Designing a game as good or better - Adventure Communist. PART 3

[Music] oh what's up everybody my name is britney spears coming to you live from health hi i'm britney spears i'm whitney houston coming to you live from hell and if you're joining us new in this series i'm trying to come up with a game that's as good or better than adventure communists it's been a while since i've been able to put out this video thank you for your patience those of you who enjoy it so we did a lot of things up in this point blah blah blah we did researches and we remade all of the ui we did some things that i do i tried to read every review i tried to write down a lot of themes where i left off last before i got done talking to my mentor and coach dan ross love the guy and then here we are on this episode and what we can expect ahead is

i'm gonna show you the final process of uh my process the final the final shots of my process and then reveal to you guys a game that i think is worthy of talking about and that is a game that i think is we'll talk about it right it's a game i designed an idol game around adventure communist and i'll let you guys know if i think it's as good or better towards the end after i recovered from this crash which sometimes i run into especially when i'm trying to gun for a project like this so basically what's going on is joseph and i were trying to figure something out we wanted to figure something out so we were willing to work with anyone within his network he's a pretty good network so this is network of people who have extra engineers at an existing company maybe that's a company that's running out of capital we could team up with them if they trusted my designs something that's fast so i said man if i could really come up with something

better than adventure communist then wouldn't that be something right and so i asked him you know i said i'm gonna try to do it but it's going to take me some time so although these videos are really spaced out this this was all shot over the span of about three weeks and so at this point in time i am trying to think about a bunch of themes this is not hard work you don't need a you know genius to think of themes for a game but there is an art to it and it can be fun and um you definitely don't want just anyone to do it you know you want a creative person to give it a shot and to really try to think of stuff so here i am figuring out the rest of the potential themes that i can possibly think of

before moving on someone was asking me about reading the reviews they were like what happened with those all the reviews that you read and the truth is um i lost some of the content that i had because i had written a bunch of notes on it but there is an image of me looking at these things and i tried to recreate them to the best of my ability and i had them on the wall above the big um the big core loop and so if i zoom into those and try to understand what they are and try to remake it from scratch it's kind of like this after one of the papers said important misc and what i mean by this is i can't really remember everything that

i was telling myself but just miscellaneous stuff that i was thinking about like it said account creation prestige languages so i'm thinking about multiple languages how accounts can go across devices how there's like offline satisfaction meaning i could i'm still progressing even though i'm not online there's events perhaps more fine controls on spending i thought was something that somebody said uh in inside of all of the reviews so i me and when i said i read every review i read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reviews and it was really probably one of the hardest things about the all the things i decided to do because when you read a book it's like a journey right but when you read review after review it's like damn but every once while you find when you go oh i should pay attention and i talk a little bit more about some of those learnings and how they help me find some idea on what i wanted to do and you could see more ipad as important

potatoes is a great joke and then the next thing that you'll see is i have this thing that says here's really important positive things that i saw from all of the reviews people like it they think it's innovative lots of gameplay good balance well done not greedy advertisements very casual with strong progression they say they love the ranking system and the jokes and the memes lots of people say it's a great time waster they like the ads they think no one really complains about the ads they don't place too many of them and um it feels good to see the numbers go up you know this is something that i saw within some of these comments and i said embrace this this game has become a part of a daily routine a lot of people play this game as a daily routine and i think it's pretty cool you know these are just things that i reminded myself that were positive and then finally i had a just a high level list of some

negatives for the game that i saw in all the comments one is not smooth on the end game huge complaint amongst almost every free-to-play game that there is lots of volume issues i saw in a lot of the comments something about when you watch an ad it like then blasted your eardrums away tournaments are not frequent enough i understand the pain for the devs you can't run tournaments as much as you'd like and sometimes the cadence of tournaments can't ever be accurate it's just you know you try your best some people thought it was not worth their time so i wrote that down and the general theme creates government-like reviews about communist communism and some people said hail hitler once or twice in the reviews and you know this is just a funny thing about this particular theme that i've never seen before in my life you know it's just a weird theme

i can't tell you how this theme became into creation i just can't think of it i tried to think of everything i could possibly think of and nowhere in the realms of my creativity and anything that i can possibly think of involves communism or adventure communism it's just such a strange pair but people seem to really like it and they did such a great job with this character then it's so odd to me but it's also kind of funny and i don't know why it works but it does elicit some of those weird comments and i just put that there and i was even curious recently in america there's like a lot of what they call like extreme right politics and extreme left politics if you're not familiar with what that is it basically means there's people who think really differently right and extreme rights often accuse stream lefts of wanting to embrace communism and

when i had i had to check the reviews in this game like this is months later because it's been taking me months to get this video out and it did not disappoint people were again talking about communism in the comments of adventure communists in related to the current political shenanigans in america and all so it does elicit some of those maybe unwanted misconceptions but that was really it for the the reviews but later on when i show you the pitch when i pitch you the game you'll see that actually reading all the reviews came in came in pretty pretty big hand pretty handy for this particular project so i definitely suggest reading those reviews in the next video that i'm about to show i tried to think of every single feature that i could possibly think of and i decided against showing this thing because there's just so many different features like i thought of like over a hundred different features

for free to play but they're not in relation to anything and it made me really it pushed me to try to think of like i basically didn't think some of them were that good and some of them just were named weird because not every feature has a name like you might understand daily login you might understand spin to win but there's some things i was just giving names to them i was like this is really hard to understand and then i thought maybe i was trying too hard to look smart or something like that i don't want to try to look this way and then this is like a whole rabbit hole like if i showed me writing down a bunch of features would people want like screenshot of that part or like try to understand and then features are only good in relation to some games so basically this is some footage of me trying to complete one of the last final tasks that i wanted to do which was i wanted to think of a lot of features that were in related to this

genre [Music] [Music] and so after that there wasn't really anything more i can think of so the there's just some footage of me just trying to figure it out and i i kept it in because i figured the biggest takeaway from this is i i do tend to be invited to some meetings i haven't worked for every company in the world and god knows there's so many good game designers and such a huge gaming community and so many different companies and so many different ways to operate but in my career what i have seen is

that if we want to talk about a new game most companies don't talk about a new game a new game is announced or a new game is found through facebook marketing tests or something like that sometimes they'll choose a game that complements the team which is not a bad idea either i don't have the answer but i had some time to think about it after i did all this and i took the time and usually the time you have is like an hour meeting it'll say what are we going to do and this the meeting is called ideas around next game at 2 pm or something like that and the engineers are invited the senior engineers everyone's there it's a big you know big show and you talk about where the company's gonna go and things like that so in this particular time i didn't do anything except think about it you know i just thought about it and

and i'm not really embarrassed of that i i told joseph i want to try to figure this out and after i ran out ideas some of these things were kind of just excuses for not having an idea but it was work towards something it was better than doing nothing because if you said hey paul do you know a game that's better than adventure communists and i was like no then that'd be kind of lame and i want to try to do my best but i doesn't guarantee anything someone actually someone today asked me and this is kind of cool that some people ask me this stuff now he said i noticed that you research games pretty deeply how do you then come up with an idea or when is the game going to be done like what do you when do you stop and i was like i don't know man i've researched games super deeply and not come up with the idea like i research ula law adventures really deeply it's a whole other topic but i didn't really come up with a better idea than that but i learned a bunch of

stuff but i didn't come up with anything better so sometimes i have a better idea and i research in advance and sometimes i'll research a bunch and try to come up with stuff just hoping i come up with something but if i can't come up with something at the end i'll just say look i know the game really well and i within my powers cannot come up with an idea but during this time there was a moment where i thought of a really interesting idea and um i'm going to be presenting that to you guys today [Music]

[Music] [Music]

[Music] so [Music] so the game that i came up with with two separate themes once a game that i'm calling pills versus zombies and obviously i'm trying to lean a lot towards plants versus zombies with that idea but it was a really strange twist of thinking that made me find a way in to adventure communists and what you're going to find in this pitch that i'm

going to deliver to you today is that adventure communist is locked really tight if you want to break into it so to even find a way to break in to me was super exciting and so i designed the game fast i got a bunch of different screens for it to kind of illustrate it and what i'd like to do now is present it to you like like i was in a company like we were in a meeting room it was my turn to talk i was going to pitch to you a game that i think could potentially beat or is better than adventure communists and i i have my own opinion on that towards the at the end of the presentation but i'm gonna do my best to try to explain it to you and it's not gonna be fast it's going to have to take you through many slots and by the end of it i think you're going to be super educated on the decision and know a lot about adventure communists and then my attempt to kind of get into that space

now remind you if you're not familiar with adventure communists it's a very very low budget kind of looking game that has a tremendous amount of success so it's a it's a it's it's an it's an eye candy for early starters if you can think of something like that you could really sustain a business i mean who wouldn't want to have a little simple game like that just in their back pocket and as i grew into the world of idol games i met a ton of people who tried to look at it so i'm really excited to show you a game idea that i call pills versus zombies [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music]

thank you i think [Applause]

okay so i guess i could have just started the video here where i say hey what's up my name is britney spears coming to you live from hell and this is a game idea that i had and blah blah but it probably wouldn't be as fun and um yeah so it was really nice trying to show the journey and this is the hard part this is the part where i found myself more than a few times luckily maybe like two or three or four probably three or four being able to pitch a game and pitching game is really difficult to do there's a lot of factors and a lot of times you have a lot of people in one room you got your marketer guy he's worked there 10 years nobody knows what he freaking does anymore he comes to work three times a week and doesn't even he wears new balance shoes and he's totally not even a cool person but he's for some reason the marketer and he's like yeah i know everything and then you know you got your pm and

they're like looking at you you know saying you got your lead engineer like go ahead say something dude i'm the lead engineer you know seven years ago i was hired as an engineer but now mysteriously i've graduated to the lead executive designer of the company i'm saying you're like damn man it's a tough crowd so pitching a game can be extremely tough and what i hope to do here in this complicated video game industry is to penetrate doubt introduce a concept to you and by the end of it hopefully have you really educated to the point where i am then you can make your own decision on how good or bad you think the game is that's up to you and i will tell you my stance on my own work and so without further ado this is a game that i call pills versus zombies so pills versus zombies to understand

if this game is any better by the way i'm going to be presenting this in illustrator there's a lot of slides ahead so if i zoom out real quick there's a there's a bunch of stuff coming i feel comfortable in illustrator so it's gonna be a little bit different presentation so before i try to make a game better than adventure communist i need to first convince you or at least let you know what this game is we need to come to agreement what this is because we can't make anything better unless we know we're making it better of right we need to make a better version of what it's a ui based game it has a quest system the quests are the only industries that matter you only have to do the quests for that particular quest you only have to do that you only have to get the thing of that particular request there's researchers there's ads they're extremely vital and there's events this is essentially all of adventure communists so just to make sure you understand one

more time adventure communists has quests when you complete all of the quests you prestige and you do it all over again there are three quests at the top at all times and the only quest that you need to do at all times is one of those three quests so in this case i need to get 950 000 minds and when i get that that quest turns into a chest and that chest then gives me researchers and researchers are just boosts they're just a multiplier around many different booths in the game may that be how many of x or y that you gain per hour or so forth so and it's not just a game okay we're not talking about making a game we're also talking about a live service adventure communist is more than that it is a really really really good twitter it's a really really good instagram it has a really really good facebook

they do a really good job responding to people who have reviews and bad reviews and they also have some really good push notifications so it's a it's a business i'm not just talking about the game i tried to look at this in every angle as if i was a small company trying to make something that wouldn't be successful not just a designer with uh you know like fancy ideas but something that would actually be tangible so how do we compete with this we got this text based game this really cute ip all this live service behind it how do i get something better than adventure communists well how do we get something better than anything is what kind of question i wanted to ask you which it what is it do i how do i make a game better than match three do i come up with a better theme uh teddy bears uh candy seashells

you might say well these match threes are all top grossing because some features are different they provide different experiences well what is the different experiences you know even if you could say from a marketing standpoint the word fish and garden and candy are like still that doesn't explain why or or how exactly are we gonna make a game that's better than one of these match threes or why do they why can they exist amongst each other did they all come at the same time one of these had to come later or something like that so how do you design a game to into the same category as other people is what i'm trying to explain so this some of these features might be very subtle and the theme might be very subtle but it still works now if i go over here you're going to see these games how do i design a game better than these games these are story-driven games which are kind of what i call innocently x-rated

games innocently x-rated is a term that i learned from actually this book right here that's funny i was just this is the book songwriting for dummies and it talks about music and inside this book they say some songs are innocently x-rated like it'll say last night you were in my room and now my bedsheets smell like you you know that can only mean one thing you know what i'm saying it can only mean one thing it means sex you know what i'm saying and the whole song is about basically he's sucking and [ __ ] there's a lot of songs i listened to when i was a kid now that i'm older i'm like oh my god you know i used to listen to the song called nelly it's like underlay underlay mama yeah yeah if the head's right nelly's there every night it's about that song's about that song's about oral sex all right you know what i'm saying but when i was a kid i was dancing to it now when you look at these these these games are very innocently x-rated and they're pushing sex in a way that is it's very close you

know and some of these people are proud of it too and it's very artsy it's an art form it's also an art form of music so there's nothing really wrong with that but how do you make a better one of these do you get a better writer do you push the boundaries of innocent x-rated more what are you gonna do you're gonna make it look better i mean the art pipeline can only be so big you know how hard it is to animate all this crap you're like hey did you touch my girlfriend he's like no pass smacks her in the face and then he's like why'd you do that and next you know there's like a sex scene how many of those can you think of so you got the best writer in the world is it really about how good the writing is or is it about the amount you can do a lot of companies that do really well with these not to get on tangent find themselves in a really difficult treadmill and they start saying if only we can get this stuff out faster um what about oh it's a duplicate sorry about that what about this game what about these uh these these these apps not a game but bumble tinder zeus

what does bumble do it lets the girl respond what does tinder do nothing really it's just free-for-all right so if you can make one defining change in a product and then change the to yellow would you agree that it could be successful probably not at a meeting level especially if you had the whole brigade of the gaming industry in one room like how some companies operate it's just absolutely madness which i don't mind i i don't know i don't i think the industry is the way it is but if i told a marketing marketer and a ceo hey i can make you a badass product if i change one thing and make the product yellow i think people would say oh come on man you know we gotta test that we're gonna do a facebook test we gotta get our slavery art team in the philippines to crank out a bunch of art so we can run a facebook ad for two weeks and then we can make a big old deck about it and then measure every name takes three weeks to get the turnaround in this complicated system so why is it that these things can be so

same the same but then some be successful what is it what is it about these three games that make them successful why can these games exist amongst each other they're slowly pulling apart things are changing their things are one of them's getting better and when i'm getting worse but why oh you say rise of kingdoms is better it's just better so then you would be saying you admit that making a better version of a game is enough is the economy is like one-to-one rise of kingdom from what i heard a lot of the people who worked on the economy in game of war actually work on the economy and rise of kingdoms so i've been told and my sources are pretty close to the pretty close and accurate on these things if i'm wrong hit me up correct me if i'm wrong but can you just make a more polished version of a game that's not polished and then win

well if that's the case then all i have to tell you is we need to polish a venture communist more but would you be convinced that that was my answer what about r what about kings of avalon should i just add a dragon adventure communist dragon warfare is that enough probably not so there's a lot of little features that make this game marginally better right and only the people who play it would really know and finally the last example i had was uh i was like duplicates man um shooter games every time you pull the trigger the gun goes bang why does why do some shooter games do better than others oh you might say well fortnite copy pub g call of duty has a good franchise so all these can exist amongst each other well fortnite didn't have a good franchise it's killing it and i'm saying there's more

customization in pub g than all both in all both those games combined and pub g you can customize your glasses your mask your hat your feet your legs your torso maybe even your watch you can have an eagle flying next to your shoulder call of duty thinks that's tacky they don't want girls running around in bikinis so why can't they exist amongst each other what is the defining features right if you knew if you had that answer then you would attack that right you would go for it so i have a game idea that i call adventure communists i'm sorry pills versus zombies and this is what it looks like here on the right and you probably want to zoom in and check it out but i'm going to present to you the rest of the game and try to show you why it could be better in the rest of the presentation and it's it's it's some slides to go so if you look down here the rest of these slides i'm going to be explaining to you why it's different and why it's better i'm going to zoom into this particular screen here and i will be zooming in

looking closer but what i want to tell you is i've created a game that i think is very similar but different enough to be better and it's going to be better marginally in a bunch of different like marginal gains and by the end of it i'll tell you my thoughts on if i really do think it's amazingly better or if it's worth it and i'm going to talk about it from a business standpoint and i'm going gonna show you everything that i can possibly think of to make this particular game different within the same category of the game and i need to check if this camera is still rolling because i can't [ __ ] this up that would suck okay we're good all right we're good that would suck okay so we're looking here at three screens so i think the most important thing for you to know is that i've created an outdoor world to this

to adventure communists so if you see here on the outside you're gonna see a bunch of guys going up a staircase towards three windows and so you see a button that says outside and inside you see guys standing at windows so if i were to push outside it would literally this this nurse girl would literally open the door you would zoom in through that door and then zoom out uh into outside so you're transitioning from inside to outside and this is a fundamental change that i that you need to understand for the rest of the slides to make sense so i've created an outdoor world to the windows of adventure communists so adventure communist typically just has well let's talk about it these quests with words so my quests

are actually begging people who are sick with a disease that's going to turn them into a zombie so i imagine the very first scene of this game is some kind of big-headed character that looks like he's from idle minor exaggerated stuff this isn't the final art he gets bit and he's like oh crap and he looks and he sees a bunch of people in line like help me help me help me help me and then he runs up to the line he's like yo you got to give me some pills and this is when the game begins so i turned when i when i thought of this game i turned the missions the only place that i can think of that could be altered into a place that was better than what they have it was the best i could come up with while staying within the confines of the ui so these windows were really important to me when i thought of it i was like this is super weird and as i explained it to you i was like this is actually pretty cool it made me if you see me now i started to get excited about i started to sit up

straight about i started to really just start banging it out and a lot of things started to make sense and it flowed and i was really lucky that it did that i didn't have to drape features throughout this to make it work it kind of just waterfalled throughout and then became a product and that product is pills versus zombies so let me explain to you this what you're seeing here is the three windows that you would normally see in adventure communist with five pills along the bottom red blue yellow green purple and these are the industries for the game so people are saying hurry hurry help me help me this is better because in my opinion it's not the same as these three missions and i feel that these missions although they're really simple most users just start slamming through the industries they don't get it now when i i know this just by instinct you wouldn't be able to market this or understand this but

adventure communist has a weird problem the quests are right up top but nobody sees them and there would be people to back me up on this there's got to be someone even in hyper hippo knows what i'm talking about when i saw joseph kim put adventure communists in his hand he said i don't know what to do and i said i know you don't i didn't know what to do either so these missions although right in plain sight are vanishing in front of the user's eyes so you might think at first this looks a little kind of weird to have people at the top sweating and and like being sick like help me help me but what i've done is i've removed text i've given plenty of room for a lot of different characters we're talking characters of construction workers doctors policemen all kinds of people walking up saying hurry help me and there's a pill next to it in a color and that color is reflected inside of the very tab now what this also does is it improves the discernment between which quest you need to do now again you would need to trust me on this but there

are some quests inside adventure communists that aren't as good as some like for example it'll say collect a thousand of a truck but you don't really know if the truck is in the farm category or the oil category then it only happens a few times and i could probably find it maybe like four or five times for the most part the design team did a great job at making sure that the categories have relevant content underneath each industry but my industry is color coded and it could potentially be pill shaped because pills have many shapes so if you don't think color coding is good because people are colorblind then we can make many different shapes to go along with the colors more on this later but let's keep going i added a community in this thing and this community is going to show up a couple times so what you're seeing here is a tab that says social when you click on social it's going to go to a chat and we know chat is bad right chat is like hey what's up does anyone have sex i think i even wrote that in here just to be funny

and this is what happens with chat and it's it's a risky thing but i think it's actually worth the risk adventure communist allows players to name their whatever they call it i forget what it's called but they let them name their account but there's no real need to name your account because they're you're not around anybody because you don't need a name unless there's other people to call you by your name so i've introduced a chat system and not only do i allow it to just be a chat system i'm also introducing a gif system because come on man gift system is a like obvious feature free to play feature that's just it just rocks right so every in-app transaction you buy if you want to you can buy an app transaction or the item itself that gives people speed ups or boosts and it rains through chat like twitch so here's twitch this is a gift when you have a gift if you buy the gift it goes through it and it says you know you're getting stuff and people

are like oh my god this is awesome so i'm introducing the idea of community and more on this later this is just the beginning of it so one of the biggest major differences is this inside and out and why this is so special is because well many reasons i don't even know how many reasons more than one one or two more than more than there's many so i'll just i won't say a number but basically if you notice here it says twac22 this is my spot so how this is really working if you're wondering what this is is i'm actually trying to tap into a really popular marketing campaign where people are showing lots of things running at something

afk arena play now for free and then the gods or the warriors are slashing through many of something this is a really popular marketing campaign so i introduced a feature that would not only work with the game but then tag on to a popular marketing campaign so zombies are attacking this pharmacy and gunners are just shooting them down automatically so these gunners right here are just shooting them down at rapid pace sometimes they hop the fence and the user will have to tap those particular bullseyes to then kill the zombies so be like bang bang and then they would drop dead and they would gain something from this like a coin and they would then let production flow more smoothly so i think i have a slide on it here now where this idea came from which is such

an important remember discovery was that in egg inc egg inc has this thing called silos and how it works is if you have enough silos if you have a bunch of silos that's how long you can stay offline so i'm making a really big executive call here that our game pills versus zombies does not produce forever that it actually stops producing after a few hours just like a gink and you need to have a bunch of silos to do that and your silos only let you have so much offline time similarly in my game you have to upgrade your gunners so your gunners are a bunch of different badass people who shoot down on these fools so when you buy it it would be like this sick ass animation of him being like and he would be like let's go and you would be increasing your offline time but you don't have to buy it you see you can click on other people's um

i'll go i'm gonna skip ahead so actually i'll just back up here so here's an example of the creative there's a lot of something running around and it's this is an advertisement literal advertisement inside of these games and it says auto play so i'm tapping into this i'm already thinking about the storefront how could this look [ __ ] awesome and i would need it to look this awesome it would need to look this good this good and this dangerous in this for like insane and when you click these zombies it then unlocks your collection you can continue to play so you would receive push notifications that your production has stopped that zombies have jumped your wall and you need to come back and clear them now when you do do that the production would continue in like a cool way like production continue as i'm demonstrating here so what's also cool about this is if i click on booty times avatar and i look

at his particular pharmacy i can click and then undo the stopping for his particular pharmacy so let's say a zombies have jumped his wall well i can kill those real quick and then increases and help them out so unlike egg inc where the user has to come in and unlock their own production i'm allowing people to unlock their own so i'm creating a reason for people to survive this situation and so you would get a message from me let's say my name was yo-yo ma yo-yo ma helped your pharmacy by killing the zombies production continued and so you would be like oh that's dope thank you so much so there's this like selflessness furthermore i think it should be that people can watch ads for each other um sorry that's a duplicate so here you see me pressing the add button and watch an ad and then it says player booty time right here yo-yo ma

helps your pharmacy by watching an ad and when i talked to joseph about this he was like dude that's actually kind of weird i was like yeah i would let people watch ads for each other because you'd be surprised people like to help each other and watching those ads before you go to bed is really important thing to do so if you noticed that somebody in your in your group or someone that you befriended in your friends list in the chat section was um not boosted and their their production was stopped watching ads for them could be a really fun thing to do because someone would see a notification paul watch for ads for you your production has been 2x boost for the next so many hours which is a really cool thing that i'm doing by adding the chat so that's one of the reasons why i added that chat and that's one of the reasons why i added this outdoor area because i want to give a place i'm trying to give you an actual thing let's continue these duplicates are

killing me cool so here's some marginal gains the character the main character i want her to stand on this thing if possible so i'd want to be working with the the art team like can we get this nurse to stand there in the actual game as opposed to the adventure communist farmer guy he's he's he's m.i.a he doesn't exist anywhere except in the commercials and like on the ipad version of the game or something like that but he's nowhere in the game so this nurse could potentially walk the floor and then talk to these guys and like work with these guys it's a little cramped but possible and even cooler you can have one of these guys lunge at her and grab her or something like that and the notification could say one of the patients is out of hand come save your nurse and it could be like oh no screw that right and you just go hit that guy off and i even had some ideas that what if these guys eventually turn into a zombie like maybe that's a problem like your

nurse is hella scared she's kind of like oh my god and he's like ah and then you have to go in there and just shoot him real quick and then clear the line one other thing that this also does which is a little bit too advanced for this video is if you can see the zombies coming up your walkway sorry if you could see the the quests coming up your walkway you can even see what quests you have next and decide which one you want to clear in advance i don't expect everyone to understand that but if i could tap this character knowing what kind of pill he'll need then unlike adventure communists where every quest you get is a surprise you can strategically empty the line in a way that's advantageous to your route ultimately creating a little bit more strategy to the whole process which i don't expect to win any points in the marketing department about that one they would just be like whatever so

the pills repeat on every tab so this particular pill two rows down this red one would also be two rows down in blue and two rows down in yellow and two rows down in green and two rows down and purple so not only would people be able to find the pill faster they would probably become way less frictionless right this is rise of kingdoms superpower they are way frictionless so what i'm trying to do is guide the user towards what they need even quicker as opposed to being like where is the the band-aid or something like that where is it at so i hope that would be a perk as well and the game is just fun man it's fresh this is this damn dabbing pony with all the pills flying by it's a joke man i got it from asana

asana has a unicorn that flies by when you click done and this is a completion based game i want to make it when it's done it feels good and also i would want it to be a little bit innocently x-rated i want to nod to the fact that there's a bunch of pills and that it's not it's not necessarily a game about drugs but it's also a wacky game with a bunch of crap it's just funny you know what i'm saying so that's also a plus two i want to lean more towards that so a bunch of different characters that kind of dab by like let's say if i if i fix whatever character in the purple window he kind of dabs by real quick like yeah you know it's like just funny so that's how i imagine the whole the whole game feeling now here's some more features that i think are just some marginal gains this is what i call rank up liquor store social and i'll explain liquor store social in a second but essentially i was using this meditation app once trying to get all

deep and enlightened but after i was done meditating the app said 50 people near you also were meditating and it had a list of all their profiles and i was like that's a really good feature so here what we're seeing is on this rank up page you see you guys may have seen this girl on youtube you see all the people who ranked up recently when you rank up so just now it's showing that there's people around you who have ranked up which is another reason why i wanted to add chat so when you press confirm you go through the flow which if you don't know the flow the flow is you get a new rank and you open a chest and at the end of it you see this list of repeating um you see this list of repeating player profiles but what it says is five minutes ago and i was just lazy about it but here's a list a really full list of people who have recently ranked up these buttons then go to their profile

and these red badges mean there's zombie problem um and they're in there they need help clearing the zombies and this page scrolls so again i'm just trying to find out how to make this game a little bit more better right and it's still building off of the same thing uh continuing on to the next slide oh yeah i wanted to talk about liquor store social a little bit and explain what i mean by that so this image when i found this image i was like yes i could not find a better image than this one you just cannot find a better image liquor store social is a concept that i coined potentially about turning something that would otherwise not be useful into something useful so this guy is surrounded by in america they have these things called scratchers and you scratch off the the this film and then behind it is a prize and he's surrounded by these in their he

has attached to them the date in the winnings and this would otherwise just be trashed to somebody who doesn't know how to run a good business but this guy's a genius right he's thinking about how to reuse things in his product that is actually beneficial to his own business so this is essentially recent winners recent winners is not a new concept plenty of people do recent winners casino games and so forth but what i'm getting at is adventure communists has a system where a lot of people are ranking up and plenty of people are playing and what i would do is i would say this these people just ranked up with in the same time as you just let them know that they're not alone and even if you did this in adventure communist today and said and just said 500 people just ranked up too it would really change the way it felt because you'd be like oh my god when i watch youtube videos of adventure communists to study it more

people were excited to watch adventure communists it sounds crazy but it's true and they all said oh i love this game and there's a community around people who love it and i feel like this particular community is really excited to know that other people like this game too they go to the comments and all the comments are really friendly and all the reviews are really friendly and the people who talk about it on facebook are really friendly and it's kind of insane to think that people would watch this game on youtube because it's not that kind of game but they do that's because they have something in common they all found the same game so i'm trying to reuse some of that information in a smaller way in a small way but that i think is very impactful and could be easily understood in this fast presentation so that's the idea the idea is and there's some ui improvements down at the bottom and adventure communist has since changed their ui since this old screenshot but this is the idea

the idea is that i've created identity i've turned the one spot in their game that was missions into an animating character similar to that of idle minor where they're asking you for help in a way that's more urgent and like pulling for your attention i've created an outdoor world to leverage mechanics that i think are useful to help increase the depth of the game the strategy of the game and monetization and overall social and like the ability to help each other but is it better now this is a good question and i've prepared some slides to talk about it so adventure combination in my opinion cannot be beat at least at its price point what i mean by that is if you take adventure communists it's a very low shelf success it wins every time

you can't i can't within my own powers think of a game that is ui based that is different ui from the ui that it has it has to be that ui it's it's a it's a timer from left to right you cannot beat a progress bar that goes from left to right you can make them skinnier more compact i tried radial progress bars i tried every different way to try to bend that ui and i could not get through it i can't and the only way to get around it is to try to create a game that start getting really animated you got games that have bumblebees flying around you got guys who are doing packages and stuff you got idle minor all these things it's the same [ __ ] a line going left and right with everyone's trying to put a theme in this so to get away from that ui is extremely hard okay so the fact that i preserved this the ui to cut cost and created a new game is quite difficult in it of itself and

if i may say so myself that window idea where the characters come up to it was actually really lucky and pretty clever because it was right there in front of me the whole time and i was like holy [ __ ] so i cannot beat adventure communists without increasing the budget and you go up in complication right adventure communist idol minor ooh lola adventures adventure is probably a bad example because it's a crazy ass game it's super big it's a it's a mmo in and of itself but it's still kind of like an idol game adventure communist is as low as it gets with that success and i don't think anyone will be able to beat that and let me explain why so if you the big question is is putting all the time and money into the idle game like that worth it like if adventure comments cost 300 000 i don't know if that's what it cost but let's say it did probably didn't it's like the cost of one

diva engineer in san francisco so if you've got a bunch of those guys you ain't going nowhere but potentially let's say the game cost like 300 000 under 500 where does pills versus zombies come in does it eight hundred thousand is it f what is it when does it stop and then by the time you're working on a game that costs eight hundred thousand dollars you start to think man [ __ ] we should have made something else there's so many options and they're eating actually should we done a runner should we do enough freaking match three should we done uh uh like i don't know could we have done something else and then the tools are getting powerful too right like unreal unity they're getting so powerful you can make games really fast so is pills versus zombies better than adventure communists i cannot within my powers

discover an as a cost-effective product as adventure communists everything is just more expensive so whether you think pills versus zombies is a good idea or not which i would be surprised if you did i talked to a guy who was a ceo he is a ceo of a big art company totally anonymous whatever he's pretty good he's like i've i've worked on ton of [ __ ] paul you know he shot me down right away even after all my research he was like what people really want in an idle game paul is they want to make money that's what they want and i was like well then how do you explain to venture communists i mean the main currency in that game is potatoes and he's like well they want to see the numbers go higher that's what they they want to see the numbers go higher and i was like well pills versus zombies has numbers that go higher so why can't it be successful he was like oh okay and he's like that's a good idea so i've seen this run by some people like pills and zombies and when i

work with them and if i can really take them there i say don't you understand though what i'm trying to do you know stop looking at it like this and look at it like the opportunity that i'm trying to make it trying to take money off the table from adventure communist and this is not an easy task everything else is just more so unless you want a bigger project with more time that's even more risky then this isn't so bad and then i had some people going oh yeah i kind of see what you mean it's actually not so bad it's like yeah it's not so bad now right now i'm trying to get somewhere with them but still it's not better i would take adventure communists game every day over pills versus zombies because it's just easier i mean we're talking with characters running up and all this stuff it's insane and there's some screen confinement issues that i would admit it would be hard to fit all that in there not impossible but interesting so pills versus zombies is not a better game but it has some potential to take the

money off the table from adventure communists it would have to be really well executed and likely copy a lot of its economy and i say that not caring at all you know it's it's just the problem with this is like the game is so well done you can't outdo it in an economy wise it would just have to be a clone of it it's subtly different if that at all but that's pretty normal you know you don't change the speed of racing cars for your racing game sometimes certain speeds feel good you know this this the pace of a of a march battle game feels good you do it too so it would need to be very polished to beat it so we're talking rise the kingdoms of game of war right it would need to be really good and most people get that they go okay yeah the game needs to be better but it needs to be way better to the point where people say this is a lot like adventure communists but it's just kind of better i don't understand it even though pills versus

zombies is a really weird theme i would argue that adventure communists is a really [ __ ] weird theme too so i invite criticism and i also i also welcome a little bit of you know i'm saying of belief in this thing i do think that if i had a small team and i was like i needed to make something that was small within budget i may say you know what let's [ __ ] do this dude pills versus zombies let's try it we'll take them on it's different enough similar enough let's go but even then i still feel hesitancy even within myself so i had one more idea and i'm gonna end this video with my last idea that could potentially beat adventure communists but because i already understand

i cannot do better than the low shelf i cannot put a game on that low shelf with adventure calmness adventure communist wins it it took it right it's the tabasco or whatever it's on every table it's tabasco is a hot sauce on america if you don't know what that is but it's a they did it you can't beat it in my opinion if someone does it's going to be something that i couldn't think of and i'm too busy to try to try harder i thought one more idea and um if you have time i'll explain it to you it's the last one all right [ __ ] let's do this oh god this one this game that i'm about to show you is so cool i like it so much i'm getting tired it's only 10 o'clock i don't even have a watch on [ __ ] free to play dude she goes and goes okay so we're still recording what's going on okay we're recording

still okay cool so i showed you all this crazy stuff and you might have a lot of thoughts about this hmm okay weird right it's pretty weird it's a good try okay not easy we're talking about a big business here this is a big deal so i took it serious so bear with me here down here i have a secret game that i came up with and this is totally out of left field so one day i was sitting on my phone i was looking on my iphone and i saw this advertisement for an apartment thing like decorate your dorm room and it showed this thing spinning around and i was like no dude no dude don't do this to me right now like ah man i was like i have an idea and i can't not try it so i was like i'm gonna try it okay i love this stuff i'll do it even though

it's i shouldn't be doing this stuff it takes me too long but it's so fun so i basically designed one more game okay i went at it and i call this game musical neighbors now if i hadn't sold you on pills versus zombies i'm telling you now that i you know i actually believe that musical neighbors is a is a badass idol game okay this is a bad ass idol game okay i know it because i can feel it there's far less hesitancy on pills versus zombies pills for zombies is a nice try good try right not easy to do try my best but this game right here is good okay check it out you're gonna trip out so this is musical neighbors right i got four different characters from different vector packs vectorstock.com and they look like a family

although they're created differently i didn't draw them myself so how musical neighbors works is i didn't go into so much detail okay i just need to get this over with you guys you need to you need to be a smart person to understand this stuff you need to be adventure communist pro so what you're looking at is four unique band members this is pretty cool okay so check it out and each band member is in a room okay on the same room that spins in the example that i showed you and you have your guitarist your drummer your keys and i put vocals but i'm going to change this to not be vocals it needs to be all instrumentals you can't have a singer unfortunately so it need to be like guitar drummer keys and a bassist but for now we'll just use vocals but let you know i've already thought of some issues with a vocalist and what you're seeing here below is the

exact same ui as adventure communists except every theme is around that particular musician so the guitarist has guitar content the drummer has drum katan content you see the drums and the snares right and the the keyboardist has keyboard content you see the keyboard and then the the vocalist or what in this case i i suggest now it would be a bass player would have bass playing content and i'm going to go into all this in a second but what i want you to know is when you tab through this stuff the stage shifts okay it shifts just like in that one little example that i showed you and it goes through each one when i told joseph about this he was like why don't they just all stand on the same stage and i said because they're different missions they're different practices they're different personalities if they're all on the same stage then we're gonna have a problem right there's gonna be some kind of like

mashup i can't fit everyone there and everyone at hyperhippo knows already that i got rid of the missions but i put the missions in this little thing here and this right here is i think a better change you can't put the missions on the front and win if you want to do it again like if i worked at hyper hero i would say guys we need we need to change okay we not so much but we need to change we need to do something badass and this is what i would suggest now missions are always in a menu in my opinion they're always in the menu i don't want to go on i i'm getting out of order but they're in a menu even in on call of duty and they're the hardest little menu to see but people know they're there and i was heavily influenced by the call of duty button called duty mobile button by this one right here so this is eventually this is essentially just adventure communists except it's a band now how it works is there is literally a piece of music that they make so if you see here when you press this

button the three missions pop out these are the three missions and this is the name of the track that they're that they're headed towards and the track is split up amongst different parts so this track is 10 parts long adventure communists you need to do 10 quests to get to the end so i would take a piece of music that and this is how music looks like in logic and i would split it into ten or whatever how many missions five six because the amount of missions you need to do to prestige varies between like i think three to twelve or maybe to fourteen and i would split the track into about 14 different stems this is actually possible and that's how music works in a lot of different genres but you know you have a boom [Music] if the next mission was the base then it would literally add that it would build a track that i have some more proof on why this would actually

work but again we're talking more expensive here so essentially like i explained these three certain contents these three missions like collect 900 000 c sharps or in this case it's practice so you practice and your top one is hours and the top one is practice so instead of it being potatoes i tried to have all of these things in summation to practice that was the theme i thought that's pretty good and i was kind of stuck on that for a while and i was like what i'll do is every single piece of content underneath the particular instrument is actual practice and that's pretty cool because you don't need a designer anymore because the content makes itself because guitar lessons have tons of content c sharps you know your bending notes your your your c chord various guitar

practices you know hammer-ons these are you don't need to look far for these and it would always fit really easily and so as you can see let's say this is like the kick and the snare this is like the synth part one and this is the bass and so on until you get a full song and i'm going to switch over to a website real quick see if i can do this easily i don't know if i can here we go so this is a epidemic sounds epidemic sound yeah and here's a song and you can see the full mix of the song [Music] so the the full mix of the song is like the b so it goes [Music] and it's just instrumental you can buy these online this i can literally download this right now because i'm logged into joseph's account spending his money but you can also get the stamps so if i press stems

i can just get the the drums and then it'll split it out and show me just the drums so when you're playing adventure communists the first thing that you would get was would be a part of this of the damn song right so you'd be playing it would be like boom so let's go over here the first mission would be like do the like do the bass or whatever and it would be like and then you would add more and more so it would i think it would provide this like oh [ __ ] this song's going somewhere this is kind of cool and if you look in this website here if i fast forward drums progress so it would be tight and plus you know there's actually i was going to go into this rant about audio engineers there are really good audio engineers and sometimes they're misunderstood i work with a bunch of them now my favorite audio engineer just to give him a shout out his name is keith zizza now keith zizza is a super good

game audio engineer he is good i asked him to make a cut a takashi 6 9 beat for a game i was working on at sega he did not disappoint he made rap beats like crazy to the point where sega came to me and said in a video we were making and they said paul you can't use i love the video it was awesome because they wanted me to make a video of our game so they could share it with the company and said you can't use someone else's beat i was like that's art that's our [ __ ] that's our music and he was like what people are like really i was like yeah and they're like damn they're so surprised that i i was i was in charge of this game i made sick ass music for it with keith we were directing it and keith can make really good music and he's not overpriced and he's he's super flexible so what i'm suggesting is is that we have a track for every prestige that makes an album and going back into it here um scroll over so here's the point

you complete tracks that make an album and that album goes into your inventory and then you redo it again now this is an enormous amount of content but it's cool i mean if you had an artist team and you're talking like you're working with the hyper hippo guys someone would literally be in charge of four personalities to really make this game and it would work on similar fundamentals and you can probably get really creative with downloading music and breaking it down because you can really break down music quite basically i mean if you have a c chord if you have a chord a three chord progression um you can break it down from one chord to two chords to it then the three chord you can do this pretty easily but you first have to make a song and then chop it up for each one so another reason why this was so cool when i thought of it i was like dude another reason why is this good is

the content makes itself i mean you just need to make dope instrumentals and you don't even have to think about this i mean this would be so much fun for people it's just fun that com a company working on this would be like hell yeah man like if we're going to make music it's going to be freaking cool i mean who doesn't like music and i've never seen a music involved idle game and there are very accept they're very successful music games i forget the one that my my nephew and his friends were playing but there was like an island of characters and you you collect them and then they play songs and they make this whole musical piece so there is room for this kind of stuff but never been done quite like this another reason why i thought it was cool because it's just fun i mean one thing that pills versus zombies lacks is the ability to make good researchers now the number one comment inside pillsbury adventure communists the number one hands down is that it's

funny people like it they like it and you might not understand why but it's because the art team and the designers and the company has a really good sense of humor and they make earthworm gym and you know jason the the killer from a movie i think and they put a lot of puns basically so you collect these researchers who look like real world people but they rename them in a funny way this idea it's infinite i mean you can have so many knock-off characters and it would just be cool and another reason why this is a good idea it's marketable nobody i mean even a marketer would have fun with this one as much [ __ ] as i talk about marketers i have a funny love relationship with marketing but marketers would have fun with this too i mean do you know how many tutorials there are where you can load this thing up and imagine if like hyper hippo made musical neighbors they would be like hey guys what's up before we jump into this tutorial i just

want to let you know that this video is brought to you by hyper hippo they made this game and it's really cool it's actually based on real music and you make music in like this idle way right now i'm working on my next song and it's sounding like pretty dope you know saying you should check it out so i think people would actually be drawn to it and you would be marketing in a space that's not over saturated and i don't understand marketing that well but i can at least think of it common sense wise that this would be really fun like to market it i mean you would be providing opportunity for all kinds of musicians so that would be cool and i think you might be tapping in a new user base where you're finding people you didn't have before and just growing things and you could be cross-promoting if you had other games too but i think youtube would be a super spot to market this type of game and what's that is i thought people would say what's that i actually don't know what that is this is was the outside button i don't have time to design the whole thing but hey [ __ ] give this game to a

bunch of designers and they will not disappoint it's already going it's already got a lot going for itself and um that's it this was the game the last game that i can think of and i couldn't go into it in detail like i did with um adventure communists but this game right here is cool this is cool this takes adventure communists and makes it look like a game that was happened a long time ago but it's more expensive i would literally want a small drumstick to come in and kind of hit that hi-hat as like an animating images i would want these icons to be animating as much as possible clapping like you can bark a hi-hat so when you go so if it said hi hot bark it would be nice if it did that or if it resembled music as much as possible because then your community would be like dude this is dope they talked about high heart barks i mean when i was looking at drummer

content i was like drummer practice and i got this massive book of how to practice the drums and i was like well there's all my content easy so you know there's a lot of people that i've worked with in the past you know some really special women that were really good at ui and really good at art that i think could make some super characters with this i would replace all of the varying economy currencies with different things like you see here i got a tape a music note and a diamond i'd figure that stuff out i didn't really get a chance to figure it all out this time but this and game right here musical neighbors i mean i just had so much fun with it guys i mean let me see if i can find one more thing i was even thinking about over here when i was designing on it like i would have the art the app icon like if you see this girl right here she's got her her her ear to the wall and he's got his ear to the wall and this would be the wall and this would be the app icon so if i

like make it blue so i i even got excited about the app icon like the app icon can be really fresh too because you could have two personalities like listening to the wall which is where i got this idea of it being something called musical neighbors because well they're a band who plays music next door to each other to give them more personality so i swear to god that i actually think that musical neighbors is better than pills versus zombies and i would bring a lot of the pills versus zombie stuff over like some of the somebody ranked up recently kind of features and that's the best i could do that's the best i can do man and yeah kind of uh kind of interesting and i'm not going to do anything with them like we're not going to work on the games i since have thought of some different games we've gone different ways some a team that was going to work on one of these games

they were acquired by a different company and they decided to do something else so i just designed these games to work on it ourselves but then because we weren't going to get to work on it i just decided to put them on youtube and give them away so i will be providing in the link i'll try to figure out a way to give anyone any all the materials so if you want to look at my materials some of my mock-ups if you want access to this stuff it's linked down below and you know if somebody thinks this game is worth making and they want to go for it and they want to hit me up that's fine you know i think it's a little weird that i'm on youtube and i made a game on youtube but this is a big deal this is my best try i'm not the greatest designer in the world i'm not the worst but i literally do think that these two games have potential and so this and what's rare about this youtube video is that it's it's a it's a nice try from a guy who's tried his hand at design for a while and then i just put it out there so i'd be

interested if someone was i'd be curious to see if someone made it or see what some people think but i do have to admit that musical neighbors is pretty cool it just puts a smile on my face you know i think the team would really like it and if i had keith like banging out hits like bangers i mean we could really get something done here and people would be like when's the new album coming out when's the new album coming out i can really see the team getting around on this and it just feels new enough so if i were to make a game better than pills versus zombies sorry better if i to make a game better than adventure communist it can't be done man you have to go more so if you're gonna go more i would go to somewhere like musical neighbors but adventure communists fantastic game congratulations to the entire team and what a what an accomplishment it is such a bulletproof game that game is really hard to penetrate and and and

steal from it's lock tight so musical neighbors would be my choice of direction and uh i think that's it had a lot of fun thanks for watching guys this has been a lot of fun and uh yeah i appreciate it cool have a good one be safe