The Design & Business Behind The Original Fantastic Contraption

what really makes uh fantastic Contraption work the realization that uh if you can take an engine you don't need to have a whole bunch of different tools like plungers and uh things that push back and forth specifically you can make your own plungers and complicated tools out of these very simple building blocks so this is the version that went out to friends and family uh it worked probably just barely well enough uh to sustain that role and uh if you look back yeah so it's got kind of all the major tools ended up in the final game and so we can bu actually bring up some of the uh Contraptions that they made it's a yeah so you can actually look at some of the original Contraptions that this is uh I think this is my brothers this is the way he beat the level

and uh this is one of my friends and this is my favorite this is my dad's which I I think he called the praying mantis and so right away uh even with very simple tools and really early on in the design process this is validating a lot of uh this is validating a lot of assumptions and we're also learning a lot about design there are things about how uh rods Collide in this that did didn't make it into the final design there's a lot of things that change from there to here but over and all you can see that the the big stuff is working another really important thing to learn uh that you get to learn by uh watching your users play the game is that and like I have these videos because they were really keen on sharing them and so if people are using your thing or playing your game and are really keen on sharing your videos then you should

probably make that make that part of your game build that in and then try to take advantage of it if you can all right so uh this is um the first version that has its art is a little bit better but I think it's still my art and uh this is the first one with an actual win Condition it's the first one that says oh my God you won and so uh after watching those previous plays it became it kind of became clear how people wanted to play the game and what the win condition would actually be so beforehand kind of the blurry eyed morning when I wrote that thing down the initial thought was all right well you build a thing and that entire thing will go from A to B and so if I just sat down and like cranked out the entire game and released it that's probably what Contraption would be like but uh that isn't nearly as compelling as just getting kind of like um just a bit of your Contraption at the end uh other ideas uh Bandy back and forth were just tagging it like remember my dad's man break or pring mantis just kind of tags the the final goal but that makes a some

designs a little too easy so uh the final goal object piece is really worked really well and is was kind of a direct Rel was a direct outcome of play testing all right so is this the uh fusing all right so if Andy moves on to the next one all right so I want to show something that uh man we're having a lot of trouble today all right well I want to do uh I wanted to show you something I want to show you uh well I wanted to tell you about something that we tried that it didn't work out and so there's this idea that uh if you build raw if you put rods into so you build things with rods and so rods kind of hold Wheels together and they form structures and so if you cross

two rods so sometimes you want to be able to cross rods and sometimes you don't you want to be able to build ramps that things can roll up on but you also want to be able to build ceilings over things that hold balls up so things can run underneath them so to do this you have two kinds of uh two kinds of rods rods that pass through each other and rods that don't pass through each other so that's that's simple enough but uh problematically if you put two rods down that that can't pass through each other um what do you do so what what what error do you show the user or what functionality do you have so I was really I really didn't want to show the user just a a big red X and tell them they couldn't draw anything so the original attempt was to F actually fuse the rods together so this is really good I think this is a really good design decision to fuse the rods together instead of uh making them forcing them not to be able to do it because it means you don't fail the user you let the user just play the game like they want and something kind of natural occurs if you're constantly fiddling with the user and telling them that they're doing something wrong then they're immediately

going to become perturbed with you so uh eventually um so I did Implement that and we tried it but it just turns out to be way too good these building games a lot of this a lot of the challenge is to is in building actual structures and saying well if I want to go from if I want to have an arm that reaches from here to here there's some challenge in actually building the simple kind of set of triangles that can do that and so if you if you fuse rods together that becomes a trivial challenge all right so here is uh here's another thing that uh drives me crazy so oh that's too no no yeah can you uh wheels on rods yeah so sorry uh this is something that is in the game as it is now but this drives me totally crazy so uh Andy's going to build a Contraption for you and uh you'll see that it works um n deterministically so when the user looks at this contraption or if the user

builds this contraption then uh oh you have to build the uh you have to put the water rods on the sides when the user builds this contraption then they won't be able to predict what's going to happen and so this is uh this this spent me I lost a lot of sleepless nights over this problem so when you look at this there's a couple sensible things I think that could happen so one of the sensible things is they could both spin around in a circle which would be great or maybe neither of them spins around in a circle but what actually happens is uh if you hit play an arbitrary one of them spins around in a circle so that's some horrible game design right there right there but this is actually the uh shipped this is actually the shipped game this is as it's playing like on the web and on the iPhone right now and uh I think the reason that this works and I've never got to complain over this no one has ever mentioned this to me and uh in our forums nobody has ever brought this up and I think it's a really it was a bit of an epiphany for for me why this is

fine and I think it's about uh all about mental models and that you don't uh when you play a game and when you view the world you don't view it perfectly and you don't really think very hard about the physics that are going on so when people look at a wheel they don't think of it as having kind of a like a thing in the middle that produces torque around a beam they think of it as something that's spins and so when uh people tend to not put beams in the middle of a wheel cuz wheel spin wheels don't spin beams like cars go around like wheels go around inside cars cars don't go around outside of wheels and so you can design the mental models instead of to the real world and uh I think this really successful in a lot of games in general in places you might not think about it like um in Platformers double jumping kind of feels like you should be able to jump double jump like uh I'm sure everyone when they were a kid like attempted to double jump but it never really works and like wall running is the same thing I'm sure uh like

everyone here tried to wall run but I'm sure we never made a past about a meter and so mental models are powerful design tools cuz we can uh add thing great things to the world that make the game richer and simpler places even if they don't exist in real life you can just use the last one all right so I did a ton of user testing and I think user testing is incredibly important uh user testing early on uh helped build the game and then later on at the end there was a lot of work that went into the tutorial so this is the original tutorial for fantastic Contraption uh the game is pretty much fleshed out you know all the art assets are there everything is working it's fun and all I have to do is teach people how to play it's like fairly complicated game but all you really need to know how to play is to build a simple car and so this uh this tutorial with with just some several arrows and nothing's gray

out and I don't take anything away from you is fantastic for gamers Gamers totally love it because Gamers uh they like to play and they like to toy around and they like to experiment and they like to experiment playing games and they like to experiment learning games as well unfortunately uh n sorry unfortunately non- Gamers uh don't have that same safe feeling when they're using menu systems and learning games it it I found that uh you have to teach people every button every like what every button does or they'll be afraid of of touching it and they won't fiddle with things if something goes wrong they're more likely to stop playing your game than to try to repair it themselves so uh in this example people would get here and uh they would most likely do that because it it does technically fulfill the uh requirements or uh and if you hit go you'll see nothing happens because it needs to be connected to the middle of the wheel to fix it I mean we could have added middle of the wheel to the uh help Tex but um that wouldn't have I'm sure that would have helped very little people would do this and uh

even though there's like an example right above showing what people should do they rarely if ever would so usually they get it wrong once and then uh they would just stop playing the game and that's I think that's because um people don't like to fail early non- Gamers uh like to be have to be shown how to play your game really explicitly and they won't kind of discover how to play it on their own so the the uh tutorial that ended up in the in the actual game which we can bring up separately right anyway the tutorial that ended up in the uh the actual game after play testing uh after play testing if that one failed is kind of your typical tutorial that like most games see it's um it's like a popup box that says okay welcome to Fantastic Contraption press this button up here to select Wheels oh good job you selected wheels in the menu all right press the mouse button down here to place a wheel oh good job you just placed a wheel and then it was it's completely awful for people

like you and me because there's kind of constant Mouse clicking and all I want to do is play the game and yeah okay I I like get it a menu you click on things in a menu to select them that's totally amazing and then I please just let me play and if you fail here which is where most people failed it would just say nope wrong try again failed you failed you failed until you get it right in which case hooray you're rewarded with actually something actual actually working so uh that's I mean the of play testing is that if I had launched with that original tutorial I uh I would have have gotten nearly the audience at the game uh actually reached in the end all right all right so I wanted to talk a little about uh a development so I developed it in Flash obviously but uh I didn't use any but uh I didn't use like the flash authoring tool or any like

weird you know funky like Adobe tools I just wrote it in with a command line compiler and actually wrote Contraption uh mostly in like notepad um so don't be afraid of flash it's not you can ignore the like funky bizarre features of it and uh just you know develop games like you develop games import assets just like you would normally import any assets all right and you squish a couple bugs and uh yeah so uh I used box 2D to make fantastic interuption to do handle all of the physics and I want to do a big shout out to box 2D and Aaron C because uh that saved me a huge amount of time if you kind of saw previously the amount of time Andy was squishing bugs box 2D was much faster and let me go from uh kind of one at a time squishing things to uh to really to really getting some work done so box TD I think of as the the

fireflow of coating yeah so finally we get uh to the release into the wild and so uh you know I didn't I didn't know how well fantastic Contraption would do I made it mostly for me and so uh when we finally released it it was a soft launch so we could work out some of the bugs it didn't go up in any portals just on my my site and I think there was like two small blog posts and then uh my wife and I kind of went away for the weekend and uh when we got back it turns out that uh stumbled upon and found us and dropped a horrifying Crush of people onto the server and so this is this is uh this is one of those good problems to have but uh like here's a secret there are no good problems to have there are only problems and so uh this was hard for a lot of this was hard for uh for a lot of reasons um not least because

not least because our server crashed immediately and so the next several months and weeks we're spent trying to keep the server up which is hard I recommend you have an upgrade path ready to go if you launch a game with a hard uh with a with an important server component and uh the other problem was that the forums we launched with the games were exploded with lots of people and the forums were fantastic they were really useful uh there was what was going right with the game was in the forums what was going wrong with the games was in the forums but uh wandering into the forums myself was kind of a a horrifying ordeal cuz people who love the game and there are people who hate the game and there are people who love you and hate you even though they have never met you or know what you look like and so um the only way I got out of it was uh by the only person Contraption ever actually hired was Andy Moore's Community manager who um got me out of this horrible mess [Applause]

so I mean one of the reasons this went so well and there were so many people is because fantastic Contraption really lives online so uh yeah Andy if you want to uh like bring up the game and we can look at like a save link so if you're playing fantastic Contraption you make a thing uh you're usually pretty chuffed about this thing you just built I mean it probably took you a while and it was probably fairly hard to do and so when you finally did it when you finally think oh my God I just have to get across that Gap I can't believe how long it's taking me and you succeed and you uh you are prompted to sign in all I think we're having problems with the internet but whatever after you if you log in you you save it and that is saved on the server is your collection of uh it's your colle of Contraptions and then after you save it

you're presented with a URL kind of the atomic unit of the internet and if you take this URL it's very short it just has a Contraption dcom and like a design ID and if you paste that into any browsers you'll get back to your Contraption so you can send that to your friends or you can send that on a forum and the game suggests you do that and uh when your friends click on that they get to see your thing which is great for you cuz you get the pride of them seeing it and it's great for me cuz it means you're spreading the game around fantastic cont does really really well on forums my favorite thing is watching Contraption spread around on forums because uh someone will find it and they'll say hey I found this neat game it's called fantastic Contraption uh I've been playing it for a while I'm kind of stuck on level six but oh my God level five was great and here's what I buil to do it and someone will say oh yeah that is that that's pretty neat thing oh I beat level six and I beat it like this and so someone else will come around and say oh you know I beat level seven like the same time but I did it totally differently I did it like this and so it starts this real conversation and uh it's the entire board ends up

getting swept into it and uh just like Andy's getting swept up into his Contraption now people really enjoy it and it works uh it's it's uh it's it spreads I'm not going to use the word virally but it spreads in like a communal kind of fun way with none of the kind of cynicism of those like designed in viral Loops it's just really as people like playing the game together and like really enjoying what they've created and what their peers are creating yeah so um if we look if we go back to the the horrible Crush of people so here's my uh here's my Google analytics graph for uh if I can get past the the crush here's my Google analytics graph for the first week uh which went really well um uh all the all indie game makers will tell you that it's really important to uh Market your game really hard and develop press content taxs and

I think that is really important but I did uh almost none of that so all of this growth is basically thanks to uh stumble upon and we got a Jay's games review early which did some fantastic things for us but uh most of our traffic after the initial burst is the vast majority of the traffic is all from those those uh those save links from outside on the greater internet all right so if we can continue on uh past the first week to the first month things continue to go very well one of the things I really like about the internet and uh that fantastic contraction is a great example of is that there are no Gatekeepers uh Contraption didn't go up on any portals and I didn't need uh I didn't need steam or Microsoft or anyone to tell me that I could do it fantastic contration just went up uh on my own website and uh it went did really well on its own uh there was no paid search there was no uh publisher no one told me I could do it it just I just did it and it worked uh I really love that model and I think you know people are chasing

existing markets because uh I think that's an easier thing to do and it's a valid approach like steam is uh doing really good things for India right now but uh you know people sometimes uh steam says no to people and uh sometimes all The Gatekeepers say no to you and I just you know I want to point out and I think it's really important to think that you don't like you really don't need anyone's permission to make a really good game and be successful making your game so the first month uh traffic continues to go up pretty cheery about that and uh at this point money starts coming in which is an incredibly emotional thing to happen it's like uh logically money is good but uh emotionally it's it's much more powerful actually U my favorite my favorite part of the entire release of fantastic Contraption the most kind of emotional joy that came to me was when I was sitting at my really uninteresting job kind of like I used to um like do webd and hack code for like lawyer sites and so I'd be like hacking

some horrible like CSS problem writing PHP and uh little uh email alert would come up that would say B Bing from PayPal somebody has given you $10 some total stranger you have never met likes your creation enough to Pony up 10 bucks of his own money just to you to play it and uh that's it's an incredibly fantastic emotional uh rush to chase especially when it's like entirely your creation that you have uh like gifted into the world brought into the world and uh it's it's fantastic when it happens and is absolutely worth chasing yeah so I want to talk as well about uh right so here's uh the big three months that kind of where most of the traffic comes from that spike in the middle is a big Reddit is a big Reddit hit we never got dug but those traffic aggregators are absolutely bread and butter for fantastic attration as well as I'm sure a lot of uh indie games uh that's just kind of the aggregators um

the way people used to find things are really important when you're chasing down your own traffic and the internet you can really do that cuz content Discovery is kind of a solved problem unlike even you know some well yeah unlike uh the iPhone is pretty uh easy to enter but its content Discovery problems are pretty massive so um the rest of this curve uh is pretty smooth you know it's it's like nice and fat there's like a fairly nice little tail to it a fairly nice tail to it and uh everything continues to go well so my conversion rate was about. 5% of users so that sounds really small but I mean when you're getting like 3 million users then like that's still real money uh I'll do the so I'll do the simple math for you CU last time I did this some people got the math wrong that's a that's like $150,000 but um this doesn't represent uh the game eventually did go up on a couple of portals one up on addicting games which has a ton of traffic and as well as uh congregate and so that money

isn't represented here so Contraption the first 3 months I think made something like something on the order of like $200,000 and then obviously the tail like continues nicely as is so um after this and uh Andy maybe you can just show some Contraptions so uh so after this um remember this entire time I've got all these server woses and it's like an incredible pain in the ass to keep the server up uh so the when I really think about the launch of fantastic cont rtion I think about making the game for 4 months which was uh kind of arduous cuz it was kind of every waking moment cuz I was also working at a real job or yeah real but uh and then I launched the game and it immediately exploded so I had server problems and I got a little bit of money which was like felt really nice and some compliments and some really good reviews which felt really good and then I spent the next 4 months uh arguing with servers providers and isps and trying to keep the game up so um when I actually remember back to the contraption launch

it's not a very pleasant memory cuz most of it is trying to keep it up so uh after I was successful um people start talking to you and money somebody said that money is dumb and lonely and it just wants to be with other money so after you start after you start making a little bit of money then all kinds of people with money will come to you and um most of them I think Indies are incredibly wary of people that come to them with deals uh it mostly I think because when people come to IND Indies with deals Indies end up with a really short end of the STI off of it but uh I have had a really excellent experience working with a company named in Exile in Southern California um they're work they're writing fantastic Contraption now um and so I made that decision because uh for me it was not very fun much fun to run so they run it and uh I'm also not very interested in

continuing to write Contraption games it was really fun to write the first time but uh after a certain amount of writing code it's you I I mean I think almost everybody loses interest in in the game that they've been working on for a set amount of time I mean there's no uh you know there's no braid 2 or World of good to in like the igf this year and I think that's because uh you know we're creative people and we're less interested in kind of exploiting every scent out of something that succeeds as we are in and expressing ourselves creatively so I'm a lot more interested in working on something else and uh I still want to get you know some cash out of contraption too so I'm going to let someone else take care of that um I found them kind of uh uh kind of by Kizmet they weren't coming to me to talk about working on Contraption I kind of ended up talking to them about it first but um I had some really bad experiences before that and if you end up if you end up in this situation which I hope you do because uh it's I

mean it's it's a pain in the ass but it means that things are going well um there's some things you should really do you have to close this information Gap so we know kind of as Indies know very little about the business side of things we don't really know much about percentages and upfront and like royalties and what wrer first refusal really means and how dangerous it might be and so you have to contact other Indies uh people like me and other people who are talking to here today and you have to close that Gap you have to find out what all the stuff is what the standards are people will come to you immediately and uh I think the first offer I ever got before fantastic Contraption was ever launched was uh somebody offered me $300 for the source code and all the rights and it only got slightly better after release and so really do your homework and that is like obviously an atrocious deal uh one of the things that would have kept me out of trouble is um if you end up talking to someone if you have a lunch meeting with them do like a quick Google search find out how many times they've been sued in the state of

California and if it's like more than two then uh you might consider that heavily when you finally meet with them um yeah so uh I think the Slime yeah so I think the Slime meter is a really important thing to uh take note of if you talk to if you're talking to someone over the phone and slime oozes out of the receiver on your end then it's probably easier that it's probably easier just not to work with them than to try to pick apart whether their deal is good and bad if you don't trust someone like there are a million ways for them to to screw you over and for them to beat you so try to work with people you like especially that are passionate about your game people that actually play your game and Converse about it can talk about your game in uh like a you know like a peer and like a fellow player would because if they don't understand your game then they'll never be able to make a decent version of your game also obviously look at uh things they've done before and uh how well that did go or how well that didn't go um all right I'd also like to mention I've been thinking a lot lately about uh

kind of my perception of how well fantastic interaction went and why that went kind of a year ago because it's been it was released in 2008 and how my perception has changed this year so a year ago if you'd ask me I would have said oh yeah fantastic Contraption uh write a game in Flash make it you know better than your typical Flash game release it charge money for it like you win like stand up to Applause you're done um since then I've started to discover it's like a little trickier than that and that I think I've been thinking a lot about Machinarium which is obviously a completely fantastic game and I don't know but uh Machinarium was obviously not released as like a flash game first it was in uh Steam and for download for pay and I think most people didn't know it was a flash game and uh I think that was a good strategic decision because there are these odd kind of fallacy or odd ideas about Flash games and how they should be free and how maybe you shouldn't pay for them or

they're not worth as much just because of what language they're written in which is obviously ridiculous and uh I had kind of a year ago thought that well okay people don't really think that way Contraption is an example of how that's that's garbage and you just need to write like a decent game and people will buy it but I think uh I think closer to why Contraption worked and uh perhaps other flash games that are equally good or better than fantastic attration haven't worked as well is because Contraption really tries to live online those uh those saving links and the community features are really really powerful and uh if I was going to write a game today I am writing a game today and uh it's continuing to be in Flash but it's not just a kind of single player like droing in the water and watch it go experience it's uh it's heavily using the the internet and Community features and uh publishing back and forth and talking with your friends I think uh yeah things like the rise of Twitter and Facebook I think we

should be looking really hard at ways of doing good things with those I was talking to a Facebook I was talking to a Facebook Dev the um the other day and he was talking about how uh Facebook developers kind of look at the the entire the entirety of Facebook and think they have to conquer it and they have to uh draw in the wide swads of Facebook and make it B bow down to their will but Facebook is huge I'm sure everyone in this room has a Facebook account and like very few of us play Farmville and so I think uh it' be really nice to see some games for uh Facebook that we would play and I think there are like really great opportunities out there to use the kind of emerging social networks to do sensible things instead of kind of really dumb games that's a cool [Applause] Contraption all right and so uh wander back and

uh oh No Escape Andy thank you all right and we'll bump out into the credits and I want to uh briefly I when you clap for me I'd like you to clap for everyone who helped with this uh Andy Moore is a puppeteer this entire thing was written in all the parts that worked were written in the broken parts were me but the parts that worked were written by Eric Smith with the Citrus engine which is a nice little flash platforming engine Daniel Ben murgy I know I'm pronouncing your name wrong did the character art for me and Andy the b art I actually did There's Daniel Ben murgy uh but obviously the good art is really good the animations cheesy animations for me as well and of course I can't um help thanking Aaron Cado over and over oh one more last thing uh if you do end up making some money kick back some of it to the tool users that you created I pushed back money for uh the first several months back to Aron Cado and the whole box 2D team as well as uh money to the guys who ported it to as2 and that's the uh that's the end of

my uh [Applause] postmortem so I'm happy to feel any questions there's a microphone right there if uh anybody has any questions for me I I'll just do a filler question here do you have any U interesting insights into flashes the platform other than the you know the monetization question mean technology otherwise sorry I had problem with understanding uh flash as your Dev delivery development platform good bad yeah so I think flash uh I think every platform has its place I think it depends a lot on what kind of game you want to write um if you want to write a game that uh really takes advantage of the internet and uh people can like share with each other and uh you know I think in a lot of ways the way you actually win in game development is to

uh go into the Wilderness and so don't do what like I'm telling you to do and don't do what anyone here is telling you to do because that's you know other people are already doing that and they're already trying that what you should really do is find something that you think is going to work an idea that like you have that other people maybe aren't having and like really try to own that and make that work and so it's hard for me to say you know like flash is good and like download games are bad like download games like convert really well and like people have made uh you know like make a living off of like download games and uh flash games have the weakness that they you know single player experiences in Flash probably don't like convert as well and uh but you have big advantages if you're creative and I think that's the like the real win of flash 15 minutes for question mhm is that too 15 minutes for question yeah all right more questions can you say something about how you got people to pay money for the game that was initially free to play and how that design evolved and how that worked right

so fantastic Contraption uh you can play the first kind of 20 levels for free and then a level editor costs uh $10 and so um at the time I thought it was really important that at the time I thought it was really important to release a game that was perceived as being free even though it cost money and so Contraption reviews Contraption reviews like that if you look at reviews of fantastic contraption you'll see that it's it's like a free-to-play game and like maybe there's a little extra stuff if you pay for it but I'm not totally sure what it is and so I think that's um I think that's that obviously that worked well for fantastic Contraption uh it's impossible to know if my conversion rate would have been higher at the time but I think uh now I'm thinking about like moving pay walls up more aggressively there was about I don't know I say there was like 10 hours of free gameplay in fantastic Contraption but really I'm sure people played contrap the free contration without paying any money for

hundreds of hours and so um I mean it's hard to know if that's a mistake or not now it feels a little like a mistake and uh I'm not going to be doing I'm not going to be pushing that much free gameplay in the next versions hi Colin I'm Ryan from Untold entertainment love your game I was wondering when you went with PayPal as your payment option were you worried that you were leaving a big pile of money on the table because PayPal doesn't and cover everyone on the planet this is a nice non language based game yeah uh I think so part of being like a real Indie developer and uh doing it all yourself is you're wearing a lot of hats and so uh with fantastic attration uh you know the developer hat is fun to wear and the designer hat is fun to wear and uh the artist hat is not so much fun to wear oh yeah um all the art for fantastic attraction was done by my lovely wife Sarah Northway I think

I think a good solution for uh a good solution that I can vouch for for getting our for your game is to marry an artist but kind of the server management hat and the uh the monetization Hat are uh not as interesting to wear and I think a lot of Indies have have problems with that and they'll kind of uh not as much interest in the business side of things and the monetization side of things certainly for me uh PayPal was the easiest uh single thing to implement and then kind of forget about it you I mean you are absolutely like on the nose and that I'm leaving a lot of money on the table uh something like 1% of Taiwan has played fantastic Contraption a huge number of people and uh they like don't PayPal Works uh really poorly in Taiwan and so I didn't Monet didn't manage to monetize any of that traffic which is uh just an absolute shame on the other hand uh I know people in companies that's you know um my wife implements uh payment methods

like professionally like that's her job and uh I mean that that's like a NeverEnding you could do that for your entire life you could Implement payment methods so um for me it was just take you know the biggest easy to implement one and forget about it I think there are like interesting things going on now with the um the kind of uh the flash uh portals implementing like payment methods and like aggregating them as well as like other payment aggregators and I think they're really worth looking at um I don't think I I really haven't I don't know how compelling it is so it's really easy math to do if you should use one of those or if you should just like be dumb and use PayPal right so PayPal takes on a $10 purchase they take like uh what like 10% off the top 10 or 15% depending on if it's like an American or foreign purchase oh well I'm Canadian so I shouldn't really use the word foreign if it's an American or non-american purchase and so uh payment gateways often take uh like 30% and so if you have to get 20% more traffic from them

to make that worth it and so um I haven't seen any of them make a really compelling argument that that's true if you ask them they'll say oh yeah absolutely there's like slam dunk no problem but it's hard I mean really you need to have someone uh sell a game through PayPal and then say oh you know what I'm not going to do that I'm going to change to an aggregator and then see the numbers go up and uh uh you know release their numbers and I'm not sure that's really happened hey call I would like to know uh oh here I would like to know if people shared more solutions or more levels because right they could share both levels they made themselves or Solutions yeah that's a that's a really interesting question so um anybody if you don't have to pay any money to share Solutions with each other and if you buy the game you get a level editor and you can uh build levels and so um a a shocking ly few amount of people actually use the level editor

Andy do you remember the right so it was like under 5% of people who bought the game actually used and and saved a sign like more than one or two levels and so um the level sharing was uh the level sharing didn't take it wasn't nearly as valuable as the contraption sharing I mean uh there's a couple of reasons for that I think uh one the level creation is is uh is show off He is building Contraptions and people are like users are much more interested in showing off how smart they are than um how well they can design a level so if you look like uh yeah if you look at this level like this is one of my levels it's like very simple it's uh you know just a bunch of stairs and uh as a level designer the like idea behind my level designning Contraption was to get out of the way as much as I can so that the user can have all the fun right it's Contraption is not about me being smart it's about you being smart and so when a good level is not about the designer looking smart I mean obviously you have

to be smart to make it look like very simple but uh An Elegant but if when it's not obvious that you're being smart then people just don't really care and uh and so the levels people actually make end up being oddly over complicated and doing funny things and are very little fun to play so uh I would say the the level sharing was uh fairly uninteresting from a point both of levels that were created as well as traffic that had actually brought in um yeah and I think that uh I think that using users to actually make uh We've experimented with having contest add like levels to the games and trying to like offload some of the level design jobs to like users which would be you know really nice to be able to do but it turns out you spend a lot more time kind of digging through levels and tweaking levels and uh kind of like editorial like running an edit doing editor work on levels of people submit and you in the end it's probably better just writing your own like content for

yourself I was wondering um when you were showing those early prototypes to friends and family if you were actively looking over their shoulder in the same room or if it was just over the internet and what advice you can give for sort of managing that kind of thing right so that's another that's a that's an absolutely fantastic question so um those that initial build you saw just went off to friends and family and I didn't look over any shoulders there's kind of a like block of text explanation that went along with it um I think uh friends and family are really bad at playing your game like they'll say you love you they love you at Christmas but when it takes to playing your game for more than an hour they won't do it unless it's actually a functioning working game and so um so yeah answer to the question you didn't ask if uh your friends and family actually play it and enjoy it it's probably a good sign and it's probably like you can take that as meaningful they're not just like uh trying to make you feel good and uh in terms of user testing uh yeah

the only way to do user testing is to uh put a laptop in front of someone and then uh stand back and shut up and like hopefully run a tape recorder like or hopefully run a screen cap and like capture everything that happened and uh hopefully get them to talk about it talk about what's going wrong um I've done uh ton of testing more recently for um a game in the kind of Contraption universe and uh it's it's kind of a lot more um it's a lot more traditional puzzle game with kind of traditional answers and solutions and so especially when you're not working with something as open-ended as fantastic interaction uh user testing is just unbelievably important you just cannot I cannot stress enough how important user testing is uh puzzles may seem really easy to you and they may be completely impossible to the user and uh you may be oh okay well all I need need to do is move the ball like four pixels to the right and everything will be

obvious and uh that may be true but by moving that thing four pixels to the right you accomplish that goal and then lose them on something totally different so you can never really make changes and then consider a level solved you have to make changes iterate uh get somebody to test it and then make changes and test changes and test and so you just have to run through a lot of testers and of course that's hard cuz you run out of people especially in your Target demographic you get people who are too good at games or too bad at games but uh yeah the only way to do it is uh to just say nothing they'll turn to you and ask for help all the time and you just have to ignore them and say no I'm not going to help you actually one really good tactic that testers use is they'll start up a puzzle and they'll say they'll play at it for a while and then they'll go oh man all right I give up how do you do it and then you say oh what I I don't know maybe can't I'm not going to tell you how to do it it's like that would be cheating and then they immediately go back to trying to solve it like it was their tactic to try to get to try to get through having to Sol it thank

you that kind of leads into my question here I was wondering if you could go into your level design process and um if if you have a difficulty ramp or did you just create a batch of levels and then some worked and some didn't through the testing so definitely a combination of those so um so the idea um the initial set of levels and Contraption was was pretty easy to build right there's like the one where you go from left from right and there's the one where you have to go over a thing and then there's a one where you have to go from up to down and the one where you have to go from down to up and the one where you have to drag something from over there so there were all like very simple Concepts that uh you just kind of like build through and then uh let play out so I built up kind of a kind of obvious set of levels to begin with and uh that was I think the like obvious set was around like 16 levels and then uh when you start putting testers through it it kind of becomes clear that there are Concepts that are going on talk and so a lot of the times those Concepts

that are going unau going untaught um also are really interesting early game levels and so it's really hard for you to think of like one of the really early levels is uh you just have to like you start and can you go to um with like uh the second level like rolling away so rolling away is like the simplest level ever and uh it's just kind of if you make a b you just have to basically make a wheel in the right place like it is possible to fail but it's not that easy and so like it became obvious that uh the users just had to have one more like make a wheel level where they knew you know make it on the right is different from making it on the left and how long that Rod is has like some impact on on uh how successful your Contraption is going to be but it ends up being a really interesting level to that level of user like in the end anyway because they're still like getting to grips with all of that so so for contraption it was kind of obvious set of levels play test it discover

things are going un taught there are gaps in the in the learning curve and then uh just patch those up with with levels as needed thanks was there any particular reason why you chose not to use the flash IDE and used a different set of development tools like the notepad and whatnot yeah so um I'm I'm like a I'm just a programmer and used to writing like Java code and uh like C++ code and so um I was a lot less interested in learning to use a new tool and I was into actually making a game actually this is something that I think a lot of uh I think a lot of people who start out making games um end up kind of getting bogged down in details and like filling out tools for themselves and like worrying about Technologies when if they just kind of like sat down and started writing the game then they'd actually finish it like uh uh people who work with me uh kind of are Driven Crazy by the whole like I use

notepad and like a command line compiler because uh it's it's like an inefficient way to do things and I like finally started using flash develop which is like much better than a like command line compile command line in like text files but it's just uh I I'm really uninterested in spending any amount of time on something that isn't actually actively writing a video game which I think is a strength but can also sometimes be a weakness thank you all right I think we have like five minutes we have time enough for one more question no all right should I just end it all right thanks very much [Applause]