Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post on Gamasutra, “A Peek into the Mind of a Social Gamer” (excerpt: “A social gamer (a.k.a. me) writes about what we, social gamers, like and look for in social games”). In that blog post, I said that casual gamers want their games cute, simple, and what’s the last one again, oh yeah, easily accessible.
I mentioned: “KISS. Keep it short and simple. The game itself doesn’t have to be short per se, but it has, absolutely, has to be simple. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get it. I’m not saying that social gamers are dumb, because we most definitely are not! But, but, the reason we play games is so that we can relax and rest our brains. So yeah, we don’t really want to spend 30 minutes or so figuring out how a game works.”
I also mentioned easily accessible, back then it meant Alt Tab, and Facebook, “we just have to switch tabs on our Firefox to play games while we’re pretending to be researching stuff.”
And then almost a year ago I wrote another blog post on Gamasutra, “I Want My Games In Bite Sized Chunks!” (excerpt: “Some thoughts on casual gamers having shorter and shorter attention spans, and some ideas on how design games for them”). The solution I came up with then is “games in bite size chunks that I can keep challenging myself over and over again with”.
I mentioned: “Games HAVE to be pick up and play. Games don’t have to be really short, but it should be short enough so that the player doesn’t lose interest, or it has to be really engaging so that the player doesn’t get bored. Like I mentioned before, casual games are played in between, in between classes, checking Facebook messages, or during train rides.”
Now after a year in iPhone game development, I made some new realizations.
So we recently released a game (I will stop advertising it here, since my previous blog posts on #AltDevBlogADay already did), and the comment that we got often is the game is too short. Our game is a shoot ‘em up, with 5 levels about 3 minutes each, okay, it does seem short, so in our next update we will have add another level. Although would adding another level really solve the problem? I fear, that we might end up adding levels (repeat ad infinitum).
Our problem is not actually how short, rather how replayable is the game?
So I realized that I don’t want my games simply in bite sized chunks, I want my game in bite sized chunks that I can keep on eating forever (and not get bored or fat). Basically, I want a game that doesn’t end (like the song).
Both games offers “a new look every day you play”, “different appearance every time you start the game”. Tiny Wings uses procedural graphics to generate the levels each day. And with procedural generation, it’s almost impossible to end up generating the exact same level. So in a sense, it has infinite possibilities of levels.
But why would we want a game that never ends?
The target audience of iPhone games (Android, etc) are casual and commuter gamers, (people who play with games while they are waiting for the train, etc).
They are the type of people (forgive me for generalizing) who would slide unlock their phones, and then tap on one game and start playing when they get bored on the train, etc. Easily accessible now means that, they would want to be able to play the game as soon as possible, they would not want to have to sign in the GameCenter, etc in order to play the game, they would want a Quick Play button, just on tap and the game would start. Also, when they arrive at their stop, they would want to stop the game at once and then maybe pick up again whenever.
In a way, they are not as invested to the game as people who would play games on their consoles or PCs. They play games to pass the time, to relax.
So once they got the simple mechanics of one game, most likely they would play the game over and over again. I have seen many people (ok, myself included), play Angry Birds to death. Well, with Angry Birds, I play the same levels over and over again in order to get the three stars. And the good thing about Angry Birds is that it has a lot of levels. But of course, a lot of levels is hard work to design, develop and balance.
So it’s either make a lot of levels, or find a way to make your game levels procedural and have an infinite number of levels. Which is a better option? As a developer, I’m not really sure.
But as a gamer, I think I’d like a game that I can play forever, at $0.99, that’s a bargain.