Why mobile developers should focus on the meta game first

[Music] good morning everybody my name is Lafayette Fannin I work on games for almost 20 years now starting with text message games as a designer and programmer and yeah you can imagine that the fidelity of those games just not quite but what you can do on a phone right now 2003-2005 I was part of the second wave of mobile from my perspective we had java code running on the phones color screens real-time games so we can make car games platformers and so on and I was working with the future founders of supercell basically in the previous studio as head of studio built a studio we sold it to Americans in 2004 so trip walking's the pounder of EA quarter we will reach around a special chocolate and and then I kind of called

siren call of triple-a so couldn't resist going there the guys finished max payne 2 they want to take the lead to the next generation of consoles in 2005 and i spent six years in triple-a ship the game called Alan Wake maybe some of you have seen that game we have 20 million dollars budget from Microsoft to make something unique and unique we did I was the executive producer a chief operating officer at the company I guess this a little bit of problem yeah no problem I just keep talking random stuff here that's fine it's a few phones here or there yeah you can just switch it up if it works better anyway so after streep relays 2011 I left did a

bit of consulting and then 2013 we founded this company which is play raven and yeah today we're going to talk about our learnings of how to develop metal games because we made a lot of mistakes and the problem is not making the mistakes so the problem would be if you don't learn from the mistakes I'm going to share some of our our learnings here today clicker and maybe go back to the first slide try it cool here we are so this is the team today we're based in Helsinki Finland very international so we have seven nationality exactly fifty percent of our staff or fins and the other half is sick from all over the world and we're actively recruiting like

professionals from from all continents we have South Americans North Americans Europeans and so on people who have spent many years in China now averaging about ten years of experience per person in the games industry and the special thing about play Raven is that we always focus on fresh experiences if you played Alan Wake Forest this you understand that that's the fresh experience it was not a military shooter setting back that or anything like that it was something completely unique and still remembered today and this is a way of positioning yourself outside of the competition that is very cutthroat so the goldfish float Bowl is kind of a metaphor for me because this market during my 20 years in the industry this market the App Store and Google Play is the most competitive markets I've ever see very very cutthroat but at the same time it seems to be very competitive in pockets so if you make a match 3 game or if you make a RPG game or if you make a village

builder you know you faced stiff competition and then something fresh comes along every now and then so how can we go fresh clash Royale totally fresh and so it's a way of putting yourself outside of the competition but the trick is how do you do it so that it's still relevant to the mainstream audiences so it's very important we take inspiration from others like I'm sorry for some of the phone problems if we have here so some of the texts are a little bit cut off but we'll manage so it should say taking inspiration from others but never copy or clone so we don't take a template of a game and then just reskin it to a theme like spying or something we have to have a bolt I think you would like the great explorers that's back in the day three games launched I want to get to the topic because it's a quick shot quick session we've had very good success with the games so all of them

have been very high on the strategy charts especially happy about Rob aside in the middle so we hit number one for the first time in the US with that game when we launched it and also the the reviews were just stellar it got over sixty percent d1 retention and so on but today I'm going to talk about winter state which was not as successful and some of the learnings we have from that game before I go into that just reviewing quickly what we have in development right now so we have multiple teams and this is important for you to understand when we talk about our development that we are multiple teams and the teams are relatively autonomous that and they have different skills competencies so there's one team working on a new spymaster game there's another team working on a top-secret thing which is a major gains IP which all of you would know but unfortunately I can't tell what it is but we partnered up with

a with a bigger gauge company here and team three is under construction so we are actively hiring right now for a 830 we're growing this year so coming to the topic of meta game first so what is the opposite of putting medica interest for us it is putting second to second game play first and this is kind of what happened with with winter state we didn't mean it to happen but if you are a developer how many are developers by the way yeah so you know you know how it is I mean day-to-day you work in development you eat the rate and you have make decisions about what are we going to focus on this week what are we going to focus on during this spring and it's easy to say we have to prioritize everything we're going to make sure this is in top shape this is in top shape that's in top shape but then the reality is you kind of end up doing something and ignoring something else and if you're not conscious conscious about it it might go a little bit wrong

so the setting the goal setting for winter state was let's make a game inspired by pcr TS the team like I said semi-autonomous so they come and pitch that they want to make a game that is kinda like an RTS but completely designed for phone it's not a port it's for phones think about not not pads notnot tablets but for phones so how is that done and then come up with a fresh theme you know post climate change lots of snow and ice and so on kind of Mad Max meets a day after tomorrow if that makes any sense sound it's pretty cool let's make a few prototypes let's see if it's fun and it was fun no doubt about it when we tried it but just sing a few more words about the game itself so there was a large like a world map this is the east coast of United States after

after the climate change hits the Atlantic Ocean is pretty much frozen up and yeah you can you can pick up missions you can trade between the cities you have PvP like the yellow things there up EVP and there's like a bunch of things you can do and that's the metagame layer of the game and there's like a huge scope now looking at it retrospectively that's a huge scope to the game so all that and a very ambitious second per second gameplay on par with with the best so if you look at what what you actually do during the combat so when you click on some mission on the world map you go into this combat view which is you know full 3 3d real-time 3d and you can pan it and so on so what they first focused on all is

how do you move the units because in a pc RTS you would be drawing a lot of rectangles with your mouse and that that's like really bad way for our cell phone game so drawing was something that's natural touchscreen but makes sense right yeah so they spend a lot of time on that move drawing thing and then things like you know you draw here and then you take a finger off and then you put your finger back back there and you can continue smoothly like seamlessly from your what you've drawn before they're also like a lot of other features looking like okay so we don't want to get firing orders so we have to have auto engaged when you come to a certain range with the enemy units start firing automatically okay so how far is the firing range does it differ for different units if I have a North artillery is there different auto engage range and so on all these things take

time if you're a developer in the audience you know that it takes a lot of time to figure these things out so that they feel exactly right this energy you can collect their this energy you can use for the special abilities here which you can manually trigger then getting the right flow and that the timer's you know how long is a match we limited it to three minutes but we of course iterated with four minutes and five minutes of whatever we limited the amount of vehicles you have but what is the right amount five vehicle three vehicles for vehicles what can you handle in a phone you have to try all these things take a lot of time and finally a very very nice thing if you're playing on a phone you really want to pause it if you are you know you gotta you got to do something else you're in the middle of traffic or whatever but then fancy things like bullets time so when you put your finger on a vehicle everything slows down everything sort of slowly moving but you can give your orders and draw draw your pass and so on

it's a wonderful wonderful very fun gameplay and we tested it a lot we use play this cloud as our main sort of UX testing because it's so convenient and we can use Americans it's like overnight testing and we've got high scores for this gameplay so that leads you to think okay we're doing the right thing hey the game is working great right just a few more words about what's happening there in their game so of course there were different mission types just to give you an idea of the scope then because all those nice things are now dance or what is the scope of this combat there's a different mission type so you can see the HQ label there so sometimes it's you're defending an HQ sometimes it's like a meeting encounter and so on there's a ton of gorgeous visual effects so you can see the missiles flying there that's particle the smoke you can pour you can pan you

can see the missiles in the air it's all beautiful real-time 3d and finally then the amount of maps in the game just because if you stare at one beautiful map for a hundred hours it's not gonna you know you're not going to feel it anymore after ten hours or five hours of whatever so there were 13 unique combat maps but we also built a system where we can do variations on the map so you can rotate it foresters and let this time you're coming from this edge of the map or whatever you could change the positions of buildings and whatnot easily from those of 325 variations again a lot of time and effort spend in this system first building the system building the tools and then designing on top of those tools and I think that was also a pretty big like astounding

technical achievement when we finally were able to push the whole game with all these three RN 3d all these maps all these vehicles everything to under 100 megabytes initial download so they would download through a cell phone network and then coming back to the metagame so meta game okay now we have adapted gameplay so what can i buy in the game what can I level up what can I grind if I don't want to pay what can I grind every day what is my sort of long-term what am I going to do in six months or 12 months or of 24 months so vehicle was designated as the main thing that you would be upgrading of course unlocking upgrading leveling up and we ended up with 15 vehicles not a great inventory it's just reflect you know it gives you an idea that how complex it is when you add a new vehicle you got to figure out

all these things now firing ranges movement speeds how they interact with other vehicles in combat and because the the combat is so second to second like millisecond precise thing it takes a lot of time to include like I add one more vehicle to the mix and make sure it's all balanced and it all works out nicely we have ten drivers as well but that that's pretty much is what what you could do are in the metagame side of sort of as your long-term grinding goals and of course now looking back at this it seems totally insufficient and we didn't aim for 15 vehicles obviously but it's what we ended up having in the game when when it launched so that hope will give you an idea of where we made a game that was heavily heavily second to second gameplay focus even though we

wanted of course it also have a strong metagame what we ended up just through sheer scope and kind of the development teams daily focus you have on the top of your mind okay the missiles are not flying correctly are going to fix the missiles the drawing is not as smooth as it should be i'm going to fix the drawing rather than thinking okay I'm going to fix this game so that we can design vehicles faster into it or or that or that there would be more categories of things to sell to the player or grind so we made a conscious decision last year when we were at the final stretch of winter state that the next game we're going to make this is this was made by a different team but they were looking at the winter State guys and thinking okay we're not going to make our game like that we're going to make a game that has a very large inventory or collectibles and has a very

rich social metagame so this would be the unique thing the unique metagame thing about this game and no second the second game play whatsoever none so if you take that out of the scope out of the equation the team is going to spend zero time on the second second gameplay on missiles on controls on vehicle tuning whatever and let's see how that went so has anybody played this game it's the soft launch in a few countries right now it's a what we refer to as the new spy master so this is the basic gameplay of spy master that we started with so there's a little map and this multiple continents but there's also like just a few cities in every map and

you can unlock more more cities and then when you click on the city you get this view where you have this sort of a mission and the only thing you do in a mission is you allocate which agent is going to do which job and then you press go and there's timers so agent allocation and timer that's your second second gameplay which skip it totally just have a timer and then we added more more modes when we first kind of her happy okay this is like a nice baseline layer but since you're all is waiting for something what if we add something that is instant so you also want to have things that happen immediately so we added instant raise but still the same idea i'm going to pick an agent something happens pick an agent something i was picking edges you lose you win kind of situation think of it a little bit like a casino so if you

enter a casino it's very easy to operate any machine or go to any table and play you're not driving is sort of luke diving into a mode where you spend three hours learning the game at a casino the idea is that you have a rich experience because you have so many slot machines for instance rather than having a one very complex slot machine so here this is a very simple fast game mode the instant rates are very simple fast game mode and sustain the metagame all the time as a player you basically don't leave the metagame talk about collectibles we have over 300 agents 3 upgrade paths per agent we soft launch this game 200 agents after five months of development and we've added 100 more during soft launch we have 30

cities to upgrade path and this creates like a very very large grinding roadmap for the player and all the agents are unique as well then looking at the social side of things we have a couple of things that were introduced very very early in the game I mean in develop in development so first is the chat very standard thing I mean a lot of games have a chat but it was established very early so they could move on to the more ambitious social things requests and donations kind of you know still a little bit standard thing but then they start innovating on stuff because we wanted to come up with fresh new things so rescue missions if my agent gets captured you people can see it as a mission in the guild feed you can join to rescue my agent and I get my guy back you get some rewards we want to look at this system of how can my actions create

more missions for the other players and content and another example of this like a innovation in the metagame side would be the laboratory so you don't have your own laboratory there's a shared yield laboratory that we can together build but i have my own scientists so i can then send my scientists to work in the laboratory so we were able to move really quickly to the features that we really work felt that these would be the unique things in the game and we were able to put them in very quickly try them out with real users and so on pretty short on time here so just going to go to the results now so comparing these two project with by putting the metagame first we were able to create a very rich method game feature set and iterate very quickly without any burden of like you know everything is

interrelated in the second second gameplay the inventory inventory obviously very very big compared to the which state game so 20 times bigger or so and we go to soft launch of metrics much much faster so winter state took more than a year to get the soft launch this one in five months and what does that mean as a result basically better everything so k factor for instance around point six point seven repurchase rate sixty percent so if you make one purchase sixty percent make a second purchase and so on there's more stuff to buy it was more interesting stuff and you could imagine things you will do with the stuff in in the Medicaid side [Music]

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