Designing Social Play for Sky: Children of the Light

[Music] [Applause] hi i'm here to talk about how that game company created the unique social dynamics in sky children of the light i'm john hughes a field engineer at that game company and since 2015 i've been working on the social components of sky most of my background is in engineering but i do a lot of design work day to day this includes working on our relationship and gifting systems emote and outfit systems and our matchmaking i also wanted to mention a lot of what's in these slides comes from work by done by over 50 people and mentoring and feedback from many people but particularly michael highland john edwards nicholas clark and jenova chen in sky players explore together to spread light and warmth through a desolate kingdom and return fallen stars to the sky creating bonds with each other along the

way it takes place above the clouds and players can explore and fly around together players can hug hold hands and chat sky is on ios and android we soft launched december 2018 and officially launched mid-2019 when i joined tgc we're still very much figuring out the core experience of sky we knew we wanted it to be social whatever that meant we knew we wanted a story that emotionally resonated with players and we had a clear idea of what the setting was and had some tech to support it we knew flying together felt really good and our cinematic style was fairly well established the the narrative arc of sky at the time would loosely guide players forward and provide context for their existence in the world along with emotional highs and lows this was super important to us we had learned from journey that a

strong emotional narrative experience could bring people together and we wanted to keep that in sky we had a problem though the clearer and more compelling our linear level design became the more people ignored each other we were bringing play testers who were sitting beside each other connected to each other and in the same game and a good chunk of them didn't know it was multiplayer they would see other characters in the world come and go but they just weren't interacting our idea was that we should incorporate some down time between narrative events on the main path where players had a chance to relax and spend time with each other this leads us to our first principle multiplayer gameplay that inspires social play should provide a careful balance of open-ended and goal-oriented play we switched to more of a tree structure and created alternate paths added secrets and activities these acted as ice breakers for deeper relationships to form anything in the world that slows players

down can encourage the boredom necessary to inspire creative usage of the mechanics players have gained access to although to be clear we saw this behavior with many types of goals not just not just player when players were focusing on traveling forward in the story we had prototypes where people needed to work together to find keys to get through a door and and the more compelling the goal in front of them was the more likely they were to ignore each other after that almost all of us were focused on expanding the pockets of pleasant gameplay moments like standing over a vista with another player or wandering into a mysterious cave and finding an abandoned structure to explore together these moments were really great but could we encourage them to happen more frequently and how did they fit into the larger experience at this point in development we knew that some of the best experiences you

can have in sky were off the main path being guided by another player or just stumbling around together to reinforce this we we introduced hand-holding between players which has proven to be one of the most iconic features of sky one player can give control to another and then be guided around the world a really attentive guide will create an experience for other players trying to gauge the interest of whoever they're guiding and being careful not to move through areas too fast a good guide will anticipate what secrets or collectibles others have left to discover and help find them most importantly though it's a nice intimate way for players to connect we knew it felt good to have another player offer their hand and dedicate time to showing you around or helping you find the next play area we knew something about this felt real and emotionally resonating and somehow through this in-game action you could feel a real

connection to the player on the other end after an experience like this while play testing ourselves we wanted a way to be able to show each other appreciation this leads us to our core gifting mechanic the ability to reward another player for some value they've provided you that value could be from holding your hand and guiding you for helping you find a secret entertaining you by playing an instrument or just to show appreciation for the time you spent together all this felt positive and exciting and at first actually we would tally gift counts for our own play sessions and someone would come around and collect a real dollar bill for each gift and this really magnified the feeling of get getting a gift you knew someone meant it when you got one

but we had to ask ourselves some questions why did we feel like this was working and how could we build on this more generally how do you define social play or or what determines the success of a social gameplay mechanic there are any numbers or any number of ways to think about what makes play feel social but we define social play as any activity performed near other players which encourages simulating the thoughts and feelings of others the scope of what can fit under this definition is is really big and note that we're not talking about multiplayer single player or any social media integration or anything like that it doesn't even say with other players just activities near them what we're talking about specifically is the simulation that happens in your brain of another person's brain as you interact with them this inner simulation can be used to either anticipate the needs of others in a friendly cooperative setting such as sky

or maybe even to get an advantage during competitive play but basically we're talking about empathy so we had interesting spaces to explore along with a strong but subtle narrative backbone but things still didn't fully feel right you could acknowledge players for the experiences you shared with a gift but the experiences were fleeting the acknowledgments weren't tied to anything else in the world and when you were separated from your new friend there wasn't a clear indicator of who was who but playing internally we were having a hard time distinguishing players from each other and we'd frequently have confusing play tests where one of us would just trick most of the other players into giving them gifts and weird erratic behavior was being rewarded a few things came together to solve this the first thing was expanding the outfit

system and basing the available outfits on the number of gifts you had received through a number of iterations we ended up with our current heart economy players can gift each other hearts and in turn players have more options to express themselves through what they wear this was also the beginning of our social gameplay loop the loop for a different game about building a character to fight monsters you might you'd naturally allow the player to become more powerful to fight more monsters we did roughly this in sky where you have outfits social abilities like emotes and other expressive items and as you use them with other people and they appreciate it you get more opportunities to express yourself the loop we created allows players to earn abilities and equipment such as instruments emotes fireworks outfits and chat players can reward each other for performing these abilities in creative ways or places by giving them gifts

and these rewards grant access to additional interpersonal interactions which in turn offer more opportunities for being acknowledged by other players the key i think is always including another player in the loop somehow either directly or peripherally so players can get a real sense of mastery still from a social experience they can become better at expressing themselves more charming and entertaining or more helpful this brings us to our next core principle that expression is at the core of social play but how how do we teach this unusual gifting reward expression loop we didn't know if players would understand the system or or let alone if we could make it feel motivating i i was personally inspired by a joseph campbell book called myth to live by and a big part of what he talks about in it is the role of rituals and rites of passage in ancient societies

he says that the role of these rituals is to teach people especially during a transition such as approaching adulthood or elderly years how to interact with others and function and contribute to their particular community we embrace this idea of ritual a social learning tool directly with our reveal mechanic to to reinforce a polite calm initial meeting between players at first when you interact with a new player in sky their identity is hidden and you can only see their silhouette to reveal the other player you touch your candle flames together and once they are revealed you can perform other interactions and see their outfit this doubles as a nice meeting ritual and a checklist for which players in your game you've interacted with before so this and the outfit system were deliberate steps to separate characters from each other it doesn't matter if you can guess what someone is feeling or thinking if you can't recognize them again to do

something about it we extended these ideas further to keep track of individual relationships in addition to emotes and outfits you can find in the world players have a set of abilities that they can perform with with each other which are unlocked as the relationship grows both players in this case are required to invest in the relationship to unlock more intimate interactions such as hand-holding hugging and chat doing things this way we mitigate a lot of the potential toxicity that can come from short low investment interactions we saw this toxicity in initial implementations of our chat benches which is a which are areas that allow instant access to chat with others we reduce the toxic interactions by moving the benches to harder access areas and increasing the investment required of players to engage in chat

at around this time in development we opened early beta access we are feeling good with internal play tests like it really mattered spending time with someone else in sky but would external people get the idea of a gifting economy or were these ideas to abstract we found that the gifting expression loop was understandable and motivate and motivating for people which is great and we all had some magical moments of bumping into new players and forming a real connection i had great experiences at the time bumping into a random person sticking get together for a bit and slowly investing and being able to communicate with them and eventually unlocking shot after about an hour of play and it turns out people are generally looking for a real connection with these learnings at our disposal after developing the gifting and relationship

systems we're able to apply them more generally to the rest of the game i think it's easy to confuse something you do together with someone as being social just by virtue of you both being there i think we can tell though that some activities are definitely more social than others i think typically if you gave someone the task design some type of interaction for two people where in the end they're gonna feel good about each other a pretty common first thought would be to put them in a situation where they help each other accomplish something in a video game this task might be to kill a monster together or to use a two-person switch to open a door and progress where these examples don't line up with how we're thinking about social play it takes very little thought about another person to do either of these things in the case of a monster even if it needs a coordinated strategy to win

against you're typically not thinking about the other player as long as they're doing their part in the case of a door requiring two people to open the other person has the exact same function as a simple key which definitely doesn't encourage you to simulate their brain in any way you just want to get to the other side i think if you don't need to know how the other player feels to perform your task together players often often slip into a mode of treating each other as tools just a means to an end so in both these cases we potentially have the opposite effect than we intended at best the two players might have a muted feeling immunity or or more likely one player will mess up and somehow inconvenien inconvenience the other so actually sky does literally have two person switch doors and this almost contradicts the previous slide but doesn't exactly and it just shows how context

for these goals uh really do matter uh we cur we encourage people to think about the way that others feel with a slight tweak we keep all of our multiplayer doors on side paths and all the all main path doors are all of them are single player that way players can always progress on their own but if they can convince other players often non-verbally only through chirps and emotes to follow them to a secret area they'll be they'll both be rewarded most of the time this means playing with the other player for a bit and building some some rapport maybe like unlocking some friendship abilities or really just investing in them in any way to prove to them that you won't just abandon them as soon as they change course it's a subtle difference but one design encourages players to consider each other and the other one doesn't

so for sure there's a ton of opportunity for social cooperative play it's just important to keep in mind that whatever we're encouraging players to do with each other involves thinking about others as people and ideally also encourages them to consider the way they think and feel so to review a few of the key points i've discussed goal-oriented play is the enemy of social play players really need a chance to relax and get a little bored before they start focusing on on each other play becomes social when it requires you to understand and empathize with others and giving players the ability to express themselves in unique ways is how players form connections a few more notes on best practices for encouraging social play we don't force players to perform any of these interactions players can complete the whole story arc without the help of others

this is important because as soon as you start thinking that someone is doing something with you because the designer has forced them to even if the designer hasn't you you lose a little bit of trust in the other player that they're being genuine so a tutorial quest to join a guild or a daily task to send a gift can potentially do a lot more harm than good a good example of where we've used this learning is sending gift messages to other players asynchronously we've considered having like a send all button but instead it takes time to send a gift to each person individually without this i think we would be missing out on an opportunity for players to build additional trust with each other also as you play sky you start to develop a bit of a sense for the types of players there are there are some who dive into relationships too quickly and others that are measured or

conservative in offering or accepting accepting gifts this is another place where we encourage players to think about how the other feels to time the next step in the relationship in a comfortable way something that has come up continually as we've developed and maintained sky with all of these social tools at players disposal and with the rest of the experience really designed to get people interacting with each other it's totally possible to have an awkward encounter with another player and something we've tried really to balance really carefully is how much or how little we protect players from these interactions aside from a bug or like a violation of our terms of service and just pure social awkwardness i'm talking about as a prime example a mismatch level of investment between two players where let's say a player chooses not to reciprocate a gift we stay pretty hands-off this is related

to the earlier point where it's best to avoid forcing players to interact because it removes trust i think by the same token removing the stakes involved in investing in another player also removes the opportunity to be vulnerable there are a lot of ways to experience drama in a game it can come from a narrow escape in combat great direct or environmental storytelling or any number of places for a big portion of sky players that drama comes from real interpersonal experiences being slightly vulnerable in front of others and eventually paying off in terms of them reciprocating and forming a deeper connection with the other person i think you need a range of social interaction you need the lows to really appreciate the highs ultimately what i think is crucial to designing social experiences is giving players the opportunity to anticipate other people's thoughts and feelings and act on those in some expressive

creative caring and tangible way thank you for listening [Music] [Applause]