Social Depth of Location-Based Play in 'The Walking Dead: Our World'

[Music] and there's marcus so my my history i've been working on software projects for about 25 years uh initially like multimedia cd roms and websites and then a couple of friends of mine started a company called solace where i joined to make hubble hotel for about 10 years i was also the lead designer for a virtual magic kingdom for disney in that company then started a my own startup in in london called nike lab where i made three repeated toys and games and um after that moved back to helsinki to work in next games where i've been working as an executive producer and a game designer my name is marcos montala i've been working on location-based games for 15 years in 2009 we wrote a book and published a book called pervasive games theory and design because we already knew how to design this kind of stuff then iphone happened and the playbook was rewritten

i was working on the first mobile location based mmo shadows at this and after that i've been working on different mobile gaming startups in helsinki since then so uh so today's topics um so we're basically going to talk about how we made the original social game play for for the game um and to get you started we're going to talk about first basically explain what the game is um so how many of you have actually played it okay quite a few awesome um but first rest of you give some context uh then we're going to be talking about the prototyping and pre-production research and and things that we did to really figure out what the game was that we wanted to build and then some about some of the designs that we actually landed on so what can that our world it's a location based game it's a single single shard mmo uh world scale where every single one of the players is in the same reality uh same the same

missions you can persist things on the map so you can actually put the stuff down other people will see it and and you basically play the game by going to these missions that you see around you or kill the walkers get some collectibles and and become more powerful to go into even harder missions and this being based on the tv series it features a lot of the characters from the tv series uh as collectibles so you can actually find and play with the the actual show cast and and get them to be more powerful and help you in the missions as well as collecting weapons um that you can use yourself and when you go to mission it kind of looks like this so here i'm with carl shooting some zombies uh you can use ar if your phone's compatible so they actually like do real world human scale ar ar things which is really cool um the last but not least we do a guild system where each one of the players is pushed into a guild very early on during the game where you can chat but they also has these um task boards where

you start to create this like complete this test together collaboratively with the rest of the guild and unlock some of the best rewards and then get progressively harder challenges as a group to complete and and this actually like turned out to be something a lot more successful than than we uh thought it would or for me as a game designer like basically like i've been reading some of the feedback we've been getting on this particular feature uh and and people are telling us crazy stuff like somebody is biking 30 kilometers every freaking day to complete more admissions to actually be able to help the guild advance in the tasks and and and a lot of people actually telling that they never quite felt this deeply about collaborative social play in any of the games that they've played before uh which i think is is a like really cool like achievement for me as a game designer uh to actually be able to pull it up in a slight small mobile game so how do we end up on this and creating

a walking dead game in the first place so the previous game we made uh was called the walking dead domains land which is a tactical kind of like turn-based shooter looks a bit like maybe xcom but super simplified for mobile and and where we featured similar elements where you were collecting the the the show cast uh you made teams of three uh went into missions um and and like of different types like sold little puzzles with these guys and we're really happy about how this game game game turned out and amc seemed to really enjoy us as well and liked the game and and it simultaneously the walking dead stevie series uh is still doing incredibly well so back in when we were starting the project we were looking at the the show and figured that like the the brand has for some longevity and amc was quite happy with us so we feared it's kind of like no-brainer to make another game with with those guys and at next when we start working on new projects one of the things we really

want to do is figure out gameplay mechanics in the games that make sense from the brand perspective so we primarily do games based on ips and we now that we were creating a new game for the walking dead we wanted to figure out like what would be a logical combination for that brand and many of the viewers of the show actually like were telling us that they have this core fantasy of like really thinking what they would do if the zombie station actually happened so we figured that like let's maybe try to prototype location-based gaming and see if that works because it's a really good brand fit actually like being able to really put you in a situation where like now you're alone you need to get better weapons better teams to to be able to survive the zombies now this being the like beginning of the project we kind of figured okay let's actually look at location-based gaming what's been done in the genre before to understand it better but also come up with a a like really really live in the in the present and plan for the like the launch where you need to come up with a feature set that's actually doable in

high quality um during the production but which has to be also really competitive when the game goes out so i think one of the big trouble problems is when you have a production schedule of a couple of years you need to figure out a set of features and gameplayers when you actually ship the game when the market's already changed to something different so what can we learn from the past um shadow cities is like we will actually look into multiple games uh including shadow cities were one of the really early ones that marcos had made back in the day and and were the gameplay basically was that you could build resource production build but buildings on the map um become more powerful uh build teleports that allowed the people to cooperate and travel the world super interesting but also featured really brutal pvp where when you logged in you could see the your surroundings but all the other players immediately so as well and if they weren't powerful you just got ganked immediately

uh and that was kind of really cool if you were the most powerful kid on the block uh but many weren't so so the the location where you logged in like what time of the day really made like matter because you started to learn these patterns of like where the other powerful players were that's like the areas to actually avoid um due to the other players being there um pokemon go had just come out uh so it was in the early stages of like a lot of people trying to play the game um and and this used fundamentally different design or from what shadow cities had done in the back in the day for in pokemon one of the things compared to shadow cities is like shadow cities give you perfect information as a player immediately so like everything on the map was immediately interactable you could see it in pokemon they actually hide the vast majority of the content and they want to incentivize you to move to be able to play the game so you find the things on the on the world and you could really not play without moving at all um some of the content was obviously visible so if you wanted to get more

more pokeballs you need to go to pocket stops you did see uh somewhere around in the in your neighborhood and and in order to access the gm you were very likely that you again needed to move because they've been so sparsely um placed in the world that it was quite unlikely there was anything next to you and with pokemon one of the other things i got asked a lot in the early stages of the project like how do we replicate this level of success or i think i think the primary reason why pokemon is so successful is was again simply the fact that the activities that players do in the game is a excellent like real band brand fit dot people that people were expecting the bank in the game so if you so see the animated series ever you're gonna expect that yeah i'm gonna walk around the world and throw balls at the pokemon and collect them and this is exactly what you do in the game so the the mental model that people had in their heads before they started playing perfectly matched the the gameplay that they actually got on when they started playing the game

so the hard thing when you start making a location based game is that there are no really that many location based games and especially there are not that many successful location-based games so when we started we knew that we would be again into a very exciting and challenging endeavor where we would need to figure out a lot of basic stuff from the get-go the thing is that usually when you see people playing mobile games the play pattern is something like this you're somewhere and then you play there for two seconds and then you go somewhere else most mobile games are not really mobile location based games are actually mobile so we had to face all these kind of different play patterns that players might have we had to figure out from the design angle again based on shadows it is based on pokemon to go based on other games like how would players maybe possibly use this game this would be me most of the time i'm a

commuter player so if i'm at work if i'm at home if i'm at games conference if i'm in the bus that's when i play this is one of our key use cases but we have to also figure like how is this game gonna work for people who walk their dogs for one hour every day and how are we gonna keep it balanced for them some people like to jog a lot they like to play real world games while they're jogging we don't necessarily approve but this is something they will anyway do so we have to figure out how to deal with it something we learned once we actually had launched the game we had a lot of tram riders trams move a little bit slower than bosses so they are perfect for playing uh the walking dead our world you're sitting in the tram you're grinding a mission and the reason why you're sitting in the tram is that you're you're trying to grind as efficiently as you can we had half of our team sitting at the tram one week when we were in the soft launch trying to optimize on a mission

the key point you have to decide is do you want the players to move in order to play or do you want them to play while they're already on the move this is how helsinki looks like next games is based on helsinki and you can see the little dots on the map they are the google pois where we spawn all our content and when you're looking at this kind of map and when you're working in this kind of a city you get all these exciting ideas about how this kind of a game could work maybe you go to a gas station to get some gas and then you go to uh i don't know to the river front to get some fish and then you craft something and and that's of course a very good way of doing a game if you make a full collector game like for instance pokemon but we knew that the the brand of the walking dead is not about assembling collections it's about something else it's about survival and fighting and that kind of stuff so we couldn't really do that and and the reality is that much of the map looks like this this is kansas in in our world you can again see

the pois on the on the few roads that you have there we couldn't really afford to have the fantasy of going to the gas station to get some gas because let's face it we are in the mobile free-to-play market and mobile free-to-play market is about about allowing players to generate value through going through core loop iterating over the core loop again and again and if you're in this business you have to be able to get the player into the core loop and out of the core loop and again into the core loop multiple times during their first session no matter where they start and since we were not doing a full collector we had to make sure that our game was always playable everywhere and it would be nice and exciting experience no matter where you were of course you can add that kind of frills later but fundamentally we had to be a core loop game so we went back to the basic let's forget about the location for a moment and this

focus on how to make a really great mobile game like many other other designers we got highly inspired by the self-determination theory of motivation if you provide players with competence if you provide players with autonomy and if you provide players with relatedness then they will be highly motivated to play your game this is a one very good recipe for a very good game especially we identified the relatedness as a key usp that we could reach in the game other location based games are also social but we wanted to focus on guild play we wanted to focus on the inclined social because that is very much what the c the series is all also about it's about pulling together not a part as rick grimes would say so based on this groundwork we started shaping up these core design pillars play everywhere

wherever you log in for the first time wherever you log in for the first day first time on every day you will you will get a full and interesting complete session in there it's always worth opening the game in the new location there needs to be enough discovery that i want to see what's surrounding me we wanted to support couch play we wanted to make a little bit more traditional game so we wanted to make sure that people who would be mostly playing at home and at work would have a nice experience nevertheless in our philosophy getting a better location moving around is it gives you a nice opportunity it gives you better optimal situations but it's never mandatory we wanted to focus on the strong collaborative social mechanics and finally we wanted to be true to the walking dead tv series so now we have some core pillars and we should start to get thinking about like how do we approach this how do we validate these ideas and how do we

prototype them and sulka is going to tell you a lot more about that all right so we kind of figured out that there's five big questions uh that we needed to answer before we knew exactly what we wanted to build were uh with the core loop uh the the what were the constraints of how you actually can create missions that are meaningful um on the map that people will be interacting with and that's the locational context bringing something to the gameplay like what are the things that you can do and are there something like mustang like must not use that we needed to take into account uh we figured that like this is a map and like with geography there might be really interesting opportunities to create area-based gameplay and and with being able to place things on the map would be we knew that from shadow city is that this is a good opportunity but we need to figure out like what is the gameplay that we would be doing it within the context of this game for the social gameplay we wanted to try two different ways of adding social in the game where

one would be on location social um so that you'd actually need to be interacting with the other players or the play content that people have been placed on the map and and but also could we do a meta game on the social level that would be played through the on location missions but you still progress things on on the middle level um dan cook has this really fantastic iteration like illustration fire actually iterated on the games so the way we think about this is early on to create the process you're going through these cycles where you want to add value and do not try new things but you need to be able to identify what's valuable and call away all the all the things you are trying that don't actually ultimately add value to the the players of your game where for the prototyping the the core cycle that we looked into that we wanted to do with each one of the prototypes is gather ideas and research designs the gameplay mechanics that we wanted to implement into the the test uh then build and build and really do the testing and evaluate the results to

see if this was something that we wanted to put into the game itself and we i think we ended up doing something like dozens and thousands of iterations ultimately on different features uh started basically just using paper paper is really fast i recommend actually using like wooden tokens whatever it takes uh to figure out kind of like the initial ideas because this is really cheap um but we pretty quickly got into the actual questions um first being the like with the core loop is there something like constraints that the on location gameplay puts into how you do gameplay in the game uh so the first prototype basically looks really simple we took assets from the previous walking dead game that we had done so the workers actually looked really weird because the perspective was different uh you could just tap on them to kill them like like mega simple first person mechanics so we figured that this might be a good thing um put some missions on the map where you just could like collect more weapons and get some bullets and and we already got like from this really simple set of super interesting findings where firstly the first person shooter like

look promising so we decided okay let's keep on iterating on this uh but what really fascinated me was that there we again proved that there's no magic circle the location based game so when i was playing the missions and like while i was brewing coffee for myself waiting for kids to break off from the bed for me to take them to school the gameplay experience was fundamentally different from when i was playing the same missions walking toward lunch with my friends or if anything like on the road took longer than 10 to 15 seconds everybody else needed to actually stop on wait for me and that was socially really awkward so we kind of figured that like anything that we put onto the map itself the interaction speed needs to be really really fast you need to be able to complete those missions and interactions like in seconds um so the very kind of like okay like this looks promising but and then we can continue on this but let's aim to keep things simple with the missions we did actually a couple different iterations again we thought maybe we can add depth to the individual missions if the even the if the gameplay here is really

simple uh by like allowing people to see perfect information about what's inside the mission versus imperfect information and make different type of decisions over like what's the gear that you're going to be taking into the mission like you need to come up with a plan and and turns out actually the the mission version where you got the perfect information made people optimize their gear so much to the point where they actually kind of like this analysis paralysis of like overthinking what they need to do which turned out to be a really bad idea so we kind of figured that like okay less thinking is actually better like let's make sure that the interaction again is really fast and people don't need to think about things when they go into the missions the other like one of the actually really big ones is the the players immediately started asking for a share of reality so the first um prototypes just randomly put stuff onto the map and you couldn't actually play with your friends because when you went walking with your buddies onto the the world uh both of you saw random points on the map so if you i i saw something really

desirable and like told okay let's go to that direction to pick up the missions i really want to play it uh my friend wouldn't say actually that's like no like i'm seeing the same like cool mission the other direction and that was really awkward so we need to realize that we actually have to create the system to make sure that all the players share the same content the shared reality on the map itself and which brought us to uh starting to iterate on a like deterministic procedural content generator that produces the same results across the board for each one of the players um and we're taking the google poi data uh to with with prominence information that's really important um that we're using to spawn the map uh to the players in a way that actually where the players see the exact same things took many many iterations to actually get this right and produce the desired gameplay patterns um the way we're using the prominence is google actually tells us what are the most important points in the world and we can play some of the more important content players are most likely to want to play in points that they're the most

likely to visit during their commute during the day continuing on the next question so with the core loop we wanted to know about the area place gameplay mechanics um so i figured the traveling salesman is a really nice np hard problem that you can probably gamify in this context and and so we i did this like with the missions we figured that okay i like the heroes you can take them they had movement points so you go through multiple missions to come up with these chains that begin it became progressively harder but you got better loot and and like this was a disaster so players immediately lost immersion when they saw the 2d map versus actually the like the map the project projected view and mixing on location play and the 2d map turned out to be incredibly confusing so vast majority of people kind of like not only lost immersion they couldn't quite figure where they were where the heroes were and like they just like lost that like they just couldn't cope with them what the information they were seeing uh so we figured okay this is going to be way too complicated for the core loop and i would just decided to kill this

the other prototype we did with this is we split the world into a voronoi graph a very fancy way of like actually like taking any air and splitting into places or like smaller areas uh you could capture the areas by playing couple missions and you got better loot if you progressively like played more in the same areas and again like completely disastrous results were way too complicated to be the core loop activity and and also secondly like this felt psychologically wrong where we have this mental model of the world where we kind of think where the natural boundaries of areas lie and and the people are like really objected to us splitting the world into areas that didn't really correlate with anything that they had used to actually see in the world where we chose to kill this partially because this was kind of an unsolvable problem or if your players have a certain way of thinking about the world uh it's very unlikely that you can actually solve something like that in indeed in the games project so i'm sure

a mapping company might be able to do something with areas and like natural boundaries that that conflicts with how people see the world but like with like in the scope of the project like we just could not have been able to solve this um with the player generated content the map uh the first prototype we did here is allowed just very simply put ratio generators on the map get resources do appointments uh super super simple um and and building stuff that felt really good uh being able to see some stuff like next to my home uh was very powerful but not being able to access the buildings where i weren't there felt really really bad like super bad um so the the kind of like the the overall player sentiment was that they they all needing to figure out where to play stuff in the world especially when you were potentially like you like should be next to your home or next to your office and maybe you were commuting like through a daycare to drop off your kid and figuring out what the optimal pattern

for like placing the buildings would be like took some of the bad aspects of people needing to think about their daily routines in the context of the game you know where they make the decision process way too complicated uh the vertical universe that like wanted to retry the building bought some in some completely different form that didn't have the boundary like the limitations of how you access this so for the social gameplay we actually decided to take the idea of the buildings and build a collaborative gameplay on location mechanical to it or the the concept was the safe havens um so added mission types were like admissions where you can rescue survivors from the walkers and and build buildings like safe havens for these people um to take into uh to get loot and and they actually like this firstly the rescuing uh felt really good uh very much in line with the brand so you you can be the hero of rescue people from the walkers uh but also the fact that you can now see get the sea buildings from other players really like made the world feel

alive and and the fact that we turned it into a collaborative play where you were leveling buildings together and it didn't really matter where you dropped the servers into or suddenly turned the entire feature around and made it feel really good um so we actually figured that we need to turn this into it continue iterating and turn it into a real feature we also thought that we would do cooperative missions on the map where like players would be able to drop stuff on the map and play things together uh so we made a simple prototype on a like this lure thing where like you could jump in and play missions um and this turned out to be pretty disastrous as well for the the density of players at any given point in the world is actually something that's incredibly difficult to predict and and these missions that we built were fantastically fun when you had five of your friends participating in what you play in them but immediately when you got more we actually turned this into accidental rival good where the

players started feel that the other people like too many people playing the missions was took the nice easy missions away from them and and it became like a race on who gets to complete the the missions first uh so that you could play and and we kind of like understood okay like the if we want to do anything that you do cooperatively like with the other players um we needed to would have needed to go to the drawing table and like figure some completely new way of approaching this problem so we decided to kill this for now we might do something with this later but not now so social um so lastly the the collaborative metagame play with the location based uh so the we got this idea that let's add show locations um from the the show in the game were like say terminus and and so you'd get some couch play missions if you unlock these by completing missions on the on the map uh say kill 100 walkers in one admissions at the place open so you can play submissions like no matter where you are

and do this collaboratively with your guild and the result here is actually like we this was unexpectedly unexpectedly fun so suddenly the the progress bars that you got at the end of each one of the missions turned to be the most fun thing in the entire game much more fun than like any of the collecting mechanics or like any of the other like finding new things so we kind of felt that like this has to be something that we expand very significantly in the like i make something much much better out of it and and at this point we kind of felt that we had our five answers um for the only location gameplay we're happy with the first person shooter and figure that we need to keep this incredibly simple for the core loop on the map to actually be something that people want to engage with the area based gameplay was deemed to be not the fit for the product and the player generated content uh was turned into a social feature rather than something that that people would be doing as part of the core loop by themselves the on location social gameplay was figured to be something that we should work on

eventually but during but it was too complicated for us to figure given the scheduled project and and the social meta game driven by location uh was deemed to be sold like beautifully like nice and people loved it that we decided that this has to become a really good feel like a large feature in the game and and marcos is going to talk about a bit more on what we actually did so as to look at this client we figured all these things that don't work and that's when our pre-production ended and we shifted into the production trying to figure out like okay we're gonna do a game now and the game has to like stay together and be engaging and nice and fun and fulfill all the goals so let's see what we did we did what we like to call a byte-sized fps so every session is pretty simple first you log in and you have a look around you maybe collect some stuff around you

you look around at the fights around you and you pick a fight you shoot walkers for 15 seconds in this video the player is rescuing a survivor from walkers and when i say you shoot zombies for 15 seconds i really mean like 15 seconds and that often includes the loading times we really wanted this to be short and snappy and bite-sized you get some stuff and then you use the stuff to upgrade you log in you have a look around you collect stuff you pick a fight you shoot for 15 seconds you upgrade that's really simple we wanted to make sure that you could do this everywhere you wanted we wanted to make sure that you would see nice things around you while you do this we wanted to make sure that every time you did this there would be stuff to play stuff to collect we didn't want to ever have any failure sessions that would when there would be nothing to collect and our our collaboration with the google maps has guaranteed that we can actually

do this they give us really nice points of interest everywhere except for some designated no play areas like like airstrips where we don't want players running around upgrading is quite simple we were doing so many novel things in this process that we wanted to make sure that at least something would be tried and true and we wouldn't need to figure it all out so basically you collect weapons you collect heroes and you collect some other items from series and then you level up level them up just as if you were playing clash royale we want the players to unite with other players so in the end of the tutorial you will be offered one guild to join and the choice is basically join this guild or search more in in the walking dead no mas land we have learned already at next games that this is the best way we can sort of encourage you to join a guild give you one recommendation zero decision making anxiety and join or don't we actually intend to be even more

aggressive about it in future we're actually thinking about forcing players into guild consequently 90 of our daily active users are in guilds and we've learned that the the business value in retention monetization in all respects that the gilded players are so much more valuable for us than the other players that that we don't really lose anything if players don't who don't want to join a guild uh leave our game scavenging is also a big part of the walking dead and we wanted it to be a big part of our core loop as well so every time you log in you can see some resource crates around you where you can collect things like energy you can collect grenades and first aid kits some free-to-play games decide to make these kind of resources extremely scarce they want you to have that one i don't know lollipop hammer that you will treasure looking for the impossible mission we wanted to do this this in a

completely opposite fashion in our game you get collectibles consumables all the time however the cups are very low so you need to also spend them or you end up wasting them this creates a loop where you're actually constantly spending consumables constantly getting consumables and sometimes you actually do run out and that's the monetization point but if you want to just like if you just walk 100 meters you will get some more so even though it's a pinch it's not that kind of pinch as we usually think of it in in free-to-play games so let's look at our core loop you log in somewhere you look around you will scavenge the consumables you will take the consumables and spend them in different kinds of fights you will gain cards and coins and survivors you take the survivors into safe houses to get even more cards and then you use the cards and coins to upgrade your things

rinse and repeat as many times as you like so we were not entirely satisfied with this core loop at this point it felt a little bit dull the players kept requesting all kinds of discovery they wanted to really go to that gas station and get some gas and we were like we're a little bit short of resources and we don't want to do that much that big an investment in that kind of gameplay so we introduced rare and epic missions where you would get guaranteed rare and epic cards and suddenly players were seeing a purple glow in the horizon and they would be walking there to see what's in there they would be talking in the guild channels like there's a thing in the market street if you're near market street you should go there and get it we were also introducing both dynamic and static difficulty missions we wanted to make sure that there would be always nice content for you to play so we had to resort to dynamic difficulty most of the time however if you design a game that only

has dynamic difficulty you end up in a situation where progress doesn't feel like progress because the difficulty always increases so many of the rare and epic missions we spawn are on the static difficulty so they communicate to the player like if you were a tougher guy you could also be playing this mission so the core loop is now a little bit more complicated there's different priorities of missions there are different varieties of trades and there are a lot lot more options what you can do while you move around of course these are very contextual opportunities so if you happen to be in a nice location then you will have nice opportunities and if you're not in a nice location then you have to figure out whether you conserve your energy and your grenades or whether you will use them on the bad opportunities right here right now sulka mentioned the safe havens nowadays they are called safe houses players can build buildings in our world after you build a building you can leave

survivors there you get rewards and you also improve your rating in the safe house leader board if you believe enough rescue is there then the safe house will be upgraded if you don't upgrade your safe house in in a while then it will be destroyed by raiders we also have different kinds of safe houses that give you different kinds of cards as rewards so suddenly we are facing surprisingly complex decision space you have to figure out whether i want guns or heroes this time whether it's important for me to upgrade this safe house whether it's important for me to beat the other guys on the leaderboard to become the leader of the safe house and get improved rewards or whether it's important for me to save a safe house from destruction the leaderboards also have a really nice quality of showing that other people are also playing around you and they create this kind of neighborhood friendly co-op competitions where someone is a leader

in this house and some someone else's leader in that house and if you try to be too greedy about too many safe houses then you actually can't be a leader in any of them this is kind of like we wanted to make the location a social opportunity for you and this kind of simple kind of complex game uh allows for that sulka mentioned that we are a single shard game so we are everything in the world is mostly similar to all the players so when i can see something cool i will tell you that it's on the market street and go there however we wanted to also introduce a feature to facilitate that and that's why we created a feature called flare there is a consumable that i can deploy here and if i deploy a flare here all my friends in my guild can teleport here for free this helps us a lot in in creating kind of a social dynamic where it's it's some

somewhat patronage it it is it is couch play because i can invite you here while you're i don't know ill at home or whatever it allows virtual tourism i have been sharing moscow center several times this week because i want to tell everyone that i'm here and when we get to the deeper social tasks uh the flare allows for added coordination so the core loop let's add some exploration so you have different kinds of safe houses now it's starting to become a little bit of a resource management game you have this one survivor and you have five safe houses around you and then you're trying to figure what to do with this guy and the way we built this thing is that it's mostly cooperative so everyone is benefiting from this friendly competition but the guys who are playing most actively and making smartest choices are benefiting even more it's also not a very serious game the benefits that you get from leaving your

survivors into better safe houses are actually quite small but they are nice so we wanted to make sure that you can't make mistakes but if you're smart you can be a little bit better in the game also we wanted to give alternative to the walking and discovering which is the teleportation so now you can ask your guild mates to flare you somewhere or you can share something that you find and flare others to there you can share the location opportunities to other players it looks nicer now the core loop but not nice enough just yet remember this suka showed this and said that nothing felt as good as seeing the bars progress after a battle and this is very much true this was a very good prototype for us and based on this simple progress mars system we wanted to develop something a little bit more sophisticated and let's be honest a little bit more complicated

so this is a guild board it consists of about 25 missions that you complete there are also three chests on the board and if you complete a row and a column then you can collect the chest in the intersection of that row and column but the the thing is this everyone in your guild is collaboratively completing these quests and all the rewards are social there is no way for you as a individual to benefit any more than everyone in your guild benefits when you unlock the chest everyone unlocks the chest the only thing that you can gain in the guild board for yourself is that if you're a top contributor to a task you get your face on the wall like the the four yellow portraits in the top row this has turned out to be a surprisingly strong motivator for players some people want to i want my face on the wall so that i can prove that i play a lot i want my face on the wall so that i won't be kicked away from the guild i want my face on the ball because i already have

seven and i want more faces on the wall than serger has this is how the tasks look like win 40 battles this is an easy task this is actually so easy task that when you start playing the game and you're in the guild you start kind of accidentally completing the quests and this is what hooks you into this somewhat complicated guild board system actually there's a funny story about this screen on the right side right hand side a programmer was implementing this feature and they came to me and they complained like i i just played this mission and i completed seven tasks or incremented seven tasks yeah so so it's not like it's isn't it a little bit weird to complete seven tasks at one go and i was like if you choose the optimal hero and the optimal gun and the optimal mission and then you go there will optimal i don't know grenadiers or something and you manage to progress seven missions at the same time isn't that cool so actually we ended up designing the easier guild boards in a way where this

is very likely and constantly happens on the later guild boards on the harder tasks you will get these kind of missions lone wolf one group member must win 80 level 20 battles with a reclaimer shotgun so suddenly you need to parse together quite a bit of information and you need to start sharing tasks who's going to do the reclaimer task because someone else is doing something else this 25 square board is in a sense it's a simple representation in a sense it's complicated but the interesting thing is that it has surprising depth when you're trying to track the progress of everyone in your guild and trying to figure out what they are actually doing and what is your best way of contributing to the common task it's also a great collectible motivator because if no one has the reclaimer shotgun no one's able to complete that quest so this is a way we can we can shuffle players collections around and make sure that even the weakest weapons are used

we organized these guild boards into 20 different tiers on every tier you have three identical boards so the boards are identical except for the target counts of the missions so on the first board of the first tier you might need to complete 10 battles then 20 and then 40. and we decided designed this in this way in part because we want the first board to be a practice board usually the first board takes a good guild about one day and that is the one day during which you learn to allocate your resources and coordinate your efforts so that when you you're tackling the real challenge of the third board you will be educated and understanding the tasks you have to do you have one week to complete every tier so this is a time pressure challenge and this works really nicely for us in a weekly cycle every day though every thursday when the boards open we can see a peak in the player activity when

everyone is enjoying the fact that they can progress seven missions at one time and when they are charging through the easy board however if you don't complete the tier in this in the week then you will be starting that tier over the next week so it's also a challenge that makes that becomes harder and harder every week and finally we have eight weeks in every season and we have a leaderboard where we track the best guilds in the world and and after the eight week season you will get a massive reward and start over we spent a lot of time iterating these guild boards trying to figure out how we can make them work one important thing we did was that we specifically designed decided that none of the tasks require you to be co-located so basically you can play with friends from anywhere in the world and and succeed in the guild boards it was far too complicated for even for us to even plan about the missions that would require everyone to go to i don't know moscone west to do something that

would have been super complicated one of the important features in the boards is that it's it's 25 squares so so the like the learning it is super hard so one thing we did was that we just decided what that one of the chests is easy chest another chest is a medium chest and the third one is the hard chest and every mission that leads to the easy chest is actually super easy so that when you're semi randomly doing things on the map you actually see that these quests are starting to complete and then you're actually figuring out that there's an opportunity of grabbing the easy chest if you just coordinate the efforts a little bit and then of course when you have done that you've done quite a bit of work towards the medium chest as well so that will be half complete when you're done with the easy chest and the same goes on with the hard chest one thing we also did here is that some of the missions are as the previous example they are alone wolf quests so that one player needs to focus their

efforts on one task this has been a really interesting dramatic tool for us uh one thing we can do for instance is that we we take the best player away from some difficult mission so that the others need to shine because the best player is focusing on the lone wolf mission the lone wolf missions also become competitions between players when both want their face on the wall and they then they are effectively wasting their efforts in in this glory hunt which is really nice we worked even further with trying to make sure that these guild wars would always be like so so that the players would also have hope in completing the guild boards so here you can see the difficulty curve of the guild boards basically on the left side you can see the tier one and on the right hand side you consider tier 20. and you can see the small numbers but i can tell you that the the highest most difficult guild board has difficulty multiplier of about 300 compared to the difficulty multiplier about one of the

easiest board so if on the first board you have to win 10 battles on the last board you will have to win uh 3 000 battles so they get extremely difficult towards the end of the stack it was hard for us because players were getting stuck on the boards and then your your social dynamics start to go awry because when you lose hope then there's no nothing fun in the game anymore and then some people stop playing and then it gets even harder to progress so one of the important things we did was that as you can see here the the difficulty curve of the first board of every tier is actually quite lenient so no matter where you are you can always complete the first board the second board which is the medium board is a little bit of a challenging and then the real push is the third one but then there's another aesthetic that is really nice here besides the aesthetic of hope which is that the first board is always a really nice reward for you like in clash of clans the reward for upgrading your town hall

level is not really the better town hall the reward in clash of clans is that you get to upgrade all your stuff really fast and so the game becomes very fun to play and here the same thing happens with the first board being fun to play and super quick and super fast we found this math of hope really important part of the dramatics of the guild board system so let's look at the core loop it was a little bit complicated already but then there are different kinds of missions that you have to do and you have to start optimizing not only between the rare missions and the the safe house that you want to save you have to also start to coordinate with your friends and you have to start to figure out which are the best ways for me to contribute in these guild quests and it gets pretty complicated because there are multiple social systems that are interacting in unpredictable ways you have both the local social system of safe houses and then you have the guild-based social system of the guild boards and and both of them are dynamic

both of them are unpredictable both of them are gamed by not only you but also your guild and that makes the game quite deep actually of course every game gets stale over time so we also added some token events so sometimes you want to go somewhere even to get this week's special mission tokens i i think i heard of the term smart depth first time about 10 years ago in a wooga presentation and their point was like that you want to enrich your core loop while you want to keep your core loop just as it is so you want to add smart depth while keeping it simple and and i think we succeed in our world in this task because this is still a really simple decision space you can't do anything wrong you can just fail uh you you can just introduce waste in your process there is no failure every time you log in you shoot some you pick a fight you shoot something for 15 seconds you

progress in the game but if you're really smart you can progress a little bit more and even for advanced players such as myself sometimes i'm i don't know walking on the street and i don't want to think that much while at other times i want to be super careful of my resource management like i have one energy what is the best way for me to use this one energy here right now of course from design perspective this is kind of difficult to handle because there are so many options so we were thinking like how can we simplify this and then we figured out like let's just assume that players are scavenging quite optimally at all times let's just do all our excel math assuming that they get really good crates at all times and that helped us a lot and then we figured out let's just assume that they put their stuff in really good safe houses at all times and if they don't put their stuff in the really good safe houses at all times then they're introducing waste and that is their problem and then we figure like let's assume they win all the battles so we don't need to

think about the difficulty in terms of economic design of course we think about difficulty a lot but in terms of economy design you always win and since location is just an opportunity even the teleport flare feature is just like we just assume that you have really good opportunities at all times so from economy design perspective this is how our game looks like time equals progress and it's modulated by skill and effort so the player can introduce some waste if they are not ideal and of course no one is ideal but at the same time it's still the social fantasy of the walking dead surviving by pulling together and not apart so trying to start getting into actual takeaways so looking at the core pillars that we set early on in the project we wanted to achieve we feel that we pretty much nailed all of these you can play the game pretty much everywhere it's always worth opening the game where you've moved uh the great game is quite so couch play friendly uh given given the location

based aspect of it uh social mechanics we we wanted to make something that was really strong we actually did it and and the game really does feel like the walking dead where you absolutely have to coordinate your efforts with the other players in order to actually succeed so even though the shape of the game that we ended up making was quite different what we imagined at first we're very happy with what we ended up with a key takeaway is that when you do novel design you have to do a lot of prototyping and valid validation and the important thing in the prototyping and validation is that you have to accept that it takes time and it requires many failures and of course paper prototypes are the cheapest and quickest way to fail which is very good but ultimately you will have to especially with the social systems you have to actually build good proper prototypes and we spent a lot of time doing that so having said that yes you need to be able to and and prepared to kill all the darlings even if they're really cool um i personally like the we we as humans

are very easily fall with the for the uh sunk cost fallacy where we think that we put so much time and effort and love into a prototype and it must succeed simply because we like it so much or we invested so much energy into it but let's while all as a game designers and game developers try to fight that and make sure that if something doesn't actually fit your game just kill the future away and your games can be so much better for it even though there are no references for novel design you can always have references and you should look outside the box for references if you don't have them our our guild board system is basically a marriage of disney tsum tsums bingo boards combined with everwings guild quests and and our shooting mechanics combine operation wolf with baccamole so the the language of games is still very very important when you don't have anything direct to look at [Music]

with the core loop um once you actually figured out something that really works continue iterating and adding more features but really do try to keep it simple and and have the same way of people approaching how they play the game throughout the process so you'll end up with a loop that is still easy to play but has so much depth if the players actually really want to look for it and finally you need to iterate your own game until you're hooked to it on the right hand side you can see a guild board on tier 3 which i completed alone because all my guild mates were slacking that week because i wanted the progress and they didn't so um thank you i hope you enjoyed and really good to see so many people here despite the i guess assume the party is starting at six o'clock so uh i'm sulka my name is marcos and please remember to fill up the the feedback forms if you like the presentation

[Applause] i assume we might have time for like maybe one question i'm just curious about how long um did you guys spend just in pre-production uh so the core prototyping i think we spent maybe 10 months on it like actually like doing things that ultimately mostly got chunked away so um and the team was at some point like or i remember the programmers really asking like do we really want to spend all this time doing things that we're going to throw away so we did but we did and we did a huge refactoring pass of actually rewriting a lot of the code from the prototypes to be something that we could actually put into the final shipping product cool thank you

cool i guess that's it thank you oh okay hi uh thanks again never work on a location-based game so maybe my question will be them but did you see some changes in players behavior based on climate or like warm countries or during the season and did you make some adjustments with events or stuff like that or rules based on the right design to accommodate that we are internally debating on how much those effect effects influence our game personally i know that when my hands freeze i stopped playing so in order to accommodate players like me we have done some increase in couch play lately to accommodate for the winter but but we don't really know conclusively the other thing to keep in mind is the geography of the world is fundamentally different with depending where you go so

one of the features of helsinki is that the the the city blocks are huge uh so the the number of buildings that you actually see at any given point is actually not that big because the buildings are so big uh but if you open the game in india like in typical indian cities the game has to load about five thousand buildings uh because they're all very small uh so the the way we've built as humans have built uh the this eq like the system or in which we were living uh is so fundamentally different that if you want to design a game that actually works across the globe it's not only the the like how warm it is somewhere but there's so many aspects that you actually need to look into and like you need to play and teleport around the world uh look at how the game works across the globe and so it's very complicated to actually isolate any one thing that would um make a difference to to the players when we're depending where they are thank you [Applause]