Clash of Clans - polish

SC spent a lot of time polishing CoC. They launched the game in beta only in Canada for exactly one month. I have never heard of such process for other iOS games. As a result, the game has been praised as well-presented and easy to play, with a smooth, clear interface and animations that are packed with character.

The depth of CoC's mechanics is a much-argued topic. When the game came out in mid 2012, a reviewer argued that the actual strategic elements of gameplay are far too lightweight and hands-off to satisfy fans of more traditional strategy games. But another praised CoC's unbelievably high replay value thanks to its varied troops, and distinctive performances of all defensive buildings, walls and traps that generates infinite possibilities for battles. The core of the argument comes from the fact that once a troop is deployed, the player is not in control of it anymore: the unit just behaves according to its AI behavior until it dies or the battle times out (after 3 minutes). In the first few weeks of play, CoC battles feel not precise and even frustrating. But then some players realize that battles are simply about unleashing a horde of troops to overwhelm the enemy. Some even go so far as saying that even a moron with no strategy at all will advance in the game with time. It is true: in the first month, the mechanics are so forgiving that some adults even let their infant playing CoC for fun.

But after a few months of play, I realized that no two units or buildings have the same function or effectiveness in battle. For example, among meat shield units, Barbarians are the cheapest and fastest to train, Giants also fast to train but more costly, and Golems the slowest and most expensive. But these units are actually very different in practice: Barbarians target any building, whereas Giants and Golems only defensive buildings. Giants have five times more DPS per housing space than Golems, and therefore can pierce through walls, whereas Golems need wall breakers to open the path. Even though the most powerful units are usually the most expensive and slowest to train, the behavior of the units in battle allow for dozens of attack strategies. So the game is essentially deceivingly simple, and its complexity grows with time. In my opinion it's great for newcomers and loyal players alike.

A lot of tiny details contribute to the great play experience. For example, the Dragon generates a lot of excitement when it becomes available at TH7. Players can donate troops to each other through their Clan Castle. Dragons can only fit in a Clan Castle level 3 or above. The Clan Castle reaches level 3 at TH6. So if I am TH6, even though I can not produce dragons, I get the thrill of using one through my TH7 friends.

The game also receives patches with new content, bug fixes, and balance tweaks roughly every 50 days. An observer suggested in September 2012 that SC implements super units, in which players emotionally invest to, because these units sell like pop corn in a movie theater. Heroes got introduced in January 2013. Unlike other units, which disappear after being used in battle, heroes stay after a battle and only need to be recharged after a battle. Heroes also provided a sink for dark elixir, a game currency introduced in the same patch.

In my experience, players were not very emotionally invested in their heroes. Getting a permanent hero for the first time generates the same craze as training a new disposable troop such as the dragon. The craze fades off quickly, and heroes are just a way to loot more gold. This lack of emotional attachment may be due to heroes being human-looking. If they were pets with accessories, players may be more emotionally invested.

While the base game was very polished when it hit the app store, each patch released so far has contained a couple bugs. Many of these bugs are graphical and directly observable when launching the game. Clearly, the QA for patches could be more thorough. Moreover, the aesthetic choices for buildings follow too many different styles: lava, electric, diamond, and so on. Players have complained about villages becoming ugly.

Solstice Arena UI

Lots of things to say about the UI of Solstice Arena (SA), an ipad MOBA by Zynga.

Gameplay of Solstice Arena

SA is a traditional MOBA adapted for the ipad. Players first pick a character among the dozen available. Characters can get various advantages by selecting/buying a potion before the game starts. Matches are 3 vs 3, and typically last from 5 to 10 minutes. One team starts on the left, the other on the right.

Players can buy equipment using coins, which they gain automatically at a rate of around 1 per second, as well as by collecting a chest standing in the middle of the map (100 coins at once per character in the team). Players also amass energies to increase their power. All the controls are based on the player's taps. Players can also send signals such as "retreat" or "attack this target" to each other.

There is no character leveling within a match: during a match, a character becomes stronger only by collecting energies and buying equipment. Completing a battle rewards a character with XP, and the player with valor points. Valor points can be used to buy characters or potions, or level up characters without fighting with them. When characters level up, the player can improve one of that character's skills. Gems are the in-game currency bought with real money.

UI problems

To get from the main screen to a game with 2 other human players takes 9 taps and about a minute of waiting when I'm not doing anything but watching a blank screen. Plus it's 10 to 20% of a match's duration! This is way too long...

Let's look at some of these 9 screens and critique them.

• 75% of the screen, in width and height, are taken by an ad.
• The left icons all have a blue background with some swords, and it takes a few seconds to distinguish them.
• The Redeem Code button is next to my nickname and level, which is itself next to my valor points, my gems, and my friends. Quite a mess.
• Communities keep the game alive - and the giant ad to join the forum says that too. Then why is the Friends button so small? Why do I need to tap the button to see which of my friends are online and I can play with?
• Logout button: Zynga has decided to not use the iOS's built-in game center, but rather forces players to authenticate through their own servers. Hence the need to log in... As a result, I can't invite the friends I'm playing with in other iOS games.

• It took me a week to spot the button to invite friends to join a fight.
• Too much information: when I'm going to fight, I do not care about the price in gems or valor points of a character. I should not have to scroll to pick Kyra, which I have unlocked and reached max level (15) with. In fact, all characters should fit on one screen.
• There is no difference between the "previous screen" button (left arrow at the top left of the screen) and the top-right corner cross. Why having both?

• There is so much information in such small font that I did not notice the potion slot in the middle of the screen.
• If "one potion is always free", why not selecting it by default and save me two clicks that I ALWAYS will do, unless I forget?

• Why displaying the small picture, and not rotating/animating the full 3D model like in the previous screen?
• Play tip: good.
• 30-second waiting time for a 5-minute match is way too much.

• The ready check is here only to check that players did not leave within the 30 seconds (or more) that they were in the queue. If you reduce the time in queue, you may not need the ready check anymore.
• If one of the 3 players does not click within 10 seconds, the whole match is cancelled, all players return at the end of the queue, and wait for another 30 seconds. The players who ready-checked should be sent to the head of the queue instead.

• My character has 100 sun for 0% cooldown reduction (what is the point of sun, then?), and 10 moon for 3.51 movement speed (then why is my character aligned with sun?). I was expecting the other way. I guess it is thanks to the fury potion, but it is quite unclear.
• Exit button is not a red cross, and is not in the top right corner.
• The head equipment bubble could target my character's head, but it's instead targeting his belly. Why? Because there is actually a much smaller and quasi transparent model superposed over my character's pelvis.

• Why is the reason I'm reporting not next to the player I'm reporting? It looks like the reason is common to both players...
• The reporting window/box does not have to overlay the victory screen. The reporting could take place in the victory screen itself.
• When reporting a player, I only see his name and the name of his character. I should also see what his avatar looked like, instead of having to remember it. I could also see some stats about that character (eg number of kills or time spent in the base). Recognition rather than recall.

The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

Bottom-up game design

Existing definitions

Adams defined bottom-up game design in 2004 as turning a simulation or a real-life mechanism into a game. It assumes that any process that is subtle or interesting to program is also going to be interesting to play with. If the simulation has too many variables, many of them end up being useless, and this results in possible dominant strategies and the game being dull.

Lopes and Kuhnen redefined bottom-up game design in 2007, as applying a particularly fun gameplay verb or mechanic, complementing it with the appropriate setting, content and story. Developers think first about the elementary game actions, called verbs, that the player can execute (move, attack, ...) and then about the aesthetics (fantasy universe, ...). Examples are games in the Doom series, which were built barely as excuses for the brutal, over-the-top shooting gameplay; the oppressing universe and mood simply fit well with the gameplay.

In 2010, Deleon focused more on the medium constraints with his definition: concept inspired by or chosen partly by its form of representation. For instance, Bubble Bobble is about shooting a ball into balls of similar color, and the little dragons or fruits are merely decorations. Same for Bejewelled. Bottom-up designed games also include games made for particular platforms with limited hardware (like Bogost's games for the Atari 2600).

More theory: ludemes

Ludeme was a term coined by Berloquin or Dawkins in the early 1970s, as a portmanteau of ludic meme, because a ludeme can be found in many (classes of) games. Ludemes are described by Parlett as conceptual elements of the game, most typically equivalent to its "rules" of play. For example, whereas the material piece shaped like a horse and designated "knight" is a component of the game, the distinctively skewed move of a knight is a ludeme of the class "rule of movement". But other types of ludemes also exist. For example, the name, referend and associated connotations of "knight" - those of a chivalric courtier - may be said to constitute a thematic ludeme.

At GDC 2005, Koster presented his vision of a grammar of gameplay, referring a lot to ludemes. For Koster, ludemes are atomic mechanics with at least 2 possible outcomes (e.g. moving a Checker piece to capture, prepare, or force the opponent to capture (which is actually a kind of preparation)), among which at least one is failure (even if failure only means closing some of the player's opportunity doors). Synonyms of ludemes are: verbs (Crawford), choices (Meier), or conflict. Each ludeme involves a UI action (e.g. pressing button). In terms of complexity, Chess is more complicated than Checkers because each of the 6 types of Chess pieces has its own movement and capture ludemes, while all Checker tokens have the same ludemes.

Bottom-up game design in practice

As Lopes and Kuhnen pointed out, designing games with a top-down approach is somewhat of a dark art when it's time for the designer to bridge the gap between the high-level concept (e.g. in terms of experience, emotions and feelings targeted to the player) and the routine tasks of the player (e.g. drawing a card, moving their avatar or attacking). Current game design textbooks such as Adams' Fundamentals or Schell's Book of Lenses, putting forward player-centricity, suggest a top-down approach by focusing on the experience the entire game should convey to the player.

But a player-centric bottom-up approach is also possible. I'm trying here to provide prescriptive rather than proscriptive steps. In the bottom-up process, the designer should ask the following questions:

• What are the elementary actions the player can do? (define the ludemes)
• How can these actions be fun? (feeling of latent power, fiero, schadenfreude, aesthetic pleasure, ...)
• What are the transitions between these actions? (for the ludeme "roll a dice", it is when the dice is rolling)
• How fun are the transitions? (surprise, feeling of progression)
• Sanity checks: how do the actions fit together as a whole? (pointing to shoot in FPS should not be followed by a dice roll, the intense mechanical ludemes of Doom should be matched with horror-aesthetics ludemes such as the lack of light, ...) Does the overall feel of the game match the feeling of all the elementary actions put together? (ludemes should add up, not negate each other)

This process is tentative, possibly flawed, and therefore feedback is most welcome.

Rules of Engagement - Pardo at GDC 2008

Pardo R. 2008, Rules of Engagement: Blizzard’s Approach to Multiplayer Game Design

A talk from Rob Pardo which was actually first delivered at GDC 2008. The talk has already been covered elsewhere. You can also find the slides with Q&A of GDC 2008. Anyway, here are my take-aways.

• Implement the multiplayer part of the game first, then the story and single-player components.
• In PVP, focus on balance, skill differentiation (e.g. reflexes for FPS, multitasking and strategic thinking for RTS, knowledge of the mechanics for both RTS and FPS, economic dominance), and ladders/ratings. For co-op games, focus on the communication between players and complementary classes. Ex: in Warcraft 3, a mine is considered 'full' when 5 peons work on it; the economic part is dumbed-down to encourage the players to focus on the micro-management of fighting units.
• Avoid differentiation on map knowledge: it's not really a skill. Instead, reveal the map but keep a fog of war (like in Starcraft 2), so that players know the flow of the map and where the resources are, and can pick their strategy accordingly.
• Everything should feel overpowered, not mediocre.
• Balance first for the expert, then for the novice.
• Balance is affected by the maths, but also by the UI (e.g. WoW's UI mods, or the possibility to select only up to 12 units in Starcraft 1 as opposed to an arbitrary large number of units in Starcraft 2), maps/level design, special effects (e.g. too much blurs the vision, cf the War of Emperium of RO set /mineffect by default to limit the visual flood of skill effects)
• Players hate loosing, hence make games shorter so that they can play more games per play session, and eventually win some.
• Reward the behaviors you want people to do/make it a bonus
• Tie art and game design together. The appearance of Heavy of Team Fortress is explicit: tough, lots of HP, and lots of damage.
• Spectatorship enables empathy with the players, cf Poker became more popular when hole cameras were introduced because the audience understands better what's going on.
• It does not make sense for warriors to cast spells, therefore they don't have mana but rather they have rage.

The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach

The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach
Zagal and Tomuro
MindTrek'10

See the PDF or the ACM page.

Primary Elements of Gameplay Aesthetics

Aesthetics cluster	Words in cluster	Description
Pacing	fast, stressful, dull, tedious	The perception of how often game events occur.
Scope	endless, vast, immense, minimal	The size of the possibility space afforded by a game.
Complexity	simple, short, complex, uncomplicated	The measure, or sense, of the number of parts in a system and how they are interrelated.
Demands	hardcore, experienced, retro, demanding	The requirements imposed upon the player by the gameplay
Cognitive Accessibility	deep, unusual, twisted, intricate,	The measure, or sense, of the opacity of a system and the challenges it poses in understanding it.
Impact	addictive, boring, overwhelming, visceral	What we feel games “do to us” when we play them, and how they make us feel.

• Analyzed nearly 400k user reviews posted before April 2009 on gamespot.com. 8k games covered by reviews from 112k users.
• 40% of user reviews contain the word gameplay
• Method: Stanford Parser to perform part-of-speech tagging. Matrix of (723 adjectives total that precede and modify the word gameplay) x (5000 most frequent words that occur before or after the adjective, ie context words, ie words that give a context to the adjective). Cells of the matrix contain number of occurrence of an adjective with a context word. Run kmeans on the matrix to obtain k=30 adjective clusters. (Compared to k=10 or 20, k=30 generated better-looking clusters). Two adjectives are similar (and put in the same cluster) if their context word distributions are similar. Then, give a name to each cluster based on the adjectives it contains.
• Only 2 clusters about narrative elements. Therefore, players have no difficulties separating the formal or mechanical aspects (game mechanics) from their narrative interpretations (representation).
• AI does not emerge as a cluster. Possible reasons: no language to describe game AI, or games AI are not sophisticated enough, or a too recently marketed topic to feature in reviews.
• Genre does not emerge as a cluster.
• Limitations: Gamespot population = 95% males, lots of colloquial words disappeared in cleaning phases.

My remarks

• A group like "fast FPS gameplay" may have been considered as "fast gameplay" because FPS is not an English adjective, and the Stanford parser only looks at English adjectives. Since genre adjectives are not English but rather specific of gamer communities (e.g. "FPS", "RTS", "JRPG", etc.), genre did not appear in clusters.
• It'd be interesting to know which game names occurred most often next to gameplay. For instance, "gameplay like Civilization" may be quite rare, but very meaningful when talking about a niche genre.
• If genre is a label of the dataset, then it could be interesting to cluster a matrix like adjectives x genre. Goal = see which adjectives are explaining most a genre.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 12: Level Design

Level design = determine level's initial conditions, pacing (stressful or calm, genre-dependent) challenges, win/loss conditions, cut scene locations, aesthetics and mood (lighting, color palette, weather, special visual and audio effects, music, ambient audio), through tools.

Level design process

1. Determine level features: events, objects, NPC
2. Plan the gameplay: layout, challenge areas, win/lose conditions. Plan also the art: textures, styles, moods, ...
3. Prototype: requires that the game engine is at least partially working. Use mockups to place triggers and document what sets triggers off (= rigging).
4. Keep reviewing (with other people) and refining the level's size, pacing, objects, triggers, NPCs, and aesthetics.
5. Hand off the level to the art team with requirements and documentation.
6. Integrate visual and audio art assets, bug fix, and tune.

Guidelines

• tutorial = included in the first levels of the actual game (not as a side) = hands-on learning. Start explaining the most used features one by one. Disable unused features to avoid confusing the player. Explain UI elements and point at them visually (blinking or glowing). Let player go back and try the tutorial examples again. Allow the tutorial to be skipped.
• vary pacing within a level
• after player surmounts resource-consuming challenges, player should be given resources to come back
• avoid things that do not make sense/inconsistencies
• scope: do not get too big, adapt levels to team's capacity
• do not show all the challenges to in one level - introduce features gradually
• know your audience
• atypical levels should be optional: either they break suspension of disbelief or the challenges are foreign to the genre, and are therefore not exciting for players who like the genre. Atypical levels should be unlockable, hidden levels, or side missions, but not in the main progression.
• inform player of short-term goals
• be clear about risks, rewards, and consequences of decisions
• reward for skill, imagination, intelligence and dedication
• reward a lot, punish a little
• The AI is here to lose
• provide multiple difficulty settings
• action games: vary the pace/players must be able to rest
• strategy games: reward planning, give advantageous locations but let the player find them
• RPG: allow character growth and player self-expression
• sports: verisimilitude
• vehicle: reward skillful maneuvers
• construction and management sims: provide interesting variety of scenarios (= initial conditions and goals)
• adventure: challenges consistent with their location and the story
• artificial life: offer a lot of interactions between creature and environment
• puzzle: give time to think

Layout patterns

Pattern	Indications
open	player's movement has no constraints
linear	works well with linear stories
parallel	works well with foldback stories, shortcuts possible
ring	mostly only for racing games
network	maze, good for explorers, hard to tell a story because the path is quite free. If all major spaces are connected, then exploration is easy: it's good for FPS deathmatches.
hub and spoke/star	start at center, challenges and rewards in branches
combination	many kinds of games!