F2P Design Tips for 2021, Copy Clash Royale! (1 of 4) Ft. Jeff Witt

hey everybody welcome today i'm here with jeff wood master systems game designer right jeff and we're going to talk about we're going to have a quick four part series and every part is going to correspond to a new design tip that jeff thinks is essential actually critical for game design in 2021 and jeff your first tip you call take clash royale gameplay ditch the meta systems could you go into what you mean by that yeah definitely um so you know clash royale has proven to be very successful as a game that players enjoy playing the um real-time placement of cards both troops and spells is very natural to the sort of phone mechanics and um it's definitely a game play that not only fans of clash royale

have enjoyed playing but also lots of developers continue to use the gameplay as inspirations for their own games and that that makes perfect sense the the problem is that they a lot of the game developers believe that if you take the game play you also have to take the meta systems as they were designed in clash royale and that is uh my tip for today is that you really don't need to do that it's very easy to divorce the uh card meta system from the actual gameplay and could you talk about like if you were to describe some of the biggest problems with the meta systems what would those problems be sure basically the card economy in clash royale is very shallow you have right very few levels each level is is a flat uh stat boost um and the costs just scale up super high so when you get to you know levels 9 10

11 the amount of cards you need for the next level gets into the hundreds and eventually the thousands and typically when games do this it really just tries to slow the player down which um i think they succeed on but the problem with that is also slows down monetization and that's why we've seen a decline of clash royale's modernization over the last two years um and all this is not really necessary for the success of the game and we know that clash royale can it is yes it is you know an rts but it can sustain a fairly heavy stat economy um without disrupting the gameplay that players enjoy and so i would you know if i was a working with a developer who was going to use a gameplay that's inspired by clash royale i would strongly encourage not only to go deeper with the card economy than

clash royale did but also think of a few other systems that would also add stats to the game that players could pursue you that will give you more levers to try and monetize more off your players but also you could be more generous with rewards and and make the game feel less um sort of grinding in the elder game like clash royale is once all your cards get up to levels 8 9 10 11. right and jeff i see you've got like this kind of chart in your blog post that kind of shows the the upgrade cost and card amounts required to go up different levels and so when you're thinking about the depth of an economy like how how would you kind of think about what's too much or too little um so you know there's your overall amount of cards needed

to fully upgrade a single card and then there's you know the amount of upgrades and i think that how you you sort of balance the two can be the difference between uh something that feels okay or something that feels pretty good so like you know uh it takes about uh you know 9 000 ish cards to go from level 1 to 12 if you're a common but that's over 12 levels you could take that same 9 000 and do it over say 30 levels and what that does is for players the amount of cards you need for that next level for that next stat boost is a lot more manageable which makes um the grind ahead of them feel better than the feeling that oh crap i need to get 3000 more cards until the next level that's that's never going to feel good unless you you know reward cards it's a much more accelerated uh

pace um so for for this not only would if i want to add more depth to this not only would i increase the amount of overall cards you need to max out a card but i would have the levels go up into the you know 40 50 60 range and have those the card costs sort of be smoother from level to level to make sure that each new level is always within distance if i you know grind a little more if or if i spend to open the chest i'll be within striking distance that next level and that's you always want to leave players within striking distance of the net of that next feeling of progression so that they get that uh positive emotional hit um and that's something that our clash royale's balancing doesn't really do at the elder game right and jeff in terms of like let's say you were to elongate the level progression and the card progression i guess one other impact of that would

be sort of stretching out your player base from a matchmaking perspective right in terms of like trophy count and things of that nature and so how do how do you think about that or how would you weigh the matchmaking relative to the you know which is a very big problem that you're mentioning right like i i have no desire to ever play again in clash royale just because you know i don't feel like i need to because it is so shallow to your point but then you know what would be the other factors that you need to consider when you stretch out the progression well so you know clash royale's uh you know uh trophy system like it does a good job serving as a proxy for the combination of stats and skill of a player um so theoretically adding more stats by you know elongating this system may not need an adjustment in the formula but if we find that um [Music] the the stat differences between players

are growing more and more divergent in matches which you don't want to do you don't want the game to feel totally unfair so like right now like if if a player is one level off it doesn't seem that bad because your skill could um sort of outweigh that statistical advantage but if if that becomes you know two to three levels off or if the card levels are several levels off and you start feeling like you're just consistently a statistical advantage or disadvantage at that point you'd want to consider tweaking your matchmaking formula to put a greater emphasis on closer uh stat ranges between players that you match um but it's still possible given the skill based aspect of uh clash royale

so it gamepl like it would be manageable exactly like it's always good to slowly add content over time uh not only does it you know give players the sort of feeling that you know the game keeps expanding but you also will have more player data analytics data around those levels that you added to inform your choices of how to balance the levels you that you add after that okay is there anything else to add about your or tip number one um you know try when choosing what to take from a game like clash royale just yeah try and ask yourself okay what is this doing for me like you know uh the the chest system that clash

royale has um it's great because it basically eliminates the need for an artificial [Music] limiting factor like energy because once all your chest slots are full the game's basically telling you either you spend or your session is more or less done because it doesn't make sense to play when all your uh treasure slots are full um so you know if you want wanted a game with no energy mechanic uh the chess system from clash royale is great but you know if you already plan to use energy you may want to rethink okay does it make sense to still take the the chest opening mechanic if i have an energy system so just think about you know try to ask yourself what is the reason that you're taking certain mechanics from other games to incorporate into yours and try to think okay what am i bringing to the table or solving by adopting this mechanic and if you could justify your choices in in

taking um uh mechanics inspired by other games um you know that that will make your game better because you've thought through you've been more deliberate in your design choices uh and taking inspiration from other games cool so maybe i have one last question for you so you know one of one of the guys that we know another game designer javier barnes suggested that maybe one thing that clash royale could potentially do is use kind of like the hearthstone notion of card sets or packs or you know whatever seasons what what do you think about that if somebody launched a clash royale type game with that kind of a monetization system what do you have any thoughts in terms of what the potential impact of that would be yeah so you know with any sort of real-time strategy game the one of the worst things that could happen is if players just

get grouped into some uh strategies that are just optimal and that's the those are the only strategies they pursue and the problem with that is it limits the number of cards that you know they're going to focus on optimizing because different strategies only need certain card combinations um so that's definitely where you don't want to be so one way to prevent that from happening is you know a term that you know gamers refer to as shaking up the meta which means you know in general um changing how you know cards are played or changing stats within cards or you know how they worked in order to make sure that the same strategies that were before aren't necessarily continuing to be optimal going forward um you know there's two ways to shake up the meta one is rebalancing cards that are live and you know whether players accept

occasional rebalances it's almost like it differs game by game i've seen some games where players hate every time cards are rebalanced i've seen other games and i think clash royale is one where they've generally been a little more tolerant of rebalancing um cards um as you know the game continues to age um games like hearthstone and magic gathering which was the inspiration have used a more artificial sort of way of shaking up the meta in that um you know they have only certain sets of cards being sort of eligible for um you know ranked play at a given time and so what that does is you know strategies that may have made you sort of super soup do very well in the past may no longer be at your disposal because the the cards from certain sets that you really use you can't use anymore and so you

must invest in some of the new new card sets um both rebalancing and those artificial sets theoretically will achieve the same thing um it's it's probably easier to to have artificial limitations on what sets you can play but again it's one of those things where you need to be really careful about how your players are going to take that and so it's good if you're doing a card based game and you want to use sort of the artificial limitations you know that hearthstone and um mastery gathering use to set that expectation from the beginning so that players don't think that they could use all the cards at any time you definitely want to create situations where only certain cards or sets of cards can be used just to make sure you're communicating to your players that uh they are not going to be able to use all their cards at all times in the game and that that'll give

you the flexibility to play around with artificial rules about which sets could be used when and and make your uh job of of shaking up the meta a lot easier got it right cool well that's all the questions that i have any final thoughts on tip one or um you know uh may 2021 bring a successful development of some really awesome games um and don't don't copy clash royale's economy all right all right thanks jeff until next time stay tuned for our next episode tip two from jeff witt thanks jeff [Music] [Music]