Shadow Cities and the Future of Location-Based Games

[Music] welcome everybody to my session called shadow cities and the future of location-based gaming I'll start by showing some video and then get into the topic hundreds of years ago an ancient now long-forgotten force pulls through our world this alternative reality has now returned using technology is the gateway challenge your concept of what is real and what is not join us forge alliances secure your territory and fight back

our battleground is where we live our streets our cities and choose a side defend your area gain control of your city and expand your influence across continents shadow cities it's a game it's really so this is shadow cities our game lets me look for this pointer I make some magic my name is Marcus mandala I work at gray area a finished start up creating location-based games I'm here to tell you about our location-based game called shadow cities that was launched globally a year ago telling some of the lessons and something about our vision about the

future of location-based gaming I work as a game designer especially a lot about what's location-based in shadow cities I've been working on location based gaming projects since 2004 at universities at Nokia and now with a commercial product at grey area earlier I was here talking about our game called pervasive games theory and design that we did on the academic background that covers some basics and principles of this kind of gaming we're talking about that in 2009 today however I'm taking the academic lessons on the practical level and talking about the game we're actually doing and promoting here not everyone has heard about shadows it is so couple of words a big part of why I'm here talking to you today is that we want an online Innovation Award in GDS a

online last year we've also been nominated for a couple of awards such as nordic best handheld game and most reasons we want an audience award for the best mobile MMO on iOS or as the New York Times said I have played the future of mobile gaming it's called shadow city's shadow cities isn't just the future of mobile gaming it may actually be the most interesting you know provocative and far-reaching video game in the world right now on any system inwards obsessed Cecil in their culture front page - I'm going to show you a little bit about the game and then talk about what it's about and where we're going so if I can get game itself on screen this is shadows it is when you're log in for the first time you realize that this is where I am really so when you look at

the map you can see that we're directly here here in the most cone Center I can look around in the map I can see some things players have created here for instance here it's a beacon created by a guy called scatterbrain which I can use to navigate the place or we can see some spirits and PC monsters that we can we can attack if we want to other players scatterbrains moving here apparently some enemy players I'm playing on the orange side as an as an orc attack then here we can see an animator I can move around in the world a little bit if you want to jump around or I can cast spells at the enemies as you can see the whole UI it's pretty abstract a little bit sparse but we want to create a game where the feeling is all about you being the mage that's why I use runes and magic symbols to cast

spells because we didn't want to create a game where you push buttons to cast stuff we want to create a game where you are the mage where you can yourself feel that you're in the in the virtual world usually when I'm demoing isn't this life someone's sooner or later Arthur gave me and whitey but is now doing the task for me so apparently I died it happens every time thank you buddy but alright let's get back to the business so a sister shadow cities is a very PvP oriented game we have two sides fighting the architects and the animators it's all about conquering your city two factions are struggling who controls which neighborhood when I when I come to my own Center I can build dominators and I can collect energy from the from from the magical ambience of the area and the sides of God there's more points every

week wins it's a kind of an eternal struggle that never ends or produce this kind of permanent result but that keeps the players occupied pretty well also we supplement that with a lot of missions and question that kind of stuff we started originally as a three-person startup and of course a lot of the design we are showing today is motivated by the fact that our original business plan was selling one car one guy's car and then living off it until until the things turned better and indeed they did because now we are 17 people in in Helsinki and we've out in in 38 countries and so forth the entire game is built at the moment on the on the philosophy of wouldn't it be cool if we did this or that and wouldn't it be cool if I could control my city wouldn't it be cool if I was a mage in my city wouldn't it be cool if I could see the other guy right there and attack him

over the all these these streets blocks and everything I think our players agree it's pretty cool so shadows it is it's a location-based MMORPG the basic game mechanics are about casting spells killing enemies gathering XP completing missions fighting other players so forth but what makes it special is that everything is done on a map in essence the planet is our playground we try to do this planet being playground in two levels when you log in you can see the micro level you can see your own city block you can see the most Coney Center but of course the battle is about the world you're trying to conquer the world you're conquering you're stealing energy from the world and I'm trying to win our weekly campaigns so here in the map you can see that different sites have taken different parts of Europe over and and they're struggling so whenever you play the game you can be a part of the big struggle you can be one of the French

architects or French animators and you can be one of the people who are really carrying this battle to our sense we believe that this is the most exciting game board you can have everything that mankind has built it's on our map basically so there's there are a lot of activities players are organizing for themselves that are based on the fact that we have this infinite resources are used it is very powerful when you log in for the first time you get a very tangible and visceral feeling of here and now when you see that you're in in your hometown you can see your own home there on the map you can see your neighbors a couple of blocks away you can see that they are playing right now you can start battling shooting spells back and forth you can talk to them in incomes if it creates a very powerful first minute of absolute wow that we try to create and then cultivate over a longer player lifetime our philosophy is to make games that are much more than check-ins most location-based games are

very much checking based or they are minigame based while we are trying to make a real-time game play going on in the game in the fashion of real mmo's like I don't know what it Warcraft or whatever as a resource I mentioned already people love this emergent exploration we don't need to put stuff on the map in order to for them to find it for instance here the players are in the Forbidden City in Beijing or they organize these treasure hunts here they are in arc of triumph in Paris or Pearl Harbor or area 51 players go into these places they organized their own competitions they organize come into your hunts and whatever they write fanfic based on what we do they write fanfic about gathering in area 51 and going there and doing stuff the powerful resource we have here is that we have a coherent world everything in the game is courting the same fiction because it is

this is not a game it is your magic device where you draw runes and you cast spells so everything you have in the real world you can appropriate into the game if you have a cool piece of local folklore you can you can enter it into the fiction if you have a mage Meetup cruise you can make that a game event we believe that games like shadow cities can create a very powerful feeling of secret world until you see the game and open it up your you're completely unaware that the Moscone Center has been a area for fighting for this weekend but once you try it out you can see that there's stuff going on you didn't know about people are actually fighting over some things you don't see and when you when you go outside you can actually envision yourself seeing the beacon coming out from behind the buildings or whatever in a very tangible way so our vision is not to create just a game but a kind of a global game layer

that could extend to other media as well when players put shadow cities in their pocket and walk on the streets it follows them wherever they go so even when you don't actively play the game you are still in some sense a part of the game if you left the beacon or a Dominator or whatever in the world other players can find it other players can attack it you could get a push notification that people are right there needing your help or you could get a push notification that your things are going to be a fact oh so forth of course we also leverage the appointment gameplay so when you take over the most cone Center you start gathering energy points and you want to go there to say that they are still there we're trying to make this in a way that is kind of real for the players instead of creating artificial structures we we're trying to leverage the fact that we have a living world living current world with a lot of stuff in there in order to motivate

players to come back and check begin whenever they are taking a work walk or walking their dog so when you're doing groceries you're in shadows it is or where you're listening lecture you're in the shadows that because you can be imagine this game this is one of the fanfiction things we've gotten we got a My Little Pony with architect symbols all over it so let's look at what we have learned creating shadows it is it's been quite a ride we haven't taken the easiest possible route in fact we have been creating a game that is very much unlike anything before so there have been couple of rocks in the road and we want to tell it tell about them to you so you can avoid them when you're doing your game this is my first very important point when you think about location-based game you think about players like the character in the in the

picture active young people who are urban explorers or whatever moving around in their city biking or hiking or something but what really happens is the players play on their sofa the location that is most central to our game is your home this is my first key take away this if you take nothing well nothing away from this lecture except for this one then take this one so so here we can see the Packman of where our players play home and work and home alone alone are 74% of our gameplay while people who play on the move or somewhere else are about 26% we were quite surprised to learn this when we launched the game of course because we like everyone else we were thinking in terms of this image that people would be moving but the

truth is that when you create a good good game people want to play it several hours a day and when you ask yourself how many hours are you in in a bus or in other mass transit where you can play every day that's going to be maximum of like one hour or less so most people spend most of their online time at home or at work and even those players who don't who mostly play in the transit also play in their home players sometimes do move in order to play they take out the dogs in order to attack the enemy they they drive around Helsinki and they stop in weird places to find if there's anything to discover but for the 99% of the playtime it's going to be on the sofa everything that and a lot of things that I'm going to talk about today have to do with this fact first of the obvious obvious consequences of

playing on your sofa is that you play with your neighbors a lot you live in some where you live in next to the most content or whatever you see the same faces every now and then you see the the people who are on your side they are your instant friends they are the people who protect your assets while you're away they are the people who you chat with quite a bit they are the people who collect the points for the same theme as you but you also see the enemies in the same area you see the nasty animator who is always taking down your stuff there's pretty quickly there's going to be a kind of structure of vengeance and rivalry neighborhood rivalry where you're attacking each other just because you know that he is going to do the same to you when he is getting under line in some point you might forge an alliance kind of some kind of a truce that because we live in the same block let's not fight each other the problem of course is that the real world is not fair since we only have this one huge

level we can't really define it in the way we might want to for instance if in your neighborhood there's a level 18 bully who keeps on breathing you whenever you get online that's going to be a problem for you of course of course we can do stuff like protecting new base and that kind of things but in fact the real world is not fair in so many ways that that you can never turn it into an entirely fair experience for instance if you have any resources in the game world if you have herbs or if you have oil or whatever some people are going to live next to the resources while other people are going to live far from them and there is no way you can balance your resources in the world so that they would be fair to everyone one thing we were thinking putting some stuff in downtown while leaving suburbs in countryside empty in order to create the kind of friction between the countryside players and the demo town players but then we ended up

in a situation where people of course travel from countryside to to set it to work and back back again so the patterns people have in using the real world are so different that it's absolutely impossible to make the real world entirely fair of course you can take your resources and put them everywhere in the world so you can have oil and herbs everywhere but then you again lose some of your location-based flavor of the game it's a very difficult balance to strike entirely possible but something you want to think on when you're planning your game also you don't have lobby areas and so forth instead of cities we ended up having very few resources in the game world but then again it being a PvP game having other players near you it's also resourced because then you can fight them and again the game is not fair that is my key takeaway number two here in the

image you can see the map of southern Finland it's about roughly the size of Arizona in terms of of area and population in South you can see the big city is hell think especially in the middle and also in the southwest you can see some other bigger cities this is this map indicates the level of player activity in different areas in the contract the problem is of course you want to keep the converse eyed populated but you don't want to clutter the the big cities you're gonna have a lot of players in in urban areas like Manhattan so they must be playable for your game but then you're gonna have trouble in Montana because there is no one around there are no resources around and you have to figure this out somehow this is a very critical question we knew that the critical mass would be some kind of an issue but when you start looking they'll being deeper into it you

have to realize that you have to have in a multiplayer game you have to have the critical mass in every neighborhood at all times especially because channel today is very much about TV play and collaboration the experience suffers a lot if you're alone in somewhere so basically it's a very hard balance when we wrote the book I mentioned pervasive games we wrote about critical mass for two pages if I wrote the same book today I would write about it for you know 12 pages or something this is probably the biggest challenge in in the way of map based games like shadows it is eventually I believe you have to choose to cater to downtown the suburbs or to countryside and find some fixes for the way to make it make the game work in other areas but it's not going to be easy anyway this is a very important take way one way we can solve this

problem it's virtual movement so instead of cities as I showed you you can move in the map even though you don't walk around in the real me space that's gonna solve a lot of your problems you can create new be areas you can you can solve the critical mass issue it always also will shift your balance from playing with neighbors to playing with your real-world friends if you want to have a game where my Facebook friends are more important than my my friends in shadow cities this might be a thing to do because then if you live in Manhattan I can make it fun travel to Manhattan and play with you but of course this also would say afraid of if you're creating a location-based game and if you're serious about it you might want to think about how much of your location-based appeal you will lose by going this way probably the right thing to do is some kind of a balance shadow cities has one example of the balance and we've been tweaking it while the

game has been running but I'm really much looking forward to finding out what kind of solutions are found in future instead of it is the primary way for players to movies is the beacons I can place a beacon in Moscone Center and all my friends can then immediately warp the Moscone Center we have a lot of good player activity when when there is a fight going on in somewhere like Central Park New York and people start putting up out bacon some screaming to their friends that please come help me because these guys are running us over and that creates a lot of good big battles bringing people together in urban areas another solution we have used is that we encourage dormant gameplay with dormant gameplay I mean that the game is dormant you're not actively playing but there's still things happening that can influence your assets and the game can also alarm you from the dormancy with a push

notification or some other message and invite you to play again that is a good method because even if you don't have the temporal aspect of the critical mass in order you can have other players leaving their marks in the world and when they are when the when the players are finding each other's marks they start alarming and inviting each on each other over to the game and that works pretty well for us on the other hand our mechanics encourage ambient gameplay with ambient gameplay I mean game play where I'm working and I have my cell phone owner I'm monitoring what's happening around say Moscone Center I'm watching over my assets and I'm chatting with my friends and I'm I'm working I'm you know whatever sitting in Facebook or something we actually have sessions that are upwards of 60 minutes long people just getting online sitting on their dominators sitting on their game great ways looking at their neighborhoods and

chatting and fighting every now and then it's it's a very hardcore group that does that but then again we are aiming at our game to the gamer audience anyway it is often thought that real time gaming requires long play sessions but for Santos it is is clearly not true if I log in just for a couple of minutes like I did a moment ago there will be someone quite open I can fight with or I can I can harvest my stuff or I can plant some stuff for harvesting in future and and there's a good chance of real-time gameplay coming in meeting me especially when the game gives me a push notification that my stuff is under attack I just check in to the push notification and I'm in the fight right away in the middle of it in this image we are in Beirut and Barrett is here to illustrate the challenges of location data for instance in here our map data

was all encoded in Arabic there are a lot of this kind of surprises that that you will encounter once you're starting to roll your game out in different countries some places are not in the day map databases at all our central unit of map data is neighborhood a neighborhood means very different things in different places we've been looking also a lot into stuff like venue data from Goa land and Foursquare but that data is also quite problematic for instance we were looking at at military installations and we found a load of load of historical sites and if I find a historical castle when I'm trying to find an ammo Depot for me as a player it creates a bad sense of discontinuity between the game and the real world we want to create a feeling where the player knows that there's an you know there's a military installation here and so when I go there there might be something related to military installations but when you use

map data you might very likely end up in tinkering with the data yourself and that's of course a lot of work because the only level you can have which is the planet is really really big a level of course you can let your players edit your database but you should then remember that players who are playing on their sofa will want to optimize their own neighborhood so they want to put their military installation and hospital and whatever you give resources for so it's not going to be easy that's why either there's again a key takeaway that you want to take on on the production side definitely speaking of maps this is what maps look like and when you look at the location-based games that use maps you can frequently see that they are not they don't look very game-like they don't look very playful they don't look very fun and that is of course because our our mission with the maps is actually the opposite when we compare it

with a mission of the people who are actually making the maps they want to make clear concise visualizations of environment they want them to be zoomable and palpable and so forth they want them to be neutral on offending serious clean clear while for instance when you look at the shadows of this map that is blue and black and creates a fictional world where somewhere closer to what people want to do in in level design in console games we want it to be mysterious and secretive and shady and intriguing in my opinion when you when you see people putting game-like frames or game-like icons on top of the Google Maps or being a Maps or whatever it's very rarely works nicely because of this inherent contradiction also the map data is full of details you don't want to maybe tell your players for instance here we can say Marriott Hotel and most

cone Center and so forth and it might be that if you if your game is about if your game is about mages you don't want your mages the focus on hotels and and tours tourist attractions you might want to have you know dark alleys and and whatever on your map technologically of course iPhone was a great news for our company actually we don't we wouldn't exist without iPhone but still the tech that we are using in in the games it's not exactly designed for location-based gaming and it's also not necessarily very optimal for it for instance if you take positioning positioning is not very accurate and it takes a lot of battery of course most of the time when if when utility UPS position you they just want your location once or if you have a running

up then maybe like once a minute or something but if you're biking away from the architects should we update your location all the time the problem is that positioning takes time it's not very fast it devours battery power especially an iPhone 3GS playing shadows it is quite a quite a challenge because you have to be hooked into the into the charger pretty much and so forth and the challenge here is that when you're in environment like App Store you're gonna get reviews from all your players not only the players who you optimize for so if you have if you have issues with battery life and you have your game open for 3GS you're gonna have people lots of people they're giving you low ratings because they're they don't they're not satisfied with the battery performance the same applies to positioning accuracy of course the positioning on iPhone is mostly mostly reliable but when it's not and it often

is not then you start getting complaints from players as if you could do something about it which of course you can't we also need a lot of network traffic and the thing about mobile lag is that it's very spiking the network light can spike unpredictably above three to five seconds if we get a 10 second lag spike it's not a rare occasion it's particularly difficult because it's very very hard to predict if you have an iPhone you know of course just holding it the wrong way might spike your lag and your players will be wondering what's happening your player might be going inside an elevator or a car and still not realize that it is he who is creating the lag and not your system or the even the phone and of course when you're running a multiplayer game you don't know or your designers can't predict who is going to be on GPRS who's gonna be on Wi-Fi who's gonna be on or 3G and in multiplayer battles of

course the people in Wi-Fi have an edge so the same the way we manage these problems is that we try to manage the players expectations from the start for instance if if if we gave if we pinpointed the players location the map very exactly we'd get even more complaints about the problems of positioning instead in shadow cities we hover the players gently around above the map so that the players are somewhat unable to say where there's gonna be problems with lag spikes we of course cover live spikes in in casting animations most of our spells can be only they they take like two or three seconds to cast so our battles are a couple of spells back and forth instead of what we might otherwise do dozen of spells back and forth if you create quick interactions and quick animations you're going to be in trouble in some point we were thinking about a game idea

with with swords and attacks and you know ninjas and stuff hitting back and forth but in ninja animation it's going to be super difficult to hide the fact that you're hitting someone with a sword and then the log is five seconds the thematic limitations in this field are gonna be a challenge they are not a huge challenge yet because everything is not yet done but there will be a huge challenge in five years if you want to create a game like shadow cities where the integration of real world and game world are us it's a thorough as we are aiming for you have very few themes that you can buy ably exploit you have vampires mafia paranormal aliens police and so forth but there's gonna be the day when all this real world fiction is so strongly stopped out that it's going to be pretty hard to come up with new fiction and I think for vampires we are

seeing that already in in the culture in general that people have seen so many vampires that they don't want to see anymore vampires and I wouldn't be surprised if mafia or crime or that kind of stuff would be going pretty fast after it this is actually this is a real challenge because the experience of shadows it is is that the cohesive world and the total team that is overarching is very powerful in terms of player creation in terms of fan fiction in terms of player created activities the it is very valuable for us that the mythology of shadows it is even though it's very sparse it's consistent and players have easy time adding to it so you might want to plunder it before it's all done the important thing about many of these challenges is that some of them are unsolvable there is something game designers rarely

say but I feel that we needed to understand it in terms of design if we take an example from the MMO RPG or mod scene they had a couple of problems that that they discovered were unsolvable but it took them years and years to discover it perma death is probably the most famous example they tried to make perimeters in lots of multi-user dungeons they tried to make it in in in different kinds of permanence in many MMORPGs in shadows even Star Wars Galaxies had a permanency in the beginning for Jedi characters they discovered that as long as you have unreliable network connections people are going to lose connection and they are going to die and that is not fun if you have perminov or if you don't if you allow people to unplug their computers when they are about to die then they will do so to avoid perimeters all the time so perimeters turn out to be an

unsolvable problem the way they deal with the permanent now is of course that when you're dying in world of warcraft you spawn a minute later next to where you died this was kind of an unthinkable and unintuitive solution when when first mods came out because if you have a world and someone dies in the world then they have to stay dead otherwise there is no point I'm wondering what are the unsolvable problems of the map based games and location-based games we don't know it yet because we're going to try different approaches a couple of times we're trying to find our ways around them we're looking for the solutions and I'm looking forward to see which of these problems can be solved which for instance is if the critical mass an unsolvable problem or do we find a clever way around it in MMORPG scene one of the issues with a critical mass they used to avoid cluttering was instancing

maybe we should try instancing as well of course over time we're coming up with unintuitive solutions that we become the staple of the industry like spawning next to a dead body my favorite example is farm bill gifts the presence you give to other players that you can't get yourself that you don't lose when you give them out that same nowadays quite intuitive to the players even though they wouldn't make any sense in any other context this is my fifth key takeaway when you're trying to solve these problems uses you should think about whether they are unsolvable and you should just go around them as a company what we're going to do is it's going to the future step by step with shadow cities we absolutely innovated we try to create 80% new things and stick the 20% old things but in future I believe that now that we've established and we learned from shadow cities we're going to try to stick 80 percent to what we know and

just innovate for the 20% instead of jumping into unknown the business model should be careful exploration of what works and how to innovate on top of that of course the games like this must be extremely simple shadows today's is quite complicated actually because the players have still have hard time in understanding how to play location-based games in the first place even though our game is fairly abstract we get these player creations one of our players is creating plush toys out of the spirits and send us some so the challenges we have chosen to address they are far from AAC but will believe that the future there's a future in location-based games and we want to be one of the first companies that go there and figure out what is this new thing we're building our PlayBook in trying to learn from the lessons of

shadow cities from the ups and downs and kind of loading our gun for the next big shot we believe that in location-based gaming the sweet spot in terms of business it's right now there is not yet a category leader like Zynga or Blizzard but the tech is sufficiently advanced and the business models monetization and viral models are sufficiently advanced that we can create a viable product and indeed shadow cities came out a year ago and after shadow cities there have been at least the following games sting topia go or zombie hood life is crime please take home and code runner coming out in in the last year I think there are a couple more but these are just some examples and as you can see when I talked about the teams here please take home and zombie hood are about zombies life is crime is about crime obviously code runner is a little bit different it's

about agents go war is quite different it's about thanks even and stink topia well you have a factory in the clouds where you build smelly chemical compounds and then you throw stink bombs on your friends so they have a novel theme at least also in these images I think you can see the difficulty of turning the the Google map into game like singing so we have the huge challenge of educating the players teaching them what our location-based games how do you play them why are they fun but then again we get to define the genre ourselves when you look at you know today's and fire it up and play it with it you know for two minutes you can see that our vision distance on the map it's about 500 meters when we chose that 500

meters it was a fairly arbitrary decision we wanted it to be something where you can see a little bit around you but not too much around you but after you give shadows it is to someone who hasn't hasn't been there in the process of thinking that's 500 meters it feels pretty obvious that this is the right distance I'm not sure if it's at all obvious but by doing this kind of decisions and hopefully inspiring other people's making location-based games they will follow in some of these decisions and and we can see a kind of the watermark we have left on the scene we're actually happy to see the competition we don't think that the other six games and so forth are really competing for the same players that we are trying to grab because the truth is that there is no such thing as a location-based player base as a huge entity I think most of the location-based players play either shadow cities or life is crime or one of the couple of previous games so we're

actually trying to create customers not fighting over them the future of course hopefully it's going to be not only location-based but also context based your physical your social your temporal and cultural context can all be leveraged for game play we like to say that our rain effect in shadow cities is the best in the game market because if if it rains in shadows it is you really get wet unlike any other game where we're keen on finding out what other kind of context can be included in this kind of gaming whether it comes from Goa on Foursquare or elsewhere but then again we have to think about whether the map based gaming is the future of location-based if you quit if you remove the map and you just stick to the locations you will lose a couple of things great things we love some of

these things you will lose the feeling of here and now you will lose the feeling of Wow when you see your own home in the game you will lose the feeling of seeing that the other guy is there and now I'm I'm busting his ass but on the other hand you can also solve a couple of problems with us for instance regarding the critical mass issue you can you can pretty much hide the fact whether there is a critical mass or not because you're not strictly binding yourself into this this precise and exact visualization of the game world we are using you can just say that there are 10 players around you and not care whether they are 10 meters around you or you know within the radius of 100 kilometers you will lose the map scaling issues and positioning issues you can save a lot of battery power so we're

also keeping our eyes open for that location has many other meanings than just the map reaching towards the conclusion of my presentation I want to tell a story just an example of of an experience that we have made possible something that was utterly impossible in any game before shadows it is as you know every year there is a memorial for the victims of the 9/11 strikes in New York they erect these two pillars of light on the near the location of where the Twin Towers months where our players inside our cities wanted to observe this memorial so this is what they did they went into the Manhattan in the game world they invited their friends all over the world and they created the bacons from the beacons of shadow cities in order to replicate the same memorial in the virtual world and this is again one example of the emergent content you

get for free when you're where you're using the planet as your playground don't Norman said we we grow to love the objects that connect us to other people create meaning and remind us that we are alive at gray area we believe in this quite strongly we believe that they come for the game but they stay for the community and we believe that we can use the real world to create a lot of meanings lot of social content a lot of anchoring points for players who can then stay for the community and enjoy the the global game layer we are providing them even though this they come for the game they stay for the community it's a truism for all MMORPG field we believe that we can we can create a community that is quite different from the others because our community is based on location based on neighbors based on where you live and

based on how you move around in the real world so this is our vision in your city is a game all cities are different what kind of game would your city be shadow cities is our first stab at mastering the art of location-based gaming and map get best gaming but we believe that we can surpass it with our next title that's coming out later this year quite well even though we have uncovered a lot of hazards and troubles on the way to the weight where we are at now at 17 people we are pretty proud that we've accomplished what we've accomplished and we're pretty proud that we created the first location-based MMORPG at least as far as we know we have not chosen an easy path and we've found many challenges but we also believe that there is a very good market that can be uncovered by capturing this new field

thank you so if you have questions or comments please stay with the microphones hi congratulations for the presentation very interesting yeah I have a lot of questions actually but I go like just for a few of them then I maybe I come later so one is a bit technical so how did you solve the problems with the map in the end how did we solve the problems with the map yeah in terms of design and look and you know removing some buildings that you don't want in the map it's a right personally I'm a game designer and my background is in humanities so I might not be the right

person to answer that question unfortunately but our CTO make voice here so you can probably ask him off further of your presentation so he'll be good so that's one of the questions I keep for later I think we have another Barrett but as a game designer using the real world as your your your level use your map how did you and using this kind of large connected experience how did you go about testing and iterating on your concepts we test and I prayed a lot and we do it like I guess it's some kind of a social gaming tradition nowadays we we I trait on the fly pretty much so everywhere you can shout out it is there is a campaign that has a couple of rules changes especially during the be done and after the global launch we were putting out this week on campaigns a lot and we're constantly looking at our metrics and see what works see what doesn't it's kind of mandatory actually

because the world is huge and we have a lot of players and it's a very complex game in terms of interactions and emergent behaviors so the only way to really test this kind of thing is to kind of put it out there and say what happens and then tweaking it on the run coming in the user testing you did before you watching again did you do any of that we had friends we had an alpha for friends and family but in all cases like this one when you engage your real player base then you're gonna hit the wall pretty hard so we've been we had to do a couple of big changes in the beta so we first opened the game in Finland only and we were looking very we're very close that's what players did on how they worked and we were doing radical changes in the game at the time that some of your users have been doing stuff like integrating folklore or local history into the game I was wondering if you could explain some of the ways in which that's happening and whether or

not you've modified any of the mechanics of the game or introduced any new mechanics to sort of foster that or what makes it possible in shadows it is is that we are very sparse in terms of visual and text textual information so we don't tell much about the world we just say you are at mage and we show you the world and then we then you get a very short mission descriptions all our spirits are entities from the real world mythology so we have Valkyries and whatever you can fight but because the game is also very abstract it's it's a it's kind of a black hole that you can feel with whatever you want them so that is basically the thing but most of the fanfiction stuff and that kind of thing happens in our forums that is correct cool thanks yeah sorry I go with the second question these are more commercial so can you disclose anything about the revenues of the game or in

general if you did some market analysis what the potential is that this kind of games we haven't released any player figures but then again that wouldn't be the right way of looking at shadows it is either we are not aiming at the casual or hyper casual market here instead of we're where we believe that that gamers who really get into the game when it's not betters better and that it's actually true for a great game our our lifetime value of player is pretty high so that is what we go for Thanks you mentioned you're the first LBG in fact the military and various homeland defense organization have been using similar things to this for some years they are even now blending or mixing so-called lvc trading live virtual and constructive where you can be in different worlds at

the same time the it's very expensive of course to model a city in 3d movies are doing it I know several companies quite well that are 3d mapping for their movies and their different franchises the military and others are mapping have you considered a partnering and working with some of these people that have 3d maps so the question was whether we have considered partnering with people who are using 3d maps of cities I guess the big challenge there is that the world is huge and we have players everywhere so if we wanted to I mean that kind of different approach would force us to focus on big cities like New York and San Francisco I'm not sure if the player base exists as large enough in those cities but I gotta say it would be the coolest experience I could imagine in this kind of game probably hire Elias

I'm buddy bad thank you for letting me crash your presentation I had a question about the core game loop of Shadows he's a very transitory transient experience really quick gameplay and I wondered if there was any thought in the design process to extending that to a greater permanence of the augmented reality that you're creating game creating structures that have a longer lifespan in game versus kind of the quick core loop of the game currently the question was about the session length about in our game we believe that the most important thing is to make the 2 minute sessions possible so that is the that is the real thing and everything else is a bonus so I think in the foreseeable future will stick to fairly short sessions but I'm not sure about that also our players are having those mammoth sessions of 60

minutes or longer because they are just watching over some neighborhood so I think we already have that I'm not sure if we should ship what support that anymore any deeper and kind of on a related note what was the driving force behind the decision at least in the states to change the battlegroup size from individual state by state to entire regions of the country the question is what's about our battle group sizes so that's nitty-gritty in the game mechanics it was that since we have two sized battling we want each player to have a bigger feeling of impact in the in the in the struggle so if you're if you're one of the thousand you're feeling less important than if you're 100 and I guess that was my question is I think there was a tire sense of community in the original size and it's with the expansion I think there's I think the answer there is whenever you touch your community in terms of game design they are gonna they're gonna complain about it because because no that's also what's happened in in MMORPGs saying when when what a Warcraft

went from 40 people raged the 25 people raids because people had to break their guilds they had to lose their friends because if blizzard changed it and when we changed our battle group system we and encountered the same problem we we touched something that they had built for themselves and handlers and that is always kind of major thing to do thank you hi just a simple question how is your target audience segmented when it comes to gender and age mostly men a little bit old I don't remember exactly but I would say 25 75 maybe 75% male roughly in in terms of age I would say they're adults so they're 18 and

upwards but then again that's because we primarily are on iPhone and that's the iPhone demographic thank you hi I had a question you touched on it earlier about new players and loby zones and that kind of thing which is kind of you know we're probably gonna find with elbows in general and in location-based gaming you filled the map of like the United States covered in green and that kind of thing do you find it's harder to get new players into shadow cities now it has such a strong community and relatively stronger players that it can be almost intimidating for a new player to step in and you know constantly get killed or struck down and are you doing anything to try and address that the question was do we have trouble getting new players engaged with shadow cities now that the community isn't level 18 I guess that is something that happens with all games that the people who come up come into the game very early are going to feel

like they are the original players and they are going to be a part of the maturing community I think that is something that happens to every MMORPG and yes it also happens in shadow cities but then again that's been the norm in shadows it is because people level to the maximum level in well a month maybe so I think for the most of shadow city's lifetime that has been the case and of course I think it's the case you know say what Warcraft as well thank you I think we have two last questions actually my question was very similar to his so I I mean I've thought about all bs for Allah and my question was very similar in the sense that how do you deal with the case where a new user joins and say like I play from home and all my neighbors are like really mean and they won't let me do anything but because I'm stuck 2lbs I can actually change to like another place I need to physically move in order to start over is that what's the precisely

the question is what we would do when when you're surrounded by enemies and you start from level 1 and they keep beating your ass and that is actually that is actually a big challenge in in shadow cities you're protected until you reach level 6 or 7 so no one can attack you unless you hit them first on longer term we believe I mean we believe that in that point the player has learned to move in the world as well so they can travel to other peoples baked-on someday I can find some choir so there's bass can actually not be their home there they're like there datian bass cannot can be not where they actually are yeah they can move completely away like they like it more or less they could be playing a game not location-based yes they can they can move virtually in the game okay yes yes thank you okay the last question yeah my company we built sports games you mentioned you talked about like different genres like zombies mafias and stuff like that do you see like location-based systems being able to

implement sports games in that genre that's I guess number one question number two I guess it's our part of that same question is that where do you see kind of locate location-based like technology going forward and how is that going enhance you know different genres and development ways the questions was about sports games and location-based games and also the location based gaming technologies regarding sport games I haven't really thought about that but I would imagine that if you had a game in the stadium where everyone in the stadium could participate in whatever bedding for the end result of the match that could be that's my first idea and I think that might be sellable the future of location-based gaming technology as a company we are only interested in kind of mass-market technologies like iPhone and Android and that kind of stuff and I'm not sure if there are going to be big changes in the near future I don't think they are yeah all right thank you thank you and please remember to fill your feedback

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