Reality is a Game

Game thinking from Adam Clare

Category: BusinessPage 9 of 44

A Saga About Crushing Candy

by

On 20/11/2013

In Business, Design, Psychology

Candy Crush Saga is a game that you have already played or have heard about because all your friends are playing it. Half a billion people have installed the game and seems to show no signs of slowing down. By the way, the game is only one year old.

How has this game got so successful when it mirrors previous games?

A lot of has to do with the look and feel of the game (it’s really well polished) and their marketing strategy works well with the game itself. Forbes has broken down five marketing reasons the game has succeeded.

Scarcity Increases Desire
Most games let you play as often and as long as you want. After all, to arbitrarily limit players would be annoying, right? As it turns out, the limits Candy Crush players have to endure are one of the key ingredients in its addictive power. Players get just five lives before they have to wait 30 minutes. Some spots in the game force a player to wait until the next day.

 

There are other reasons the game has succeeded and the brilliant minds at Overthinking It have tackled Candy Crush Saga. There, the author criticizes the game for not being game, but also that it’s more like a JRPG than anything else. Confused? You should be, but reading the article will take care of that, here’s a choice quote from it:

And suddenly the half-bored, trance-like state in which I play most rounds of Candy Crush these days makes all the sense in the world. And although Candy Crush has been compared, unfavorably, to a slot machine, I realized something else: in that dogged persistence actually will alter the odds in your favor, Candy Crush is less like an actual slot machine and more like the game that slot machine addicts think they are playing. “This machine is gonna pay out soon. I can tell.” And it actually will! Well, not pay out, exactly. But it’ll let me win. Brightly flashing lights, bells that go bingley-bongley-boop. Endorphins. All that jazz.

This makes the game come across as addictive and sure enough there is no shortage of people who claim they are addicted to Candy Crush Saga. Over at Macleans they have a Q&A with Tommy Palm, one the brains behind the game.

Q: Do you believe this game is addictive?

A: It’s optimized for fun. Players go back to the game because they enjoy doing it. In that sense, I don’t think you can compare it with addictions from other medical definitions. The social component is really important for longevity of the game. We see that with other games we have, too: Bubble Witch Saga was launched two years ago, and it’s still in the top 15 of most popular Facebook games. People continue playing it for a really long time.

 

Thanks to Nick for Overthinking It.

Two Different Postmortems On Two Indie Games

by

On 06/11/2013

In Business, Design, Video Games

Postmortems are always helpful in understand how other game developers work and what issues they brush up against. It can be very illuminating when multiple studios run into the same problems. They are also useful if you’re thinking of getting into the games industry to see if those problems are even ones you want to tackle.

The great folks at DrinkBox are always looking to be better than they were the previous year. Chris Harvey, from DrinkBox wrote a great postmortem on Guacamelee! for Indie Games. It goes into great detail and address many things that arise during production of a game.

Their art style for the game evolved from a cutesy look to a more adult look, with (surpassingly) the tech team making a first pass at some of the art.

thanks gamasutra!

While this success was naturally a result of the talents of the art team, it also depended on a cooperative back-and-forth between the art, tech, and production departments. In particular, over the course of Guacamelee! we changed how effects were developed, counter-intuitively putting the development more into the hands of the tech team and then letting the art team direct refinement.

He even shares internal issues that any company runs into when it grows. The studio had an informal work structure which works quite well for small teams but inevitable breaks when the company grows.

During Guacamelee!, we encountered difficulty scaling this approach. Some new members of the team struggled to find their place alongside peers when working without a clear authority structure. Lacking the confidence to navigate disagreements constructively, in frustration these team members sometimes ignored decisions or emotionally disengaged from certain tasks. As a result, we’ve begun to put a clearer authority structure in place for the team, and we’ve become more aware of the need to monitor personalities and provide ways for people to make their concerns known.

For a much shorter read, check out this reflection on the release of The Stanley Parable. This quote sums up their overarching message:

[If] you make the marketing material interesting on its own, it’s irrelevant whether it “sells” your game. Our focus was always on creating content that was on its own fun for people to experience and to be a part of, with essentially 0% of the design aimed at trying to get the game to sell.

Page 9 of 44

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén