Legend of Mushroom Deconstructed - How it became a fungal phenomenon

[Music] hello and welcome to deconstructor of funds product deep dive today we're going to cover Legend of mushroom by Joy ice games so hi I'm Jen donaho I'm the Strategic marketing consultant at bet hat and Jaden Inferno I'm Laura taranto senior director product at Big Fish Games and we have a super special guest guest super special guest super special guest this deep dive is going to be extra product extra design heavy and so we needed to bring in an expert in midcore gaming and so it just so happens to coincide with his deconstruction that went into the latest newsletter and blog post Ken Landon CEO of super secret new studio what what the hell does that mean Ken what are you up to thanks means that we're not ready to talk to VC's yet so yeah no no outward branding no no

disclosure of what we're working on but yeah I'm a CEO of a new startup um yeah I joined it with a couple of people I worked with at blizzard um friends who worked at machine Zone scopely Etc quite a heavy pedigree there but uh yeah really excited to be on and talk about Legend of mushroom it's a great game oh so happy to have you I just love talking to product nerds like you and by nerd with all due respect the folks that are the best at this are nerds in all of the best ways so um what you're going to get from this video and this podcast remember now we do both of these things so we're going to give you an understanding of this really actually complex Idol game you're going to hear me on it which is going to be really fun and how it works why is it making a lot of Revenue so why am I going to on a game that's making a lot of Revenue I will tell you because as a player uh we all have different motivations of why we play games and this is one that doesn't spark joy for me but it Sparks joy for many many people we're going to hear why so

coming out of this you're always going to learn from these deep Dives how can you apply this to your own games what are areas of improvement that would make this game a little bit better and more successful and so we always want you to make sure that you can apply it to what you're doing so we're going to kick off with an overview of the game if you're not familiar with it so I'll go first it's an idle RPG that made me realize that I personally hate Idol RPGs I will be role playing the role of on this podcast because I really absolutely hated playing this game and Laura I mean next time we're really going to have to pick something more my speed for our next pod because I this is like two in AOW well Township wasn't that bad although I I didn't yeah it wasn't it wasn't nearly as bad as this one for me but okay all right I'll shut up what's the real summary you're starting to sound like Goldilocks this game's too hot this game's too cold why can't you just give me a game that I like

oh that's funny just teasing just teasing um so real summary actually I'm going to give a mediocre summary and the reason I mean Ken is more of an expert in this space but for those of you who haven't played Legend of mushrooms and if you're in the west you probably haven't or if you're not playing midcore games you probably haven't seen it we have a little bit of a slide deck but I'm actually going to quote I'll quote Ken directly but I I'll I'll put in my own words to me this is this is like a RPG Idol mix with a very I wouldn't even call this a game loop I would call it a game spiderweb and we'll go we'll go into it later and and and as to why um but imagine if you took the idol games we know and love so you could there's there elements that you that might be reminiscent of Adventure capitalist which Ken has worked on and then you take you know old old games I would even say maybe like way back when I think it was called taptap heroes or tap Knights where you're just you have this Auto battler and your whole goal is like just to level up and you know take over the

world be the most the highest power player but uh let I'd rather have Ken describe more accurately how how he would summarize this King yeah I think that you did a pretty good job I mean it it really is one of these games that's centered on you gaining as much power as you can but not really being punished for for not being active all the time you though they have the idol elements in there super super deep and varied progression curve so like lots and lots of different pieces of gear you can collect lots of things that stack on top of each other in a meaningful way so that your power just escalates and escalates over and over and over lots and lots of chores to do so like you'll log in in the morning and you'll have 20 red badges I think uh you know that you have to go and clear some of them will be like free gips of currency some of them will be a key based unlock for running a dungeon um but there's just lots and lots to do lots of things to make you feel like you're making meaningful progress these games are very very much about catering toward Ward the

players who have this need for feeling like they're they're making meaningful progress on some like uh chore it's almost like an RPG version of a chore for players to do this type of game this game in particular is is kind of smart in that they've added some social elements that allow you to Peacock your progression against other players they still have a long way to go um to like compare against other heavily socialized games but there's not that many Idol games I would say that have this sort of social comparison Loop and this is sort of like a good V1 to get us into like a more polished game in the future nice nice when I worked on a lot of midcore games it's scopely um we called it housekeeping you know all of the housekeeping items that you had to do as a player you know when on a daily you know basis to get your dailyweekly reward system and this game is one of the worst housekeeping games I've ever played where you're it it takes like 20 minutes and I mean I actually feel like I haven't haven't accomplished anything

because by the time you finish all that you collect like 50 diamonds and or gems and the gems aren't worth in this game so I'm pissed at it for making me cuz I'm one of those people who can't have red dots anywhere on my phone because it just it it drives me crazy it makes me feel like o o Ken you actually sent me an article on this the the feeling that there's an uncompleted task drives you to to actually engage more because as humans we feel like we have to complete a task which is why badges are there but in this case it it drives me insane oh don't look at my phone are you one of those people that has like 500 unread messages and like 16,000 unread emails that would kill me Laura is I have um 127 unread messages the emails like clear but the the messages I've given upar how do you do I mean who talks well thank God you respond to me I mean I'm thankful that I'm not one of the 12,000 that make it

in all right so uh one of the things that we like to do um on these deep Dives is talk about takeaways uh right up front this way you guys you all get the best learning possible from all of the work that Ken has done in going through all this so uh let's go through a couple of them Ken why don't you take the first couple and and you and Laura kind of switch off and I I'll come up with the last one AB so the the first one is to embrace the RNG drip make sure the gotcha is well balanced um we'll dig more into that a little bit later in this talk but uh one of the things that the game does really really well which you know anecdotally a lot of our friends have reached out to us about is this uh lamp pull um system that they have in the game that's just a constant free gotcha um so you have the sense of like o there's this great piece of gear that I just got and where like between moments of lag of like totally crap gear that crap gear is still meaningful to your progress cuz it's you know how you level up your character and earn gold to to dump into other progression systems

so that RNG is very very meaningful it's another learning that uh you know brawl Stars went into and they talked about at GDC recently RNG can be a very very strong component for retaining players it's one of the key elements to a retention Luke with uh varied rewards are super super important the second one is catchup mechanics are extremely important and once a player leaves in this game particular there's no way for them to compete in the future which uh really will likely lead to them turnning up you I can see a world in which it's very difficult for the UA team to reactivate players into this game because once they've been reactivated they just feel super let down by their progress compared to where they were prior to U leaving and there's no way for them to get back in I mean when I say no way like you can but you'd have to spend like literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to like get back on the top 20 of your server and that feels terrible so they need to figure that that system out I'm going to let Jen cover the the strong positive social

motivations because there's one feature in this game I really like called the dormatory and that's probably a neg negative interaction that I have I have three retainers and I tickle them every day um so um so watch out I don't want to do the explicit uh check mark on this podcast easy there Laura it's just a feather it's just a feather okay all right uh but I will um there was one when we had a little bit of a a pre-show talk and we were talking about the NeverEnding battle passes and if you ever think in a game like if you look at one of the features you're designing and you think I don't think I can make a battle pass out of this this game should teach you yes yes you can this actually is a great example if you want to see different ways to do stacking battle passes multiple layered battle passes different types of feature interactions all of them have battle passes and again it ties very well into the point of the game the point of the game is to grow your power and they give you a lot of

ways to do it they basically want you to spend because the lowest tiers are not super valuable you don't get enough resources and currency but they provide ways to progress that I think that can easily be taken into any game you're working on whether it's midcore or casual yeah I actually on this one um I put it in as a joke in both in a good way and a bad way as a player I was like oh wow you know which which battle pass am I am I am I in the farming one or am I in the you know the the other one the mining one am I I I can't I couldn't quite keep track and then you know Kent your earlier point is unless you are fully spending at the full amount um on every single battle pass and every single thing there's no way for you to compete on your server and it goes into your catch-up mechanic when I was on and back at scopely on all the midcore games we actually and we had games that were live for at the time it was like 3 years we actually had to increase the hour and

what we would reward people coming into the game for the first time so that they started at a higher level so they had at least thought they had a chance to catch up um luckily a lot of people don't do good math and so they don't realize that they can't catch up until a little bit later but in this game I've already seen in just the couple weeks that I've been playing how much further away people are getting from me like even in my own family because you can tell by the mounts like I finally got the spaceship or the Airship Mount I was you know stuck on the surface board for forever and then the hoverboard and that's a great way to kind of peacock to your other players but so I don't know be careful about too many battle passes but also see it as an opportunity yeah for those listening that haven't played the game a family is a guild so they call guilds in this game families yeah sorry about that everyone has their own branding for the clan The Guild the whatever the battle passes are insane I I was spending very heavily at the start of the game and I there was one battle pass which was I was just like I don't really like this mini game so I'm not going to engage with the battle pass and that was a massive mistake I like I

ended up buying it like four or five days after I was first able to but that first four or five days of not having it meant that I meaningfully dropped back in the progression pack and then I just never recovered it's super super punishing but yeah one of the really strong sides that they have in this game is they have excellent early merchandising um and every single IP offer that they offer you at the beginning of the game is extremely valuable like the the amount of progression that you can uh push through with just the first I think it's like a $1.99 pack is uh significant if you buy all three of the first gear packs that they offer I think it's a total of $14 or $15 you can get easily to like level 50 in the game just off of those without having to do any of the other idle mechanics like your character will just P power through with just those three pieces of items and they end up stacking them in in like the right prices so they escalate from $1.99 to $5 to $10 um and then they they start

adding in new um systems so like they'll offer you a bundle pack for the system that just unlocked like maybe you'll just have unlocked Pals and then a new bundle pack will pop up four Pals so that progression based targeting is is pretty powerful the flip side of that is that it feels like they don't have PMS working this game or they don't have like segmentation Tech in place because all of our whales will have been spending $99 on Gold packs or something like that and they'll they'll still be offered the $2 progression pack um there's no um no relevancy to their their past spending Behavior which is something that we're running into in a lot of games recently like even brawl Stars has that problem where they they just don't have any ability to Target people's P spinning uh Behavior yeah I absolutely agree with you on the merchandising and uh I always preach to people to to P my PM Partners it's like hey guys like starter packs early monetization that dollar purchase leveling up in in value you know trying to capture people to make them feel

really good and powerful about the game uh is is a brilliant way to keep people what we found at Riot uh was once somebody made that first purchase the chance of them coming in and making another purchase was incredibly incredibly meaningful let me say so I I agree with you on that one other small thing we didn't have on our list I wanted to throw in there is as as someone of a certain age who has really shitty eyesight the text and the everything on this in this game is so insanely small and I have an iPhone 15 Pro so I don't have the big one I have I have the little one but for the love of God we should all have a minimum font size that we use in our uiux and so maybe these you know the audience for this are people who have cat-like vision and have no problems whatsoever but sometimes I'm getting my magnifying glass out and I'm like what's this sa here I can't quite so just just make sure that where you can the icons that

you use and the text that you use try to make it make sense and make it make it legible uh okay so this is what we're describing as what is Legend of mushroom this is I recorded this this is my level 72 can we we probably should have taken yours because I I saw some screenshots of of your account you're like way above 100 now at like 115 um Lor you're still on the surfboard I'm level 70 and I and I have like a better Mount than you hey this is the beauty of this game there's multiple ways to only spent like four dollars though so I've only spent like four no I've spent I've spent maybe 50 to 75 bucks I got the cool little like like propeller airplane thing we'll go into more detail and I'll show some we'll show some screenshots of a further account I'm now just just you know I'm at level 90 92 now um so I have progressed a bit but just to give you everyone who's watching an idea of what this game looks like and you can see the small small text that

Jen Jen's referring to but the pure scale of this is this is a little bit showing my daily tasks and just kind of the what we what we talked about there's just so many so much housekeeping to do as everything in the game resets you're going through oh there's oh that's the tickle that's the retainer oh I missed the tickle um but there there's basically a lot of of tasks that give you a little bit of power here and there um that you do every day and and then as mentioned it's the spend that really propels you forward I didn't figure out the prayer thing until recently that there are levels and you kind of like pick which ones you want to lock and which ones you want to like roll and so I have like all A's and now I don't want to roll anything I'm like well but then you can't level up the statue without rrolling yeah if you lock everything it's locked in they have different sets there too as well so like if you um if you're doing PVP you're going to have your PVP set on if you're doing uh do your PVE set as well it's quite smart

I'm only at level three yeah so I'm not I haven't unlocked the rest of the sets yet the first one unlocks at level five sorry the second one unlocks at level five so I keep having to just pray to level up the statue so I leave one unlocked hoping I don't get another a because now I have all A's which is the higher class the more powerful Yeah the more powerful um Buffs and now I'm like H what do I do I just have to do my little one roll and get a little bit here and there until I get the next set to unlock more of them so we're looking at the mine I felt like I was playing Township quite honestly it's like the exact same thing is the only thing I I believe that was different is in Township they have a different radius of what you can see underneath the um unmined tiles so I believe they show you here everything you can get in all areas where Township only I think shows you one or two squares out so you have to mine extra to be able to see if there's something under it or use one of the the uh large larger clear tools yeah it's

it's strange to me that this isn't like this doesn't track with the RPG nature of the game at all it's like literally just mining mini game thrown in on top it's it shows that it doesn't really matter what your mini games are people are still going to engage with it because it's something else to do well we saw that in white out survival as well like they had a fishing game that was you know very hyper casual focused and I think the Insight goes to we've talked about this a thousand times that these hyper casual mini games that are utilized in UA that people find very simple and very engaging can be something that you utilize inside your game especially if you utilize it in you in UA and there's a reason for you to do it I think everyone kind of can gravitate towards oh I get it like this is super easy but when you get later in the game and you've got like a thousand hammers not a thousand 100 I think I'm up to I get like a 100 hammers it takes me like 10 minutes to clear the m and I'm like I don't want to spend my time on this like allow me to clear he this faster so I think this video goes on for

a little bit I think it's it's I can't remember 10 or 12 minutes so we can jump to you know why why we selected this game uh despite U me pushing Jen Jen's like oh I don't want to do this game this game is no there's no joy there's no happiness here and I'm like but but look at these numbers look at these numbers yeah it's a top 10 in the world grossing game right now or it was when we wrote our article it was number 10 in the world yeah yeah it's still tracking really high um when you look at it across countries too you do see a lot of like Eastern you know Japan South Korea Revenue did it launch there before it launched in the US is you can see the downloads there in February massive install rate from Japan and South Korea December and January was South Korea January and February was Japan and then the you know you can see it there in the bottom chart so sorry if you're on a podcast we or look you know we have a this is what we do know we have a deck and we have gameplay and we have videos

this is why we uh encourage everyone to watch us on YouTube as well and so uh we'll try to explain as much as we can for the podcast folks that listen to this as well but just so you know uh March looked fantastic across many countries us coming in to be more of a top country since it's launched so now we are on to um charts and all of this is data AI right oh well now it's called sensor Tower uh Tower a whatever and every time we talk about just going to say app I'll be like Crest so uh this chart is Da on the top and ARP Dow on the bottom you guys want to talk a little bit about this I was just going to say that it's already noticeable that their Dow in Japan and uh South Korea is starting to decline um significantly like they're they're it's difficult to see on this chart the the way it's stacked but um yeah they're they're seeing significant um declines you can also see that in the previous charts on the revenue um they're already starting to fall off

I think you and I had originally talked about this game likely resulting in the SharkMan type monetization and retention and it's starting to to show up in charts um and you'll be able to see that now from these uh leading countries like Japan and South Korea and I would assume it's likely due to what you mentioned before like that c there's no way to to meaningfully catch up this is about people that are going to love this game want to be number one and once you once you take one step back yeah if you can't meaningfully catch up it's going to be it's going to be very difficult to keep people engaged with these charts usually we stack them uh in in other episodes we've shown them by app um or just overall these are specifically for those watching divided by count so you can see the split and how certain areas of the world was you know this is this is performing very well in certain countries over other ones and it this the starkness between where the spend is the downloads and where users are is not necessar what we would seen like in a game like

Township or some of the previous games we've deconstructed you've heard of heroic Labs by now and we keep talking about them because in today's mature Market you need every Edge to be successful rather than spending those precious company dollars on building game Tech focus on building your game and shipping it get into your players hands faster and grow your community heroic Labs is Battle tested partner and friend of the podcast their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for Success heroic Labs has your Tech stack covered whether you're looking for a worldclass back-end game server an amazing game development framework Fantastic live Ops tooling or reliable Mass scalability heroic Labs has solutions for all of these challenges and it's not just us a deconstructor of fund praising heroic Labs the company works with some of the world's biggest Publishers on many of the Beloved games focus on your game save a big chunk of cheese and avoid Tech risks with heroic lap [Music]

this podcast is brought to you by data AI now you're asking didn't they get acquired by sensor Tower they did and that's awesome here's why what do you loved using data. a or sensor Tower the combined company will offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the full Digital customer Journey exciting times lie ahead as sensor Tower and data join forces go to data. or senser to.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business now back to the episode all right are we are we ready for core you're you're I don't know how you do this it's amazing how you that you you should devel somebody should pay you to be a product manager almost like a senior director level product manager I would say that's very kind because I have to say um Ken did an awesome job in his article going through all the progression verticals I gave up after a

little bit in this doing this this game it's not even a loop it is a spider web because there were so many that I was like well they're not going to fit on one slide and if I can get them it's going to be elgible but I did my best to go through at least the main bits so I'm going to do I'm going to go through this and and Ken I would I encourage you to jump in correct me and add and add color as I describe this okay so we have our basic Loop which is what we were discussing about how you you light these lamps they're they're a little bit like a you don't know what you're going to get it's a piece it's usually a piece of gear and if it's better than your your current gear um you basically have the choice of equipping it or if you're silly you would sell it but why would you sell it because then you don't get more power but you do get coins and XP so you light a lamp takes a lamp to light a lamp you get some sort of armor and then you have two choices equip or no um if you don't equip coins XP you get towards level up and you level up enough times when I say enough times

this is like Ken's at level 100 something I'm at 92 it's like every 30 or so 20 30 levels you get basically an evolution choice and and I CH I think I chose wrong I I I chose the axe guy and spend those gem Berserker the Berserker got to spend the gems to swap classes but yeah yeah it cost 4,000 uh gems to swap classes I've discovered because Ken's recommendation is why don't you archers are better if you're going to do the idol mechanic I was like I had no idea so you get this choice to evolve uh it all goes back into powering up if you do equip your armor that's another form of your power so you get stronger this is better for battles and then you start to get things like powering up your skills and Pals so in addition to the kind of class you are you also have uh skills which I'm thinking of like they're like magic kind of yeah or else yeah yeah spells traits there's a ton of

them you get shards of them all the shards you combine together to level up your your skills which again make you stronger you want to be you want to power up these skills um and Pals and Pals are like pets they also are shards that you level up and then they get they make you stronger too and then that basically makes you stronger to to participate in your your idol battle or your Arena Battle or your PVP and by battling you basically get more lamps so I'd say that's how I would kind of describe the the core Loop how do I do pretty good I think there's some Arena Battle um rewards that are an addition to Lamps um specifically you get uh like PVP currency that you can then use inside of PVP shops which further on in the game they allow you to ascend your character I think there's also some ways you can buy like PVP only pets and skills maybe I'm think might be confusing some some different shops from the events but I

know that there's exclusive things you can buy inside of a PVP store as well that you use PVP currency in part of the housekeeping is doing a lot of the you know clearing out getting your diamonds you also get diamonds from they have like a mini task system um I find that actually it's almost as fun as clicking on the lamp seeing I've accomplished the task because then I end up getting tickets which are the for the gacha poles which is not the lamp it's a separate gacha pole system and then I get more diamonds I believe there's a slide later that'll show what the gacha system looks like but it's it's basically insert tickets get shards oh it's if you go back one yeah so if you look at skills and Pals on the right hand side you basically yeah this is your gacha and it gives you shards you get enough shards you Evol you know Evolve level up your skill or your pal and then you get more power so just what's on the artwork um what's really funny is it is like a literal got machine from Japan um or it's the you

know the claw like in Toy Story oh the claw that comes down and so I don't know what those games are called but it's basically they you know they're like G this is your gotcha machine here you go like we're not even going to pretend like it's on the deconstructor of fun article covering this we have a animation of what this looks like as well the pole and how it displays out your her your skills your pals and then what that looks like on the skill screen and if you play with sound it sounds like a slot machine oh I don't play with sound so I would have know that yes it sounds I basically felt like I was walking into a casino once I started listening to the music and sounds in this game do you guys play with sound sorry like I maybe I don't know I I never play extremely rarely like I usually will spend maybe an hour or two just getting a sense for the sound and then turn it off um because I play with my one-year-old while she's sleeping and there's a lot of different reasons why I would not want to have sound on when we were at congregate we did a study and

found that like less than 9% of all players uh listened with sound on or play with sound on in our portfolio of games that's like hundreds of games that Cong yeah I thought I had heard similar research that not many people turn sound on but then what was interesting when I've talked to like the YouTube folks now again this is not this is YouTube on mobile not um gaming but they say most people listen to uh watch YouTube or engage with YouTube with sound on cuz we were talking about ads and I guess that makes sense right if you're watching a video but a lot of people are starting to turn the sound off like when they're on the train or on this and that's why so many videos have captions now and so they're seeing that go down with not not as many people engaging with sound on YouTube and even Tik Tok and so it just means a lot for your UA ads too if you're going to advertise you you need to think about uh captioning what sound looks like on and off anyway so sorry that was a tangent uh I was just curious on sound uh Laura

back to you on your web game Loop spider chart anything else you want to hit the only think thing I will add is they do have this they have a little couple side Loops that are the again the coefficient of performance so this is you invest in areas of the game that make um your future investment in the game easier so you can if you do these side quests like the planting is a good example of it they have this planting mechanic it requires different resources but it gives you power percentage increases so it's not necessarily direct like you're not getting power points but you're getting uh you're basically getting more power or uh some other efficiency so the mine which we showed previously you're getting all this random stuff you're getting or diamonds tools and you're also getting a gacha tickets it costs tools which refresh over time but it has a research basically a tech tree and doing doing the tech tree raises your efficiency so that when you uh when you need to generate uh pickaxes or you want a bump

in your HP if you engage in these other two areas then it makes the rest of your power progression easier those are like the two main mini games that are unlocked fairly early in the game you have uh the dermatory which unlocks later as well as parking ORS and those are very very similar systems um I found the dormatory to be a little bit weird uh thematically like not very politically correct uh you're literally like capturing other humans and slaving them and tickling them for resources very strange The Parking Wars feature is similar to the dormatory but uh you don't capture other people you elect into other slots um but with this sort of like Master uh type psychology as well like you're trying to be on the person's plot of land that is the most powerful so that you can stay there um without getting pushed off by other players on the dormatory you're trying to capture other players and you want to be captured by somebody powerful so that if somebody tries to steal your players from you that your your master will

defend those people and it's a very a very interesting um like micro mechanic they have a bunch of different variants of the the core combat Loop uh inside of the daily key unlocks so they have the lamp Thief which is how you get your majority of lamps every day they have the molten dungeon which is how you get uh I think it's gems and got tickets they have a system for your mount a system for your art fact and your system for relics later down the line they also have which is like unlocked very very far down the line they have another system for your class Awakening so this Stacks up like you basically have to engage with I think it's now nine different subsystems every single day each of these subsystems if you're not using the autocomplete feature takes like I don't know 5 10 minutes so like already at an hour a day just completing all these um sub systems that you're playing optimally and really they are just like reskins of little micr Loops right like they their entire purpose is

to increase your stats you have to engage with every single one of them a day if you if you don't you'll fall behind in progression and you know it feels to me like a UA play like they're making mini games that they think would translate well to like UA um adverts and not get them in hot water but yeah like the the variety of progression vertical means that they have a lot of different systems they can monetize off of you know to our earlier point if there's nine different systems in this game that we're saying are meaningful progression verticals they have nine different battle passes and there's $12 worth of spend depth on each one of them typically on top of the battle pass each of these systems has IP purchase packs uh related to them their live Ops is also built off of these systems so they'll have like a live Ops event that is go and pull Pals and we'll give you extra rewards just by pulling or um this will be your Mount event you'll get Battle pass points for leveling up your Mount and for this week we'll put you on

a leaderboard and your rewards will be this extra rare Mount that you can only get through this event so it's a it's an interesting way to like add liveops content but it starts to feel like a chore and for some players like me that who are sort of addicted to these Idol RPG games this is the right balance of the amount of them but I can see how this would heavily overwhelm people once you get past like three or four of these doing them daily is insane like it takes a lot of time oh yeah yeah that's this so the farming one where so so please do you not have timers that are like 5sec timers where you're going to sit there and make me wait for like 5 Seconds like I I don't I don't understand like when you're when you're farming something so especially on this screen right so when you when finally when you harvest it takes like 5 Seconds to harvest and I'm like well why are you doing that I don't yeah watch this I'll show so this is like the pick in the planting takes time which doesn't really

make sense it does not need to be that long I think it has to do with something of a server check they're like actually checking to see if you are allowed to pull that thing there's probably some backend code reason for that but it does not need to be 5 Seconds it could be 1 second animation and they can still do the same amount of checks that aggravates me yeah and that part I do find frustrating and then Ken was talking earlier about the Parking Wars so this is the parking lot so as an example this lot's full oh I haven't unlocked this yet I'm a m I'm a m 70 so where are you parked I think I parked in a friend's lot just because but they could be helpful to hear your take on like how this thing works cuz I'm a little did you know that you can park multiple cars at the same time or multiple vehicles at the same time yeah no multiple and basically all this does you you've put yourself out there and you're generating Idol rewards for yourself the the rewards that you're generating are dependent on the vehicle that you Park as well as its level you can now level these up on your Mount

screen but other players can come over here and attack you and in doing so you see remodel there all the way to the right on your screen in doing so they'll kick you off of that spot and take all the resources that you've already farmed there um so you're incentivized to go onto a spot where the owner of that plot of land is very powerful so they protect you from being killed ideally in a game that has like really strong social there would be some sort of social contracts or there's additional benefits and agreements that you can make with the player to like yeah I only want my best friends to be on this plot of land in this game there's none of that you can just literally choose anybody's slot the first come first serve just join the whale the whale can also kick you off the slot it's is very strange there's very weird social interactions in this game where the heaviest spending players or sometimes they in your guild sometimes they're not but if they're in their Guild they still will kill you because you're the only option for them to kill and they need to kill you for some progression currency inside of an event or just for like um leaderboard

rewards the entire top 50 players in my game in my server are all in the same Guild and they all have to fight each other every week for PVP placement um which feels very weird like you would feel like they should be fighting other guilds at the least um but there's a heavy focus on like me winning versus my guild winning but which doesn't really grock well with me once you have a guild system in the game it's very strange yeah that's weird so this is what the guild looks like it's a little navigating it is a little bit strange and kind of related to how the text is too small some of the ux interactions in this game are challenging there there's no reason for this screen to to function like this where you have to like manually move a around over to to get to different places it's super frustrating it's super frustrating you just have to move a little bit so you can see it but you can still tap on the lava I mean you don't have to be in front of it but you do have to like move yourself a little bit I think Ken it's the peacocking

right like this is this is just showing off like where you are amongst your we covered this a little bit in the article that showing off amongst your peers is the key reason why people play these games and the key reason why they continue to spend $20,000 in a month I have this Mount that is exclusive and only available via the leaderboard award and you can see it there that is the key place that all the whales will show it off um yeah I have this only this weapon that is an event weapon um and those are the the the few items that they actually show on that that screen they show your Helm they show your weapon they show your your Mount right and that's all you really need to show those are the things they're mer they're merchandising and monetizing off of I feel like I'm the only one with not a cool sword now so it's working I bought the mask and the in the sword or the artifact they call it an artifact I guess y i I did some of those early I cuz I spend in games because I also want to make sure that I didn't even catch up to you guys I I didn't spend enough it did make the early part of the game feel

so much more fulfilling that I was blasting through things when I made some of those purchases I think Kenya said this earlier but not only are those purchases low price points that get you to engage and feel good about spending more and they offer you a lot of dollar price items with 1,000% value right like I think we all know is you the PMS when you showcase the value in a percentage it helps players understand that they're getting a discount cuz so many people want to buy on a discount and it made me feel good about spending the money and I think that's another reason why they are seeing so much early monetization is that the value translates to gameplay value one to one um it it yeah and it feels very fulfilling and so this again is why stacking your price points starting with very low some people are like why would I charge a dollar Jen like what I I could get so much more but if you start there and then you introduce the 499 and

then you introduce the you know the 9999 the chance of those players graduating through the ladders of the of the price points is so much higher absolutely it also is in the battle pass in terms of two tiers cheap tier more expensive tier yeah and the people who are in maxing and competing they're doing both right they're just that's a way to increase the value on that $999 tier and this is what we mean by there is multiple there's battle passes and battle passes and battle passes I mean and then and also there's just so many things to purchase they do the stinky thing and and white out survival did it too so at the top of the screen there's usually a little chest there actually I don't know if it's in the growth pack oh it's here yeah already that little chest you've claimed it today so every single thing you can tap into is badged and you know and they give you a reward but the reward is like it's like somebody throwing you a a penny or the lowest currency possible and again

it it does play to people like me who are like oo am I missing something by not clearing all of my Badges and so now I'm trying to like optimize and get efficient about okay well do I collect my badges at the end of my session or at the beginning cuz sometimes I'll clear all my Badges and then I'm playing and then they're all up again and I'm like ah I just I did not do also West Coast right the server reset time is 9:00 at night yeah so if you're playing around nine your badges will reset at that time yes I am very aware from my gossip Harbor in Travel Town uh exactly when that reset happens which is like four or five depending on daylight savings because it does switch with daylight savings hey game devs are you tired of dealing with complicated payment processes all over the world well exol's got your back with exola pay station it has a simple user-friendly interface that makes it easy for players to pay for your games and in game content however they want and because the exola paystation user

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dedicated Hub is packed with Innovative products industry Partnerships and unrivaled expertise to ensure your game brand adapts and thrives we understand that every game is unique and apps Flyer's datadriven insights allow us to cater to your specific needs we know that in today's evolving landscape staying ahead of the curve is crucial trust in apps flyer for games to guide you through this exciting Journey we have the tools the knowledge and the passion to help you succeed in this ever expanding landscape together we'll Conquer New World worlds both real and fantasy break records and create gaming experience that leave a lasting impact get in touch with appar for games today and Unleash Your game's true potential apps flyer for games supercharging the gaming landscape any other parts we want to show that we want to cover with the game live or should we start going into some of the areas where we think it can be improved like we can talk about uh how you would improve the gacha if you pull up the gacha right now or actually pull up the pal screen this screen translates pretty well what's wrong with their gacha system is the how sharding Works

um their gacha is a Shard based gacha which means that you have every time you pull you get a high volume of shards pulling 30 items at a time but there's typically you need hundreds of um you know shards at the lower levels to be meaningful at the higher levels you you need like uh you know three four five six of them to be meaningful and you you never really get the sense that you earned anything significant after the first PLL of something um and it's it's a really bad translation for money additionally like the utility of them is is is poorly designed um if I send you a screenshot of my screen I have most of the skills unlocked now including all the way up to the highest tier of skills and I don't use most of them I use that little Shield bubble thing and the healing one because that's how I survive boss levels like they're designed in a way that you're supposed to try to just like quick equip your most um uh highest highest tier stuff

but if you do that you're not playing optimally like and that's like a weird learning why would you allow people to just quick equip the highest Rarity stuff but then not have the highest the most valuable skills be the highest Rarity like there's no defensive skills at the highest tier and that means that I'm just going to get instantly killed at some point when the the boss content gets really difficult but if you put that little mushroom bubble what do it you have like in the middle of your screen right there uh shroom Shield yes so that's one of your two defensive ones and the one right next to it is your healing skill those are like the two most powerful skills in the game and they are like mid-tier Rarity putting those on will keep you shielded from in boss fights and healed especially if you're not playing on auto mode if you play on manual mode you can stagger The Shield from that the mushroom shield and then the heal if you play on auto they'll proc at the same time and you'll be healing yourself while you're at full health and it won't work the auto logic in the game is the greatest there is nothing worse than I

when I would sink like a couple thousand gems not not as much as other people and I have no there's no meaningful progress to any of the individual skills rep PS and I'm like I just got all this stuff to be fair I did I do the quick equip because I'm not a Min maxer as much but I would fully expect to see if I've 5,000 sunk which is what maybe uh seven gacha pills is five six seven gacha PS then I thought I would get some something that would be upgraded to the point where the game would when I did Qui Qui equip quick equipped it would be it would be a noticeable increase where there' be recommended me something stronger and that just does for comparison in genin I'll use genin because it's a best practice in my mind if you're pulling 10 Heroes at a time and you're pulling 16 times you get an automatic five-star character in their game and that character unlocks meaningfully new gameplay um right like the way that the those gacha games play together is that by every new character

has a new ability that interacts with the map and the world in a new way and you have combinatorics that that allow you to stack different characters together to have additional new utility on top of that this game does not work that way at all so like the utility that you get from the skills and the pals is super low and the value translation of how much money I'm spending to the power I'm getting when I do that is super super poorly um translated to the player so that that's probably my biggest one um I can't see that system monetizing very well for them I I would imagine that if there was an iteration on this game they need to look at the gacha system very heavily makes sense I think the next big area we can talk a little bit about optimizing ad placements briefly I don't even really notice them uh even the opportunity for ads how do you where how do you even get click on the oh it is a now bringing your exact point up it is a very small button next to the the uh title of the dungeon You're In in the main battler what let

me get my magine glass cuz I can't see then you can also as part of your daily two little yeah and then part of your daily tasks you you going as Ken mentioned you're going through the dungeon you're you're assaulting the lamp Thief to get lamps remember correctly the cro the keys from the Chrono tower Tower are what upgrade your Mount I can't remember what the ancient city does there's this oh this one is the relics yeah and then you basically get a certain amount of keys and then you basic what the ads enable you to do is yeah so you can watch it yeah get more keys to get more layups currency for relics or uh what are the clock winders for them yeah those those keys are yeah they they're kept in the store as well there's not very many of them you could I think you can spend a few dollars a day on Keys there's like there's no way to dump $1,000 doll into the keys there's see that's zero one packs available for you right there um

not a great monetization system but the ad side of it means that the ad view is quite valuable and uh one of the first purchases I made in this game was that no ads purchase this think it was like $9 and never have to watch ads again and I I get it like the benefit of what would have been maybe 12 ad placements worth of that then throughout the day another place you can get it um ads is in the for fertilizer in the the field system and I think which is sh me f there applying once you run out of fertilizers oh I have so I have so much that I may not trigger the odd oh and then you also get it for pickaxes which I any of the mining boosters oh yeah when you're when you run out of your mining stuff yeah um but there's not a single vertical that is like exclusive to add monetization um which is interesting to me because Legend of slime which this game is made uh is based off of does

have that there's a there's a vertical in Legend of slime that is monetized extremely well through ads and um they didn't carry it over to this game I don't know why it would have increased their ad Revenue significantly because players would have just watched it every single day I think it's because their their whole entire transition away from ads Revenue into into IP Revenue means that most of the players who are IP Spenders are going to be spending on that no ads placement anyways and therefore they they would have not monetized as heavily had they kept one of the verticals to be ads only all right should we move to last Improvement point and I mean I have a big gripe with this I have a gripe with the PVP matchmaking that was my biggest complaint when I go to the arena and I'm trying to do please tell me someone else is frustrated with this I have four challenge tickets yeah am I going to compete against any of these players no because then I will lose trophies like I'm going to lose this this battle and the the I don't know why they're pairing me with these types of people tell me

tell me why here's here's something else is so you'll notice that red right there's a little bit of red anyone who's red you definitely can't beat exactly so hit so Hit refresh you'll get like a then you'll get a green but that's one of 10 one of 10 that I've been one of one of 10 and you might not even beat that person yes that's the worst when it's green I should win and I do not win oh you're winning this one no all the time for me yeah this me oh good job for you yeah yeah I stopped because it was I was getting my ass kicked yep one of 15 now there was one battle of 15 that was winnable for me and I don't understand why they're organizing the matchmaking this way they're basing it off of your your points that you've gained so you have 972 and they if you press challenge they're paing you against like pointed people instead of like powered people because these players that they're

showing you right now have not probably challenged anybody those players are not farming points so they your pool of people you're attacking is heavily skewed towards powerful AFK players that's I don't want I want people I can actually have a decent battle with like give me give me yeah give me couple points above couple points below but make sure of my five it's it's something that actually gives me a at least the belief that I have a chance of winning even if it's a little outside of where my power is and to our Point earlier like these top three players may all be in the same Guild and they're only ever going to get points if they fight each other so you're like knocking your friend down to to boost yourself up which does not feel great okay I gotta be honest I played the ranked match quite a bit and I know it's leagued so I'm in I think I'm in Gold five I don't know how I have no idea how I got here I just kept challenging people and it kept having me compete against uh other players in leagues higher than and it left me in a state of constant confusion I didn't even know there was

ranked you can do instead of doing like a random challenge do the do like a targeted challenge so like one of these people that is that's the Thematic difference between the arena and the cross ranked is arena is only you you can like select a list but here you have to like be pick and choose who you're actually tar targeting from this like I don't know 50 people that you're going up against you're going to get demoted by the way if you don't uh attack one of the people you should probably try to farm that yeah there's decent rewards for this the better League you're in um the more placement rewards you'll get and then you'll be able to farm items from the shop that is if you continue to play this game after this this talk is over with no oh I'm in silver I didn't realize so it it's cross server challenge right cross server ranked match exactly so we touched on this earlier I think this is a great example of how featur Fe that could actually um Target specific player

types and be helpful to the game are not surfaced well one thing I do want to call out for very poor surfacing is the soul in bed this took me forever to remember how to find I don't understand this I was Ken I was going to be like can you please teach me what the hell this is because I even got my magnifying glass out and tried to read it and still don't understand what what's going on here but that's fine I don't really care I me it's just another progression vertical that like you have to mini game and there's a gacha inside of it there's a ladder inside of it it has its own currency um there's a fusion system so that they can like I don't know work towards the the the players who like fusing every single mini game in this game makes me feel like they're trying to spin an ad off of it like there there's now they're like oh you have to fuse Souls together to get a better Soul here um there's a ladder that you have to climb with ladder like there this whole tire thing is is like a UA play in my mind um but from a gameplay perspective it's just another system that you have to farm and if you don't you'll fall behind so what I hate about

it is it is basically you're climbing this ladder which is very similar to The Dungeons it's just presented in a different format it is a dungeon but it's separated into its if I need to do a dungeon to get relics and I enter it through the Relic menu I don't understand then why what I should be able to do then if I want to get these uh clock windy things what I would expect if they're going to follow the same behavior and it's about establishing um inherit like basically things that inherently make sense so if you're going to have like basically a separate currency to be leveling up things like your relics or your your mounts the way I do it is through right now is through the Dungeons and that's a loop the soul embeds completely break that pattern and how may go through a completely different kind of exactly and it's very frustrating and it requires players to remember where things are and I that is one big gripe I have about the game if you want to expand your audience it needs to be much more intuitive there's no reason for me to have to try to

memorize the paths of tapping here and there to remember how to get to specific things in the game they have an additional slot for it as well inside of your your like dungeon key page if you click on the X like just add it down there just add it below all these things why why not just put it in that coming soon section right exactly yeah the way that they have tabs within you know you go to something and then there's so many tabs to click over like that's that's why when you were like in the arena I actually think I had one point finally clicked on that CU they badged it right so they badge things in in a way that they do use badging well to help you find things to try to teach you it's it's almost like sign posting but not incredibly well done like there's there's no there's nothing that kind of takes you to where you need to go they're just they're they're marching you down the path so that you kind of get to know where things are and I think that's why they do the badging right they're trying to

teach you maybe one day you'll pay attention as you go into these things but with the soul things I think I'm hitting cognitive overload in this game even though they've layered things right we talked about how you know some things don't unlock but they introduced The Soul Stone thing and I was just like I I don't even know what you're trying to tell me these things are which ones are valuable which ones do I merge which ones do I destroy and scrap like they're all mechanics played in other games but I'm like okay well which one do you want and then by the way um when we get to ads I pulled some ads for us to take a look at they actually aren't even doing the mini games and the ads they're doing like fake gameplay so I just I pulled some Us ads and recently so as we record this it's April 19th and um they're actually only running two ads um they were running uh more but it looks like they weren't performing as well so one of these that you see here in in the top middle it looks like an RPG it doesn't even look like anything that this game

has again you know kind of like a fake ad they have a static ad below that makes it look like an old school Zelda game um and then they have this ad over here on my left which you know kind of makes it look like a sidescrolling squad battle like none of these actually look like anything that is going on uh inside this game and so um you know they're they're trying to Signal RP G and I think if I were to watch this I get I get RPG out of it but what a huge opportunity to leverage some of those mini games make them playables and then they're in their game they're there they followed the strategy they're just not using it with UA so it's pretty funny ironic actually so maybe that's my one key takeaway from them is like go do more fake ads off your mini games guys like everyone else does we covered in a previous talk on this was that the some of the ads that they're the static ads that they're running on Twitter are um IP theft ads where they'll have like

Star Wars at-ats walking on the screen or um there's like three different Star Wars ads they have with Legend of mushroom characters replacing like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker it's very very illegal um they also have a Pokemon ripoff where like the your pal looks like a very iconic Pokémon a very very strange Direction they've taken but you know it works interesting yeah I didn't I I used the data AI creative poll so I didn't those didn't pop up but if they're doing like please don't do that everybody like that is IP infringement that is a way to make enemies in this industry and you don't want to be the marketer that does that but perhaps the studios in China they don't care and in many cases those folks don't know about IP and know that you can't just do that um but we're here to tell you don't do that shall we ends on a positive note I feel like we there was I I feel like I came down a little bit

hard on the game there's there's a lot to love I think there's a lot to love but then there's a lot of room for improvement I would just ask Ken what's your favorite part of this game from a PM what do you think is the strongest product design in this space that they've done definitely the lamp loot system this like a constant dopamine drip of gear that's free into the player and it's driving super long sessions I know we talked about earlier like this this system can enable you to keep your app open for like eight hours at a time while you're just turning through all these free lamps you've gotten keeping a user in the game is how you keep them spending right like you can't spend money if you're not in the game so keeping them in there keeping them fed dopamine um and that dopamine also translating to your meaningful progress is a very very strong hook it's definitely my favorite product Haack that they've done how about you guys what's your what's your favorite if if not that I enjoy the art style a lot um I thought the characters were really

adorable uh the pal like we know that the idea of Pets and Pals are always engaging I like how they had two systems with the skills and the pals kind of building up your your character I like that you can choose how you evolve your character and the path that you want to go down it's always nice to see your your character get cooler stuff and and become more badass so even though I like the character design it did remind me of like Toad stol from Mario and and so it it did have a a little bit of lack of uniqueness and that I I feel like they could still do something with that though um some of the evolved characters that they become humanoid so yes that's weird to me so the whole thing is like hey it's Legend of mushroom and you're evolving this mushroom and at the end of your Evolution when you get to like a really cool thing you're a human and so to me that was was really weird and kind of took me out of the fantasy but I was I'm not cool enough to be a human yet

can did you get that high I'm fully awakened as they would say in the game you you you're awaken from your you're it's like what is it like a butterfly from a Crystalis but so humans come from mushrooms everyone that's the science lesson for today that is so that is my favorite part of the game that actually is a huge motivator for me is becoming the human bit and seeing the evolution that is why I'm driving towards U I think the the first proper humanoid character is level 100 and that is why I am 92 with my game sitting open uh just drawing lamps battling earning currency doing my housekeeping to get to that state the power fantasy is is real there like the from an RPG perspective you're like you're leveling up over time my class gets better over time um visually I get cooler over time and more big and strong more humanoid yeah I totally gr that so I guess one other thing that I liked and I didn't like do you remember when you first opened this game and it's Auto battling and I'm like

what what the is going on like ah H what do I need to be doing and and I I felt the little like Manic and out of place until you figured out that oh this game just autop plays and I cuz I I was like well what if I die and you don't know right away that you can't actually die like there there's something you you can do about that so it was it was unique and then it was the first game that has ever done that to me and maybe I I'm not playing enough Idol games like again not my genre uh but has any other game done that where you just open it up and you're you're dude there a few Idol RPG games it's not new for legend of mushroom or the developers like other developers um have done this um the sort of like continuous running Motif that you're just always fighting and then you hit a wall and you have to push past the wall by farming up on that time period for a long time or spending money to get past it it's quite common it just had no instruction though like you you come in

and I I felt a little bit lost in the beginning um and so there might have maybe again sometimes what we're finding is that these games are targeting people that are very used to these kinds of games and if they ever have a hope of growing the audience you do need to do some research with players adjacent like I'm a squad RPG player right like I'm an adjacent category but I'm if I'm not used to your your your mechanics how do you do some research with those folks to be like okay well maybe we need to do a little extra handholding a little extra sign posting a little extra tutorial to help somebody know what to expect when they're coming in because I wanted to throw this my phone against the wall when I first opened this I'm like what are you guys making me play I didn't understand and so that's what I think the the challenges for developers when you're in a specific genre we talked about this with a AFK Journey too how they were out there marketing like hey you unlock all the characters you get 200 free pulls whatever it I forgot the details of what it was but it's so

inside baseball it's so the the information is so inside this insular group of people if you want to grow you have to make sure that you've got communication for different segments and audiences who might not be your core audience uh anyway that's a little extra aining on my side of what I would do different yeah they is a little bit rough there's also that uh the lamp Loop where you're manually foddering gear for a while that lasts way too long I think that lasts until like I want to say like level 16 or something like that and it needs to be like level two instantly allow me to outo Auto F because players generally don't care what gear they're picking up so long as it's better like let show me a green arrow up okay I want that one yeah yeah I I didn't figure that out soon enough and so again it it's like I felt like the game wasted Ed my time and yeah don't do that to players all right are we all we we good

any final thoughts thanks for having me on good all right thank you everybody Ken it was awesome thanks for joining us Ken this is amazing again great write up on the blog um if you want to reach out to Ken you're in the deconstructor of fund slack Channel and Linkedin I'm on LinkedIn and I'm uh addicted to the deconstructor of fun slack you'll see me posting there quite frequently I know you covered a lot of GDC I thought didn't you post a lot in there of like some of the talks and stuff if I remember incorrectly yeah thank you for doing that it's a service to everyone and um all right thank you guys Laura what are we doing next have we talked do I get to pick Travel Town oh no you guys just did a whole you went to the enemy and did a pot I'm just kidding they're not our enemy we're all friends here I know I'm joking okay for how about you've been so kind you basically I've been I've been dragging you around do this game do this game do this game so have a look dealers your choice I'm really curious now which direction you're going to go with that Ken do you have a suggestion WWE

champions go old school go some you know really well get Zoe on and talk with her oh my God I can't do that again I can't I I don't think I could open up that game and in oh although it would be kind of fun to see where they're at but no it's so it's so mice nuts now to crush's Point okay well we'll figure it out you just did gossip Harbor and travel town without me the two games that I'm literally at the end end I am an endgame player on both of those games and you don't have me join you on okay fine I see gamer you're G to take it up with M yeah all right okay that's fine all right my friends thank you again and see you next time see you see you next time you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor fund slack group if you have 5 years or more of gamesindustry experience go to deconstructor of fund.com slack and

apply to join join the games industry's best professional Community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators thanks for listening [Music]