End Game Content: Trials of Osiris

It has been quite some time since I last wrote about Destiny. Today I wanted to discuss some of its end game content. Specifically, why Trials of Osiris is brilliant and what unexpected effects it has had on the community.

A little bit of back-story:

Destiny has taken a lot of flack recently because of the few ways to gain the highest-level gear. The best way is the Raid Challenge modes, where players do a particularly difficult boss encounter a certain way to be rewarded with extra max level loot. But this doesn’t always last for players. The difficulty with having the end game content being against computers is that people can out smart them. There are endless strategy guides and how-tos, which walk the players through the entire raid. This makes it considerably easier to finish when they know exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen.

Then there is Trials of Osiris. Trials came about in the House of Wolves Expansion pack (the second expansion pack) in early 2015. With it came one of the most difficult challenges in Destiny; getting to the Lighthouse.

Let’s dive into Trials:

The way Trials works is the player must win nine games of Elimination against other players before losing three. If they do so, they will be rewarded with some pretty cool gear. But if the player makes it through the nine matches without losing any games, they have gone “Flawless” and get to travel to the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse is a kind of social area where only the best Destiny players have access.

Side note: Elimination works via pitting two teams of three players against one another. Each player only has one life. Upon dying though, they can be revived by their teammates after a cool down timer. Every time a player dies, the cool down timer is extended. The team wins a round when all three members of the opposing team are dead simultaneously for three seconds. Teams need to win five rounds to successfully win the match. Once a team has reached three victories, the next round heavy ammo will spawn on the map in two locations, causing both teams to do a mad dash for the heavy that round.

So why is Trials of Osiris so special?

While computers act a certain way every single time, other players don’t. Trials pitting players against one another serves as an interesting experience because it is always different. There is no definitive “ This is how you do this and you will win”, because for any strategy your team might think up, the opposing team might think of a way to counter. Additionally, because this goes on for at least five rounds total, (the game can last a max of nine rounds if each team wins four) teams must change their strategy. Unlike the computer enemies in raids, humans learn and adapt.

Trials are only available Friday-Monday, and each week is a different map. Players who are really good at one map won’t necessarily always have the advantage every week. It’s impossible to get really good at Trials without knowing all the maps. But even if the player doesn’t know the map, they have time throughout the weekend to learn it.

What about the end game content?

Well, we know that games get boring when players run out of goals to achieve. Whether that goal is to complete all the levels, or get that one piece of exotic gear, they need a carrot on a stick or they typically get bored. The Lighthouse is that carrot. And there is no easy way to get there. By pitting players against one another in a weekly competition, Bungie has taken a lot of the work out of having to create new content. Did I mention you are paired up against players who typically have the same amount of wins as you? So the game automatically scales in difficulty just based on player’s survival. They have successfully created gatekeepers to this legendary area out of the community.

The other goal they have achieved with Trials is teamwork in PvP. All of the end game content in Destiny requires that players go in with teams. And players won’t be able to win without communicating. Due to the nature of elimination and the high stakes gameplay, the best teams are constantly communicating by calling out enemy locations to one another. This communication in turn brings people closer together, thus giving players more people to play with and ultimately Destiny retaining players.

And now, for the ugly.

When Trials originally came out teams would be paired up randomly against other teams as long as there was a good network connection. While this was nice because we didn’t have to worry so much about lag, players who are playing their first round could be paired against a vetted team, which has gone 7 and 0. This resulted, as you can imagine, in many unbalanced fights.

In the most recent months, Bungie has been attempting to pair players in as fair matches as often as possible. This is why the matches now are based on how many victories teams have rather than connection. This resulted in a lot of bad connections and lag, especially in later fights as there were less teams to be paired up against.

While they had the best intentions with pairing players based on wins against one another, it doesn’t help much when your team has been paired up against another team which has already gone flawless and has the ridiculously powerful Lighthouse weapons. So there is still an imbalance there. I feel as if non-flawless players shouldn’t be getting paired up in the first couple rounds against players who have already gone flawless.

Sidenote: I feel as if it is important for me to mention these weapons do not make the players invincible. It’s just that no one else has access to them until they have gone flawless and that they are incredibly powerful. (I’m looking at you Doctrine of Passing (Adept)). Players can get a version of them at 7 wins but, from what I understand, the flawless versions don’t just look different, they also pack a meatier punch.

Unfortunately, Trials of Osiris going flawless creates a bit of an Elitist mentality inside the community when discussing Destiny PvP. This mentality really hurts new players because players who have gone flawless will very rarely play with/ talk to players who have not gone flawless. Just take a look at Destiny’s LFG (Looking for Group) on the Bungie website.

“DOING FLAWLESS RUN

MUST BE 315 LIGHT

MUST HAVE YEAR 2 FLAWLESS EMBLEM

MUST HAVE A K/D OF 1.3 OR HIGHER

MESSAGE ###### FOR INVITE”

or

something like this: 

​or this:

as a result there is this guy:

 I'm pretty sure this is against Bungie's terms and conditions. 

This makes the barrier of entry an absolute nightmare for players who are getting into Trials.

Sidenote: Due to Trials having such a high learning curve it is very difficult for players to get started. They can do the trials bounties (6 a week) which give them a % chance to recieve Trials gear but any Destiny player will agree, the random drops are useless more often than not. When playing at that level new players wont stand a chance until they have a team which can work incredibly well together and the gear to back them up. 

While this is an issue with the players playing the game (and not with the game itself), the players acting this way is a direct result of the difficulty of the game. Unfortunately, this community will turn off a considerable amount of players who will never get to experience this content because of it.

Sidenote: The raid was no better when it first came out. But over time players have become more confident in their abilities and the LFG posts aren’t as bad. Whereas Trials has never let up, from what I’ve seen it just gets worse. Even though I don't blame them for not wanting the best of the best on their team (everyone does). There is very little in place to truely prepare players or to get advanced players to help out newer players. This is problimatic because in the rest of the high level content it seems like the most popular way to get through a tough section is to have a higher level guardian help out and teach newer players. 

Trials of Osiris is brilliant. Pitting players against one another for some of the best loot in the game really has made it much more difficult and rewarding when the player finally reaches the Lighthouse. This tension of the matches and how rewarding it feels to actually win is truly intoxicating. But the poor match making and the elitist community it is creating is making it difficult for a lot of players to experience this content. I hope this week I got you thinking about alternate ways to create end game content by simply changing the rules and using the community to your advantage. Also, I hope you thought at least a little bit about how difficult team events will effect the community. Thanks for sticking around.

I’ll see you next week,

Scott

If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.

The Illusion of Danger

First a little backstory on the game:

Rolling Sky is a goal runner. The player must navigate through a course while moving at a constant speed. They move their finger across the bottom of the screen to have the ball adjust its location along the x-axis. If the player makes it to the end of the track, they win.

I was playing Rolling Sky this week and I noticed something in the second level.

In the second level, you encounter these hammers which are swinging in a circle. They swing off the platforms and then back around to take up some space on a platform. If the player touches these hammers, they instantly die. The first one the player encounters swings inward when they pass it thus narrowing the path the player can travel on.

Then the next three pairs of hammers swing outward when the player passes them. I found this to be peculiar because the other three then can’t actually have an effect on the player as they are swinging over nothing and the player would have already died if they had traveled over to that space.

To clarify, this wasn’t the first time a player encountered these hammers. Upon reviewing the previous level, they were taught about them by the very first one encountered swinging outward then the next one swinging inward. So the player has time to learn how they function and prepare themselves for it.

We know that typically in games when players are introduced to a new threat, they often have a chance to observe it and try to figure out how to tackle the threat.  This can be in the form of scoping out a Dark Souls boss and dodging their attacks to learn their tells, or as simple as seeing some enemies attack something else in the distance. From that moment on, the players figure out how to take care of the problem. By solving the problem, they are able to refine their methods and become more skilled at fighting this type of enemy or completing this type of task.

But in our case, the hammers are harmless. The ones that swing out have no effect on the difficulty of the game.

That is of course unless the Designers intended to use them as a tactic to make the player freak out or distract them. This could be their goal; by psyching the player out, they have surely ensured their doom. 

We see something similar to this throughout these levels as well with the falling platforms.

The vast majority of these have no purpose, aside from making a cool ping noise to go with the music, since the player is moving at a constant rate and unable to stay on them for long enough for them to fall anyways. But interestingly enough, we see larger platforms later on that can actually let the player fall.

Here we can see the player touching the platform and the larger platform falling away, creating obstacles in the future which the player may not have accounted for.

The falling platforms fall into the realm of standard game design by showing the player how to deal with something before introducing them to actual danger. The hammers changing back and forth give us an interesting conundrum. Could going slightly against the standard rules of game design be used to throw off players? I believe so. Because there are so many excellent games out there that teach players how to think and solve problems in games, this could be an interesting idea to make a game feel fresh, although it can be difficult to implement. While the developers of Rolling Sky used this expertly, the rules of design are standard because they work.

Side note: I’d like to take a second to talk about the controls. Because the object the player is controlling is a ball, this could have gone a thousand different awful ways. (Tilt controls GAH!!!) But because the ball is tethered to the location of the player’s finger, it makes for an excellent experience navigating around tight corners.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration of the illusion of danger. I hope this week I got you thinking about ways you can break the rules in your games to make your games feel fresher.

I’ll see you guys next week,

Scott

If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.

Neko Atsume: My Collection of Kitties

This week, we’ll take a look into a very interesting App: Neko Atsume. We’ll talk about how it works, where is the fun, and whether or not it is a game.

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How does it work?

In Neko Atsume, you decorate a room and attempt to attract cats. You can do this by setting out different “Goodies” (boxes, balls, bags, etc.) to attract them. Each cat has a favorite toy, and when you set up their favorite toy, they might stop by to play with it. But toys aren’t enough for the cats. You need to feed them as well if you want them to stop by. Once you’ve set some food and items out, cats will begin to stop by and visit. After they leave, they will leave the player with a gift , either silver fish or premium gold fish. These are used to buy more items to put out for the cats.

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Here we can see the placement options for goodies as well as food.

Food mechanic:
Players need to stop by a couple times a day and set out more food if they want to continually attract cats. The cats can visit while the player is not in the app. If they do, they will still leave a gift for the player, but the player will have missed seeing them.

Side note: This is a nice little addition because if the player doesn’t get the reward of getting to see them, they will still get something.

Every time a cat visits, it will eat a little bit of the food. Upon all the food being eaten, no more cats will visit until the bowl is full. Because there is a free food bowl called “Thrifty Bits”, running out of money never becomes a problem.

Side note: So the food is like a timer. After so many minutes, a player will need to return to the app and refill the bowl if they wish to progress and receive more rewards. Because the food has no visible timer for the player to track, the player will need to check back more often to see more cats.

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For anyone still confused on how this game’s systems work, this flow chart might help.

Chart made in Lucidchart

So, where’s the fun?
In Neko Atsume, there are multiple kinds of rewards. I like to call these direct and indirect rewards. Direct rewards are something that is given to the player that’s blatantly a reward. In Neko Atsume’s case, this would be the gold and silver fish the player receives from visiting cats.

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Indirect rewards are more like cinemas, things that are rewarded to the players that are solely for their enjoyment. They don’t necessarily have an effect on a game’s progress, with the exception of story. In Neko Atsume’s case, this would be like getting to see the cats do absolutely adorable things.

Like hide in a box!

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Or play with a ball!

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Or even get their little fluffy butt stuck in a tube!

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These moments where the player gets to see the cats be adorable is the reason players continue to come back. The direct rewards are more of a means to an end. They are in place to support the adorable cat reward. These rewards, combined with the hidden food timer, makes sure the player has a nice steady stream of cats to enjoy, all the while not letting them see all of them too soon and instead forcing the player to come back.

Side note: I’m pretty sure the developers knew this is where the fun came from and wanted players to be able to revisit the adorable moments that they have already experienced. So they put in a camera feature where players could take pictures of the cats and put them in photo albums. They also gave them names and stats to help sell the attachment players might feel for the cats. So while the player could have a goal to fill up this album, there is no reward for doing so aside from their own satisfaction.

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My album is on its way!

So is this a game or what?
Typically, games have a win/lose condition. That’s kind of what makes them special. So I’d have to say no, it isn’t a game. That doesn’t diminish how much fun it is. It’s more like an interactive toy, because even if you fill up all your photo albums, the game doesn’t end, and if you do nothing, the game doesn’t end either.

In the end, Neko Atsume is an excellent app which is great at wasting a few seconds out of the hour. By giving players a variety of rewards, drip-feeding them new cats, and forcing their engagement through the food mechanic, they find themselves returning to this app again and again. I hope I got you thinking about how to make simple apps, which aren’t necessarily games but are still enjoyable.

Next week, we will be returning to our regularly scheduled posts/updates.

I’ll see you guys then,

Scott

If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.

Scott Fine Game Design 2015 Year in Review!

In this past year,  I started this blog to focus on game design and my own projects. Now that the year is coming to an end, I’d like to take look back on a few of my favorite posts.

Specifically, I want to highlight three game analysis/postmortems which I believe are my best articles of the year, plus one honorable mention that I felt should be included. I also want to highlight three posts about my personal projects and processes which I found to be enjoyable. If you have yet to check these out, I highly recommend them because I think they are excellent!

1. NFL RUSH Heroes & Rivals Postmortem

In this post, I sat down with an old friend who also worked on the NFL RUSH apps, and talked about what went wrong and what went right. It highlights some of the work we did and is easily the most popular of my posts this year!

Read it here!

2. In-depth look at - King’s Fall Raid series

I know I am technically cheating by counting these three as one post. In this series, I break down three of the toughest sections of Destiny’s King’s Fall Raid. I explored how the player learns to defeat each section, and eventually how they beat the raid.

Read it here!

3. Two Dots, Too Charming

A mobile game which captured my heart. My goal for this post was to understand why it was so pleasant. What are the core mechanics? How do they use the free to play model? What makes it so charming? What can we learn from this game?

Read it here!

Honorary Mention: Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future

“Freeblade is a lot of things, and I could gush about so many things it does right, but today I want to stick to the controls. Controls in iOS games typically fall into one of two categories: either they are intuitive and easy to use, or an absolute mess and frustrating.” Excerpt from
Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future

Read it here!

Personal Projects:
In my personal projects posts, I went for a less formal tone and more of a casual blog style than the analysis posts. I hope you enjoy them!

1. Choose Your Own Adventure

Here i’m going to walk you through a bit of my process. This is in no way how you should necessarily do things; this is just to show how I sometimes do things. I also discuss what I did programming-wise to bring this prototype to life.

Read it here!

2. Blog: Diamond Raven Games & Haunted Hop not quite a post mortem

Here I talk briefly about the process of bringing “Haunted Hop” to life, and eventually to the iOS app store.

Read it here!

3. Prototyping… I love it.

“I like to prototype. It helps me to figure out my thoughts and test the game mechanics to see if they are actually fun. Also I don’t have beautiful colors or great looking assets to cloud my judgment. It allows me to focus solely on the mechanics.” Excerpt from Prototyping… I love it.

Read it here!

Last but not least I’d like to thank you. By reading and giving me feedback on my posts, whether through conversations over coffee or in the comments section, I learn more about what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I’ve improved because of your feedback. And even if you didn’t get the chance to give me feedback directly, I’d like to thank you as well for using your time to read my ramblings. Thank you and I hope you had an excellent 2015!

I’ll see you guys next week,

Scott

Flappy Bird: Exploring Fairness & Fun in Games

Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get very different responses when asking, “Is Flappy Bird a good game?” From a monetization standpoint, it is an excellent game. Last I heard, the guy who made it was making 50K a day. From a game design perspective, I’ve heard a lot of, “It’s not fun. It just makes me want to pull my hair out.” Today we are going to explore why so many designers hate Flappy Bird. Additionally, we’ll try to figure out where the fun lies.

“I hate Flappy Bird.”

These words I’ve heard countless times. But when asked why, I usually get the response “It’s just not fun”. Well why isn’t it fun?

For the three of you who have never played Flappy Bird, let me elaborate on how the game works. The player taps the screen to accelerate their bird upward quickly in a short burst. After the burst from tapping is completed, gravity begins to take its toll and drags the bird down. This results in the player tapping the screen over and over again to attempt to keep the bird airborne. The player gains points via successfully navigating between pipes. Every pair of pipes cleared nets them a point. The pipes appear at various heights. If the bird touches any of the pipes on the screen, it falls to its doom and the game ends. Players earn medals based on how many points they earn.

·      Bronze = 10 pts

·      Silver = 20 pts

·      Gold = 30 pts

·      Platinum = 40 pts

At the ‘Game Over’ screen, the player can view their game ranking on a leaderboard or play again.

And that’s Flappy Bird.

So why do designers hate it? My guess is lack of depth. The game doesn’t really change as time goes on. It doesn’t ramp up and never increases in difficulty. No upgrades. No progression. It doesn’t speed up. There are no strategies. Just take deep breaths and focus. Really, there’s not much of anything.  It’s incredibly shallow. Arcade games from the 70s have more depth. It’s not fun to them because there is no variety. There is no challenge.

Side note: I'm not speaking for all designers when I say this. Just most of the ones who I have spoken to about this topic typically state their dislike for the game.

No challenge? The hell are you talking about this game is tough!

I’m sorry, that was poor wording. Let me explain. While the game in itself is difficult, there is very little reward. In something like Final Fantasy, the players will be rewarded by the feeling of power, seeing more of the story, and beautiful cinemas to watch as they progress through the game. They will defeat more powerful enemies and solve puzzles. But here, there is no reason to continue playing aside from beating your score. (Or your friend’s score) Within maybe ten seconds, players have already seen all that the game has to offer. This leaves no reason to continue playing. This brings us to the genius of Flappy Bird.

It’s fair. Because there are no surprises or variables which could change, aside from the pipe height (And even then the player can see it well in advance), there is no situation where the player could say, “Well that’s not my fault, the game cheated!” This helps to push the player to play again. They begin to think “Well, I made it through the first five. I’m pretty sure I can make it through one more.” So they decide to try again. When this concept is combined with the game’s simplicity and ease of getting back into the game, it makes it easy for the player to try just one more time. The player literally just needs to tap the play button from the game over screen.

Side note: The just one more try phenomenon is something hardcore gamers know oh too well. As well as the just one more level, and just five more minutes. But thanks to mobile gaming, a broader more causal audience can experience it too.

But this still doesn’t answer the question: Where’s the fun?

This brings us to the bigger question. Where is the fun in Flappy Bird? Before we get into that, let’s talk about fun. What is fun? This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. That’s because the concept of fun is completely subjective. Take Destiny for an example. There are various points of fun. The players can chase loot, explore the world, chase achievements, become the best in Crucible, outsmart the A.I. and defeat all PvE challenges, complete the grimoire, etc. In a game like Angry Birds, the player’s fun comes from figuring out each level’s puzzle and progressing through the game. Maybe even scoring higher than their friends. But you get the idea.

Side note: My personal fun in Destiny comes from exploring the world and spending time doing challenging activities with my friends.

Every single person gets something different out of every single game. This is where knowing your audience comes into play. When people have a common view of what fun is they can be grouped into an audience. When designing a racing game for the Forza audience, the developers are not going to put in Mario Kart physics and controls because their audience wouldn’t enjoy it.

So where is the fun in Flappy Bird?

My gut reaction is the difficulty. The game is insanely hard, and some people might enjoy the challenge. Unfortunately, the fun is short lived because there is not a lot of depth involved in Flappy Bird. So why do people keep playing a game which isn’t necessarily fun?

Friends.

The same thing that is keeping the Destiny community alive (and many other video game communities) kept Flappy Bird going for so long. One person tried it, failed miserably, and then their friend tried it, and people just began to pass it around. Then they started to compete with each other. People began posting their scores online to social media. It’s kind of funny that a game which lacks any depth and any assistance to connect to social media would do so well.

Side note: We can take a brief moment to think about Dark Souls, another incredibly difficult game. But while Dark Souls is difficult, it offers so much more. A combat system which feels rewarding to master, a world to explore, lore and a story to uncover, and so on.  This gives it considerably more replayability and engages players for longer periods of time. This also appeals to a larger audience. I played Dark Souls initially because of the fantasy setting. I wanted to explore it and learn about the creatures I would encounter through the story. I fell in love with it because of the lore/story telling, combat, exploration and co-op systems. But Dark Souls will be for another time. I know I’m going to get some heat because technically Flappy Bird has access to a larger audience. But this is because of the device it is on, not because it has various hooks to grab players in and retain them.

The only other reasons I can think of as to why people kept playing it would be the same reason people stare at car accidents. They can’t help it. A sense of morbid curiosity if you will. How terribly will I fail? Or how terribly will my friend fail?

Or

It’s a great time waster. If we think about the average engagement time for players on iOS games, we know that it is very short. This game gets players in instantly, and as soon as they lose, it is really easy to get back in again. The entire game is designed around players having the minimum amount of down time. If players can get back into the game incredibly quickly and are constantly engaged throughout, that leaves them with no time to leave the app. It might just be the perfect mix of short gameplay and minimum downtime.

Side note: From my own analytics I’ve been running, typical engagement is less than ten minutes.

Looking at this game helped me to realize that maybe a fair game isn’t necessarily a fun game. People play games for a multitude of reasons. Some like them for the story, others to feel powerful. But I’ve never heard anyone say “I play this game because it is fair!” Maybe someone might enjoy Flappy Bird because they want a challenge, but endless games quickly wear out their welcome. Especially if there is nothing to unlock. With this post I hope I got you to think about where the fun in games are, and where is the fun in your game?

I’ll be off for the holidays for the next two weeks, so I will not be posting a long analysis or updates on prototypes during that time. If I can find some time though I’d like to try a shorter, more bite sized, “Bonus Round” post. I’ll return January 5th. I hope you have a Happy Holidays!

I’ll see you guys next year,

Scott

If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.