Legends you have certain characters that will take certain paths based on their role in Skylanders and have roles but there is a very strong reason why we want you to play multiple characters the next one is player versus environment so this is PvE as many people call it it's just any of the monsters hazards traps other things that the computer is doing to try to make the levels more interesting difficult and other things like that so anything that's not another player that's what this is and then the last one is the character within itself now this is why would I use one ability instead of another ability a character who has one ability that is the best ability and no reason to ever use any other ability again is a character that has very poor balance within itself a character that has lots of reasons to

kind of mix and match and play all of its moves has good balance so we kind of look at whose priorities all where we'll start with League of Legends now League of Legends in a very small nutshell is a game that you play there's lots of characters you try to kill the other team with your players there are many more rules and I'm sure many of you know them but in this case PVE is the least important factor in this game doesn't mean it's not there there are little minions and there are enemies that hide in the map that aren't players but it's not important it's not it's not what needs to be gotten right for example if one of the monsters on one of the maps just had way too many hit points it's not really going to break that match because what matters is the fairness or balance between players which is why the PvP section is the really big wedge character versus character and character when itself are also very important legal legends makes a lot of its money by selling more characters very similar to Skylanders so

that's a big deal for them and then the character within itself because there's some depth in it that you don't you want interesting characters using one ability at the right time versus another ability is important to it now to contrast if you look at Skylanders PvP is the least important thing to our audience I am going to spend a little bit of time on a little bit more as to why it is but the big purple wedge is the PvE there's a story mode this is the kid sits down and wants to play through the game and get to the end beat chaos at his new scheme very important to them character versus character is almost exactly as important we want kids to want to buy more toys and we want them to enjoy it we want to feel like they're ripped off or they got a toy and it was kind of lame and it didn't really meet their their expectations we also want kids to argue on the playground which Skylanders cool in another skylander and then the character within itself is actually pretty much the same importance of the League of Legends is why would I pick this ability instead of this ability

characters start to get boring when they're not so that's really what I'm talking about with balance the priorities of what is important to your player base so start with what your players like and kind of scope and balance accordingly there so to get into the meat so much meat that I had to break it up into four smaller sections these are the types of balance now player versus player is kind of the first one I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about it for a very short period of time this was the lowest priority for our demographic because they just didn't play it as much we did have to make some special changes to it and there was some really big things that we learned that even made us prioritize it less so one of the big things that we change was anything that would remove player control from another player was actually removed from that mode so we have lots of abilities where you can put people in bubbles or you can freeze them or you can make them dance those victim events or victim states as we called them didn't happen to another

player now they would still do all the damage and you could still hurt the other person but you could never be put in a bubble you could never be frozen in a block of ice because that was very frustrating especially to a kid you don't want to lose control of your character some of the other under the hood balancing stuff we did was kind of health for example if you are playing a character that's a very low level and it has very very low health and kind of up to help a little bit for you just kind of under the hood of the handicap make it a little bit more fair but all of this paled in comparison to the living room balancing that occurred naturally with kids we would put kids down on the same couch or chair or whatever we had setup that day and we would have them play and what we would see is that they would make up their own rules a kid would put down a giant no you can't put down a giant or not playing with giants in this match alright finally both can play as Giants or oh you're playing as a swap force character i want to play this hop force character will need to play as girl characters today like that overshadowed any amount of balancing that we would do

on top of it because they had their own priorities they had already ranked these characters and they were doing self balancing and so that made our jobs a little bit easier we still to do a lot of work to once again move certain things but that's that's really all i need to talk about with that one we made this decision fairly early on because of the balanced priorities so to go again back to my first point we obviously couldn't do this this amount of work on many of the other points so the next thing is PvE or player versus environment so there's going to be a little bit of boring math at the beginning i'll try to tear through it and then we'll get to some of the more interesting and/or controversial topics so the simple ones these i'm just going to run through hazard damage versus players we pretty much had kind of a optimal level for i skylander to be at when they were on that particular story level now in Skylanders as you know your lives are your toys and so if a character dies you have to put a new toy on the portal

so we have no idea what toy is going to be put down at what level and in fact later on in the game you are more likely to replace a toy with a very low level toy because you can play in the game with your favorite character he's awesome and then suddenly it dies and you're like oh well dig around oh I haven't played at this character a while and I'll stick it down and now you really kind of have to learn that character again so we kind of couldn't account for it fully but we had to make some assumptions that oh well you're at the end of the game you probably a little character and we would just balance the damage accordingly so at the end of the level it was flat damage same exact amount of damage to every single character pretty simple health pickups was a percentage of total health it wasn't a flat amount this was because when I kids were playing in co-op and one of them would get pizza we made it so one one picked up goes to both players if I had a max hit point level of 10,000 say and my friend has a max hit point of 2,000 and he gets two thousand life back and his bar goes to

full and my bar goes up a fifth it feels like I got screwed and so we just made it a percentage which means characters with more help got more health it was just kind of part of the character and even though it was contrary to a lot of the kind of balanced things that we thought that's what kids wanted that's what kids expected XP games and gold picked up once again more math we tried pretty hard to make it such that you can beat the game completely from start to finish without doing any extra content with what was given to you in the starter pack so swap horse came with three characters to swappers and the reposed stealth elf we figured out oh it takes this much money to max them all out and takes this much XP to Max them all out we then just took the levels we had on the main path divided how many levels and divided how many enemies were in it and that's what we got so if you played through the whole main story you would have enough money enough XP to max out all those characters those are the

kind of the boring ones now some of the trickier ones is where we started getting into things like what what about the AI now once again we want out here just to be balanced but we said what's the purpose of a I will put a I are there as a challenge really want to make that player feel powerful we also want a player to feel like they're advancing and they're getting stronger as they move along we want every character to feel viable even though there are kind of types of attacks that are stronger in certain areas which you're going to get to more later you never want to feel like you put a character down that was just utterly useless and then lastly winning can't be boring kids have no patience and they will tell you if they are bored and they will walk away from the controller no matter how many chips or soda you give them so winning can't be boring so there was kind of this interesting thing that caused more problems than we thought it would originally and that was damage numbers now advantage numbers was something that was kind of established with the franchise already and they weren't really going away but I feel pretty important to talk about the

problems that they caused so what are the good things of damaged numbers well it's a literal reference point you say I just punch that guy or I blew up that barrel or I sunk that ship I did 50 points of damage because see look it says 50 it's also really good for incremental progress if I put on a hat that gives me point three percent strength and I see my damage number go up by one yay I can see the change and once again it was established for the genre the cons however or that nobody read them now you could ask someone hey how much damage do you do or what does that damage numbers say and they will then read it but subconsciously while playing the game they didn't actually read if we took the number 10 and made it really big and read with an exclamation point it actually was perceived as more damage than the number 88 that was written small because when you're just churning through it you're seeing big things flash up and we even like what can't we just do big hit reacts and hit effects once again there are a lot of pros to

having them and they weren't going anywhere but it was important to note once again we're not like World of Warcraft we don't have people running omen or recount or other things to you know maximize their damage per character they were also very distracting reference point as you'll see in a little bit when a player would try to figure out how powerful a character was they would look at the damage which sounds like oh yeah of course that makes sense but let's say you have a character that can kill everything on screen in one attack and when I say kill everything it just does a lot of damage so we would balance that move to say do 40 points of damage to everything on screen well let's say you put that character down and you execute that attack and there was one guy on screen it does 40 points of damage to the kid and you might put another character down that has a pretty strong single target attack and that single target attack does 60 points of damage to one thing the kids like well the 60s bigger than 40 of course that character is more powerful so it's not very reflective of the actual value of a move so it was

distracting and once again it wasn't reflect well not once again it wasn't reflective of the players action count now what do I mean by the players actually count well with action counts it's how many buttons you're pressing and things like that so let's say an enemy has a hundred hit points and you have an attack that does 25 points of damage okay I mean math whiz is out there for attacks that's how many times it's gonna take for me to hit that guy to kill it now let's say you get a bility boost or a hat or you upgrade your character and now you're doing 20% more damage 20% is a pretty big jump there's a lot of raids that I would grind to get a sword that gave me 20% more damage output however it still takes me four buttons to kill the same thing so even though the numbers are a little bit bigger I don't feel any stronger I don't feel any powerful it's just as much work to kill the same darn thing this concept of wasted damage is just not really received at least for

our target demographic once again if you hit an area and the strength of that move is it can kill ten things at once or attack ten things at once and they're not using it right it's it's just problematic so how do we kind of balance for this well we actually started with our enemies so our basic melee guys were six hits two combos our average combo was like a three hit combo our basic ranged with half of this this is because the challenge of a ranged enemy is closing the gap popcorn is always one hit if you find a chumpy who super jumpy at the end of the level he will still take one hit to kill a couple special things in some of our arenas but for the most part I was the popcorn the heavies were the same as the may leg guys however they would usually have a little rule or a little special thing for example all you have to get behind them or all you have to wait for them to sneeze other things like that one very important thing when you do this do not do chants do not do an enemy that has a

30% chance to block what you're doing or oh maybe it'll do that or 50% on hit doesn't go over well that just means that you have to button mash 50% more of the time a rule is a rule and when a kid learns it you want to reward them for figuring it out and they will do it over and over again and they're going to feel great but if it's like well I have a chance to learn you're a chance to kill them it just kind of gets lost it gets confusing and usually they just end up button mashing it the super heavy the last one really these were just give them as many hit points as is not boring traditionally we would mix in super heavies with a lot of other things that are going around them so you didn't just run up to a wall and beat on it for forever usually they would kind of stay around while other waves of enemies that kind of jump in the big thing with all of this AI hit point is that the difference in health from the very first level to the very last level or the easiest difficulty to the very hardest difficulty was only 200% we did this because once again if you go to the last level and you put down a fresh sky Lander whose level one

we didn't want you to feel useless we didn't want you to feel like you had to hit that enemy 500 times just to whittle away at it so then it's like well how did you make the harder level harder well that's where we were we really leaned into how much damage these enemies output so we ramped the damage enemies output very significantly so much so that if you play the game on nightmare most enemies in the first half of the game had the ability to one-shot you however they couldn't actually put a rule in that says if you take enough damage to kill you in one blow we give you 20% of your health back and make you immune for about a second it prevented people from being completely ganged up on you can still totally get beat if you stand still for that one second but what it meant was that to be good at the game you had to get out of the way dodging and blocking is a technique that is very very very tactical for a six to ten year old the best offense is the only way to play and so what we found was that once kids

started getting good at getting out of the way getting out of the way then they were like okay and they could take on nightmare but it meant that if you could play the game on easy and never get hit you could beat the game on nightmare so we're done with PvE so moving on to character versus character this is why I would choose one character overnight another son we got a lot of awesome data we did tons and tons of kid testing if you are even more interested in how either kid testing gareth is giving a talk about how we did all that late by friday attic in what's up so the character versus character we found that there was some pretty core reasons why people would pick and that these things would change over time aesthetics what the character looked like was huge the surprise that were fun and tell a little bit more about that in a little bit ease of use pretty soft on to the utility how actually useful the character was in given situations and the actual power actual power was the

least important to everyone which made it even more difficult but i'll get more on that later so overtime so if you look at the first red line it's the only thing that matters on that first sight because they're looking at the character on a shelf they're looking at on a commercial so they're instantly making expectations of what that character is going to do and how awesome that character is going to be when they get them home so none of those other things matter they can't play the character yet they're just seeing it and so that's why all of the things are at zero the aesthetics kind of continues to be important but once they kind of built the rapport with the character and they know what they look like it kind of fades off a little bit if we ever make the character or start to be ugly or we change them so much do it during upgrade it does have a negative impact but it does slowly taper off the blue line now the blue line next one is ease of use you'll see it spike and then tape tape it taper off this one's pretty self-explanatory they don't know how to use the character they put it down right on the floor and the first time if they're frustrated

it's a really big deal for them however very quickly they learn how to character works and it kind of tapers off down now that yellow lie my favorite line the fun this is something that keeps being important to them and actually continues to grow you can't have a character get boring a kid has no tolerance for that and will walk away and so fun spikes up and continues to be it in the end is really the most important thing at the end of the day the green one now this is one where those annoying little damage numbers pop up because you'll see that it's spikes goes down and comes back up again the reason for that is once again the first time they put that character down the portal they run up to a thing they hit it how much damage did it do oh that's how powerful it is it's usually fairly inaccurate and so they kind of forget about it and then once they really start playing the character a lot more and understand the depth of the character it kind of slowly goes back up the brown one it has a slow grow this is utility this is because the character

needs to or player needs to kind of take in all the different encounters we're going to throw at them over the course of the game and find out oh this character is good here this character is good here so you really can't appreciate the utility character until you played a pretty large amount of game so let's dig into this a little bit with some examples so aesthetics what does the character look like uh Skylanders go through an awful lot of iteration to get where we really want them to be for example this is trap shadow he was awful scary when he first came out he lost his bowie knife and a couple other things and we actually ended up making his little trap all ghosts and shadow because their traps are pretty nasty things and so we go through all of these changes the moment a kid see you're actually mowing anyone sees this character they make an assumption of what that thing is going to do once again most important slowly tapering off now you'll notice that the line stays flat from first two to thirty second to

play and that's the moment where the design team was really put to the test we had to cash the check that the concept artist wrote so I'll show you an example stinkbomb it was a little coming through skunk he's very ninjask now in his toy he has these throwing stars there in his hand he's getting ready to throw them he looks really cool so what happened was we made him a ranged character now a ranged character having kung-fu moves kind of starts to mix up his kit he's now pretty good at too many situations so what we ended up doing is we gave him a little one-inch punch through a Bruce Lee stink palm and it works great because it delivered on the kind of kung fu fantasy the kids wanted but it kept him very safely in the type of character he wanted to be because the the one-inch punch doesn't really do that much damage and it knocks enemies away making them more susceptible to

using your ranged attack originally he had a little blow dart and would shoot these little poison darts on one attack and then you would throw the stars on the other attack we kept a little poison acorn he throws as kind of a Hadouken fireball as an upgrade but they kids didn't see the value of having two very quick ranged attacks even though one was a damage over time we kept the damage of time we just put it on the punch now the fun and surprise this is not about a talk of what is fun there's probably a billion books you could go by and I hope that most of you have read at least one of them this is really more about that one memorable fun thing about the character when you ask a kid hey what what was it about that character you really liked this is that thing so once again very important and continues to stay important Frye knows bike is a really good example of this so finally the fire character he hasn't come out yet and we didn't want to do just another character that breathed fire okay we

used flame attacks and lighting so the whole thing with him is what he actually does is he heats up metal and like a blacksmith does so you'll see he gets a little tantrum he starts to get angry but instead of charging when he's hot he summons a molten motorcycle and this was just meant to kind of be a fun one off of how hey wouldn't it be cool yeah we'll change the charge of a rhino so what we actually ended up doing because it was so well-received is we cut a pretty substantial number of his other moves and we made one of his base abilities that motorcycle and even after that if you look towards the end he's got an entire path devoted to the motorcycle if you look on his model very carefully in the shipped game you'll actually notice that where his fist meets his wrist there's a little chain inside of it he used to be able to punch his fists off and grab things and pull them to him there's an awful lot of time spent doing that but it wasn't really relevant to his kit and it was not what he was remembered for so we cut it and just put in a motorcycle now easy use

this is how learn about the characters with our game since you could put down any character at any time we can't expect you to go through a tutorial but we still have to teach you these characters and these characters have lots of moves so we actually hide our tutorials within the way that you buy the abilities because we know that once you get some money you're going to go wanna buy an ability and while you're in the ability shop we can at least have your attention for maybe four seconds before you push the buy button and go back to playing so this is something we have to be very mindful of the persona and how the character gets played and who's being played by so once again spikes up then kind of Peters off so pop thorn he's this little teeny puffer dragon now he can inflate himself and he can deflate himself he's awful adorable he would have been more adorable if we got the sneakers on him that we wanted to but I never got that to work but we found that because he has such big goofy eyes and was really awful cute he was

very very well received by our younger demographic so even out of the six to ten on the 5 scale so what he is is he's what we call a Modi character meaning he can go from one mode to another pop this is another character if you know the franchise he can drink his soda and turn into a little monster but so what pop turn does is he's little and then he poops and then he's big so what we did was we made it such that you could actually play this character as a button masher he has one button that inflates him and he has one button that deflates him if you're already inflated when you try to inflate he shoots little spikes if you're already deflated when you press the D flat button he breathes little air now what this means is you could just blindly button mash back and forth or any one button and you'll actually be having fun you'll be doing stuff he's not very effective though when he's played that way he's actually bounced such that if you go back and forth frequently and at the right time

that's where he starts putting a lot of his damage out so what it did was it meant that if you were a very young player and you really didn't have the skill to know it you were going between modes he looked fun he was doing cool things and you were actually being effective however if you kind of wanted to get into the depth of him you would really focus on how he upgraded no one you would expand for example if you run into a crowd of guys as you're small then you inflate you'll knock them all away their upgrades where he gets like fresh breath so once he jumps when he goes small immediately his breath is minty fresh and does more damage or when he just inflates his spikes or spiky ER so this is a time where we kind of balance the whole character for how easy he needed to be to use utilities the next one now if you're familiar with Skylanders there are little gates around the game that say oh you need an earth character to go in here or in swap force you need someone with the rocket legs this is not the type of utility I'm talking about what I'm talking about is this is a melee character this is a lobbying character this is a crowd controlling ability so we call these archetypes it's

something that once again you have a very slow appreciation for and you really can't because you're going to have to experience multiple encounters and be like oh this is one of those encounters where I need one of those characters so the type of utilities was kind of big I'm not expecting you to read this I charted I'll go away right now but the first category is melee or close now melee is common we have characters with weapons that swing them where they punch things but we have lots of things that just enclose attacks so this is really I hit something in front of me and or right immediately next to me this is one of the most common ability archetypes that we have and that's what male encloses the next one is kind of this straight ahead category now you'll notice that I'm using a rain scare to hear our ranged characters actually tend to fall in the straight ahead most of our straight ahead characters our range characters however really anything that attacks in a Hall if you could imagine a hallway in front of you is this is a straight-ahead character so

in this case we have characters that shoot snakes or you know characters that shoot throwing stars other things like that the next category we have is the lobber and the LOB or does just that it's kind of an arc now there's the this is the lowest archetype represented in the game but it's the one that has the most kind of odd ability in that it can hit enemies that other abilities can't and so you'll notice in here countdowns throwing his head another character would have to jump up onto that ledge or even it could be on a ledge that you can't get to with another character at least by going the long way the next one is kind of the miscellaneous category if I was making a harder core game I would call this crowd control so in the case of stinkbomb he can go invisible no one knows where he is or he can kind of stink them in the case of magnet charge you can pick people up carry them around throw them doesn't really do that much damage it's all about kind of controlling the battlefield special is something we try to have most of our

characters have something in because it allows us to do a lot more wacky things the new category we added for swab force was the movement category the video will load there we go now movement is an ability that does just that move the character in some form so in case of hoot loop he has a portal ring that he throws down he can fall down it and he kind of comes up the other side that moves him forward kind of teleports him fire Kraken will turn into a giant parade move him forward I love that move so cool this was very important to us because swappers we wanted to have the top Hathi how you fight and the bottom have to be how you move so we tried to kind of keep that as you can see your freeze blade has a skate attack where he'll kind of skate forward he's actually the fastest character in the game by the way but we make you work for it because you got to keep pumping your ice skates so this is a little bit easier to read so the global spread kind of felt like that with the new categories you'll notice that the numbers are not the same and that's

totally fine what was important was that if you look at the library okay well twelve out of all the characters use that type of archetype we go and we work with the level designers and say hey this is about how many characters are going to utilize this you should probably make this many encounters have that as kind of a cool thing to be able to do you don't have to make it even across the board because some people like certain types of categories more you just have to be aware of it of how much you're going to use it for example if every encounter in the game had lobbers it would actually create a really high demand for a character that we don't have a whole lot of so you kind of want to to gel talk with your level designers now swappers of course were special they had some extra rules most of which are not as complicated as we thought they were going to have to be so the first one is synergy with the with the matching half now you may not always play the stink part of stink bomb when you buy stink bomb but you bought one of them and they come together in the same box so he at

least know that you're putting them together we also know that there was two type of kids kids that loved to mix up everything and then the slightly more OCD crowd that was like no everything must match perfectly so we had pretty good chance that there was a large number of people playing the swappers as a normal character so we tried to keep synergy we also limited each parts archetype to two almost always this means that because there was five archetypes total in the game and each swapped half could only be in two you could never have a swapped combination that filled all archetypes we had about two characters that could do it I think trap browser is one of them it ended up being okay because he's not strong in all of them he's kind of a jack-of-all-trades pretty good at everything once again the legs were themed with the probability so characters with the rocket boots probably needed to have a rocket - that was just kind of more of a design theme thing but we balanced the characters like you would just play - weaker characters at the same time I know that sounds really easy but it was just kind of a nice little mantra we had

and end up working out really well the last one and the most important one in the biggest revelation for us because we had some fear was if anyone played Marvel Ultimate Alliance we had a concept called fusion where if you had spider-man and will and you put them together you'd get a brand new spider-man Wolverine combo move we did not want to do that at all because it creates a ridiculous amount of work it's exponential work in fact an exponential to terrifying word and so what we had instead was moved synergy meaning if I had a character that had a fire top and an ice bottom he did not get a new water attack we would have the things that get created in place in the world have rules with how they interacted with each other for example punk shock is shoots electric bolts and she throws water balloons so you throw the water balloon you should go electricity at it the electricity electrifies the water but we also had zap zap would leave a trail of water down so if you play a thunk shock and you shoot the electric

at his trail it electrocute it they would just have a lot more kind of these happy more emergent gameplay modes that we did not we did not go and make that move we just had these rules of things in the world we even did this with characters for example nightshift has an upgrade where every time he uppercuts someone money comes out of them and scratch has an upgrade where every time she collects money she gets healed and so it actually made a very interesting vampire cat cleric warrior combo that we totally did not account for and it just worked and we didn't have to do any extra work so to talk a little bit about this Attila t1 is gambling uses guerrilla drill ax Rilla Rilla has these straight-ahead archetypes he punches and he uses these little drills he become stationary when he does so you hold it down the drill stays out there because he becomes stationary when he punches we wanted to give him a kind of attack that could go much further out ahead so when I was designing him I was like oh hey what's kind of a jungle e thing I know Jumanji wasn't that an awesome movie kind of was but uh no wasn't but either

way the the idea was that I was going to have these little like a bunch of animals kind of Stampede forward in a straight line well when I was just kind of proxying it up we had this monkey statue in one of the levels and I swiped the monkey statue and I just look I will just make the monkeys run out and monkeys running around with just a canned monkey chimp sound playing was so hysterical that I was like screwed I'm just gonna have a bunch of crazy monkeys running around and so first we started doing just crazy monkeys everywhere and it started bring him out of this archetype he was supposed to be in so we kept the aesthetic but if you notice when enemies are a little bit closer they'll all run to the same target and then they kind of scatter around and that means that they still fall into that hallway archetype but it kind of gives you this sense of all a bunch of crazy freaking monkeys running around actual power this is probably the hardest one to communicate to people but this was how much damage is an enemy or a hero actually outputting once again we don't have

recount we don't have some damage numbers running in the background but we had a very large perception problem and not in the bad way we had characters being perceived as too powerful this is where you got that word little spike from the damage numbers are talking up about that so here's an example so here is storm or free ranger I sorry I use dev terms he's free Ranger and we had a kid with kid played through the whole level who's actually in for level testing and he said magnet charge is so Opie's totally ope I think he said that he was beast I guess beast is a thing kids say now but he had gotten to this encounter and now if you'll notice that little icon that's fond of flashing at the bottom its calendars if you have a certain element sometimes you're strong on that area so this is free ranger he's a melee character and he was very strong in this area he's an air character he was of the right element it took the kid 20 seconds to beat this encounter we then said okay you think he could do it better with magnet charges like a man charged opihis okie didn't

with magnetars in 36 seconds we didn't tell him how long it took we just asked him how awesome magnet charge was and even after doing this he still felt magnet charge was more powerful managers took a lot longer even had they go and pick a guy up and run off the counter or find a cliff and I know that these things aren't totally controlled experiments he did one after he had done the other one he had already played this in Canada before hand but it just showed that the perception of how powerful a move could be and in fact the case of managers the kids thought they were breaking the game with disability it was a really hard challenge now I have a whole bunch of people saying you got a you got a totally get rid of Miami Chargers ability and it's like dude not really breaking the game at all it's all in perception so that that proved to be very difficult I'm going to go into a little bit more of that when I get to the communication section so that once again be mindful of why people are choosing to play a certain character because those reasons will change over

time moving on to last time the character within itself this is why you want to choose one ability over another ability so I just want to talk a little bit about how Skylanders upgrade if you guys don't know already so with the Skylander they start with two basic attacks the primary in the secondary and then they can purchase up to four abilities in any order they want usually after they bought all four of those they then get to choose a path they either go you know the path a or path P and then the soul gem is something that's kind of upgraded tangentially because they collect it in the level so swappers a little bit different a little bit the same basically a slightly shorter list but they have it twice on for the top of one for the bottom so what we found that was really important is when we started prototyping these characters we would go crazy like always have this upgrade you have this upgrade and we'd start prototyping all the way up to the upgrade pack and it created kind of a lot of tangental moves that nobody ever really played this is star strike star

strike is one of my favorite characters she has two basic moves she shoots these little stars and then she has a spin attack now the spin attack will reflect projectiles and just as a whim the designer said I wouldn't be cool she could protect her her own projectile back and it kind of created this whole final boss of every solve the game you've ever played type mechanic and we just started making a whole new game out of it like hey can could you keep that ball bouncing the entire level how well could you do it and it was ridiculously fun so much fun in fact that we said we're just going to make the whole darn character all about this and so the first ability is to shoot the Stars the second ability is to spin now the third ability this Starfall one right here I used to just kind of be a screen attack it would just she'd throw her fan up in the air and you'd see all these stars come all around her which had really nothing to do with her core kit and so what

ended up happening was we change it so that when you do it it just creates a little turret and that turret basically provides even more things that you can bounce she actually gets an upgrade where she makes like kind of the you know the fourth not fourth of July New Year's Eve Ball Drop and that's a giant one that comes slowly comes down you can spike it away and we found that the more and more we could make all the upgrades kind of keep reinforcing that base mechanic it made tutorials less important because every time you go into the store you're being reminded of how that character kind of plays and it makes every move useful because you're learning how their basic moves work so now when we design characters we say get that corset right I don't care about any upgrades make it fun just do that first thing and then we move on from there so that brings me kind of the next big bullet the validation communication so we learned a lot of these things we make a lot of changes but there's a lot of stakeholders in Skylanders and you all private allow stakeholders in your game and so you have to kind of communicate how and why you're making these changes so kid testing surveys and data is huge

we collected as much data as we possibly can I actually ended up tricking the team to play the game because we are in the toy business we have a 3d printer and we print a lot of bad toys because we're trying to figure out something and what I do is I also kind of paint Warhammer minis and so I was I got to take the jump toys and I'll paint them up and I said hey if you fill out a survey your name gets entered into a raffle and so in the end we ended up getting almost a thousand surveys with a total of a little over ten thousand lines of actual feedback from the team alone we sorted it all we prioritized all we went through it all on top of that we also had all the feedback from kids as well as all of our executive meetings and that gave us a really clear picture of what types of people liked what types of characters once again we didn't want to make any character that people were kind of okay with we would rather make a character that people loved or hated because you one of those kids arguing on the playground a big

thing was we wanted to follow up with those stakeholders even if we said hey we took your feedback and it was absolute crap and we threw it away if you can say I you did that and here's the thing getting back to someone when they give you feedback makes them feel like you actually listen to them it was tremendously helpful it's a little bit of work but it actually ended up saving us a bunch of work in the end when you're sitting in these meetings with a lot of people you really want to rely on those facts remove yourself because even myself I am biased there's some characters I really like to play because they match my style and some characters I don't but when I know that okay we just got 50 kids in there and 45 of them all love this character that's pretty good in my book avoid any little stuff use good data and create as many opportunities to get the feedback as possible the more and more you ask feedback from someone the less they're going to feel like they need to swing by your desk at 6 o'clock on a Friday to tell you about it because they know that you're listening they know that you're going to come back to them and really track that characters history so

rollerball is a really good example of this we love her because we love roller derby but originally she was very badly received because when we first showed her she didn't really have a whole bunch of the effects on her and there was a particular control scheme that she used to follow so once again she was kind of like a modal character you would tap a button to put her into this - move well the only way to get out of - me was the tap the button again the reason why we made you enter the mode in the first place was because a younger kid has smaller hands and trying to hold multiple buttons at the same time it's kind of tricky especially for a character's core move and so what happened is they would push this mode and they'd be like I'm dashing forward I want to get out of it and they would let go of the stick and they've now let go of the controller and the character is still moving around without their control and they felt like they were completely disconnected for the character and it was just so uncontrollable the fix was ridiculously elegant and easy the designer just said oh well if you let go of the sticky stop to fixed it the very next round of kid testing loved it problem is that the

damage had already been done on the executive level and so she had a huge amount of negative baggage when we would go into these meetings what helped it was I went back gathered all the feedback and said look here's how the kids received it here we made this change and see how now all the kids are receiving it and even just starting the meeting with that and saying not hey we fixed it but saying this is what kids think now it immediately cleared a lot of people's expectation and the meeting moved much much much better and so it helped us a lot it helped me stress out a lot less so that kind of ends this last part is have a little bit of a wrap-up and then we can do some questions so the first thing is prioritized the balance for your audience you want to balance with the priorities of your target audience if you're making a PvP game please make the PvP most important when it comes to balancing start with your data even the boring ones and then use that feedback and iterate and iterate and look at how

if you're seeing trends in your feedback and make that to fajn yukkuri really can't be all numbers like the title of talk says you really just got to get it to where it feels right especially when it comes to taking into consideration perception if a move is perceived as being very powerful it is powerful if a move is being perceived as very unpowered go ahead no Big B effects and maybe an awesome sound effect or even a screen shake it goes a long way and then lastly communicate that feedback in a very non biased removing yourself method say hey look at here's all the data here's how we got here if you understand why all those changes are made and record them it's going to be so much easier it makes making the next character even easier because you're like oh we've seen this problem before let's not do it again and that's going to help you a lot so I think that wraps it up Sam how many questions [Applause]

oh yeah if you have questions go to the mic if you ask a good question you can just keep walking from the mic and grab a toy hi that you went into great detail about how you develop the player characters I'm actually curious did you use a similar process when developing the enemies for encounters like you're only really touched on how much health they had at the start so with the the enemies we actually went through a lot of changes with the AI the big thing was we kept trying to make more and more variety originally we had very few AI types and we just kind of copy them all over we also all of our enemies had way too many hit points when we first started doing this we we wanted a lot more tactical style combat system where it's like well I'm going to stun this guy and I'm going to stun this guy and while those two guys are stun I'm going to go run over and punch this guy and that just wasn't it wasn't being played that way and it made everything seem very boring and so we ended up giving

the enemies far less help and when when you shorten the lifespan of your enemies it changes your combat significantly and so we had to move all of the choices not to be how am I going to kind of juggle all these things but when it came to AI placement and where they were at we originally started our AI being like oh well they could all have victim events and you need to use this AI and everything but because we literally make characters up to the last minute we very quickly realized that we need to set a benchmark for what the AI are and then balance all the characters to it so the air actually got nailed down pretty quickly oh yeah that answer the question there any archetypes in particular that you had to draw because they just throw it too hard or they didn't work with it or was it more that you just made the enemies too hard to begin with we definitely ended up cutting other questions I'm supposed to repeat these questions the question was did we end up cutting any AI because they just ended up being too hard and answers is not the AI entirely we ended up cutting

particular functionality to them blocking AI was a huge thing that we fought with for a very long time we also had lots of AI that that kind of with summoned minions or they would just be too hard and when we made them simpler it kind of they lost the uniqueness in the first place so we're like okay we're just going to scrap that functionality whatever using the assets and repurpose but yeah awesome thanks so now that there's multiple Skyliner games and you have your large backlog of characters how do you go about ensuring that those older characters are still relevant especially with the introduction of swamp force and the ability to change your characters so the question was how are the old characters still relevant well in swamp course we did want to make the swappers a little bit more important because hey their name is on the box but one thing that we we did with any new functionality that all the characters got we had to go and add back to all of them for example jump

none of the characters could jump before we had to go back and make them all jump they all need to know how to rail slide other things like that we we changed some of how their attack windows worked we use jump in our game as an escape we didn't want to make a hardcore platformer we put a couple little platforming puzzles on off to the side but the the big thing with with jump was it would cancel whatever you were doing because if I'm in mid punch and a bullets coming at me the fact that the kid even decided to get out of the way as a huge win for them and so we actually make them invulnerable for a very couple frames and kids like I narrowly missed that like actually you didn't we made you invincible for a second but we had to go and do that for all the old characters to make them feel as responsive and anything like that so whatever the new things will be in the future of Skylanders it's very important that we we would I think as a parent who also has kids that play Skylanders I think that kids would feel really betrayed if the old ones just started becoming useless oh thank you could you

go into a little bit of detail about the fair fight toggle that's in the PvP menu and given the weight that you guys had placed on balancing for PvP why you even chose to expose that to the players um the question was there's a fair fight toggle in the PvP mode and why we why we even let let people choose to do that originally it wasn't exposed and what happened was we did see some of our you know vocal minority I guess you could call them who started to notice that we were tweaking the dials underneath the the hood and so because that was starting to be perceived as us cheating to them or lying to them we wanted to kind of expose it to them and say all right look if you really want to turn it off you can go ahead and play with the settings so it was one of those things where we observed that kids felt that they were getting a worse experience because we were doing something for them you could you go into a little bit detail about what was

modified by the fair fight the question is what's modified it's it's the help it's it's the health and damage resistance so we actually play with your health and your armor so if you're a character that is lower level it has less hit points we kind of give you a little bit more it's like it's like a golf handicap of like okay well you're starting with really low health you could be too shot by this guy and you're in it once again it's like that whole talk about we balanced a super-heavy such that they don't become super boring and it became kind of not fun when a character has has just really stacked to their health status and they go against the character is very young once again the kids kind of took care of it themselves but that was that was our effort under the hood to make it a little bit more fair could I give it skylander all right how are we doing on time I always do that like how much time we got seven minutes are we got kind um

so so you have a character that you're working on and you have really opposite opinions from your feedback what do you usually do to try to satisfy as much as you can so the question was what happens when two different points of feedback come against each other one is we try to get more feedback it's very rare that if you ask ten people five of them are going to say one thing a five of them are going to say the other the other thing is it really depends on the issue so for example guerrilla drill ax he has this ability to call down monkeys now the monkeys are not very useful they're a little bit chaotic and if you play tactically you really want to go his other upgrade his other upgrade gives him a bigger range and it does more damage to his drill so if you're playing him quote-unquote the way that he his base level is played it's more useful to go the drill route so we would have people who were kind of the number crunchers who would be like why in the hell would you ever buy the monkeys they're just so unreliable and everything and the

counter was always because the goddamn monkeys and so it was one of those things where it's like it wasn't really a problem but then another in other cases we would have stuff where for example roller brawl has a soul gem the soul gem allows her to headbutt a target and it draws a beam between her and our target and it works like a maypole if you skate around and you have the beam it then does damage to anything that touches the beam now the fact that it already took me almost a minute to explain how that rule worked kind of created a lot of red flags for people people are just going to be too hard is going to be too complicated and so we're like okay and so that was starting to get negative it in that case we just focus tested that and every kid just like oh it's like I'm a pole oh my god I guess that's common knowledge for kids I thought maypole was like knitting like no one got it but every kid got it and we were like okay I guess the kids decided it so in that case once again we went to to more data more people or people closer to the target the thing

and a portion didn't get it to what you want I'm not trying to hoard them if you ask the question you take it away I well go we'll take two more questions that means I'll be good right two one it sounds like kids can be a bit more irrational and predictable and then older players can be a bit more elegant and complex and I guess their play styles could you go into some pros and cons for testing with children and testing with adults and do you think that any game could be useful by having children test it so the question was the pros and cons of kid testing and and their usefulness in any game so absolutely any game can be benefit from kids so with kids the pros are that they're brutally honest they have no qualms about your feelings at all and additionally a kid is not afraid to fail like an adult is amazingly we've had kids who there was a bug-free ranger

had a lightning attack now the Lightning attack was meant to stun enemies and it would put them in this kind of electrocuted state you could see their skeleton and would arc to targets and the more enemies that it arced too the more damage it would do well what it meant is if you just hit an enemy like a giant golem who couldn't be electrocuted it did one point of damage now golem has 350 hit points sorry spoiler everyone this kid beat the Golem using the lightning bolt he played for 15 minutes using the lightning attack over and over and over again and we're like oh my god I can't even watch this kid but he saw a number popping up he knew he was making thing and he was not afraid to just do it the hard way same thing with people who kept missing a jump they would die and die and die and die and die and they were like oh yeah that's fine we'd asked him was the game too hard night now this is fun because the whole concept of dying or failure hadn't been ingrained in them by society that you're a stupid idiot if

you fail all time whereas parents or even even even even worse than parents god forbid you test a teenager they feel that they're playing a kids game and if they're seeing not being able to completely trounce the kids game that they are horrible and so they are less likely to even try things and so it was pretty terrifying how afraid of failure some adults are when they wouldn't want to try something like that so so yeah I mean really kids are almost all pros other than a lot of sugar is kind of difficult to maintain when it comes to kids we do a lot of testing and you got to get good people to run your kid testing sessions and also you you can't always listen to what they're saying you have to watch what they're doing so when we do our kid testing we have three cameras one on their face one on the portal and one on the game and we watch what they're doing and so if a kid is his face is getting frustrated or he's

not ever pushing a button we did tells us a million a million things that they may not come out no let me say we'll take one more God hello okay first of all thanks a lot for the presentation I thought it was great in terms of content flow there little examples and illustrations Oh my question was related to the five play reasons which change over time how did you measure them and compare them okay so the first thing he said was I was awesome that I just what was the next part again I know this the question was about what how do we balance the difficulty as it progressed throughout the game no over the fight ladies is measured or compared with change over time the five reasons you showed oh oh how we measure that so that was done by a lot of the

survey data that we got from kids we would also have a lot of kids be repeats and so we would start to see that kids would start to get really good with particular characters and so we would be like oh we want to put this character into testing again make sure that we bring this one person back because they're they're the slobber tooth player they're going to give us different feedback from something else so we could then use it as a data point to be like okay here's what a kid who's played this character for several hours and there's at the end of the game thinks of it versus someone who's never played this character before so it was lots and lots of kids we actually didn't really include our adult data because most of our adult data we couldn't track that over time it was it was all kid testing that we got that from so how could you compare that let's say appearance mattered the most in the first 30 seconds how could you come up with that matrix or that number of that data put so the number for the very first one the number was really just done by a lot of us and our gut of how important it was depth to them for example of something

if if something got them to walk away or put the controller down or they were clearly disengaged and they're like hey can I like they would literally come out can i play another game or they'd be like I already played this game for comments to have my seventy bucks or whatever like that was like okay this is ridiculously important to them if they would then say oh okay well no I'm like I'm liking this and they'll tell you they're liking it but you could see on their face that was kind of it and then if once again you know when the kid is excited you know when they're engrossed when they're like I just want to keep playing you know when it's like hey you want more soda and they don't even hear you it because they're just engrossed we use that as kind of a way to do the ratings Thanks all right I think it weird so thank you guys very much [Applause]