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Similar to Breaking the Rules of Idle Game Design in Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money
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Breaking the Rules of Idle Game Design in Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money
- 1. BREAKING THE RULES OF IDLE GAMES IN Jim Wagner Producer East Side Games Dave Rohrl Owner Mobile Game Doctor LLC
- 2. DAVE ROHRL Veteran designer, producer, and studio leader 23 years industry experience 9 years free-to-play Owner of Mobile Game Doctor, a free-to- play design consulting agency Outside designer on TPB
- 3. JIM WAGNER Producer with 8 years experience in mobile F2P. East Side Games: Vancouver-based mobile F2P studio: Bootstrapped and Profitable. Producer on TPB: Greasy Money. Shipped on April 20, 2017. Loves idle games.
- 5. CHARTS #1 App & Game in Canada #4 Game in the US - iOS #8 Game in the US - Android *Stats from App Annie on May 18
- 6. The most Canadian collaboration ever. Mockumentary about sh*tty, Canadian criminals in a Nova Scotia trailer park. Debuted in 2001 on a Canadian specialty channel. Revived on Netflix and discovered a new audience.
- 7. TPB v1 Many grey hairs ago… Idle tapper where you steal meat, siphon gas while smoking, and flip off authority figures. Common idle conventions: resets, ascension currency, cash upgrades, etc. Everything to everyone. Steaming pile of poop.
- 8. TPB: A NEW HOPE Let’s try this again. Reinvented as an idle simulation game. Redefined our audience as the superfans of the show. Stakes were higher, we couldn’t just make another cookie cutter idle game. Dave came on to help us nail it.
- 9. THE RULES
- 10. Idle games don’t have story. THE RULES
- 11. Idle games don’t have story. THE RULES Idle games have freeform gameplay.
- 12. Idle games don’t have story. THE RULES Idle games have freeform gameplay. Idle games have low ARPDAU.
- 13. Idle games don’t have story. BREAKIN’ THE RULES
- 14. IP has a wealth of characters and stories!
- 18. PLOT POINT TOOL
- 19. TPB and CHILL. “What happens next?” “Just one more!” Binge-worthy gaming. STORY AS REWARD iOS ANDROID RATINGS!
- 20. NARRATIVE WINS/LOSSES WINS Story is a cheap reward from a system and asset POV. Measurable progression: “What season are you on?” Fan service success! LOSSES Requires new skill set, labour intensive. Handling the end game, how do we keep up with player demand? Finite number of stories to tell?
- 21. Idle games have freeform gameplay. BREAKIN’ THE RULES
- 23. PLAN A ISSUES Uneven delivery pace Extra UI overhead Non-linear trajectory
- 25. SEASONS WINS/LOSSES WINS • Predictable content delivery • Gameplay variability • No messy decision • Strong alignment of story & structure LOSSES Handcrafted content Tedious & expensive to create
- 26. Idle games have low ARPDAU. BREAKIN’ THE RULES
- 27. THE R IN ARPDAU Problem: Idle games don’t make money.1 Problem: We like money.2 Good news! Gacha make money.3 1. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/62281/farm-away-arpu/ 2. Seriously, are you looking for a citation on this? 3. https://sensortower.com/blog/clash-royale-one-billion-revenue
- 28. WE GACHA GOOD
- 29. GACHA WINS/LOSSES WINS • Great monetization • Strong 4 hour callback cycle • More strategic depth LOSSES Massive advantage for frequent players Non-deterministic player state Coupled with fixed goals – oy vey!
- 30. RULES WE UN-BROKED Idle games CAN have: • Story • Structured Ascension • Good ARPDAU
- 31. WHAT’S NEXT? More Content! New seasons, new characters, new story! Limited-time events with exclusive characters! Increases ARPDAU and video ad views by 3x.
- 32. WHAT’S NEXT? More Features! Customizable costumes. Leaderboards and competitive events. Social features.
- 33. WHAT’S NEXT? More Platforms! Facebook Gameroom Kongregate Steam Game #2
- 34. WE’RE HIRING!
Editor's Notes
- ---Slides--- I love idle games, and even though we’re talking about breaking the rules and making references to other games in the genre, it’s not to say that those games did it wrong, these were things that were right for our game. Can you tell I’m Canadian?
- Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money is an idle simulation game based on the Netflix series Trailer Park Boys.
- On launch we were the #1 App in Canada. In the US, on iOS and Android we were #4 Game and #8 Game respectively. And since then we have been persistently in the top 100 in over 100 countries charts for both free and grossing. How did we do this with an idle game and a niche IP?
- How many people here have watched the show? --Slides-- The MOST Canadian collaboration EVER. We had been talking with their team for a while, we were personally very passionate about the IP, and we finally had schedules align in a way that we had the resources available to do the project. However, this was still a niche IP, so we wanted something quick to market to test out how viable it was.
- We decided to go with a idle tapper game, seen as quick and easy. 1. 2. 3. We wanted mass appeal beyond the IP because ARPDAU is typically lower on idle games. Old fans, new fans, non-fans, we wanted to appeal to all of them. 4. REALLY bad. We leaned on conventions so heavily in a quest to get something out quickly, we ended up with something that didn’t serve the customer, didn’t serve the IP, and we weren’t proud of. Had this been our own IP we would have killed it, but this was something we were passionate about and didn’t want to give up on. For reference on how bad this first version was: we showed this to Dave and he was speechless, and if you know Dave that is a pretty rare thing.
- We doubled down. --Slides-- Rather than follow the conventions of other idle games, we needed to frame the development as how do we best serve the IP & the fans? And make the mechanics fit that. We were gonna have to break some rules.
- Idle games typically don’t have much in terms of story, especially linear narrative. We didn’t like that rule.
- Idle games are very sand-boxy. Great for some player types, but we wanted to deliver a much more focused experience to a niche audience.
- We were committing to a longer development cycle, and as much as I talk about passion, we are still a business, so we wanted to make our money back. But at the same time we didn’t have the resources or the size of audience to try to make a hardcore card battler. We really didn’t like this rule.
- Rule #1 Idle games don't have story. Why was this a problem?
- IP has a wealth of characters and story. First hurdle: how do we show them off? We had stoned cougars, shotgun-wielding veterinarians, and mustard tigers. Oh my. We NEED to get those in the game. But felt limited in v1, following the conventions made for a very open game which was difficult to tell a linear story. We wanted to do all the crazy stuff from the show and more! Things like:
- We wanted to have the boys concoct their latest get rich quick scheme every season.
- Or square off against a shit-talking, drunk, trailer park supervisor with delusions of authority.
- Or have a greasy Grade 9 dropout kidnap your hard partying goldfish and hold it ransom at gunpoint. How do we do that?
- Our solution was to build a designer tool that allowed us to create a wide variety of narrative scenes with no need for engineering or art support to get them into the game. Designers have full control to place characters, pan, cut, and add or remove effects independently. So we started cramming story everywhere we could. And we found something surprising to us:
- As we playtested, we found that players were motivated by these plot points - As they got to a slower part of the game, they were to motivated to grind because "what happened next?" - When they got to a new story, we saw increased engagement because "Just one more episode!" - Had that golden playtest moment where the playtest was over but people sat in the room and kept playing Sound familiar? If you’ve ever seen that passive-aggressive message on Netflix "are you still watching?", you know what I’m talking about. It was binge-worthy gaming. Result: The highest ratings and retention I’d seen out of a game a launch. Fans loved it.
- There is no power creep for story. It never disrupts an economy and if done right the player always wants more. Progression can be hard to measure for many idle games. For our game it’s ”What season are you on?” ”I’m on season 20” “Is that the one where the piss factory breaks down?”No, it’s the one where they are siphoning jet fuel to launch dope rockets “ One of the risks we saw was the fans wanting something more than an idle game, wanting grand theft auto sunnyvale and not being able to live up to expectations, but by doubling down on story and nailing that, we actually brought a lot of players into the idle genre who had never played before. But not without it's challenges. Big risk: having the content end. More jarring that other games.
- One of the problems we wanted to solve in the game was helping players figure out when to ascend. The is often confusing and clunky. For instance, is now a good time to ascend in Adventure Capitalist? What about now? Who the hell knows?
- We also struggling with figuring out the best way to deliver narrative. Initially, we thought about playing little standalone stories when the player hit certain milestones, like Achievements in many idle games But there were some issues with that plan, like 1 2 3
- So we decided to get two birds stoned with one idea: Seasons & Goals. Seasons came first with a simple idea: instead of having random little vignettes, let’s tell a simple, linear story, like a TV season of TPB, with story snippets at the beginning, middle, and end of each season. This allowed us to deliver a classic 3-act story in a simple, understandable structure. To move through a season, a player must complete a certain number of goals, each of which asks the player to focus on a different aspect of the game, like upgrading a specific business or collecting a certain number of cards. Once players complete enough goals, they can finish the season by fighting a boss. Usually some sort of law enforcement figure. The boys invariably wind up getting busted, perhaps because they fight gun-toting lawmen by flipping them the bird. When they go to jail, their businesses fall apart and they start again the next season in classic idle game fashion.
- Slide #3: Next Up - Adding more content (5 new seasons, 1 business, 2 characters)
- There’s a well-known problem with idle games. They don’t tend to generate much revenue per user. In fact, developer Future Play did some press around the fact that they were making about $0.08 per user per day. This is about 40% of what I expect from a strong casual game. And, having committed to doing a TPB idle game, that gave us a challenge. As it turns out, we like money. And doing a generic idle was unlikely to make that happen for a studio with limited marketing power.
- We put in a pretty typical gacha system. Random cards drop during gameplay, representing TPB characters and businesses. The player needs to collect a certain number of cards for any character they want to upgrade. On top of that, they have to collect Liquor, a secondary currency, mostly gained from breaking into Mr. Lahey’s trunk every four hours. And we made sure that the gacha system was central to gameplay by forcing players to upgrade characters in order to automate cash product, something every idle game player loves to do.
- Slide #3: Next Up - Adding more content (5 new seasons, 1 business, 2 characters)
- Come up to beautiful British Columbia and enjoy our all your can eat poutine bar.