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Story of Warlords: Bringing a turn-based strategy game to mobile
The document outlines a strategic fantasy mobile game focused on turn-based battles, where players build strong armies to compete against opponents. It emphasizes meaningful choices, dynamic gameplay, and incorporates features like autoplay for faster engagement. Key considerations include balancing core gameplay with meta mechanics and ensuring multiple progression avenues to maintain player enthusiasm.
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Story of Warlords: Bringing a turn-based strategy game to mobile
- 3. 5 hits todate Bubble Island Monster World Diamond Dash Pearl’s Peril Jelly Splash
- 13. Where did itall start? Crisis 1: Core game Crisis 2: Meta game Summary of what we‘ve learnt
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- 19. • Round BasedBattles • Strategic Army Development • Fantasy World • PvP Focus • Dynamic World • Timer-based Monetization • Mobile Accessibility Basic pitch
- 20. Build the strongestfantasy army to dominate your opponents in epic turn-based battles that put your tactical skills to the test. Vision statement
- 21.
- 22. Build the strongestfantasy army to dominate your opponents in epic turn-based battles that put your tactical skills to the test.
- 23.
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- 25. Battle Rewards Improved Army Heroes of Might &Magic Mobile F2P
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- 59. Battle plan 1. Attack! 2.Repeat.
- 61. Solve it withautoplay?
- 64. Solve it withautoplay?
- 65. Build the strongestfantasy army to dominate your opponents in epic turn-based battles that put your tactical skills to the test.
- 67. Why does one wantautoplay?
- 68. “My choices don’tmatter anyway! Just get it over with so I get my L00T!”
- 69.
- 70. Speed “Play a battlein less time than it would take to watch one”
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- 72. „Make it 1000times faster than the fastest version!“ Animation speed: 1x vs 2x vs 4x
- 73.
- 75. Move #1 Move#2 Move #3 Move #4 Move #5 Enemy move Move #1 Move #2 Move #3 Move #4 Move #5 Enemy move Can be faster than real-time Move #1 Move #2 Move #3 Move #4 Move #5 Enemy move
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- 78. Meaningful choice “Maximize thenumber of layers in battle”
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- 88. XP earning Participate Dealdamage Killing blows 7/12
- 89. Recovery times <50% 50-99%100% 8/12
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- 94. Multiplicative content Game modes Uniqueregiments & Abilities Items Tile sets & unique tiles Layers summary Battle & Meta rules Unit classes (RPS) Basic rules Terrain effects Special tiles & objects Stack sizes Recovery timers XP earning Victory conditions
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- 98. Fun a thousandtimes?
- 99. „Hey, you guysshould totally add terrain bonuses!“
- 100. Understandability “You can’t enjoywhat doesn’t exist”
- 103. Build the strongestfantasy army to dominate your opponents in epic turn-based battles that put your tactical skills to the test.
- 104.
- 107. Time for Review “Thereis potential, but will it ever be done?”
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- 112. Issues with themeta game
- 116. Main considerations: 1. Meaningfulchoice 2. Strong ties battle meta 3. Multiple avenues of progression
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- 122. D1 D2 D3D4 D5 D6 D7
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Editor's Notes
- #3 I’m from Wooga F2P Developer Based here in Berlin Founded in 2009
- #4 We’ve had more than our fair share of success… Bubble Island February 2010 This popular arcade hit has been enjoyed by over 90 million people in nail-biting weekly tournaments. Monster World April 2010 70 million gardens have been created with crazy crops, delightful decorations and zany characters. Diamond Dash March 2011 More than 200 million players joined the 60-second gem rush already. Pearl’s Peril March 2013 The largest mystery chase in history – 25 million players have signed up for our first hidden object game. Jelly Splash August 2013 Over 50 million players have matched colourful Jellies to create massive combos and competed with their friends!
- #5 This is our Wall of Fame, where we remember games that have made it into production or further… Even though all our hits to date have been in the casual part of the spectrum, many of the games in development have not been.
- #6 When we announced recently that Wooga would focus 100% on casual it thus made sense to also set up an internal studio to focus completely on strategy games for games.
- #7 So moving forward, there will be the main Wooga body focusing on casual and then Black Anvil that does core games.
- #8 That about Black Anvil, but today I‘ll talk about Warlords – our first game, that is currently in soft launch. First: very short about what Warlords is.
- #9 A fantasy world overrun by orcs and evil villains...
- #10 ...such as Jerrika the Brigand queen
- #11 The core game is to fight evil in turnbased hexgrid battles...
- #12 ...and invest the loot in growing the power of your army, that starts out with just a few men and grows into a formidable force.
- #13 There are also competitive PvP components.
- #14 What will I cover today? The story of Warlords so far. It‘s taken some time and it‘s been a pretty bumpy ride, with two key turning points in particular. Along the way going through some of the biggest game design conclusions we‘ve drawn.
- #16 A long long time ago Philip joined us and brought along the idea to make a HoMM-like game as f2p for mobile.
- #17 Heroes of Might and Magic
- #18 We‘ll come back to this very scientific enthusiasm meter as we progress from the beginning to the end of the presentation. Here early on we were quite enthusiastic, and personally I loved the idea of bringing some of the magic from all those hours with HoMM to mobile. And to do our own take on it! So, we enthusiastically moved forward with ironing out the pitch.
- #19 At Wooga, early on in the concept phase we often use a basic one-slide pitch model where we express a new game as two (or three) existing games.
- #21 The „marketing vision statement“ is supposed to be an attempt at expressing what the game is to a fictional player – to get a feeling for if it‘s concise, clear and attractive enough. During development we‘d go back and verify our decisions using this base statement.
- #22 Early on our core loop looked something like this: We also had several more empire-building-focused supporting features to carry the meta game – in line with the tradition of HoMM
- #23 Zeroing in on the essence of the game, we realized that some of this could go – and actually had to.
- #25 Slimmed down to the essential parts
- #26 So, now beyond inspiration and emotional direction – what really stayed with us from HoMM was the core battle. When it comes to the metagame we instead looked into how to do an entirely army-based meta game.
- #27 Inspiration for our meta game instead are games like Heroes Charge and Summoners War
- #28 Now we were pretty happy about things and moved into prototyping.
- #29 This is the battle in (one of the) HoMM (games). Doesn‘t look great by today‘s standards, but it does bring a warm fuzzy feeling to those that played it back then. So this being the essence - we set out to prototype it to see how it‘d work on mobile.
- #30 A couple of months in we added a few people to the team and got to prototyping. We made a battle prototype where we played synchronous PvP against each other. Already here we see a first adjustment to fit mobile: Smaller battlefield with fewer hexes.
- #31 It worked really well: We had a lot of fun with the battle prototype and got a lot of good feedback within the company
- #33 Happy with our early prototyping results, we were about to launched into production. But there was a very reasonable question that had to be answered before we would commit.
- #34 So we had some fun with this battle, but why base our entire game on just one single game series that was popular over a decade ago? Are we just pushing along with something here that is just about us wanting to make some cool stuff, blinded by our own passions?
- #35 Nowhere to be seen in the appstore top grossing lists.
- #37 Actually, it‘s not just about Heroes of Might & Magic: In its basic form, I‘d argue that turnbased hex battles are an evergreen game mechanic / core game experience
- #38 Gary Grigsby‘s war in the east as example of the old complex hex-based wargames that gained popularity already decades ago, digital and analogue
- #39 Panzer General Panzer corps, now also on iOS as a paid app
- #40 In Civ V, this has been added as a game within the game: Units in the hexgrid use basic attributes, stats and terrain to generate a very interesting and varying battle gameplay. This has not existed in Civ before – used to be just giant stacks of doom.
- #41 Heroscape
- #42 BattleLore, Memoir44, Commands&Colors ancients
- #43 BattleLore also available as a paid app on iOS
- #44 Braveland
- #45 Great little war game series
- #46 For decades, millions of players have enjoyed billions of hours with this gameplay on various platforms, digital and analogue. So what we set out to do was simply to bring this to mobile and to free2play and to really do it properly and make it fit the platform perfectly.
- #47 Bringing a game to mobile and to free2play and make it fit the platform perfectly: There are a few other very prominent games that have followed a similar approach actually.
- #49 Castle Raid 2 by Arctic Mill to the left.
- #51 Ok, so we established it’s an evergreen and that we were happy with our early prototyping results. We launched into preproduction and then onto production!
- #52 We then worked on other things some time: Putting together a world map as system for serving battles and getting the meta game in place, with upgrades and such.
- #55 At that point the battle looked like this.
- #56 We had the feeling that we were bit by bit completing the game and slowly but surely progressing towards soft launch
- #57 But then came our first rude awakening
- #58 Dave Rohrl – our design consultant evaluated the game and said: “Your game is not fun! What are you doing?” And the worst thing was that he was right! In our eagerness to get all parts of the game done, we had slipped and allowed the battle to deteriorate over time without us really noticing.
- #60 The battle tactics for most players were simply to throw the troops forward and just attack anywhere and anyone = choices didn’t matter. Interesting a dozen times. But needs to be fun 1000 times.
- #62 These games, that act as inspiration for an army-building f2p mobile game all have autoplay
- #65 These games, that act as inspiration for an army-building f2p mobile game all have autoplay
- #66 Staying true to our vision: we really didn’t want to – it negates the entire idea of interesting tactical choices in a hex battle
- #67 Back to the drawing board – board game prototype
- #68 What we did here was to take one step back and ask ourselves which specific problems autoplay solves. Maybe there could be other ways of solving those problems?
- #69 This is basically what the player is feeling. Because the choices aren‘t relevant the gameplay isn‘t there. Then it‘s just about waiting for it to play out.
- #70 So, to make sure the core battle is fun and playable a thousand times we had to tackle two things.
- #71 This became our starting target statement for speed.
- #72 First a note on reviews at Wooga: Meeting chosen peers and Jens, our CEO, to discuss progress, belief in the project, risk evaluation and gather feedback. Every review meeting begins with the use of the thumbs as a starting point for discussion (not as a vote). This was a pretty undramatic review with all thumbs up, but design-wise it represented a break through.
- #73 We brought a version of the game with a speed toggle to the reviewers. Everyone preferred the fastest version available, and we haven‘t gone back since.
- #74 Hoplite was a big inspiration at this point: A really brainy puzzly turn-based game where many times you need some time to figure out which move to make. But once you’ve figured it out, the game doesn’t make you wait even a second – it’s super snappy. Available for EUR 2.99 on iOS and Android – highly recommended!
- #75 Speed is a major problem in most mobile turn-based games, like the ones I mentioned before. Traditionally, turn-based means slow. We’ve learnt turn-based can mean faster than real-time.
- #76 Additional benefits of turn-based: Automatically self-regulating speed, with no need for settings or levers Lost attention no problem, since all action is driven by player input.
- #77 So, speed done.
- #78 This insight and change was a huge leap forward, but we weren‘t out of the woods yet. A boring game that is over fast is still not fun... Just a but less painful.
- #79 With layers I mean layers of complexity that a player has to take into account every time they make a decision.
- #81 Here‘s a typical battle in Warlords. It‘s the player‘s turn and time to act. I‘ll go through all the layers that go into the decisions about to be made and then come back to this example.
- #82 So which are all these layers? We have 12 of them - I‘ll go through all of them quickly and explain what I mean.
- #83 Rock paper scissors
- #84 Basic battle rule set
- #85 Terrain bonuses and effects
- #86 Unique tile objects, such as the Loot wagon that gives loot specifically for the regiment that picks it up
- #87 Stack size – a direct inheritance from HoMM
- #88 e.g. Victory vs Crushing victory = winning fast scores you more gold
- #89 Giving the killing blow to an enemy scores you a lot of XP, allowing weak units to be brought forward at the right moment by savvy players.
- #90 Recovery times are balanced in a way where you have a lot more downtime for a regiment that got wiped out.
- #91 New regiments each having their own unique stat composition and abilities.
- #92 Magic item with functional effects
- #93 Different battle modes allow adjustments to the main rules, creating a need for different battle plans.
- #94 Tilesets contain unique tiles and shift the composition of the optimal army lineup
- #95 So here they all are together – let‘s go back to the example to see them in action.
- #98 So, we had tackled these two things.
- #99 So with all these layers in place, were we done? No, it turns out there is one more, kind of obvious, thing that can break it all
- #100 This was player feedback from a proficient player. The thing was that it came in months after we added terrain bonuses.
- #101 If a player doesn‘t see or understand your finely designed stuff, it‘s the same for them as if it wasn‘t there in the first place
- #102 At least this was something that we were pretty confident about fixing. Creating proper on-ramps with decent tutorials and introducing complexity at a good pace is something we‘ve done a lot of at Wooga – so we could put those experiences to good use.
- #103 We also significantly improved on the information and feedback in the battle.
- #104 So, we got a lot of these layers into the battle and re-vamped the info and feedback in battle to get every player onboard. We felt that now the battle did deliver on the vision. But more time had passed and the game wasn’t really getting closer to launch. In our focus on the battle we had made little progress in other areas.
- #105 We felt that now the battle did deliver on the vision. But more time had passed and the game wasn’t really getting closer to launch. In our focus on the battle we had made little progress in other areas. So a bit mixed feelings – very happy about the core, but not about the timeline.
- #106 But then: Rude awakening
- #108 A devastating review with very reasonable feedback.
- #110 We had to really evaluate our position thouroughly. Lots of time spent. One third of team members would prefer to can it. Many big issues with the game clearly visible. Remaining time until launch unclear, but not around the corner. And we couldn‘t take the 4 thumbs down lightly: These represented feedback from our peers, people that we‘d chosen because we‘d value and trust their feedback. There is only one mistake bigger than continuing work on a failed game: To stop work on a game that would have become a hit.
- #111 We came back with a deal: One milestone – if we failed we would shut down the project: This was about regaining confidence in our ability to deliver and bring the game‘s parts to a launchable state, and at the same time tackling the biggest of the remaining issues. We launched into revamping the meta game.
- #112 With battle at a good state, we set out to fix the meta game.
- #113 What were the issues with the meta? There were many, but the two main ones were: All the different upgrades and actions you could do in the meta were muddled together and having overlapping effects The UI wasn‘t there – both in terms of visuals and usability – it just wasn‘t clear at all to players what to do and how to do it
- #114 To tackle the first problem we had to think in terms of multiple lanes of progression, well separated.
- #115 To tackle the first problem we had to think in terms of multiple lanes of progression, well separated. Different cadence (frequency of goals reached) each lane = always a next step/goal right around the corner. For example, you have the top one, with the lowest frequency, which could represent unlocking a new Regiment At the bottom is the highest frequency one – for instance applying upgrades that you get after almost every battle In between lanes things like finding new weapons, promoting regiments and completing sets of upgrades (Then we have a few lanes of progression outside of the army building too, like freeing Shires of Orcs and progressing within certain battle modes.
- #116 2nd issue: UI problems – visuals and usability not there: With clearer systems in place it was also easier to make a clearer UI. At this point we also kickstarted a complete visual re-vamp of the entire UI.
- #117 With some more work on the on-ramp, meaning introducing things the right way and adding concepts and complexity bit by bit we finally got there.
- #118 We‘ve iterated on the look since then as well.
- #119 And we actually hit the milestone!
- #120 And there was much rejoicing! We succeeded with the milestone. But we still needed some more work to bring the whole game to a launchable state
- #121 Now we just needed to execute. We spent some months and managed to get everything together and went for tech SL in PH, and that went well.
- #122 Technical soft launch went well and pretty soon we were ready to launch in „A-countries“. Lots of anticipation!
- #123 Numbers from the soft launch in „A“ countries, (CA, AU). Numbers that come in are super-promising. Chart is –d7 retention comparing with older Wooga games on Android
- #124 So this is where we are today. And now, spirits are higher than ever! We can‘t wait to make the game available for everyone!
- #125 So, to wrap up I just want to revisit and summarize the biggest learnings
- #126 Turn-based & speed: Turn-based is perfect for mobile, once one shakes off the old notion that turn-based implies slow and deliberate. Layers: For a core game to stay interesting, many many layers of complexity have to be baked in. On-ramp & information: „Hey our game is really hard to understand or be good at, but once people get it, it‘s great!“ doesn‘t work on mobile. If people don‘t get it, it doesn‘t exist. They might have loved it, but they will move on instead. Lanes of progression: Meta game needs many many lanes of progression, neatly and clearly separated, but also elegantly hooking into each other, and not being in cadence. Stay true to the vision: If you don‘t stick with your vision you have nothing
- #127 Let‘s see how it goes!