The Jetpack Joyride Postmortem

[Music] holy crap a lot of people turned off I'm totally pumped because uh the crazy Cliffy be Peter molu Mega Panel is going on at the same time so I was expecting no one to turn up I'm just looking around to see if anyone realized they're supposed to be at that instead and about to run out the door um all right so I've just been told to yeah let everyone know to turn off your noise making devices in whatever form that may be and yeah we'll get started so this talk is called depth in Simplicity the making of Jetpack Joy Ride my name is Luke muskat I'm Chief creative officer at half freck Studios I made these um Fruit Ninja Monster Dash jetpack joy ride and a whole bunch of other games that no one cares about or has heard of so let's just move along so this talk is kind of like a postmortem sort of um I'm really just going to be stepping through um you know a lot of the different design stuff we did for JE jet pack joy ride um it

kind of might get a little bit crazy at times I started organizing it all chronologically but because we worked on so many features in unison it was kind of jumping around everywhere so we sort of look at a feature from beginning to end and then travel back in time and check out some more stuff so yeah and there's way more in here than I can fit into an hour there's heaps of other stuff I wanted to talk about so uh we'll see how we go so just for a bit of context um huffi Studios is now over people uh but internally we're divided up into a bunch of teams this is my extremely attractive good-look team right here we seven people um and we actually work on two projects at once so right now half of the team is working on Jetpack Joy Ride updates the other half is working on prototyping some new IP it's just kind of useful to let everyone know that this is how we work cuz when I say hey we spent 10 months working on a one button game people go what 50 people for 10 months it's not like that uh Jetpack Joy Ride was was pretty much you know three

people um at its call and then you know a whole bunch of extra people who helped out along the way so chapter one a game in four weeks originally Jetpack Joy Ride was going to be this game we made in 4 weeks so Fruit Ninja is already out it's done about 3 million units or so at this point so you know we can really tell that that's you know going along it's got its own velocity now which is great uh Monster Dash was already out and it was was doing good uh it was sort of starting to flag off a bit and you know wasn't really carrying that same momentum as Fruit Ninja so we were looking to do something new and we kind of had this idea where you know we really liked the machine gun jetpack in Monster Dash it seemed really badass and you know when we were coming up with it the spec was what's the craziest most ridiculous stupid weapon we can make and the machine gun jetpack is what we came up with so we had this idea of maybe what we'll do is we'll kind of hack up Monster Dash and we'll make this one

button game with the machine gun jetpack and we'll make it in 4 weeks and we'll just release it for free and it'll be like this kind of I don't know almost like a fan service thing where you know just hey guys here's something cool we made in 4 weeks it just seemed like a nice little mini project almost like a distraction on the side that we could work on and so right from the beginning even when it was going to be this really simple four-week game we had some goals and some pillars of the design wanted it to be one button didn't want to have kind of context buttons all over the screen just you touch somewhere you fly up you let go you fall down as simple as that and you know we wanted to be super accessible hopefully one button game design pretty accessible most people should get that figured out pretty quickly want it to have this kind of AD break play model that both Monster Dash and Fruit Ninja had where you could play it in an ad break right like you can fit it in in a couple of minute break or you know on the train or the bus but at the same time we were hoping that this time we could add a bit more kind of depth for the more hardcore players you know we cuz you know this was kind of aimed

at our fans we thought we could really you know add a bit of extra in there as well so this is the prototype for Jetpack Joy Ride This is programmed by me I'm not a programmer um you can tell I made it in one day because I spelled Shield wrong so this obviously wasn't photoshopped um and what we did is uh you know I knocked this up in a day you know you can tell it's simple as anything it's basically you know a cave flyer you know just like ey copter or whatever and just with a couple of powerups in there to spice it up and you know we had some Collectibles and I sent it out to the office and I was like all right whoever gets the highest score at the end of the day wins a candy bar so something you should know about everyone who works at harick they are hyper competitive they're crazy competitive there's a poker tournament every Friday night there's a 500 tournament running at the moment there's a group of 10 people who play Smash Brothers every single lunchtime and have done so for like the last seven years um so people go free candy bar and they just lose

their minds and it was great because everyone was playing the game I mean it was simple I spent like a day on it it was really basic but you know it became really clear to me really quickly that this game could kind of support that competitive social side which was very cool so then started working on it so I just have a little bit of a thing here uh last year we announced Jetpack Joy Ride at GDC and I think it might have even been the same day we announced that I was at a talk here I can't remember which talk so I apologize for whoever it was but they said This Acronym um and then explained what it was during a talk which was JSI RSO which stood for jamming in and ripping out and I'm sitting in the crowd I'm like oh my God that's that's Jetpack Joy Ride that's exactly how we've gone about developing that and you'll kind of see that as I go through you know the design process for this um right from the beginning you know we kind of had this vision of what we wanted it to be you know this simple accessible game with lots of explosions basically but we

certainly you know couldn't have envisioned how big and crazy and out of control our development got um so you'll see you know as I'm going through this the crap that we tried sticking in there and didn't work and you know all the stuff we got rid of and it's had quite a um interesting life which is cool it makes it good for um you know postmortem style uh critique so this is the game at 3 days old isn't it beautiful remember when it was just a boy um and you know you can sort of see already we have some basic stuff in there the the jetp packs in there we have some coins mucking around with some lasers there's some things to dodge and also it looks like so one of the first things we had to work on was you know the procedural level generation I really wanted to do procedural level stuff um and that's not because I'm against level design I love level design you know before I started Fruit Ninja and all that level design was my bread and butter um I have a big

passion for it but there was this simple fact when was working on both Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash at the same time one designer I was out of time there was no way I would have had the time to author levels so we thought we'd go with procedural levels and this is my you can see like this extremely scientific well researched graph right here um this is kind of my feeling on you know the design workload on a procedural level design game versus uh an auth level game so with an authored level you know right at the beginning you're getting your mechanics going and all that and that's cool and you can knock out some white box levels test out some stuff and that's cool and then for the life of the project you're forever working on the levels making new ones generating content for your game with procedural levels it's a bit different because although on the back end you don't have to do all of that creation up front you can't do anything until you have the system working you got to sit down with the programmer and figure out how this thing is going to work how you're going to edit it what you might need to do in the future how it's going

to be extensible so it takes a b bunch of extra time up front but then on the back end you know the the workload gets a lot lower it doesn't go all the way down to zero just like any design it needs to be iterated on and refined and improved um but yeah so that was kind of my feeling about doing procedural level generation so we had all these different entities we wanted to place zappers coins lasers all kinds of stuff and we came up with this idea of the interval system this is extremely basic like this is not rocket science by any means basically the game comes up with a whole set of intervals you know down the corridor that Barry runs down and every type of uh entity has the probability of falling into the next slot so it's like a 50% chance it'll be a zapper 50% or sorry 20% chance it'll be coins 20% chance it'll be missiles and 10% chance it'll be something else so you know this is all pretty simple stuff so then the problem was was figuring out you know where to put these intervals by the way if you're looking at this screen and for for some reason and you don't know why your fingers are

cramping up it's because like I I was looking for an Athletics track and yeah I just completely stole the background out of quop so so regular interval system you know you see is there it's reliable but it's boring so if we randomize it a bit and have like totally random intervals then that's cool but total random is crazy right like it's really hard to keep track of what's happening in a total random system and maybe it works sign like 90% of the time but then every now and then you'll have that outlier where you have this massive Gap and nothing happens and there's no Gates and then you know all of a sudden there's like three gates right on top of each other and you know that's no good so our solution is pretty basic it's basically you know you have a minimum interval length a maximum interval length and you randomize inside that again there's nothing all that exciting about that but what's really really good about this system for you know randomizing uh and you know doing procedural level generation is how easy it is to to change you can really easily like modify

that minimum interval length and maximum interval length and in doing so you dramatically change the difficulty of the game uh Monster Dash when we had that that just got faster and faster and faster forever and the problem was was you know at a point you just jumping blindly and just hoping you would make it over stuff it got so fast that there's no way you could actually react by using this system you know we were able to do it a bit smarter you speed up at the beginning and then your speed stays constant and we start messing with these numbers we start bringing the minimum maximum interval lengths down and you know that brings all everything closer together and requires the player to have more accuracy when flying between obstacles so the minimum interval is what's really interesting in this minmax system because the minimum intervals kind of represents what's unfair about the game um so in moner dash we had these enemies the zombies are a good one where they just pop out right in front of you right and where they can pop out in front of you is measured in distance

from Barry and there's a minimum and a maximum value and the minimum value is really deciding how unfair this system is right so here's some more scientific graphs as you'll see um I'm all about really carefully researched data you can tell um and this is the player reaction meter and obviously if this zombie appears right in front of your nose the player is just going to be like well this game you know screw this this is impossible this game is treating me unfairly I want to have nothing to do with it slide it along a bit and you know it'll still be impossible but then you're going to start getting this point where it it's going to get a bit blurry and they're going to be like well maybe if I was just a little bit faster just a little bit quicker Off the Mark then I could have gotten it and a little bit past that you know where they actually get it at the very last moment that's your crazy oh moment which you know the player feels really good about so really where this minimum interval is set is deciding how unfair the game is and Fruit Ninja Monster Dash jetpack

jide are all deliberately designed to be a little bit unfair um so in Fruit Ninja you have the bombs and often you know like the bombs get right up in the fruit we could do something about that we could make it so you know the bombs never overlap with the fruit but it's deliberately has a little bit of overlap at least because we want the game to be a little bit unfair and the reason is is in these games that are all about you know getting a high score and then retrying to get a high score again and again and again by making the game a little bit unfair the player can assign some of the blame on their failure on the game you know rather than getting to 200 points and going well I'm never going to beat that I've reached my maximum skill limit by making the game a little bit unfair the player can go well if only that bomb wasn't there if only I got that extra critical if only you know all these scenarios they're placing some of the blame and you know some of the credit as well to be sure on the game itself rather than entirely on themselves and it doesn't sting so much when you don't get the high

score so when you think about it Fruit Ninja classic mode at least um Monster Dash and Jetpack Joy Ride don't seem like they're going to be a really good game for the player because effectively it's an inevitable March towards failure there's no finish the the end end game for every game is failure on the players's behalf so when you're doing a game like that it's really important to make sure you fully understand what the costs of failure are these for me are the three big costs of failure time lost the feeling of failure like the emotion and the friction on starting again or the retry Loop how long it takes to retry the game and get going again so time loss you know changes a lot for different games this is really vaguely organized like on the left from not much time lost to right more time lost so you know cannibol if you're really like I am your times are only like 10 seconds long so you know when you fail it really doesn't hurt that much much you're ready to go again

and you can just keep going and going and going and going um even when they throw you know unfair situations at you like the uh the glass window you have to jump in and the crazy car bomb thing that falls right in front of you it doesn't hurt quite so much on the other hand you know a game like spelunk you could be spending quite a long time on that before you die and that you know you really feel it when you when you die in that game you know scream at your monitor and all of that which is fine you know for the game it is it works perfect perfectly but especially on a mobile game want to be careful on how much time lost there is there's also the emotional cost so you know just how bad you feel so if we just came up and you know as soon as you die in Jetpack it says you failed and you're worthless as a human being that's probably not a great way to treat the player so what we do with a lot of our games is we actually reward the player for failing uh in Fruit Ninja you know when you when you die when you hit a bomb in classic mode or drop the fruit we actually give you like nice little fruit fact there you know gives you

something to take your mind off the failure Sensei is there he's smiling at you like yeah good job um so you know we do a lot of things to minimize the emotional cost in Jetpack Joy Ride we took this to the extreme so you know you die and then you have the slot machine so like a whole another mini game of like prizes and excitement and then even on the result screen we have the little Polaroid photo of you that gives you something to focus on you got the leaderboards to check out you know you're getting all of this kind of positive feedback and all this recognition for your game um if you get new best then stuff pops up as well and we really do a lot of steps to minimize the emotional cost to the player there's even this thing we do where originally when you ran into a zapper Barry just vaporized instantly he just went and that was it that was your score that you got what we found by you know changing it so that he kind of you know Gets Zapped and he bounces along and slides on his face and sometimes he bounces and picks up a few coins and if

you're really lucky you know maybe you might pick up a spin token or something else along the way or even complete a mission sometimes when you just need those extra few meters is it almost fades in the failure rather than just being instantaneous boom you have failed I mean you take the hit you know you've taken the hit and you failed but instead of immediately considering the fact that you failed you have this little mini thing it's only like 2 seconds or so long but you're watching Barry bounce you kind of anticip in trying to figure out whether he's going to you know run into that next zapper or collect that coin or that token and it almost fades in the failure in a way the other stuff that we do is you know obviously if you completed a mission boom you know there's stars and explosions and coins and you know we do a lot to really try and make the player feel good about themselves come back to the mission system a little bit later so the other one is uh restart friction as well so yeah when I mean say restart friction I mean like how difficult is it it for the player to restart the game

you know how how seamless does it feel so in Jetpack uh you'll notice I have this is kind of like a comic book so you start at the top left and read across um when the final spin machine comes up instead of cutting abruptly to a whole different screen we actually kind of simultaneously Slide the machine up and fade the game the game in the background down but game in the background is always there so rather than kind of cutting to a whole another area you're still being you know with you're still within the game world and it just kind of makes it feel a bit more seamless and you know rather than kind of cutting out to a whole another room even then when we Slide the final spin off you'll see the game is still in the background we mess around with the tint of it a bit just so that it doesn't conflict with the menus and you know the other thing is is we always make sure that restarting is as easy as possible so in the final spin if you don't want to play if you really just want to go again you have the cash in button so you can just tap it cash in your tokens skip past it all of these

transitions you can tap on the screen and it'll speed up or skip past them and then we have the play again button which is in the bottom right hand corner and massive and what you'll notice is the play again button is in the bottom rightand corner so is the cash in button so is the next button uh on the missions so is the continue every button that involves you progressing is always in the bottom right hand corner and the main reason it's there is what we found is in play testing was people were typically like around 80% of people were using the bottom right hand side of the screen for you know actually putting in their input even though you can touch anywhere on the screen the bottom right hand screen was the preferred area so every single thing in the game that involves you continuing or progressing to the next area uh is put in the bottom right hand corner and that way you know even if you're not really paying attention you know you're kind of playing and talking to someone you just keep mashing the bottom right hand side of the screen you're going to go to the next area and you're going to be able to restart start so

testing this is what the game looks like Christmas 2010 you can see it's still called a machine gun jetpack at that stage for everyone who remembers that whole thing um you know originally you touched this uh window and Barry was supposed to burst through the window uh we actually changed that cuz then we realized we'd have to you know do frames of Barry facing forward which is fine but we wanted to customize uh all the different outfits and it meant all these extra frames over time we'd have to do it's looking pretty simple you can see this was pre- scientists we didn't have any scientists in there yet we added them later just to add some kind of visual interest we had a couple of other interesting things in there at this stage um originally in that crummy flash prototype you had these pickups that would literally just add meters to how far you'd gone they were still in there and we had these close calls uh so every time you got close to a zapper you would actually get an extra 20 M added to your

score and then if the next one you got it as well it would chain up and it would exponentially get higher and higher and higher um we ended up taking that out cuz even though you like you know that's your classic risk reward design but it was so it was almost too powerful it kind of subverted the way people were playing the entire game and you spend your entire time trying to get really close to the zappers and then you would die and because the Collision on these zappers is you know they're they're really spiky and everything that it's not super clear not as clear as you know just like a hardcore this is a red box don't touch this it was you know it just didn't quite feel right we actually took it out to simplify the game uh a little bit later on so the way that we do play testing um is we do a bunch of different ways but one of my favorite ones is uh we'll sit down and we'll we'll go to the company and we'll present the game on a big screen you get the whole company and be like check it out this is what we've been working on if you like the look of it come down to our room room we'll put it on your iPhone and you can play it

you'll be our play testers and then once it's out on everyone's phones in the company we almost treat it like it's a live release so everyone's sort of coming back to us and they have all these suggestions and you know bugs and stuff that's coming up and rather than just sort of like taking all of that in and then you know later on we do another major test uh we actually update the game whoa I think my thing just fell off that's still working there we um and so we would actually treat it like a live release and you know every two weeks we would update the game we'd even make up these like posters uh and you know say this is what else is being added this time these changes these fixes and we're almost treating it like it's out on the store already and being updated you can actually see like a final beta it was still called machine gun jetpack um one of the other things we do is uh something called Street testing um full credit to uh Simon Joslin of the voxal agents who are made train

conductor and some other games for giving me this idea I've uh completely stolen it and adopted it cuz I think it's amazing for casual game testing uh which is literally just taking the game out on the street on your iPhone and approaching completely random people and saying play this for 2 minutes and that's it and in terms of evaluating accessibility and you know how quickly people will understand the game cannot be I highly recommend it so thank you Simon for that I looked up like um games on the street and yeah joust came up so the revelations we had from this very first company play test that we put out over Christmas and putting it out over Christmas was turned out to be really cool CU it was right before everyone's twoe break so everyone got to spend two weeks with it you know not in the office treating it as if it was an actual game on their iPhone first thing was that this game needs more time um with spent over 4 weeks already and it was really obvious to us that it wasn't

going to be done um in 4 weeks or anywhere near 4 weeks the other thing was you know Fruit Ninja was getting more and more velocity and we started to feel like releasing a free kind of halfast game really doesn't feel like the right way to go about following up Fruit Ninja you know there's already people kind of talking about on the net like ah what's the next game going to be and you know we started to feel that pressure the play testers had two major problems first it feels hard and super intense there's no low points in the pacing um and you're always one moment away from death and the other one was that there was just not enough variety you know it was so it was simple but simple to a fault at this point where people were really burning out and you know getting sick of it quite quickly so the first problem of intensity basically this is what the intensity looks like uh initially when you know at this point in the design the game starts off it speeds up and then boom you're always one hit away from death and it is intense it is always intense so we're playing around with you

know how can we make this a little bit less intense we tried putting in a three heart system just like moner Dash and you kind of get this effect where at the beginning you're kind of cruising along and you're relaxing I got three hearts up my sleeve nothing to worry about easy goinging and then you take a hit and it kind of jumps up a bit like oh I've only got two hearts left and then you lose the last heart and you're right back up against that intensity line the whole time even when we added in Hearts to collect and all that it kind of you know put some downward steps in this graph and it really didn't feel right it still just didn't feel like the best possible solution we also tried a Call of Duty style intensity you know the one you get shot and all the red comes up in your peripheral vision and got to make sure I'm sorry I know like heaps of games other than Call of Duty had done it you know even before it I just always it's the one that comes to mind for me and so what would happen is your intensity would be you know semi low and then you would take a hit and it gets ratcheted right up and then it would come down again and the weird thing here was the only way we could kind of kill the

player cuz we don't want the player to play for too long remember we we need to keep our cost of failure in terms of time lost under control was to make the game extremely hard you know we're throwing millions of zappers at them so they take that second hit while they're in that state so that didn't quite feel right either so we'll come back to that problem two was variety how do we add more variety well we add variety in the same way that every other game in history has added variety powerups and so we're coming up with these powerups and the problem is is again the game is so simple that we're really struggling to come up with powerups we have ones you know what are you going to do you give Barry a shield you you know make him invulnerable for a period of time you slow down the game like a bullet time type thing uh make the zappers smaller I mean you know these all these things kind of worked and they were interesting but it was far from inspiring um you know felt quite basic and wasn't quite there so we're

spending a long time you know bashing our heads against the wall like why is it so so hard to come up with powerups for this game so we had this idea of what if we change the controls maybe that's what we need to do people hate it when you change the controls right because you die you you don't have enough time to get it figured out and you die and it feels really unfair and almost like disrespectful to the player so this is where the idea of the vehicles came in the idea of the vehicles is simple we're going to change the controls but we'll do it as a vehicle and because it's a vehicle you'll take the hit you'll explode but Barry will be okay so the controls are going to change yes but the thing is is it doesn't really matter this is just a bonus run anyway and because it was a bonus area and there was no real risk to your overall game we kind of felt like we could treat the player a little bit more disrespectfully in this time and you know make the assumption that they're going to die the first few times until they figure out how to use the vehicle and all of a sudden the pacing completely changes for the game now it

looks like this it's always really intense still like that very first graph but when you get the vehicle it drops way way down you're in a safe area you've got this cool little variety moment you know the pacing has changed dramatically certainly you know while you're in the vehicle the speed picks up and it does so quite quickly we don't want you to spend too long uh in the vehicle or else it's not going to be special anymore but you know this really you know we we were really excited about this you know the pacing was fixed the variety was better more explosions equals more better obviously you know can never have too many explosions in a game like this at least um and so you know we were feeling really really good about this uh it was definitely a big breakthrough for us the other thing was the game had a big injection of character at this point which is great cuz before it was feeling a little bit dry and all that and you know the Barry steak fries Universe a game where the very first Barry steak fries game Age of Zombies the opening line is surprise Professor for brains really felt

like it needed some extra character in it to you know make sense that it's Barry steak fries that said you know we kept everything much more G-rated this time so then we're playing around with the vehicles and we're like well how dumb can we be how crazy can we go how stupid can these vehicles be before they're too dumb and too stupid and players don't like them I'll concede as well but not every player likes the crazy fre teleporter but this was our this was our test our foray into like maybe we just come up with this really stupid bizarre our original I couldn't find a screenshot of it the original prototype had this as the DeLorean for some reason with some really bad coder art on it and this was us really testing the boundaries of the crazy stuff we could do and you know because it was wrapped in this bonus system and it was part of this world that was kind of ridiculous it it all seemed to fit and you know we didn't have any problems with it so this kind of gets us to last year's GDC when we announced the game it

was the first time we' done like a big play test of the vehicles system especially with external people that hadn't been there during the development of it and the big thing that we learned straight away was people would make critical mistakes like in close proximity to the control changes which is kind of what we anticipated you know we knew that people were going to have problem with the control changes but we didn't anticipate to H you know what extent people really did have difficulty with it so again more explosion explosions are the answer to all of our problems when you pick up the vehicle it explodes there's a big and it clears away all the obstacles so this just gives you a bit of breathing room same when you are same when you destroy the vehicle I mean that worked to an extent that worked okay but where we really really like found ourselves breaking through was when we started mucking around with these kind of scripted coin sequences so the first time you pick up a vehicle well sorry every time you pick up a vehicle no matter what you get two sequences of coins um and what these coins do is they're never on the ground

they're never where you can get them without having to do something so it really provides the player with a goal and something that you know they're not going to get it just by watching the game play out they're going to see this goal and they're going to have to figure out how to get there so it acts like this little kind of mini tutorial time and we do it every single time because you know there's six vehicles and you've got this the jetpack as well seven control schemes to keep track of this uh this control sorry this playground area almost really gives the player a chance to explore the controls and get familiar with them again get recalibrated with them again you know you might remember how it works but you not might not quite remember how it feels how quickly the gravity changes um you know how quickly you can press it again also when the vehicle explodes we add another coin sequence again and you know this gives you another kind of little section of time to get recalibrated and kind of reared the number of vehicles is kind of an interesting thing as well because

these vehicles have so much kind of character and they all control really differently everyone has their favorite right like people really latch onto what their favorite one is the balance here is if you have too few Vehicles you're getting your favorite one so often that it doesn't feel special and that you're not excited to many vehicles you're not getting your favorite one often enough so we always found you know we have a similar amount of um weapons in mon sash we really felt like around six or maybe seven was the sweet spot where you know when you get your favorite one so the favorite one for me is always little stomper when I get him I'm excited and I'm like yeah little stomper time um so yeah it was really important there's some other interesting things to do with the way that you know we had to mess around with the probability of the uh vehicles in the missions because when you have a mission that's like you know you need little stomper for something it kind of dramatically uh changes your perception of how often it comes up up because you go you collect like four vehicles and not get the stomper and in

your mind you're saying God damn it the stomper never ever spawns even though it's well within the Realms of like you know standard probability so we actually kind of game it at that point and override the probability if you haven't gotten the vehicle you need to complete a mission in a long time well a long time it's like three pickups so the next thing we were attacking was stickiness so I apologize like this is the worst slide in my presentation for sure I was like I like what image am I going to put for foundation and this came up and at the time like when I had to submit this talk back in November I was like that's kind of a funny joke and then I was going back through my slides this morning I'm like I'm so embarrassed so let's skip past that so the game at this point is feeling like quite solid and you know the thing that kind of becomes obvious to us is this is this game the base of this is really solid and it means it's kind of this good Playground now for half freck experiment in with some things trying some things that we haven't really done before the first thing we really wanted

to do is make an ultra sticky game so you know like fruit ninja and moner dash those games people play them and they like them and they they're it's received well but people never spend that long with it so we wanted to try changing that we wanted to make something that even though it was simple people would spend a long time in we also wanted to try out a bit of you know in our purchase economy stuff we didn't want to like we weren't looking to make money off it or anything or gouge players or piss anyone off we just wanted to try it out and get an understanding for how the system works and you know everyone who's smartphone developers will be seeing that Trend kind of Shifting that way and you know we just wanted to learn stuff do stuff that we hadn't done before and you know see what we can get rather than doing something so similar to what we' done previously so this is when the shop came in so the shop kind of the idea was to provide an incentive for the player other than beat my friends because previously you know you only had that social pressure to beat your friends and when you're playing Fruit Ninja and you don't get your high score you almost kind of get this sense of you know you've wasted your time a little bit so

we wanted to use the shop to change that we really wanted to allow players to express themselves too cuz just seemed like a neat thing to do I mean this whole game is like a a whole exercise in scope control gone terribly wrong we just come up with these ideas and like yeah cool we'll add that in customization why not they've already blown way past the 4 week limit anyway so this is the very very first uh mockup for the shop um it was basically exactly the same as that except flipped um and you know so this was our first sort of stab at doing it and problem is is again you know talking about the character of Barry steak fries it feels quite dry really wanted to get some flavor text in there where you know we could write some you know semi- witty jokes and you know add a bit of extra character into the game a bit more personality here's another version you can see we've now got flavor text down the bottom and the big trouble we were having was you know how are we going to get all this stuff on screen make it

easy to navigate and kind of intuitive to get around clearly this isn't it this wasn't implemented this is just a dodgy Photoshop mockup so this time we tried putting the categories into tabs kind of like a folder um you know we had our items we have the flavor text down the bottom we've made the bars bigger to try to minimize how much text is on the screen and make it a little bit less visually noisy even then we kind of felt like that's a bit too visually noisy so we pushed the flavor text out into a popup so when you click the uh the item it actually comes up in a popup and you know this design seemed all right on paper we actually implemented it we spent a couple of weeks implementing it and trying it out and uh this was if if there's any press guys here this was the shop as it was in the GDC build last year but you know it still just wasn't feeling quite right we really weren't happy with it it was felt a bit clunky to get around so we're like right okay almost out of ideas where can we get some good inspiration from for how to do a shop front

so is time for us to you know borrow some Concepts obviously if you're playing on the iPhone you're probably fairly familiar with the App Store on there you most likely got the game by navigating through the App Store so we thought right okay these guys seem to know what they're doing let's you know take a few cues from them so you can see it sort of started to become horizontal fied those uh light pink boxes on the left there are the icons so you know you got the icons on the left the price on the right you can see you've got like the um the little sideways Arrow just like the App Store as well we still got the kind of categories down the side uh for categorizing things and you'll notice at the top there's two major categories which is like the for sale and my gear we weren't really sure whether we should be um pushing out things that you had already bought into like an inventory screen um or whether it you know should all stay within the same shop area so again yeah it's looking all right but still not quite happy with it there's a lot of text on that screen

right like there's a lot going on so Tred kind of horizontal fying the whole thing like getting rid of the noise down the sides uh so you can see it's kind of been stretched out and you can kind of see this is starting to get close to the current shop implementation um we still have the two categories the for sale and the my stuff so you know the inventory and stuff I haven't yet bought we've got down the bottom the uh you know a lot of Apple apps have categories listed down that way in those black bars but you know and then eventually we came up with the idea that we would pull all the categories out to the top level and that way we could have visuals and again give it a bit of character and then finally the the end result there um it obviously looks much better cuz at this point then an artist touched it but uh you can see that you know design wise that was kind of the the next obvious step and you can see how similar that is to the app store right like you even got the glossy icons and everything the biggest change more than anything is that when you click an item rather than pushing you to a whole

new page it just kind of Pops down okay so that was the shop next thing mission system so the mission system was originally inspired by um the the little system in tiny wings um I thought that was a really neat idea when I was playing it but I had a lot of problems with it too I wanted to do kind of more rewards structures and you know more interesting stuff it felt cool completing missions but I never really felt fulfilled by doing so and um I would often get stuck on a mission and you know really really sit there tearing my hair out trying to get past it so we figured we budget one week to do this thing if you assume that like four weeks was accurate to make this game in N months then this one we estimate was pretty close so we tried three different things in in addressing these you know in improving this mission system we had the daily system the optional system and the progressive system so the daily system was our first one the idea is this every

single day you get three New Missions you can do there's an easy Mission a medium Mission and a hard mission that way I know I'm never going to get stuck because you know I've always got an easy mission to do there and when you complete the easy Mission it's just it's done that's it for the day you don't get another one to replace it it's just there and then I check back tomorrow and I'll have three New Missions to do and that seemed like a really cool idea you know on the surface of it because we know it's going to address the problem no one's going to get stuck clearly like even if you can't even complete the easy Mission then you can just come back the next day and you know maybe you'll be able to complete the next one our goal of making it sticky this seemed like a cool idea because uh you know you'd be able to keep coming back there'd be incentive to come back every single day so it seemed kind of neat and we did another kind of company beta and onethird of the company got this system the second system we did was this optional system so again really trying to address the issue of getting stuck so this was simple at all times you basically had two missions to complete

and rather than it being one and the other it was one or the other so this one run 800 m in little stomper in a single run or spend a total of 2,000 coins and you'll notice the top one is a skill-based mission the bottom one is this kind of grind time based Mission something that anyone could do given enough time experienced players are going to complete it quicker but you know anyone will get there if they invest enough time into it so this was the second mission we tried and you know we put that one over there and you know again it is it's kind of neat but it's feeling a little bit off the final one is the progressive system so this is obviously the one closest to the current system as we know it in the game um three missions you know you complete one you get a new one uh we had experience points at this point as well uh and so you know this was the system and it was easily the favorite of our play test again onethird of the company got this the problem was with the daily system was the guys who started playing it like on a Monday compared to the guys who started playing it on a Friday the guys

on Friday felt like no matter what they did they could never catch up right cuz it didn't matter how much time they put into it they could never catch up to their friends and they always one step behind and they felt quite disempowered by not having control over what they were able to complete and how much time they were able to invest in the game the optional system worked out a bit better it seemed okay but you know it kind of delivered the missions in such a um you know you needed such a long string of them and because you were only doing one at a time it felt really kind of Steppy and this and then this and then this Progressive system was easily the favorite for the play testers because they really enjoyed completing multiple Missions at once and all of that kind of stuff originally we had this rewards system which is literally the money or the box so when you leveled up this is what happened you got this screen and you could either get the money or you could have what's in this box and we had this big list of prizes you could get in the Box it would unlock things in the shop you get random currency rewards you might like win $1 instead of taking the easy two grand or you might win 100,000

coins we even had these collectible things that you could get they were you know we had made some crazy stupid large amount of them and they did nothing they had no utility value it was like a kind of collectible card miname on the side the big problem here was uh you know in the Progressive system people felt like they wanted the missions to get harder and harder and harder and because of this rewards system we weren't able to give bigger rewards because you know we would ratchet up the money um on the money side but the box is still always this random kind of box and you maybe we give them a bigger box or a golden box but even still it was you know way more difficult to actually ratchet up the rewards to meet you know the expected reward for more difficult missions which you would expect as you kind of progress through a system so you know we had experience points you know the bars filling up were nice we really wanted um you know the Utility side of things was all good we really wanted to make it more Punchy and more visceral and so you know all of the stars that we have you know they slam

into place um a whole screen kind of moves around I think we even have dust that comes off the the Stars we really put a bit of time into it it was able to simplify the uh experience point system as well just one two and three stars and the mission system becomes this crazy surprise Mega feature like honestly when we started working on it we were expecting it just to be this this thing you know again one week on the side we ended up pouring I think we spent 3 months on it um it took us about a month and a half to get the system right and spent a month and a half of purely just tweaking the order of the missions the difficulty of the missions the variety coming up with new ones cutting the ones that weren't very good um and now like the game is getting crazy addictive right because we've got so many layers of goals you've got like the kind of social goals of trying to beat your friends we got that whole thing going on like fruit ninja you've kind of got this status thing of leveling up you know what level are you I'm level 463 kind of thing so you've

got that side of things you got these personal goals of unlocking the stuff that you like the look of in the shop you've got this Progressive system that you're working your way through towards an end goal you know the game has got so many layers of feedback and reward for the player that I really think that's what grabs people in and keeps them in no matter where you are you're always like you know a couple of steps away from the next awesome thing that's going to happen to you so we did the mission system and that seemed awesome and at this point we're like okay what about our really hardcore players these guys are going to play it finish it what we're going to give to them so again you know we got a bit of inspiration from our Call of Duty uh you know thought we'd come up with a prestiging system but instead of being just 10 Metals we would make these metals and they'd be made out of three components so would have five borders five different fills and five different icons that gives us 125 different badges we can give them instead honest to God when we were working on it we were expecting only the hardest of the

hardcore would get a couple of badges you know a couple of badges at most we put these ID tags on them and gave them all these unique games CU we thought it would give the community this kind of fun game where they would all try and come together and they say well oh I got badge 63 and I got badge 67 and a large number of people would come together to build the definitive list so imagine our surprise when this gets emailed to me after only 20 days of the game being out all 125 medals unlocked by a single person averaging eight hours of play every day seven days a week um what do we got there oh can't see the time that was on there this is a guy off the Touch Arcade Forum it's called our microbyte and we were just blown away and the crazy thing is is I mean you know obviously this guy is the extreme case but even casual plays like even my partner who is definitely not a gamer comes up to me he's like yeah I got my third medal I'm like holy three medals like we were expecting that would be our hardcore players the level of Engagement in

Jetpack is just off the chains like you know we did a lot you know that was our goal for sure but there's no way we could have anticipated how high the level of Engagement was certainly it's got a smaller audience I've added a little question mark there CU I wrote all this pre the game going free um but you know our engagement is just out of control for this game so I got a couple of quick things I'll go over pretty quickly getting this game out the door was terrible terrible horrible experience um really really wanted to make this game work at 60 frames per second on everything and like this iPhone made out of clay is probably about as fast as like the original 2G iPhone on top of that we really wanted it to look good on retina display screens as well as iPad 2 and all of that which is obviously a major challenge but then as if that wasn't enough we're trying to keep it under 20 meg eggs um you know we were really trying to trying to have it all and you know that was an obvious source of

problems for us came up with this kind of neat solution where I hope that shows up all right um you know we really wanted to make it really sparkle and look good on the iPad but there's no way we could you know Jam in these these Sprites that would take up four times more room to accommodate for retina and iPad so one of the guys uh at halfi actually wrote this kind of custom it's almost like a hq2x scaler and so what happen s is if you have a retina phone and you boot up jetpack for the first time because I see that you have a retina phone and it takes a little bit longer to load it actually goes through and converts a big list of Sprites into these you know expanded Sprites that aren't nearest neighbor aren't bilinear because you know nearest neighbor makes it look Pixy which is fine it's part of the style and bil linear makes it look blurry but this way we kind of get it looks nice and chunky and smooth and still kind of Pixy so that was a really big breakthrough for us because it could look great on everything but also uh you know it could it would still fit into 20 Megs because we only had to have these low Sprites in there we were extremely

fortunate that our artist Sierra had been you know he was a pixel ninja kind of guy and even though there was absolutely no at the time technical reason he had to he kept all of the Sprites like either eight or 16 colors just cuz he wanted to just cuz he felt like you know that was the way this game should look and thank God he did cuz it meant this uh this scaler actually worked really really well the other thing we had to do was uh then we had stuff for the interface that we'd made at our iPad and retina resolution and because that was so big it would run really really slowly on the really slow devices so then we use the Scala in the opposite direction to make lower resolution versions of that stuff so it still runs smoothly so also yeah we changed the name we did this at the 11th Hour like it was the last thing we changed about the game and it's not something we took lightly it was a massive source of stress for both myself and Phil Larson our marketing manager we spent days just being like Oh my God have we just made

the biggest mistake have we just undone all of our long lead marketing one of the big things that you know made us decide we change it became obvious to us you know this game was you know getting bit more casual than the name suggested but also when we were doing the icon our artists sort of mocked up the icon into the App Store so we could see what it would look like you know whether it would pop when it was presented in a list and you only have so many characters on the App Store so when you look at it in there and it was mocked up instead of saying machine gun jetpack it says machine gun dot dot dot which sounds like really ominous um so that was you know another reason for the name change and then the game finally came out and you know we had massive critical reception our our marketing guy Phil worked overtime we had a lot of stuff happened there we had a big chart success and a lot of people were really happy that this was the game that followed Fruit Ninja certainly it's maybe not what a lot of people were expecting you like a game about machine guns and explosions but you know it

definitely was still appealing to largely the same audience and even though this had started off as a game we were going to make in four weeks and we ended up spending 10 months on a one button casual iPhone game we really felt like it was worth it and we still definitely think it was worth the extra 1,200% effort that it took and yeah we couldn't be happier we we were absolutely thrilled with the the response we got um and you know it was definitely very uh personally satisfying for myself and the guys cuz we uh poured a lot of ourselves and a lot of our own personality into the game um you know by the end we were all so emotionally invested and wrecked and you know we were all hating on each other it must have been terrible to work with us at that point but um you know we we were extremely thrilled with the response uh since then we've been working on updates so again gadgets update estimated to take 2 weeks this took 4 months so pretty much my rule of thumb now for estimating in Jetpack jide is times it by you know8 or so and

that'll be pretty close and uh yes so we just announced this recently you know we're working on more updates and um yeah thank you very much for coming and thanks so we have a bit of time for questions we got about uh 8 minutes or so uh if you could use the microphones and line up at the microphone for the questions also if you're too shy to get up there which is fair enough um I have my email address up on the screen otherwise Come and catch me after the show I'll be happy to to talk about jetpack uh one of the things that I find a little vexing about the game is that I love playing into the high score list against my friends uh however you guys allow some minor subversion of that high score list with uh being able to buy the extra bounce being able to buy a head start uh and you can even do do this with real world money uh so part of the part of it is that I feel like it undermines my effort to honestly get on

that list and I'm curious if you get any push back from the community about that feature and uh whether you had any second thoughts about allowing people to sort of buy their way a little bit of that feature yeah we that's a really good question so we really tried to be careful about that um you know certainly uh you do gain a minor Advantage the big thing is is when we did all of the testing for the game with inap purchases and all that like we never ever use inap purchases ourselves when testing the game we do everything the hard way we earn the coins ourselves we kind of made the assumption that no one was going to want to use our inap purchase uh so you know the the good thing about the Head Start is you know you don't actually get any real Advantage from that uh in that you know it certainly it makes the first few meters easier and safer but any good player is going to be able to get through there quick you know just the same it's just going to take a little bit more more time we also made it so yeah the you can buy the kind of extra meters which I think equates to there's

a lot of stuff cuz it changes with velocity but can buy you about an extra 300 M we made it so you can't repeat it um because obviously then we would expect people to put $10 in um and just you know buy 100 B bombs and just sit there and go boom boom boom all the way to Victory so you know we were certainly aware of that um we really liked the idea of having these Expendable items in there cuz early on before we had that people would play through and they unlock the stuff they want like oh I want that head that body and that and that was it and then the coins kind of lost all meaning so the Expendable items kind of let those coins remain having meaning so yeah it was something we interested we we get a bit of push back but you know we definitely feel like we're in a comfortable area with that uh two short questions what what did you use to prototype and what inspired the profit bird um to prototype I just used flash um I use Flash as2 because I'm both a terrible programmer and it's the only thing I know I if I actually had to do things like declare variables and all that I'd go mad um in in terms of the

profit bird I mean you know it it's definitely inspired by those other Bird games that were doing really well and you know we I don't think they have any hard feelings it's just like you know a bit of a good joke and you know it all sort of fit into the crazy Barry steak fries Community as well yes uh so you said the uh name change came at the 11th Hour um jetpack joy ride uh can you share any other names that were uh possible considerations I'll tell you this name we actually changed the app to this name because we really didn't want it to be machine gun jetpack and the thing we were really worried about was that by making it too drastically different we were going to un undermine all of the uh marketing effort that we'd done we actually had this name for a while we were going to call it machine fun jetpack and at the time we were like machine fund jet pack that sounds all right maybe I could live with that and then we got in in the morning and I W walked up to Phil's desk and as we both said the same thing at the same time which just like the were we

thinking what a Terri I'm so glad we didn't go out with that name yes yeah hey Luke I just wanted to uh ask you about like the pricing that you did how it was uh paid to start with and then went to free was that a planned thing and also based on that is that something you guys are going to use again going forward I'm so glad someone asked that question I didn't want to disappoint [Applause] you so the funny thing is is we never designed this game well I mean originally you know when it was a 4- week game we were thinking we would release it for free but it became obvious to us once we spent a lot of time on it that it wasn't going to be a free game anymore we set it to free uh right before Christmas just because we thought it'd be a cool promotion to do it was sort of starting to fall down and we thought it'd get a bit of extra attention we have not since we set the game to free changed any of the pricing in the game we we did nothing to make this a premium game but what this blue line is is represents revenue and see if

you can guess where it went free um yeah and so we we set it to free and we left it over Christmas and we got in and we were like okay we'll set it back to paid in a couple of days I'm like geez this this is pretty cool though it's working out really good and you know we're excited because more people are playing our game and you know if people are playing the game then I'm happy so like ah maybe we'll leave it for a few extra days and then you know left it a few extra days maybe we'll leave it for another week maybe we'll leave it for another week I guess now we've made a premium game so I guess you believe in the premium model then uh yeah I definitely think it could work and I've been really happy with it because we really took efforts we really don't want to gouge our players we treat them with respect we do all of our test our testing as I mentioned before by not using inapp purchases at all we grind it all up manually ourselves and we set it at a price point that we feel comfortable with doing that we make the assumption that no one is going to using that purchase the fact that people do I mean you know that's that's great for us I I think the model's really good I

think the main thing is is like I really don't like people who abuse the model and you know use you know dirty tricks and you know bring it really in their face I think is you know when this it really vindicates I think the fact that you can treat players with respect and still have the model work for you thanks thanks uh yeah kind of along those same lines the the counterfeit or feature it's really dramatic ially changes the the economy of the whole game it doubles your your value and it or halves the value of the coins in the game any comments on that and then my other question is the name half brick just could you talk about the name and the logo too sure thing um well the name half uh we get to ask that question a lot honestly like there was all these crazy names floating around when the guys were coming up with it I think they may have been drinking involved and then the next day the name was just kind of the name that stuck out the most and was the most memorable in terms of the counterfeit machine so you know when we started mucking around with inapp purchase there's still very much this

big stigma about inapp purchases and I certainly didn't want to spend any money on in that purchase and I was like the counterfeit machine was kind of like for me it was like this is something I might actually think about buying like you know this is worth 9 cents to me this costs less like oneir the price of a coffee the fact that it stays there and is there forever that's something that actually appeals to me so I thought you know if it appealed to me maybe it would appeal to other people as well and again we put it in there and because all the shop stuff is you know um you can earn it quite easily and it's really forgetting that extra stuff or you know really completionist people we felt comfortable with that thanks I think we got time for one more question yeah my question was actually tied to the counter fitter I don't know if you can give this information but what's the ratio between all of your users and the people that bought that because it seemed like the most obvious feature to spend money on um I I wouldn't know off the top of my head head well off the top of my head I would say it would be somewhere around 3% Mark 3 or 4% Mark definitely

not nearly as many people as you might expect wow iing higher yeah uh but you know again you know it's quite cool with the inapp purchases certainly you know we have tons and tons of people that play it for free and never spend a dime but that's fine because they're enjoying the game and we're happy with that you know I'm definitely a believer that even if you put out a free game and you don't make a dime off it don't make a scent there's still Val there the people who are playing your game now they know about you if it's a good game they know you make good games and that's extremely valuable so yeah that's pretty much it so thanks very much everyone again uh feel free to email me if you have any other questions come grab me up for the talk and yeah thanks again