Innovating new location-based gameplay in The Walking Dead: Our World

[Music] Hey so welcome let's see if this works yay it does yeah my background is I've been working on software projects for I guess close to 25 years about 17 of them in games start the original I doing on multimedia CD ROMs and websites then a couple of friends month they start the company called salaka where I joined I work on Hobbit elf which is this teenager community game is thinking for about 10 years and during that time was its lead designer for Disney's virtual Magic Kingdom's I did a lot of very deep social online through stair confronted a company called Mickey lab in London were with the games and 3d printed toys but 3d printing was not quite there yet for consumer products so I moved back here

and joined the next games were currently working on as a lead designer for for the temple I'm talking about but before I start working on our world I was the executive producer for a game called Walking Dead no man's land and which is a like tactical like turn-based zombie is like a killing and killing game for like for it there's a adventure elements PvP you name it life we've done a lot of things like with the with the mission types that we have at this being based on The Walking Dead so the TV series is still massively popular so the Walking Dead is it's been the number one TV show in the States for a very very long time and the the 1d comes on a lie or lawn TV there's 10 millions and millions of viewers watching the episodes as they're all at all times which is a great starting point for actually making the game because the TV series that has proven out to be popular kind of gives

you a solid base of like there's a fan base it's a very well-known fantasy to start building games on top of and aims he was happy about the game we had done before and like we were happy about the MC cooperation and and given the the show was continued to be popular we kind of figured out okay like let's maybe do another game together we did but like the starting point for the next game it was kind of like the how do we what would be the good mechanic those who obviously I wanted to do something different from what we had done with the first game and and and location-based elements for luck or Pokemon was starting with Laura to come big or life had just launched roughly the time that we were talking about this and we kind of figured that I like zombies having taken over the world the location mechanics could actually be a really good fit in terms of the story and like what the LMS could be so we started looking into like what are the location-based games in the market and and so like looking at the the bigger

location games that have the cup and a lot of players nokia did this game with Rovio quite a while ago called the the Ovi Maps challenge when they were like launching like they started really having mobile phones with GPS in ape-like features that you could actually use to do location-based games in a way where consumers could actually really perceive that there is location-based dilemmas there there's a Helsinki a studio called grey area that I'm not sure if exists anymore that did a game called shadow series that original launched when iPhone 3G was out and was the one of the first like really visually rich the location-based games to actually like show the map of where you were and there was like really brutal PvP that happened on the screen like so many logged in probably if you were a noob someone of the experienced players probably gank you immediately because there were high power players and they just like could dominate each one the areas but like the

the really sparked the imagination people into location based gaming neon tech launched ingress a few years later clearly like the games were actually quite similar at launch or so like did look like they were they'd be inspired by shadow cities and obviously like a few years later they launched Pokemon go and which is a like obviously as we know like massively huge hit and I think one of the big reasons why Pokemon did end up being so successful is simply that the the gameplay in Pokemon and the fantasy of the TV's you're like this here is the animation like all the comics it's it's a really good fit so people who knew Pokemon can expect the Dalek okay like I'm gonna walk around find Pokemon or catch them into balls and like maybe do some fight thing and that's exactly what it is but how would you go about replicating the success level of Pokemon in a game and there is this kind of electronic note that went in the game developer circles back like when then why people start to talk about how to replicate this and it's kind of

like you you can't take the mechanics of Pokemon and put them another game and be successful about it even if you wanted to because there's no other IP with the breadth of collectibles and the fantasy that like really fits the way you do so if you do want to make a location-based game you just can't take one of the existing games that had been made for to replicate it and be successful they actually do need to innovate and come up with something new also looking at the games that have been successful on the location there are a location as such is actually not a genre so so there's location as I said it comes with the baggage of people expecting certain types of gameplay and the location to be meaningful but there's no like established paradigm that actually you would need to put into your game and it'd be magically perceived as a good location-based game so when I started figuring out what would we like to have in terms of mechanics the kind of starting points were like we wanted to make really strong social features so

that you would actually really be able to play together we wanted to solve the issue of like you wanted me what being able to play everywhere so if you did play a Pokemon back in the day like I had really frustrating experience myself so I played in the city I was very happy then went to the summer cottage I could find nothing so effectively turned from the game from just not being able to play everywhere other thing we wanted to support a sport coach play so the location has to be being a following a location-based game but it's really frustrating that you can't play at all unless you move so we want to come up with mechanics that actually would allow the people to progress meaningfully even without moving on every single play session and and last but not least obviously like it had to feel like a Walking Dead game so the starting point again here was the wood where the next games works is when we start creating a new game with tried to think what the viewer fantasy over the IP is when you go watch a movie or a TV series if you're the you were what's

the fantasy in your head that if you were in this world what would you do what would you lie for aspirational so we had a lot of these discussions the art team started work on different types of concepts I still like how would we depict the brand in the new game because we had done this once before but they still wanted to explore exactly like what would it mean to reinterpret the brand um in today the new game so and gameplay-wise actually created four different prototypes that offered quite vastly different gameplay make sure that we really knew what's going on so and here's a couple of pictures so these are we looked into the maps and actually bit wanted discoveries for study um people were asking or like the internal game testers for asking that they would like to see a map view of the world that allowed them to plan strategically which is a good request but it actually created this this disconnect from where you were so people didn't find immersed in in the game at all they were just

like looking at this map based gaming the location kind of lost its being completely so some of these like we had actually we tried to turn travelling salesman problem into one of the game mechanics port you'd actually like go through locations and Antrim on map dip the quite work well that's a look into like various ways of doing the sector sick so like what the missions would be and how do you look in today um the world so and bust as part of that we like also started looking at what's the geography of the world and discovered like the one pictured here is from Kansas that has this massive grid square fields in the world were the axial accessible areas in the world for for the players is tiny compared to like many other areas if you live in a bigger cities for that's like black a lot of data available and obviously like we're we're developing part of this during the winter so they're to get well this dynamic so you really do need to give people the capability of playing the game even in kinda harsh conditions so what did we

come up with the the missions in the game are like a you if you played very simple first-person view shooters and and one of the reasons we went with this and like made it really simple is the if somebody's on the move they typically have maybe like 10 to 15 seconds for one interaction or you're gonna be starting to actually make it hard to play the game so if you're walking with your buddies to lunch you can't stop and play the game for a long time or you can be like the game is gonna break the your practice or if you're commuting somewhere like you really don't want to stop you just wanna go like do if smallest short interaction that product progress is you meaningful and and it you can't stop for any longer than that the the other is the what happened during the development is Apple launched a or like Eric it and Google launched air core and we figured that we really do actually do support this because it's like the location of like being able to you'd world in a are location-based makes perfect sense but these technologies didn't actually exist

I probably started development and we wanted to create a gameplay system that would allow us to log on the exact same missions both in AR and in the VR mode where you don't move so the if you play the game it's the exact same mission layouts and like the exact same gameplay which made the developed a lot easier when you could actually just use the same content across the board and yeah and we have no no the like only overhead view because that was the one solution that actually provided immersion alike really made you feel that you're somewhere in the world being able to travel virtually and like actually watch luchador ahead map just destroyed the immersion we did want to have a collectible so we did so the same as the previous game like the the heroes from the TV series are collectibles whenever got the missions you actually get the cards as we use the Royale style gotcha of like you're getting like more the same that allows you to merge the cards together and get more powerful heroes and and find more things but we did also like pick the weapons that you use in the game collect the balls and their perks that you can use collectors

cards and again like get more powerful in the game was part to collecting them for social the the various location guests age based games hadn't really made it obvious that you're playing in the world with other players and our solution that this was allowing players to build houses on the map so whenever you play the game you will see other player having placed things on the map you can tap on the map like a building you actually see the leaderboard of who's been interacting with you can tap on the the names of people to get their profiles and like see which skills they are so if you want to join the guild so they kind of like the the social aspects over like you knowing that other players are in the game is right built into the ethnic view and it's impossible to escape the other players that have are playing the game in your neighborhood we made this cooperative one of the big reasons being that competitive elements on the game actually are in location because are kind of dangerous because if you have rival goods as in what I

collect something from the map and it's away from the other players it makes punching people in the face a dominant strategy because you would probably then want to play the game alone somewhere where you the only player to collect stuff and and if you and that would imply that people actually would need to what want to be competitive like in the physical world and you don't want that in the in in the location-based game and to make this more interesting the the social solution that we put in is almost all the players who are playing the game join a group and the group's have this bingo board style task list or each one of the players contributes to the the guilds board or either one of the players needs to play through the missions alone or you need to work together to find different mission types and play those missions in a very specific manner to progress through the board and collect the best rewards this is tiered so you can like it if you play well enough and you complete the boards

for tier the next week actually you bump up into a more difficult board that gives you better rewards so the kind of the smart depth of the mission types you play and mission how you engage what the missions actually comes not from the the sector sake itself that you do in the missions because the head map because they did need to be very short to not to distract the people from the being able to play the game whenever but how you engage with the moistures through the meta in the social level the other thing that people were asking for the longest time is discovery so with location-based mechanics people want to feel lucky whenever they open the game and I find the spawn somewhere that they they think that they were especially lucky or they were clever on they know into where to go to play the game so the most admission types are statically placed to actually find the same mission types like in the same place every single day but we also have this rare mission types that you have to be lucky to find um so if you like the blue glowing thing is a

rare mission that gives you a guaranteed better drops and you can share these to other players in the game so but you can drop in the flare and the other people in your guild can teleport to that location and play all the content in that neighborhood as if they were there so if you find something that is especially cool you share it to the guild which again supports the coach play or you being able to play the game or and feel this reciprocity of like social life sharing and being I will play better with the guild mates it's great for that and that's pretty much it so the takeaway for me for this project is that they were kind of like scared to innovate a lot um but we did and I'm happy to do that but do you remember the reserve enough time and the other thing we actually did continue to work on iterating the designs until more or less the entire team was playing the game every day and I first really hooked and that seems to be kind of the key of life now it's good enough to actually ship to the other players like now that were playing the game our own game on a daily basis and really loving it so that's it

thank you I guess we have a couple of minutes for questions yes we do we can answer question answer cuz I'm not gonna answer anything I love Finland like people are super kind but they never ask anything like everybody looks at me kind of yay solidarity yeah it's an amazing game congratulations I'm very curious is there anything you would do different something you learn and that you would do different if you had to do this game again we have a very long list of features that are coming up so so the next release I guess we're already have told the players that there's gonna be PvP and which uses the exact same collections so so that currently you can also find these greater fights of humans on the map and we're effectively taking that same gameplay mode and allowing people to fight each other and this is actually implemented using college play

so if we're and and if rewards that you get from the PvP actually support you playing on the map so usually game structure PvP in a wherever like it engaging with the PvP is kind of way from the other game modes if there's multiple and we kind of wanted to turn this around were plenty pvp actually makes you more powerful easier to engage for the other game modes but yeah I guess I can't talk about the other features but there's there's plenty copping that's we we know the players will need congratulations again question I've got is that like with Pokemon go for instance I was you saw real retailers actually get involved with the game by saying okay between these hours Pokemon go players can come here and they get special discounts and so forth are you looking to start engaging that sort of activity as well like and I'm a Starbucks okay come clear out the zombies here and then you get a free coffee so I never

heard some coffee shops actually have already like what ads for the game out there like are engaging people they are teachers coming up that will actually like enable more that's so we don't currently have a equivalent of a lure in the game but that's actually coming up probably in the next release we're already like we try to release it funny bug couldn't put it out there is features coming up or like the that type of mechanics of like you play coffee shop having things on the map visible is definitely gonna happen so yeah we are interested if Gangnam good just a second okay thanks since the game is an AR based a game have you tried any a or classes like a boost explained or other such things oh we did toy with the idea and I think

there was a prototype but the like kind of like the needed move around and using it like they their Erica the current available hard for it doesn't really support location-based gaming that well so I think they're they're amazing for like indoors AR but even the tracking technologies typically don't work in sunlight so I'm eagerly waiting for a upcoming Harvard revision sometime in the future work we could do a location-based game where they are classes yeah I think those we might just have done one more yes I think he had a question hi trying to understand the scope like how many employees do you have working on this project and how long did it take if you elaborate the entire production took about two years I think the current theme is about 15 people the we we obviously like next has a we have our own package I can tell technology that

were using for all the games so the like there's only one back-end team to support the entire like although all the different game teams but yeah like I think the current theme is about 15 but at peak we were a bit more but is that's like but if they took 15 40 years you should be able to pull something like this off [Music]