Making Games That Stand Out and Survive

[Music] I'm Nick Popovich thank you very much for showing up today if I see any familiar faces and I'm not waving it's because there's lights in my eyes right now and I can't see anyone's faces so I apologize let's kick things off with Who I am I'm the co-founder and CEO of Minami Park the game director of slime rancher hopefully some of you have played it there's me on Twitter I like to talk about game design a lot on Twitter so if you're interested in the contents of this talk some of it actually came from there so there you have it and I'd also like to first put out a disclaimer that this talk is not about how to make a great game you you need one of those for the contents of this talk to matter and that this stuff might not be a fit for your game and that's totally ok because I don't have all the answers no one at GDC does and this is not the one true

way of getting your game out there and getting people to notice it but I do think that some of this stuff will help your game succeed that's why I'm up here today talking about it and what are we talking about the three major topics of today are sell it with a gif staying relevant and a place to call home the TLDR version though is that this talk is about getting people to notice your game to buy it and play it repeatedly that is the goal of you know what I'm about to do here so talk about your game notice it buy it play it repeatedly but first let's have some rad game facts shall we first rad game fact thousands of games are released every year second rad game fact yes seriously thousands I recommend that you subscribe to the ICO or ICO newsletter just google

it and you will see all of the Steam games that are released every week last week 156 games just before GDC and that's one week so that's what you're up against and also some of them even have marketing budgets and you might not so uh and finally you're competing with all of them every single one of them whether they're good or not big or small and this is such a bummer that rad fox has decided that he's going to return to his home planet okay but why why are you actually competing with all these games despite the size of your game your genre etc why is a triple-a release that comes out tomorrow actually taking customers away from you and that is because of time and attention and if you've been paying attention at GDC you may have heard more than a few people talk about this at this point time and attention as the focus of this talk and it's the core

of why I make the games that I do and put them out there in the way that I do and that's what we're talking about today so we're gonna get right into a takeaway right off the bat that your game is what customers buy from you but time is what you buy from them don't forget that it's not enough just to sell a game to someone because you're still taking something from them and that is time so I had said everyone else's games were your competition it doesn't end there I'm sorry that I'm starting with such a bummer at the beginning of the talk I promise it gets better but your actual competition is everyone else's games as we just established and that includes four at night it's also Netflix and YouTube and Twitter and sad political news all of that stuff takes up time and attention and you need that if anyone's going to pay attention to your game to buy it and to play it but

don't worry you are not the only one Netflix says that fortnight is bigger competition than HBO and Hulu that is not just Netflix thrown some shade at their competition it's time and attention also major game publishers are feeling the impact of peaking attention there is only so much going around and there's also stuff like this which is that they're starting to put like little trailers before a normal trailer and it's because they know that you got to see explosions like right or right away or else you're going to stop paying attention or scrub to 30% of the way through which is what most people do with your video so that's concerning and we're gonna really quickly take a look at the average day of an adult in the US and 2018 it was four hours on phone and tablet so if you make mobile games you have an advantage here four hours of live TV that's not playing video games that's either watching sports online or

on cable or just watching cable six point eight hours of sleeping eight plus hours of work on weekdays and you check your phone a bunch of times day and that doesn't even factor in eating commuting other life things bathing yourself all of that so what we're left with is two free hours during the weekdays for new information and ten on the weekends and of course that doesn't count any of the other stuff that you're going to do on the weekends so like I said starting with a bit of a bummer but context is necessary for the rest of this and so we're going to move on to our first major topic and leave the rad 90s to sell it with a gif okay first of all gifts are good they communicate things very quickly they're a form of artistic expression and they're very mobile friendly and easily shareable especially on Twitter and speaking of twitter did

you know that 30 percent or twitter users are 31 percent more likely to remember content versus other online platforms use stuff like this to your advantage find that stuff out but this part of the talk is not about best social media practices so instead we're gonna jump right away to another takeaway and that is can your game design fit inside a gif so what do I mean by that can you present your core gameplay loop Giff that is the thing that the players doing over and over and over usually it lasts about two minutes can you show that in a span of five or six seconds can you show the killer app of your game and a gif and that is the feature or the must-have or must-see thing that is going to drive people to buy your game or to check it out or at least want to know more this might be because you

can't show your core gameplay loop but you can show that one powerful moment if you were Jurassic Park the movie this is the t-rex the t-rex is not the focal point of the story but it sure as hell put people in seats to see that movie it can't just be explosions unless your game is really about that and that's at its core because we've seen explosions before in the case of Jurassic Park we hadn't seen a t-rex like that before so what do you what do you have as a killer app can you teach someone to play your game and a gif this one's amazing if you can manage to pull that off it doesn't have to be every single step of the way but if you can give someone the gist of what it is to play your game and they can understand it and they could start picturing themselves playing your game you have just won an enormous battle you've walked right through a thousand-foot firewall and you're on to the next step of engaging with your customer basically though what it comes

down to is can I get your game in a gif can I see it and can I get it I might have questions questions are fine but does it answer something does it answer something material that's what you want to be able to execute on in a gif we set out to do this with slime rancher we were inspired by what what I saw with spelunky I was able to really clearly communicate itself in the form of a gif and so we knew we had to do that the landscape was rapidly changing when we were developing it and you may have heard this term before it was coined in stranger in a strange land and it's called grok people in game development use it a lot often Grug rocking a game and it is to understand something intuitively or by M you are establishing like an emotional rapport with something and oftentimes we use it in game design when we say player is grok to your game they're really into it they really get it they're in a position where they can

evangelize it they're willing to put up with you know some basically in order to get more of that experience because they bought into it but here I'm applying to this concept too before someone actually plays the game now obviously they're not going to grok your game via a gif in the same way that they would have they spent hours and hours of playing it and achieve that level of grokking but there is a shade of that a croc light if you will where someone has bought into it based on what they've what you've put out there for people to consume and so really it comes down to what do you want the player to feel and I think this is an important question as an aside to ask that about every aspect of your game design everything that you're putting out there but this isn't just about emotional context in the narrative of your game this is about do you want the player to feel frustrated at various points in the experience do you want them to have an overwhelming sense of freedom every decision that you

make every feature that you put in your game you should be thinking about what is the emotional context on the part of the player here what do I want them to feel well why would you stop with your game design why wouldn't you think about how that relates to how it shows to people on social media in the form of a gif I people make gifs of their their gameplay all the time they make trailers but are you asking yourself what is it that I'm looking for the person looking at this to feel in response to it because that might change what you decide to show and maybe it might change the kind of game that you're making if you can't answer that question so always ask that question you should always have something that you're trying to say and if you don't you're just another game you're just another entry in a genre if you're not saying anything different so the reason this is important as we previously established everyone is

distracted all the time the 90s segment taught us that and we have a finite amount of time and energy to care about new things your game included so the more time and energy is required the harder the cell and I don't even just mean a game sale I mean to care about what I just saw and maybe want to know more or to pay attention the next time I see that so basically reduce time to grok as much as possible so if you were selling burgers for example in suits who use a non video game example and you just set up a stall and you were making burgers you didn't put up a sign you didn't put up a menu didn't put up anything it's gonna be really hard to sell those burgers until you put up a sign that says burgers for sale now I have context I know what it is you're trying to sell but if you could then provide a picture of your delicious burger that you're trying to sell and some reviews you're answering questions that people might have even if it's just in their head you are giving them knowledge and that's

what's going to lead to either wanting to know more or a sale so let's look at some games that do this very very well and since I just mentioned spelunky I'll start there um spelunky here's a gif of it shows you everything you need to know about this game in the form of a gif if you were my dad you might look at spelunky and say this looks like Indiana Jones meets Mario what is it but spelunky shows you that it's a bunch of systems that are overlapping that generate experiences this is just one gif any number of gifts of spelunky are going to show you different outcomes you may be looking at the same level even though they're generated and seeing those different outcomes and so as a player I'm looking at this now and I'm thinking about all the different permutations of things that can happen it also does a really wonderful job of having fun by failing and it shows you that and a gift because these sequences

that are that are occurring here are comical I think this is pretty funny here it I think the player dies about 6 different ways here and I think that's really great so it does a great job of showing that off another one is super hot and this is a great example because it's showing you a very very simple concept which is time only moves when you do and then demonstrating how a variety of different scenarios can play out using that as as you know your main power in the game it also does a great example of showing that there's a huge difference between complex design and complex ideas you want to generally avoid complex ideas when you are trying to convey to or when you're trying to sell your game a perfect analog to this is in terms of simple idea but complex execution would be portal I think that's probably the master class in this where you can very very simply see in the form

of a gif two different portals and seeing what that means to you as the player and then your mind just starts racing with all the different things that you can do if you much like super hot or portal and get a player to start thinking about how they might play your game it's a huge advantage that you have I would I would actually relate this to how I used to learn about games when I was a kid 9000 years ago and opening up a Nintendo Power and that's all we had we had screenshots to go by and really bad descriptions of those screenshots so you wouldn't make up in your head what this game could possibly be about and you got yourself excited with lies that you were telling yourself and that's okay you you might start thinking about the different scenarios in superhot or the different weapons that you might have and that might not actually be in the game but that's okay because you're getting your potential customers imaginations excited and those are the kind of things that you want to be able to do with your game so if you want to

make games that people get quickly avoid complex ideas but allow for complex design or execution on those simpler ideas speaking of a simple idea rocket League it's cars that play soccer but if I just told you that and you never heard of rocket league before there's probably a very awkward version of saw that you're imagining little did you know it's like rocket-powered Matchbox cars that are also part ninja and I think it it it there is not a lot in rocket League in terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay it's some cars and a ball and two goals owns but you can see that there is a number of different ways that that can play out and it's exciting and it gets right to the point and it's a huge hit something a little less elegant human fall flat I really love this one because it's a kind

of very different approach it's showing you awkwardness and silliness and comedy is great for gifts and makes it very shareable but it there needs to be room for extrapolation if you just show a joke if your game is the wily coyote you know getting the dynamite blown up in his face it's a great joke but if there's no way that I can understand how that relates to your game or how that might create interesting scenarios I'm left with nothing other than a great joke that I share just like I share a bunch of other stuff online so with human fall flat in part because I understand videogames and that's a protagonist I know that it's telling me that mundane things are being done stupidly in this game and especially if I buy into it and watch a couple other gifts or check out a trailer I get that immediately I've done mundane things before cuz I'm a normal human being and doing them stupidly and without consequence sounds really exciting to me so I'll bite next subnautica does a

great job of showing you a single breathtaking moment it's killer app which is diving below the surface of the sea and seeing a massive mysterious underwater world for me to explore it has a huge advantage and that there just are not a lot of underwater games so it stands out in that regard it's also beautiful and it has that mystery element to it I want to know more I want to see more so subnautica came out when there a bunch of other survival games but none of them were underwater a lot of you were you know rubbing rocks together and stuff in a muddy forest somewhere subnautica was different it was gorgeous and beautiful and bright and I think that contributed hugely to success all of which is communicated in an image or a gif next is factorial I love this one I think it gets you very excited to play

the game and it's showing you scale of things that you can do in it you can see machines that are working together with one another and I don't know what the goal of the game is but I betcha it's to do big stuff and continue to do more and more of it and that's very exciting and I want to build stuff like that but there's some a few key points about what factorio decided to do which is that it shows known machinery like oil derricks and spaceships I think that's really important because the game might take place on a planet that you've never heard of and the point of the game might be that you're building this to defend yourself against you know bug people or something like that but it's showing me things that I can understand and I can relate to what I'm seeing there and so it acts as a sort of in road to me understanding more about this game if everything were just alien machinery I wouldn't get it as well as I do with

what you're seeing here for example if rocket League was not cars playing soccer but it was UFO like things hitting a nova cube through space or something like that and it was still soccer it would be much less Gras Keable for people because I don't know anything about that so I kind of get that we're playing soccer here but if you can give me something that I understand that path to having more knowledge is a lot more open for me as a potential customer next is they are billions which does an amazing job of showing you scale and quantity it's you know very awe-inspiring I think to see the hordes of things that are attacking this city I immediately want to know what that's all about it doesn't tell me in this gif Who I am but I imagine I'm not the zombie things I imagine I'm the the you know homes and castles and everything that seems like

they are trying to protect themselves so I have an idea right away about what this game is about and it's showing me the killer app which is billions of zombies coming at once it's also not a giant 3d experience it's something that you might even be able to see on iPad and yet it does a wonderful job of having an awe-inspiring scale moment you know it doesn't need to have a giant 3d t-rex it's showing lots of little characters running at a city and immediately you get this gut feeling like that's not good I should probably protect against that slime rancher similarly shows quantity we think that's one of our secret sauces is that much like they are billions in slime rancher you're seeing hordes and hordes of slimes bumping into one another at any given moment it's a physics nightmare under the hood but you don't normally see that in a game so even if you're a person who doesn't understand game technology or just a little kid you haven't seen something like that happen

before as regularly in front of you and so it just feels different an RTS that has billions of things coming at you feels different so you're winning a battle however if you can do the giant t-rex you should absolutely do the giant t-rex if you have the budget for it I'm probably talking to the like for triple eight people in the room right now but if you have the budget for it show it but I do want to add that there is a wrinkle to what Monster Hunter does I think it does it particularly well that is I think they flip the script and they focus on the monsters not the player so Monster Hunter trailers and and anything that they're sharing online typically is not showing you crafting systems or anything like that that's all ancillary to the to the Big Show which is giant monsters doing cool stuff and their marketing narrative is very very consistent in that regard so anytime I pick up some Monster Hunter marketing a gif that is being shared online it's a very consistent message I

am a little strong brave probably stupid warrior in this case fighting enormous monsters and they seem very overwhelming and that that narrative is very very consistent and you know how to include this I'm up here so I'm going to talk about slime rancher some more if you saw my previous talk you know we we've thought about this from the very beginning the action comes at the screen it's bright and cheery and very easy to parse especially if you're just scrolling through on something like Twitter and it has lots of physics and I already covered as to why we feel like that's important probably a better segue to this to make it more powerful would have been from Monster Hunter but I'm gonna go to one last one which is Baba as you I think this game is great it's a recent release and I mean no disrespect to it but on the surface a indie pixel art turn-based puzzle game is probably not something that a mainstream gamer audience is going to be you know gonna

care about however this game perfectly teaches you how to play it in a gif this does it right here and I think it's a very it is another wise of a sort of very complicated game to understand but it teaches itself very very beautifully and you immediately start thinking about all the different permutations of this and I think it's it contributes hugely to its success and has a very strange name has a very strange rule set and yet it teaches people how to play a game it's currently doing very very well on Steam last I checked I'm sure it'll do very well on switch as well but I just want to play devil's advocate here and say that plenty of best-selling games don't do this so I'm gonna keep saying this throughout the talk if your game doesn't do the things that I'm talking about it's fine you're going to do other things but in summary your customers have finite time and are highly distracted so make a game that customers

don't have to work to under and make a game that sells itself in the span of a gif doing so will actually affect your design if you set out to do this from the beginning it will affect your game design because you'll have to be lean and focused in order to do this customers need knowledge it makes it easier for them and as Johnny Utah famously said knowledge equals sales all right so let's move on to the next topic which is staying relevant and I'll just say right now that this is the most difficult and expensive part of the three things I'm talking about today so what is staying relevant it is having new content to play over time remaining community relevance to play over time remaining streamer or YouTube relevant over time with a goal to continuing to sell over time some of you are probably already doing this with your games and that's great

this will just be a refresher maybe I'll have something new to offer here but the takeaway right away is that I believe that your game needs a pulse to survive games with a with a beating heart have a far better chance of staying on the charts and very rarely does anyone these days release a game and just walk away from it and it's six months later it's still a best-seller those instances are extremely rare I wouldn't bank on that unless your Nintendo they can manage to do that so how do we keep the pulse the two major ones are content updates for your game and having a multiplayer or sharing feature in your game both of those together and that's the most powerful cocktail but there's also content creation from your community if you've released a tool set and you foster that and players are able to make their own content that's huge there's

communities seen in competition this pretty much requires multiplayer to work but you can be very very clever about that and then porting to other platforms this might seem like it's not a means of staying relevant over time and certainly maybe not as powerful as some of the other ones but it is on its own a very useful tool especially if you are releasing special or deluxe editions of your game as you port it to new platforms over time basically try to treat every port that you do as a new launch of your game try and have some opportunity to scream about it again when you port it don't just say it's now available on this platform thank you good night then there's community engagement this one really is necessary to work really requires that some of the other ones in order to be best very rarely can you just release a game and engage with your community and that's going to keep you relevant for six months to a year but it

does work very very well in in concert with content updates multiplayer and especially a community and seen competition but why do you do this it sounds expensive it sounds like a lot of work well it's because long-term support of your game is becoming expected I'm sure you've read one or two steam reviews that say things like dead game negative review as unfair as that is it happens supporting a released game is easier and less risky than building a new one obviously you need to already have some traction if you have shipped your game and it didn't work out continuing to support it might not be for you and just remember that concurrency is king and that is is not just about making an online PvP game so obviously you need concurrency in order for it to work I'm talking about at any given moment the total number of people playing your game in this moment by the

day or by the week is really important and really relevant to your success even if you have like we did a single-player offline game and the reason for that is it's relative you don't need to target 10,000 concurrent users in order for it to be material to your success you need to target a relatively small number of people that can grow into a bigger one and that will then lead to sales because it is a tiny little zeitgeist that grow into a bigger one and since I just mentioned it how does this lead to sales well viral mechanisms on Steam ps4 and xboxone this is one of the principal ways that we sell on slime rancher we don't spend money on marketing we rely on this which is we support the game over time and people play it over time including existing players who have stuck with us that's really important because all the while they are blasting to their friends list on these platforms that they're currently playing slime

rancher and if you're the new you know release for today and you have some of some of your friends are playing that game you're gonna you're gonna hear about it it's gonna pop up in their friends list you're like any other game that's been released and I might pay attention to it I might not and if that's your only chance that you're gonna encapsulate that little weak launch moment or weak launch moment and that's it you just drove right past a billboard and you just crossed your fingers that maybe people played attention but if you keep beating that drum and releasing new content over time and people keep blasting to their friends list that they are currently playing your game eventually like a billboard that you drive past to work everyday they see it and now they're finally paid attention to it now they maybe remember the name and now they're associating with this game that their friends seem to play a lot of and finally just sort of worms their way into their head and they're familiar enough with it that they have that little bit of knowledge and it could lead to the next step which might

be a sale it might be knowing wanting to know more and reaching out to their friends or at least looking at the game page but it is a step it's very important and you earn those by doing long term support wish list conversions and gifting from sales is another one wish there's a there's a constant churn of your wish lists that as long as you're doing things right and you have a game that people want to play you will just get a constant churn of people converting on your Steam wish list into sales over time though and a lot of that comes up when steam broadcasts to customers that game from your wishlist Hasan's well if they vaguely remember it don't remember it or you know something like that it's gonna be a much harder sell if it's that game that they have now past the billboard many a time and their friends are still playing it maybe now is the time but maybe it's not and that's my third point that sometimes people are just busy and distracted and

it may be they're not going to buy your game now we establish that everyone's very distracted we don't have a lot of time going around it doesn't mean that they hate your game or they're never gonna buy it I think sometimes we fall into this trap of thinking I'm gonna release my game and I and all the people that are gonna either buy it or not are going to to do so and that's it you've got to keep working it and you know I've backed things on Kickstarter that I've never even played that's the situation that we're dealing with don't just be another entry in someone's Steam library so other the other final point is just joining the bandwagon and discussion this is why concurrency is powerful it's because then there are people talking about your game and if you can get people talking and sharing things like a gif on social media then we're all part of this discussion it's a much easier sell if the customer thinks that there is momentum behind it and some of that you can kind of generate on your own by

just pushing that out there let's say in the form of gifts on on Twitter or by supporting your game and having people blast it to their friends that they're playing your next content update playing and playing and playing it you're generating your own buzz in people's friends networks so in summary I hope you noticed by the way that the tomatoes have been growing slowly over time and we put some effort into that your game is a garden nurture it stay relevant by doing the things that give your game a pulse and keep that keeping a pulse keeps you selling your game okay and you can enjoy delicious tomatoes final section for the talk is a place to call home and so we're gonna kick things off instead of a take away with a question have you ever sat down to play a game and not chosen a specific one because you can't recall where you left off the game is stressful or difficult and you

were looking to relax you know that you will need to find a group like a multiplayer game or you remembered that you were stuck on something I'm sure many of us have done that and that is as a result of friction all of that stuff is friction and so now we're gonna get right away insert a takeaway which is that friction kills friction being a killer is well known in game design we often think about this though in terms of game systems and game experience so it is after the player is playing the game if they encounter things that are bad or that impede their progress or confusing anything that keeps them from playing your game and keeps them from enjoying it that you are likely responsible for that is friction but I'm talking about the idea of friction being friction itself so not to get too out there but it's the idea that friction exists in the game that is creating friction from anyone playing your game and so the solution to this is to give

your game a place to call home so what is home home by my definition is any environment mode or activity in a game that allows for relaxed low consequence play but still issues meaningful rewards or progress I don't think this is talked about nearly enough in in games and I think this is really important and so that's why I devoted a whole section to it this is not a literal home base in your game this is often the kind of the cozy aspect of your game and it doesn't mean because you're making animal crossing or stardew valley and you've made a cozy game there can be cozy moments in very stressful games and very big action-oriented games and as long as it conforms to this definition here that would be this game's home and so I'll give you some examples in destiny it's

running patrols and Bounty's so this is an activity that is available to you at any time I'm sure everyone's familiar with what this is but just in case you're not you know you're allowed to drop on a planet you're not doing any one specific mission you're kind of wandering an open world and things will happen in front of you and you can choose to engage with those things and you also have a little quest list of things that you can be doing the rest of destiny content is PvP and high stakes missions and raids and it's all a higher tier of play a higher form of commitment to playing destiny for that evening so you are able to in destiny by running patrols and bounties to wait for friends to come online and/or finish the activities that they're currently engaged in and you're not staring at a matchmaking screen when you're doing that you're wandering around doing your own thing and you might be waiting for a raid group but this acts as a first tier of play commitment to those other tiers that I mentioned before and it's important to

note that even legendaries can drop when you're wandering around here one of the best rewards in the game Diablo 3 doesn't fantastic job of this where go in a direction and you'll be rewarded equally for whatever it is that you're doing so it just feels good it's like mac and cheese the video game fortnight PvP game I'm terrible at it I get killed right away but there is a battle pass and that has objectives that allow me to get meaningful rewards and do things other than trying to be one out of a hundred so this I think was one of fortnight's like you know brilliant moves is they realized we have a game where we put a hundred people in the room and 99 of them are losers and you might not think about it that way you might be very very happy you know getting enough top ten percent I'm happy if I can kill one person in it but it has these things that I can pursue on my

own whenever I want to and hey a bunch of times it's just doing the thing it's just playing the game and I can decide to go somewhere and do something or have a different objective that isn't being the out of a hundred people mario odyssey is obviously a pretty pretty relaxed experience but there are definitely bigger challenges in it and it isn't really just about sheer difficulty that we're talking about but its version of home is collecting moons from past levels and the reason for this is like i said you don't sit down with mario odyssey and think this is going to be like counterstrike levels of stress but going to a new world having a new world open up to a player like when you leave i don't know if i'm remembering correctly but leave the desert and go to this city that is a source of anxiety to some degree i mean you might be totally fine with it but there's a big unknown you now are gonna have a bunch of new objectives thrown at you anytime like a zone opens up in a world it's a mixture

of excitement and anxiety for the player and so going back to levels and places in a world that you are very very familiar with and doing it kind of on your own terms and knowing that you don't have to maybe finish the whole level you just have to get the moon that was halfway through it and it is overall contributing to your progress and your ability to go to newer places in the world later is huge because if it were just about forward momentum you are gonna have players that get stuck eventually next MMO daily quests love them or hate them they're a great way of getting people just to sit down and actually log into the game and immediately have something meaningful that they can do because at any given time most people don't have a lot of friends online that they can play the same game with a lot of times playing games with your friends is different people are playing different games or

we're in the same game much like I was talking about with destiny we're just doing different things and chatting so dailies give you that entry into a giant complicated world with a lot of moving parts but it gives you a focused daily thing that you can sit down and grind out and you get rewards for it in the case of spider-man I like this one because it's version of home which is swinging around the city looking for things to do and perhaps encountering things happening randomly in front of you it's also the best feeling thing in the game you might like its combat or its story or whatever but you're wrong swinging through the city is the best part of any spider-man game ever and it's great that in this game that is how you get around and find new things and engage with higher tiers of play commitment but swinging feels good all the time and that's huge for spider-man spider-man is having a great year it's just it's huge

next minecraft and games like it basically are just pure home gathering for projects and building them everything that you can collect contributes to grander visions and projects so in Minecraft you know you you might be looking for diamonds but if you're collecting other resources eventually you might use them that's huge it always feels like wandering equals some form of forward momentum so again you might not be making minecraft you might not be making a game like Minecraft but think about how minecraft achieved that and maybe you could do something like that breath of the wild is just almost another pure home experience other than when you're doing dungeons and kind of the higher level challenges in the game but wandering over the next horizon it's always offering you something and unlike a game like Skyrim which allows you to wander over the next horizon and encounter whatever shrines and Zelda are great because I personally I'm not

usually why about doing them but they are something in the environment that I can either bookmark or do right away and it's going to give me overall further progress for my character that's very material whereas it when I wander into a cave in Skyrim for example there might be loot there might be spiders there might be bears and spiders I don't know what I'm getting and that that on its own is is powerful but you know being able to spot things in the world and go that is going to contribute to my overall progression just by the virtue of my doing it and engaging with it that's great agility orbs in cracktown or another one slime rancher also tending to your ranch wandering you know home home is kind of my thing so I wanted this game to have this from the very beginning I always kind of think of the games I make as like little gardens of play and not a series of challenges and so this comes very naturally to the experiences that I want to create the

next game I make I guarantee you there will be some version of home within it but finally sort of playing devil's advocate again a little bit it's also a sort of a design talk so you had to say Dark Souls at some point or the lightning bolt would hit me and I die so Dark Souls doesn't really have home but I wanted to bring this up because you know you might not have an opportunity to introduce home in the way that I have defined it in your game but Dark Souls does have a kind of version of home it's kind of like a campground that you visit on your journey that you leave behind and that is you know Dark Souls can be very challenging and punitive when you're when you collect a bunch of souls you die you lose all those souls so you know that that first level of anxiety is I have a bunch of souls and I just lost them now we'd bring that anxiety up to another level which is all of those souls that you have are sitting over there by that giant dragon you have one

shot to get it so now the anxiety has peaked for the player at this point we're nowhere near home at this point home is a distant memory and it's burning and you could smell the smoke but if you die then if you if it's catastrophic failure what do you get you've basically cashed out now you have zero Souls and you're back at the hub and that's a huge freeing moment for the player because now I can go anywhere I want and do anything and unlike before there are zero consequences to my actions so I can decide to try that boss again and now I can maybe experiment with a new tactic this time I can go and find loot hidden away in dangerous places that I permanently get to keep or I could just explore and do whatever I could try something wild and then eventually I'm gonna accrue a bunch of Souls and I'm back to that anxious moment again but it's key that Dark Souls routinely because that Dragons gonna keep killing

you is offering you this moment of reprieve and it doesn't matter if you're making a really challenging or obtuse experience or something if you can find ways where you basically release that steam valve every once in a while for the player it's gonna be hugely beneficial for your experience so let's get into why players respond to home I think I've already kind of touched on this a little bit but games are recreational and home basically allows you to relax we're accustomed to visiting platforms and exploring for content like Steam Netflix and Twitter you might call this a bit of a stretch I kind of agree but I think there's some truth to it a lot of our experiences these days are visiting platforms that offer a wealth of content that we dig a little bit and we go further and further further tiers of engagement with these platforms so you might be deciding am I gonna play games or watch a movie or watch sports tonight you choose movies so now you choose between your service

providers for those you choose Netflix now you're browsing through the content that you could consume you decide to act on one maybe you watch it maybe you go for the next episode you have continued to engage further and further and further so one why not let your game be just as easy to engage with and why not let the game itself offer that experience to someone because it is really easy for me if the dragon crushes me and then I lose a level if I've at zero Souls and Dark Souls for me to shut it off pull out my phone or watch Netflix because I'm done with this for the night I'm tired of failing so offer home and I firmly believe that it'll allow players to engage with your game more easily make that decision to sit down with it there's always some amount of anxiety around PvP team play spending currencies ranked play think of our covered this so home gives you a starting point and a go to during play

sessions so home is what gets people in the door but it's also that comfy couch that you could return to in between higher tiers of commitment within the game but why is home good for your business so selling a copy of your game just isn't enough having people play your game and play your game repeatedly as I've covered earlier is key home does this so players playing your game over time will increase sales home gets players into your game and home increases overall playtime because of lack of friction now you might be saying just wait a doing minute isn't some of the stuff in this talk the kind of strategy that is used by games as a service and I would say yes and that's okay copying business practices that work is okay even if it's your not really in that business it's okay steal the good

stuff I could learn something about selling my game from that successful burger stand that I talked about earlier copy it why not why not just why not just try and fit in the mold of what everyone else is doing if you do that you or another game now so to kind of bring it all together with slime rancher it was a single player offline indie game was released over three years ago the original dev team was three people very very humble beginnings and it is also also not a typical games as service genre not by any stretch single player offline indie game about ranching Slams and farming it's far away from that but that didn't stop us from releasing eighteen significant content updates so far with another one on the way it has weekly and holiday activities and community contests and those activities are just generated within the game we took a page from Animal Crossing basically Animal Crossing is not at least the older ones weren't an internet-connected game and yet it had

daily stuff that felt alive we just beat that and it's still being ported in new platforms we make a big deal out of it every time we do that and his maintains strong revenue since its release and December 2018 was our best month ever for a what was then just almost a three year old game and I basically want to say that I'm practicing what I preach here it sells itself in a gif it has maintained relevancy by nurturing the game since its release and there's copious amounts of home in it that is usually one of the number one things they're not using home but the number one things that our reviewers point out is that they could relax when they play it it feels cozy and again you do not have to have a bright warm and fuzzy game for this to work you just have to elicit those feelings again what do you want your players to feel do it but it also does other things not covered in this talk

and it also doesn't do lots of things that make other games successful maybe including yours and so remember that the stuff in this talk will help your game succeed but it is not the only path to success so I say instead take the stuff from this talk and everyone else's talks that makes sense to you and your game and make your own path to success and good luck with that [Applause] [Music] so he's back thank you very much I want to thank Rey and Cara who helped me put this talk together and everyone at Minami Park I believe there is some time I could take some questions I really love to talk so it's a good

follow-up to what you did last year to a couple years ago yeah kind of reflecting you you said that December was your best month revenue-wise what would you tell yourself beginning slime rancher I know that you could probably tell herself a lot but what's maybe a couple of key lessons having gone through that whole process now especially from from this perspective so the question is what would I tell myself three years ago from when we were in in December of last year and and at the peak revenue yeah so we we had set out to sell a hundred thousand copies of the game that was that was our goal and I think this is important that obviously we sold way more than that but we we did not we weren't thinking in terms of let's just see what'll happen we tried to make a game that we thought we could sell a hundred thousand copies of and we had a plan for what we would do if that

happened and I think that is very relevant to what I was talking about with concurrency we weren't aiming for let's see what what happens we wanted that hundred thousand because we knew that was the momentum necessary to maybe get us more and it turns out that that was very much the case but you know I I think yeah I don't know if I totally answered your question there obviously I would be very excited but if I think I would might be slightly discouraged at how much hard work was necessary to get to that moment you know working it the long term support nurturing the game that's a very very difficult thing to do and we just had to stick at it you can't get bored and want to make your next game you just have to keep selling so excellent so a question about how to make an effective gift for telling your story or game if your game is based around mechanics which are not represented visually very well like a sound game or an audio game or something

involves creation of intangible things can you think of a way to kind of work that into a gift well gif is a visual medium with no audio so you know as I as I said in the beginning the disclaimer this just might not be for you but certainly that's a very unorthodox experience so immediately that's a firewall that you have to be able to somehow get people to walk through and so it's really on you to think what is the the shortest path through that and and yeah I think a lot of this because in relation to AG if it's visual there's there isn't a whole lot that we can do with just pure audio and perhaps there's a you know Twitter like I said is very good for delivering that visual information very quickly find a platform that delivers audio information very quickly but you're definitely up against it because even movies on Twitter and that will have subtitles on it because they know people just aren't listening to to audio so you

have your challenges ahead of you I'm sorry yes sorry fantastic talk think I'm gonna force my whole team to watch it it's like exactly what we need right now specifically about the gifts I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the creation of them like literally what tools you're using are you recording actual gameplay and then how long it takes you to edit it and put it together and just the production of the gif what's the effort and tooling you're using to do it so the question is best practices for making gifs how you do it fortunately I have someone who does that early on we early on what we did was we added a feature in slime rancher a lot of people don't know that this exists but on PC hitting G generates a gif of the last like I think it's 5 seconds of gameplay there are way there are like third-party solutions to that as well I

think it took Mike my the other co-founder of Minami Park like probably half a day to put it in it has generated a ton of community gifts which are great but also it allowed us to very quickly create those moments early on when it was just you know two or three of us that worked online they were probably totally uncharismatic my hobby Park would probably never put those things online when you're small and lean scrappy that was a great solution now she could probably do a talk on best practices in terms of recording footage and that but there are a number of people who are really really good at making gifts and they will share those processes with you I don't know if you've I totally forget the name but there is someone who makes like amazing Devil May Cry gifts and they're not Capcom definitely check that out because they're gorgeous and perfectly formatted so but early on I totally recommend put

a make gif button in your game it will save you a ton of agony later thank you so much Joe thank you your first class but the first question saying how you went into this saying you want to sell a certain amount of games and you also touched on earlier on about sort of games as a service and sort of how sigh mantra is as we say a game as a service did you go into that even early on like the first year where you're developing to make it a game as a service or did you go in thinking it was gonna be one shot and then you're gonna move on to the next project okay so the question was did we walk into it thinking we were gonna like use the games as a service model I actually covered this in a talk from a couple years ago but in brief we knew we were going to the early access and we also didn't want to do of the early access version where it's like here's a bunch of bug fixes see in six months and maybe we'll have some content because I think people get very angry about that so as soon as there was a response to it we got our stuff together and leveraged I used to make mmo's and so did Mike the

other co-founder of Minami Park we immediately leveraged our basically our MMO experience games as a service was was definitely taking off at that point it was just a natural fit I got an amazing education at three rings is too you know how to make an and run an online game so I had that experience so definitely seek out things like that learn like I was saying steal other people's business practices there's there's things that Wow does that is applicable to your perhaps a very very small game and so yeah we immediately conformed our early access experience to be more games as a service we had our patches that were completing early access as content updates and we made trailers for them and gave them key art and we got people very excited about just normal early access updates but there was always a hero element to every patch so we would never like I said just

to hear some bug fixes and we changed the bridge model and the backpack now and slime rancher looks a little bit different we had something that we can put on a piece of key art that was exciting ideally a character to get people excited about this content update and then really you know it just it just sort of worked that way because you know early access is launching your game period I've said that before and stand by that so thank you thank you so much Nick all right thanks for the talk so on the on the topic of home do you always design for your personal sense of home or do you ever try to create a generic sense of home and if so how do you go about finding that generic broad sense of home so the question is Dubai's designed for my own personal taste of home or abroad one I think it's a bit of both which is probably not what you were looking to hear but I you know you can't avoid putting your own personal tastes and preferences into

experiences but I you know in terms of the the generic sense of its I think there's there's some very easy things to do which is just you know basically sticking to the definition that I put out there you know things that features that aren't punitive relaxed play getting someone to stay for as long as they want to that is something I really value is I really hate it in games where it tells me mission complete I know this is like I've definitely a personal preference but I don't I don't want anyone telling me when like the experience is over I want to like like in destiny go up to orbit when I when I feel like it so for me that's a huge part of my personal taste is just it's its freedom it's not taking control away from the player I like that that's my jam thank you for have a question regarding the topic nurturing the game so I want to ask what do you think

stopped the optimal frequency of pushing out significant updates cuz just risk that players do not like the new updates and districts that the player have not digest for eat I judge the previous update so what do you think the optimal frequency to push this significant sure so the question is what is the appropriate cadence of content updates when you're nurturing your game so you've committed to long-term support you're gonna release content updates over time again I think that varies by game one of the ways that you can figure that out is you look at your tale so you release your game even if you release it in early access you're gonna get the bump and it's great to be up here and then eventually it goes down and if all you've decided to do is release your game walk away from it now you're here you're you you you've exited the peak and you're in the valley probably forever until you put your game on sale and then just like a roller coaster that bump is never gonna be as big as that

first one that's that's actually how roller coasters work which is super cool and I didn't know that until relatively recently but anyway so so look at that and release your content update see what it does to the bump and then you have to determine for yourself how deep and how why do you want that valley to be but if you've done an effective update you can get a data point where you say you know what we must have filled that valley full of dirt in the last update because the valley is now higher than the valley used to be and that's the critical bit of information if what you did makes you're bottoming out high than your previous bottoming out and looks like it's gonna stay that way you have done something effective to build value into that game if what you get is an exact replica of what you had before maybe that's fine because the peak equals the effort at least that you put into it and the reason breaking even there is a victory is because you've

built now value into that game for the new customer when we're walking working on slime rancher we think about what are our current players going to want and what's gonna get them to keep playing the game we're constantly thinking about the newest customer and so sometimes we add a feature where we realize our existing players chew through it very quickly and it's because they only focused on doing that one thing and that's unfortunate but then other times with that same example they are able to a new player is able to experience that and other things whenever they want so yeah okay I'll just take one less one last question is that okay yeah oh okay I'm sorry I think we're wrapping up I'll take your question after yeah so I'll hang outside if anyone else has any other questions thanks again