Expanding Single-Player Games to a Multiplayer Experience with Discord

[Music] thank you my name is Adam Cuda and I am the community marketing specialist for Shell Games and um I am so honored to be here presenting for GDC the first time GDC presenter and really excited to get talking uh today we're going to be talking about expanding a single player game to a multiplayer experience using Discord now I do need to preface and say that we are not sponsored by Discord and anything that you learn from this presentation does not have to be applied using Discord you can use other platforms we've just found that Discord resonates really well with our community so feel free to enjoy that knowledge all right so let me Dive In by telling

you guys a little bit about me uh and who I am why you should listen to me right so like I said my name is Adam Cuda and I'm a community marketing specialist for Shell games now uh my background is in community I graduated from wholesale University with creative writing for entertainment uh degree then gone into some customer support roles consumer insights and analytics social media and all that kind of Blended together to get me to marketing where I am today now currently I manage the social media channels and the community for Shell Games original Ip so uh games like I expect you to die and until you fall which we'll get into just a little bit but most importantly sorry but most importantly I am Jade's dad and uh Jade is my adorable little puppy who you'll get to know in a little bit uh let's next talk about shell games now

this isn't a pinch for our studio but I thought a little context would help so Shell Games is an independent Studio that's been around for almost 20 years we were founded by the brilliant mind of Jesse shell who literally wrote the book about game design so definitely worth checking out awesome man now um as a studio we have produced and worked on and developed many numerous variety of projects from client-based projects to location-based experiences at museums and theme parks and of course our original Ip but we're going to be focusing on those original Ip now so let me introduce the first one to you which is I expect you to die now I expect you to die it came out in 2017 and it is a VR escape room puzzle game that has a kind of humorous and witty James Bonds by aesthetic going on right now it is highly praised as a must try VR

experience and a lot of the community consider it one of the best introductions to the VR platform so this isn't me being biased it's actually Community talk I highly recommend it though just for the the opening theme song alone so definitely check it out um in addition I expect you to die too is going to be coming out later this year so you know there's that fun fact um the next scheme that we're going to be talking about is until you fall and until you fall is another VR uh game that we made and it is a sword fighting roguelite experience that has this neon synthwave like energetic aesthetic and it's all about being a badass sword fighter and taking down monsters how can you beat that now this came out of Early Access just last year and because of

that Community has been such an important part of its growth and development which is why we have such a heavy emphasis on it now okay enough of the thugs in the context let's talk about why you guys are actually here right so how are we turning this single player game into a multiplayer experience well let me introduce you all to the Jade method okay I admit I'm way too obsessed with my puppy it's fine so the jth method this is how I form all of my challenges and how I've kind of the method to my madness right we're going to start with the first step which is jumping to conclusions I know it's a little weird to have the first step be about conclusions right but it's it's the basis of my madness the so what I want any of you to do is to make an assumption about your community something broad something specific just just any kind of jump to a conclusion right so for example something like uh my community favors

competition something as simple as that so you need to jump to your conclusion and then after you have that conclusion we're gonna apply some action to it right we want to form an activity or a challenge or a quest that really like complements that conclusion that you have or that totally challenges it for me personally I like to either amplify that conclusion by a hundred or totally turn it on a 10. and test the waters it's fun experiments right now the third step is data gather and listen we don't want to wait until the end of our activity after we've started it to see what's going on with it we want to be watching the results as they happen who's participating what are they focusing on why how are the community working together or how are they what are they most competing for um it's a key aspect to Quality Community Management is listening that's

the most important part so if there's anything that you take away from this presentation it should be that um and then finally the last step of the Jade process is to evaluate and learn after the activity is completed we're gonna see how it held up against your your conclusion did it prove or disprove your your hypothesis you know like what what actually happened right as you continue to do more and more of these challenges you'll have much more quantitative and hopefully qualitative information that you can kind of compare between them and this is really really important because these evaluations will hopefully lead you to some new conclusions that can then continue that cycle uh rinse and repeat so basically I just explained the scientific method which we probably learned in high school so there's that but it's totally fine let me now kind of show you an example of

this in process so with an actual little challenge that I issued um for the I expect you to die Discord server and this is actually what I did as we were planning to launch I expect you to die as Discord server as I mentioned I expect you to die came out several years ago but we only just started our Discord this year so our goal of this kind of challenge not the not the conclusion but the goal was to gather all of our community into one space this Discord and how is I going to be able to do that well the conclusion that I drew was that social media is our strongest reach so I'm gonna really hone all of my efforts and focus my efforts into getting the the word out and raising attention via Twitter was my main focus right that was my main priority so I really wanted to use Twitter to get my uh to get our followers to be interested in

this Discord so the next step was applying action so what I did is on National Morse code day or national learn Morse code day I posted a morse code geek and this is a simple and innocent enough post and you know whereas by a spy based puzzle game so it didn't seem too out of the ordinary but I followed this up by posting daily messages that hid Morse code letters in their content and some of these letters were really not hidden they're you know they're blatantly in your face in in plain sight so I was hoping that doing that would really spark some attention of our Twitter followers and additionally each of these letters would um okay let me back up one second so the the letters then

players would find the letters and it would spell out the link for the invite code for our Discord server so each of these posts had the next letter for the invite code they didn't know that it was for an invite code but they knew that it was something right and in addition to this to get even more eyes on it for some of those posts I tagged content creators on the the original content of that post to not only pull in our followers but also the followers of content creators who had made content for our game so trying to really capitalize on that Twitter aspect right and I really expected the community to pick up on these hidden hidden letters and work together to decipher it well using the third step data Gathering and listening I found out that it wasn't Twitter where the conversation was sparking but instead on our until you fall Discord now this worked so well in my favor because not only was it raising attention to the I expect you to die going on and the fact that something was

happening on or until you fall server but people were coming from social media to our until you fall server which is a win and then talking about it on the I expected to die uh channel on my Discord server it was awesome waterfall of events that I it was great so that led to finally the end of our reveal and we um The Players figured out that it was a Discord invite link and they joined the server right away and then a couple days later we officially posted the link so people didn't didn't do the the hidden code were able to join the community and it was time to evaluate and learn the final step of the Jade process so what I learned from this was that creating a Discord was absolutely the best case scenario for us not only did this campaign really prove that Discord was a place that they liked

to gather to communicate with each other but it was now available for the I expect you to die Community as well as our until they follow and so it just kind of wins all around but in addition to that it really stressed and highlighted that our players loved solving puzzles now this isn't I expect you to die server which is a puzzle game so that really shouldn't be surprising but what was a little surprising and maybe not surprising but exciting was their joy and how much they embraced the idea of working together for these Solutions and since then that led me to a new hypo hypothesis or conclusion that the players like working together to solve complex challenges so since then we've continued to do hidden message posts and campaigns and puzzles for our community on a nearly monthly basis that have gone over very well okay so where's all the multiplayer talk

on this like like cool you you made a Discord awesome okay well I could go on with the same Jade cycle breakdown for all of the challenges that I've issued but I'm imagining that you probably get the point so now I kind of want to focus in on potential different types of challenges that you can issue that really Implement multiplayer elements even though the games are single player now uh for this I'm gonna switch gears and we're gonna focus on until you fall instead of I expect you to die so in my mind there are two different branches of multiplayer challenges uh cooperative and competitive let's talk about Cooperative first so Cooperative challenges bring the players together and they can work as a team for a common goal right you've Cooperative so of this type there are two potential challenge branches and so to say

um The Collection brand and the player pairing Branch so let's focus in on the collection Branch right now um as an example I in November of 2020 around Thanksgiving we hosted the spirit of giving challenge now let me give you some context on how this challenge worked essentially and until you fall players can earn ether which is this in-game resource that you use to upgrade your weapons or to purchase new weapons and as you progress through the game and you finish a game as you end your play session uh there's a result screen that shows how much Aether you have gained through your run and that is something that always happens right well players are kind of starting to dismiss ether right like they I was noticing that no one was really picking it up and people were you know talking like oh you know like I've unlocked all the weapons so what do I do with it like

we need something to do with Aether so I was like okay well let's turn this that was my my conclusion was that Aether needed a new purpose right like players are sick of either so how can I spin that on its head right so the action that I took was issuing this challenge the spirit of giving so how the challenge worked is that players would submit their results screen and I would add all of their Aether values together into this community pool value now this isn't reflected in the game in any way it was only on our Discord server so um sorry so they would pull together their Aether and there was this reward this chance to reward if you participated you were entered into a raffle and the more that the more Aether that they collected and the more players that submitted to this contest the better the rewards and the

more winners there would be now I had originally set a couple tiers of like if you reach this this threshold you would win this physical prize and if you reach this threshold you could win this physical prize and that really motivated people and I do want us to stress I mentioned physical prizes but you don't have to do that we often use real life swag and promo items but literally our servers love emotes themed around our game they love Discord roles and acknowledgment like you don't have to go out and do full-blown physical items like you can you can reward players in other ways we've also one of the other really cool rewards that we've done is we've rebranded our social media channels based on on uh winners of a certain challenge which I'll get into just a little bit later anyway this amplifying of the prizes and this working together in the spirit of

giving challenge so that really sparked a drive to get people involved and to really work as a team and I actually ended up having to to come up with new prizes because they surpassed the threshold of Aether that I originally expected which is really exciting now the second branch of Cooperative challenges are the player pairing challenges now these cut the collection based challenges focus on uniting the community these ones really focus on pairing people together I think more like couch Co-op right like it's a much more intimate connection so to try this for the first time I created the match made in row car challenge which we hosted in February of 2021 now for this players would find a partner to mirror their weapon sets while completing a run so for example and

until you fall you can pick weapons for your right and your left hand so I would complete it with the heart splitter in my right hands and the ritual dagger in my left and I would need to find a partner to do the ritual dagger in there right and the Heart splitter in their left they'd have to find those pairs and that's how they would earn points right well this didn't work out very well for me actually and a lot of players ended up opting to mirror themselves to get points instead of trying to pair with other players and honestly through the evaluation process in that Jade process that I mentioned I really blame myself for this a lot of the process was complicated and a little convoluted for earning points so it was easier for them to just match with themselves than it was to try to find an actual partner and this was something that kind of became um relevant and you know noticed during the the d section of the Jade process where I was you know data Gathering and

listening but despite the failure of that conclusion it's it's not to say that something like that couldn't actually work for our game in fact the community themselves actually developed what they call the Puppet Master mode which is a perfect example of player pairing essentially what they do is they all put on their headsets and hop into discord's voice chat and pair off so they're in they're in they're in pairs and in until you fall when you reach the end of a level you're presented with three random augments that can upgrade your skills to as you progress through your play right and they're randomly generated so you don't know which ones you're gonna get well in the Puppet Master mode you're paired with someone and your partner then gets to pick which of those three that you that you have to take so you can either be really friendly and give them the power up that they need or give them

that boost and refill of health or you can be really cruel and give them something that is totally Irrelevant for their weapon set or Loadout and it's it's a brilliant way of implementing in that couch Co-op experience into a single player game and uh definitely worthy of noting in this presentation now on the opposite side of the coin we talked about collaborative well now we're going to be talking about competitive because let's face it we all have players and members in our community who love to win so let's start with the first branch of this because just like the The Cooperative challenges we also have two branches for competitives so the first branch of this is factions and this is kind of along the veins of like a like a Harry Potter house or a Pokemon go uh Team right where do you belong like you know for The Horde this immediately joining one of these

teams instantly gives you uh ownership and some kind of camaraderie with your teammates you have a sense of pride in being a part of this team and it's really something that we should capitalize on right um however I do want to kind of stress and iterate like part of the beauty of having these kind of teams is really playing up the fact of appealing to people's different interests right so for example on the until you fall Discord server we have four different factions each of the factions has their own primary color right that's very different each of them has their own primary weapon combination so that is appealing to their you know the gameplay side of things and then each of them also have like a in-lore um like mission statement so to speak so this way we have three different ways that you can

um that players can feel attached to one of these factions either hey purple's my favorite color so I'm gonna be a soul tender or I really like the idea of standing up for order and balance so let me go into the Rune guard or I really like the heart splitter so I'm gonna join unbroken like there's there's a clear path for any type of player to instantly feel attached to one of these factions same is probably true for you know look at Pokemon go do you like yellow you can join team Instinct you know there's there's multiple reasons and justifications for choosing each of the factions now I'm getting a little sidetracked but it's all important to say that there's a sense of Pride there's a reason why these people pick these factions right and they're attached to them so this helps immediately boost

that competitive drive you want your team to win and um so capitalizing on that these kind of challenges can like really really drive that multiplayer experience right you're putting different teams it's it's team sports right so when I do this when I do faction challenges I typically will have these challenges focus on each team focusing on obtaining the same result but they have different ways that they have to do them again capitalizing on those individual differences of the factions and really playing that up but working towards the same goal so there is that sense of I did this and I want to be I want to do this this way so I'm going to join that team it seems to work really well and we have a lot of people who are very dedicated to their teams even if it's not the winning team which is really really exciting now as a side comment I did mention I'd bring this up again but this is actually where we had that that

um that reward of rebranding our social media channels we had a faction challenge where one of the factions won and we rebranded our social media channels to be reflective of that team's colors and symbols and really you know promote that hey this faction won and uh that not only drove some interest to our Discord but it also helped reward the players for free so pretty cool now the second branch of competitive challenges is the one that we all kind of expect for competitive it's leaderboards it's it's speed runs and endurance tests and skill assessments and who can get the most points it's stuff like that right like figuring out who is the best and that is not something to be taken lightly there are so many competitive people and that is absolutely an element of multiplayer play that you can Implement in single player games in fact a lot of games build that in and have leaderboards for time trials and things like that built

into their games but you don't have to have that built into your games you can Implement that purely on your your community side too now I have a strong example of this being our hero of rocar tournament we hosted this in April 2000 uh sorry 2021 so just a couple months ago we had 20 participants who entered and then narrowed it down into four finalists and they all had to compete in crazy and difficult challenges and then we finally had our finals which we broadcast on Discord this is the first time that we'd ever done any kind of live brought well it wasn't live but it was a pre-recorded broadcast we did a Discord watch party it was the first time that we'd ever done a watch party on the Discord so we were kind of expecting mixed results right well turns out we had 30 congruent viewers for this event and all of them were just there to cheer on the finalists and I mean the finalists were there too but we were all just there enjoying the competition and

enjoying the event and this was huge this is great for we had more participants in our watch party than we did in the even in the challenge so really really proving that players may not necessarily be involved in the con in the competitive uh competitive Spirit but can join together for you know an event and celebration anyway the finals videos also uploaded to our YouTube channel and it has a more than 300 views already so even a couple months after we're still getting engagement on it which is really really exciting all right so those are a couple examples of how you can use multiplayer elements for a single player game but using the Jade process now I do want to really just take a couple minutes to emphasize the importance of the final step in the Jade process which is evaluate and learn so I broke it down into a couple segments here into a couple points first

being measuring success now it's really important to track your participation and your elements and this can obviously this is going to depend on what kind of activities you have how you're going to track those I'm a huge spreadsheet person so I have spreadsheets for literally every challenge I've ever issued um anyway but you can find information through this tracking that is really important such as identifying players who have participated in every challenge these are super fans and those likely are going to keep participating and if they stop participating then maybe it's time to evaluate why right or you may notice that you get a lot of participants in challenges that are heavily competitive or heavily Cooperative so it's really important to track these and see what's resonating with your community right the next thing is to reevaluate your

strategies so you want to of course start with the conclusion so jump to conclusions you know J for the Jane process and then while it's going you're going to be comparing the participation and engagement during the event remember this is the D of the Jade process which is to data gather I do want to stress not to ignore other factors and I have a good example of this the um when I first started making challenges like really heavily for our community I issued the rokari Safari which was a creative based challenges prompting people to submit fan art and take screenshots in game and really really focus on that creative aspect as opposed to the skill well we didn't get a lot of participants we got some really really cool like entries but it was mostly by the same people and it was uh very you know very few in number so I kind of dismissed this as like yeah the

community just wants to focus on skill and that's totally fine well factors change and we launched the game out of Early Access and then we launched the game on Quest and we got a whole bunch of new room nights joining the joining the server and I remember I brought up a video or I brought up a talent or something along the lines of the rokari Safari and all of these new members are like wait a minute we want to do this we want we want creative challenges what why hasn't that happened again and um it just kind of goes to show that reevaluating challenges that don't necessarily work in the past that could be because different factors are in play or were in play so always feel free to reevaluate and go back to some of the ones that you've tried even if they weren't necessarily a hit before because you know they might be now so don't dismiss that and then the last thing that I'd like to point out is active

listening I mentioned it earlier that listening is absolutely the most important part of being a quality Community manager so obviously this is something I really need to stress um now listening can be done in a number of ways whether that be lurking and evaluating feedback or providing actual surveys literally asking your community what they liked about a challenge what they didn't like what they want to see in challenges this can be very very valuable information and there's no shame in asking right sometimes the community doesn't know what they want but sometimes they really do so it's important to really keep that in mind the other thing is um like I mentioned the D step in the Jade process definitely data gather during the activity that you release they will let you know when they're too confused or when they just don't get it or when they want more and it's really important to capitalize on that

so again here's just a quick Slide summarizing the Jade process jump to conclusions apply action data gather and listen and evaluate and learn uh thank you so much for joining me today I was an honor to be here I'm so excited that uh you guys chose to listen to me and I have my contact information on the slide here feel free to reach out to me on Twitter um or send me an email if you have any other questions I'm more than happy to to help you or to talk you through or to share pictures of my dog um again uh please don't hesitate and join our Discord servers we've gotten until you fall and and I expect you to die Discord server and you're more than welcome so uh thank you again so much for your time I hope you learned something and have a great rest of your day stay safe and take care

[Music]