When Trainers' Eyes Meet: Creating Real Time Combat for Pokemon GO

[Music] hello so hi i'm rob i'm a senior software engineer at niantic i'm a graduate of uc santa cruz's computer science computer game design program go slugs and so i've been working at niantic labs since uh late in 2015 and so i've been working on pokemon go and i've touched nearly every feature that's gone into it in some way or another also previously i've been the technical lead on our ar plus encounter which was our implementation of apple's ar kit and google's ar core to create an even more real augmented reality interaction that people can have with pokemon also although not pokemon i also recently spent some time working on a demo called neon 2.0 that we showed at the mobile world congress conference in barcelona just a few weeks ago this was a real-time augmented reality experience where multiple players could play an arena shooter in a shared space

it's a really cool example of what we can do with ar in modern technology but today i'm here to talk to you about pokemon go so pokemon go for those who don't know is a game where you walk around in the real world and try to find virtual pokemon on your phone so a lot has happened since we initially launched the game in the summer of 2016. and just to get people kind of quickly up to speed um we've added in pokemon from the johto hoenn and sinnoh regions um into the game so a bunch more pokemon in addition to what we originally launched with we did a large revision to the metagame system of how our pokemon gym locations work allowing a cooperative raid mode where multiple players can come to the same location to team up against boss pokemon and catch legendary pokemon we added in a quest system where players not only get direction for play but also can experience story lines

pokemon go has always been about real world social connections and we expanded on those with a friend system and trading integrated into the game we've also had a number of live events including our flagship pokemon go fests in chicago the past two summers and what we call safari zones which have been our special non-ticketed events in areas like yokosuka japan and dortmund germany also this past december we added in our player versus player directly competitive feature that we call trainer battles so what are trainer battles they're our version of pokemon battles for real-time competitive play in a trainer battle two trainers each choose a team of three pokemon trainers utilize mechanics like fast and charge attacks the classic pokemon type effectiveness and swapping between pokemon along with

new tools like protect shields to try and best their opponent a player needs to knock out all three of their opponents pokemon to claim the win and our goal with trainer battles was really to infuse the spirit of pokemon go into the classic mechanic of pokemon battling creating something new and more competitive for players to really sink their teeth into and when we made them we really wanted them to feel like a truly meaningful addition to the game we wanted this feature to create a new action in our game something that both builds from the existing game loop but also something that more smaller potential features could build on top of something that felt truly foundational and we knew that trainer battles and battling pokemon is such a core experience to the pokemon franchise virtually every pokemon game has some form of battling and it's such an essential mechanic to

have those two trainers facing off head to head now prior to this our only competitive elements were either asynchronous or parallelized against ai and so we really wanted somewhere for players to go to have that real-time competitive experience because we knew how important this was to our player base and they told us a lot but of course that's not the only reason we decided to build this feature at this point in time there were a lot of factors that went into figuring out really why to do this now and one of the biggest things was the current metrics that our game that we were focused on so what we really were really looking for most of all was to increase our number of players we really wanted to reacquire our lapsed players who hadn't seen the game in a while and we especially felt that launching something that's been in such demand and long awaited would

reignite a passion and a lot of those players and hopefully also strike a chord with new players who hadn't been interested in the existing game play and continue to grow the player base we wanted to increase retention of the game and so we looked at this as a way of deepening our meta game structure so something that would be more interesting to keep players coming back for repeat play we also wanted to increase the length of our game sessions have players stay in the game longer so we looked at this as a way to complement our gameplay of players walking around and catching pokemon together by giving them something that they could do after those sessions we were also happy with how our game was monetizing and so we knew that we didn't need a feature that focused on monetization this was something of a perfect recipe to do something competitive because we know that forcing

monetization into competitive play is a recipe for an unhappy community and we wanted to make sure that our game and whatever we added for players to compete with didn't feel like it was pay to win these reasons were also complemented by a few other things that happened in recent times so the friend system that we built that we launched earlier in 2018 gave us the infrastructure for players making direct interactions with each other and it's worth noting here that our friend system in pokemon go isn't just a list of other players that you know players actually level up their friendship with each individual friend on their list by sending gifts or playing in cooperative modes together this gave us another avenue that we could reward players for playing this new feature and something that we could tie in and kind of bring the game all together to make it feel whole we also have a rule that anything that

might be part of our summer event series like those go fest that i talked about earlier needs time to soak in the game client for at least six months to make sure that it's bug-free and working well by the time we actually get to hosting events this meant that we made december our goal for building and shipping the feature so that it could be in consideration for those events this coming summer now we had a lot of design challenges going into this feature first and foremost our combat needed to appeal to all players not just hardcore long time pokemon fans or even new players that have kept on playing go since day one we needed to make sure that entrenched players people with high level accounts and powerful pokemon didn't have so much of an advantage against other players that lower level players didn't want to play the feature at all

we also had to come up with rewards that would hold value for all these different players and not something that those well-entrenched players would already have a stockpile of or something that was only valuable to those high level players we also have a strong commitment to our concept of real world gaming and we really had to think about how a directly competitive feature would look in pokemon go what it would mean to battle another player and how players would engage with each other inside and outside the app we also had some challenges with figuring out how to teach new players to gameplay and lastly we had to really keep in mind how we would keep things open-ended so that we could keep building on top of the feature in the years to come so in order to shape the feature we really have to know our audience and this is something that's a big advantage when you're building something for an existing game

you already know a lot about who's playing your game and you can figure out a lot about who stopped playing your game this is a big place for us where focus groups came in and bringing in players from those different groups and talking to them and figuring out what their wants were from the game so our lapse players were our first main group that we really had to think about because these players hadn't been playing the game actively and they don't have the most up-to-date pokemon they might not have played since that very first month and so we needed to make sure that they had fun with the feature and they had felt like they had a chance a lot of the rest of our player base can be split up between casual and hardcore players but we really use those terms more to describe people's history with the franchise of pokemon rather than how they directly play the game for our more casual players this means that it's their first pokemon game it's a lot of people who knew about

pokemon but they didn't actually play one of the games until they were able to get one on their phone a lot of these people actually liked some of the simplicity that our earlier battle system had so we knew that we had to keep our mechanics in a way that were easy enough to understand for an audience that isn't hyper game literate then we also had our hardcore players those long time pokemon fans who've memorized every type's advantage against another that whole 18 by 18 grid and those we knew those players were always pushing us to create a game with more strategic depth to offer them the chance to prove to their peers how good they are this led us to the eternal task of creating something that's easy to learn but hard to master so we started at approaching this by trying to keep our base mechanics as similar as possible to the original earlier battle system this meant keeping

our tap to attack interaction even though it's fairly simplistic a lot of players find it really approachable and really easy to understand we also didn't want anything too complicated happening during the release of the feature so we didn't want any large-scale inventory changes to happen so we wanted to make sure that pokemon kept their existing moves and abilities when we moved into this system now we did in order to bring in some fresh mechanics allow players to unlock an extra move for each of their pokemon this gave us more strategic depth in the battle system and a way for players to have a different edge or change their pokemon in different ways we locked this behind something that was unlockable for each individual pokemon so that

players would experience this over time and people wouldn't log on to see that their pokemon had more complications overnight also instead of having something that was based on timing like our previous defensive mechanic was we decided to go for something that was that focused more on the strategic side of battle so we created a mechanic called protect shields where players got two protect shields per match that would block an entire charge attack this is actually a really big example of something that came out of our focus groups this feature actually changed a lot pretty late in development because we got feedback from the people playing our game that the mechanic that we had before just wasn't satisfying enough and so we put in something that would really give a strategic trade-off now that pokemon could have both a low

energy low damage charge attack and a high energy high damage charge attack players had to really think about what their opponent could be doing next and really helped elevate the game to more than just the type effectiveness gameplay and added that little bit extra to make the combat properly interesting in order to keep players on similar levels for combat between them we created a system of battle leagues where we made a system of tiered leagues that put a maximum cap on participating pokemon's combat power or cp this way new and returning players could who came to check out the feature wouldn't be completely obliterated by long-time players and because in our game these cp values are a stat accumulation this means that pokemon at those particular tiers are roughly equivalent in terms of power level

this gave way for three drastically different meta games for players to participate in that really change what it feels like to play at the lowest level nearly all pokemon can reach that cp level and players are really able to play with pokemon that are their favorites we created the ultra league as a higher tier that pulls some of the pokemon out of the possible play space we hoped that this would create a space for a more serious competitive environment to have fewer choices so that they could hone in more on a metagame of what pokemon are the most versatile then we created our master league so our players that have really played a lot and reached the really high power levels could use those powerful pokemon that they've worked so hard to raise one of the really interesting things that came out of this actually was that even though we designed the ultra league to be

our space for competitive play our biggest fan community in america the silf road hosts all of their community tournaments using the lowest league because for them it's just as important for the gameplay to be as accessible as it was for us for players to actually engage each other we had to think a lot about how something like matchmaking or playing against other players would work and what we settled on was to go with something that would really support our communities and immediate gameplay with each other so we created a system of qr codes where players can scan each other's phone to immediately jump into a battle with each other this really supported community oriented tournaments and players being able to jump into the feature without jumping through hoops and adding people as friends going through a bunch of dialogues

players were able to get straight to it but we also wanted to support our social systems and reward people who've developed real friendships one of the developers on the team early on said you know i've got this friend who lives halfway around the world from me and we never see each other in person anymore but we send gifts in pokemon go every day and so we decided to create remote play as a special feature once players have reached the ultra friend level with each other which means that they've interacted for 30 days this also helped us prevent online communities from forming networks for their own tournaments so that we could keep the focus on local communities and real world gameplay when it came to figuring out rewards one of the really important things to us was that players had as few possible

reasons to say no to a battle so we make sure that win or lose players draw from the same loot table this really helps players feel like they're always advancing in the game and they always have a reason to try and play the feature we did put in a daily limit of course to prevent abuse we used our stardust resource as our base resource in that loot table because it's our core resource for powering up our pokemon and helps tie together a loop of battling pokemon in order to improve them and make them stronger it also directly tied into the costs for unlocking that third move that we added we also added in a new item called the sino-stone which is an evolution item necessary for a bunch of the new pokemon that we've been releasing over the past month over the past few months this helped us lead more collection oriented players to try out the feature and give it a shot and incorporate it into their

routine gameplay then on the longer term end of things we brought in new avatar items as something that players could unlock through our achievement system we spread out the pieces of each full costume across the three battle leagues requiring players to have wins in all three of them in order to unlock the full set and this means that when you see a player with one of those full costumes you know that they're really dedicated to the feature when it came to teaching players because we had a limited development schedule we had to weigh the opportunity cost of making a tutorial versus making npc battles where players could play against an ai and we only had enough time beyond our core feature set to cover one or the other and what we decided on was that tutorials are just two one-time use to too many players especially in the mobile space a tutorial is something they'll tap through as fast as possible

not read and not internalize or learn from instead npc battles gave us a chance for players to learn the ropes and learn the mechanics and fail without punishment we took away any sense of resource costs or punishment for play in this mode so that people could keep playing them even beyond getting a daily reward for them in order to keep learning the systems better and do things like test out team compositions also creating these npc battles was a better thing for our foundation that we could keep building on in the future we also coordinated some of the information that we would have put in a tutorial with our marketing team who used our social channels to disseminate this information in the week leading up to the featured watch this wound up being really good to help not only educate our player base but use those teachings as something to get them

excited for the feature launch as it approached and this also meant that by the time the feature came out a lot of players had a good idea of how they wanted to play and how they wanted to approach the feature and that's something that worked really well for us on the side of keeping things open-ended we tried to make sure that the engineering supported that and we did this through having a really significant prototyping phase before we started the proper development this way we were able to test out a lot of ideas and more features and complications that we knew weren't going to make it in the first version but then keep those in mind as we were building the engineering and systems so we knew that we could support them in the future also because of our large casual audience we wanted to make sure that we weren't overwhelming players with new things to learn on the first day of the feature launch and instead we could meter out improvements and complications

over time developing a metagame that always feels like it's changing and evolving and we saw this evident with our february community day every month we have an event where for three hours we feature a particular pokemon and february was particularly special because we want launch moves with a chance of activating buffs on the pokemon that uses them this helped us get a lot more players excited about the event than would have normally been interested in it so where did this all actually leave us well we saw a substantial bump in daily active users and monthly active users from the feature launch and returning players and new players came to the game in considerable numbers our metrics on retention went solidly up we got longer play sessions and we had some significantly positive interactions on social media one of my favorite posts i saw on launch

day was something along the lines of wow this is way more strategic than i expected from niantic and i chose to take that as a compliment the lessons we feel like we learned and took away from this are that when we focus on making new features a meaningful addition to the game they keep they continue to add to your game past what you first put in when you know your players and know your community you can come up with something that they'll really enjoy and have fun with and make sure to keep new features approachable and accessible so that they can be something that your entire player base can enjoy together as i want to give a big thank to the team that helped build this this wasn't just me a lot of people's time and blood sweat and tears went into building this feature so thank you all for listening and any questions

all right so there are uh mics up here for anybody who has questions looks like we have some time yeah hello uh marcos mondola from next games uh what kind of interactions did you see of client between players playing pvp um so the question was what kind of interactions we saw out of client um we saw actually a lot of players kind of teaching each other the game um outside of so we did see community tournaments and things like that but outside of those um a lot of players who were kind of curious about those are interested in them because for a lot of people this is the first game that had systems like that that they had played so we saw a lot of people playing together as a way of teaching the feature to each other

or hostile interactions yeah i i think one of the things that really helped with preventing the hostile interactions was the fact that we gave the same reward loot table to both players so there wasn't like any sort of wind trading or like oh you told me i could win and then you beat me and i'm never gonna get that loot roll thank you hi uh first of all great presentation uh just related to the um xr extended reality demo that you guys have showcased at mwc is there any future kind of plan to convert this trainer battle mode into more of the extended reality type of format because it seems like that's the natural fit for it um i can't actually talk about future feature plans sorry okay got it all right thank you yes hi rosa vegas from zynga um uh kudos on the feature um what i really enjoyed about your presentation was you talked about how you structured incentives in the

game and one thing i'm interested in learning about is were there any um things that happened organically in the community upon launch that you maybe didn't anticipate that were perhaps perverse incentives or something that that you were afraid that could be abused within the community and how did you combat this um so i don't think we actually had any adverse things happen because we had a small daily limit on the number of times that players could get rewards um i think players got the rewards kind of very similarly to how we planned them out thank you hi kai from pocketchamps so this question is regarding like the timing of this feature right so as i played the game about like maybe two years ago and then i stopped playing after a while because there was no like

pvp battles and i i think a lot of players actually expected this feature to be like way before it's currently being built so like my question is like if you you guys have to do it all over again would you have built this feature earlier hmm i'm not sure because i don't know i i may have made the same choices if we had to do it all over again um is that okay to ask like what was kind of the considerations that put into not building it upon launch for example because they were like the most number of players at the same time um well we had a lot of things going on as we were trying to launch the game and we only had so many developers yeah there thank you

all right i have a question about the npc kind of ones so in the game i've been playing since day one so uh you can challenge any of the three kind of npc leaders and i was wondering if um there's ever gonna be placed more incentive on that in the future because right now it's kind of like between one to three rewards per day and the medal is like you battle them a thousand times which is a little insane because i haven't even played the game for a thousand days so i was wondering if you're planning to evolve that in any sort of way um um so that's again i can't talk about future future plans unfortunately okay sorry i have a quick question um i don't know how much metrics you actually track on things like this but do you know how many people actually buy the or spend the stardust and stuff to get the extra move sets on pokemon um we we do have the numbers but i haven't looked at them recently okay i was just curious because like i

play the game and i mostly get you know the battles to get the ceno stones and stuff but uh you know the system itself didn't seem really that uh exciting to me i use it but it's more to get the loot but i was just curious about that question first off if anyone has a relicanth or a tropius [Laughter] uh like we all got tons of unknowns i was wondering if you talk a little bit about the initial decision to move uh from the traditional turn-based battles to the real-time battles that you have in the game yeah so um one of the big reasons that we did that was because we were designing the game for a mobile audience we wanted something that was going to be quick snappy and kept the game flowing turn based means that you're always kind of waiting for an opponent and in a mobile game that means that's an opportunity for someone to background

the app and maybe not come back to it so we wanted to make sure it was something that players were always interacting with immediately thank you hello um i was curious how much the limitations of your technology really kind of drive your decision-making obviously like for the new pvp system you guys had to re-make a new networking solution for all that um has there been features that you guys have completely scrapped just because modern cell phones or even the average cell phone just really doesn't support that um i think this is another case where i can't talk about features that we haven't announced or talked about sorry so it's a yes i didn't say that hi can you hear me okay yes i've got a

question regarding monetization which doesn't exist for that feature when you've got a game as popular and huge as pokemon go the expectations in terms of revenue must be huge so how do you go about and and convince top management that you're going to build that huge feature and just not monetize it or indirectly maybe through retention but how do you do that well what was your strategy about that so those were actually the goals that the metrics goals that kind of came from us from up to us from up top so it was actually we wanted more players playing the game um for longer periods of time um because this also the bigger your player base is if you still have the same percentage of people buying in-app purchases you're still growing revenue okay thank you all right and i think that's about all the time we have so thanks everybody for coming