Shopmania is a downloadable game title that Gamelab created for casual game publisher iWin. In Shopmania, the player is cast as Lewis, a hapless worker at the $pendmoore super-store, a huge and exploitative department store chain. As Lewis, the player’s job is to fill the carts of shoppers with objects that roll by on conveyor belts. (The motto of $pendmoore is “We do the thinking, so you don’t have to!”) Rather than covering the entire production process of making the game, this article takes a close look at one crucial moment in its development. Filled with characters, cut-scenes, multiple play modes, lots of special items, and 60 unique levels, Shopmania represented a great deal of hard work from the project team. When iWin first released the game in May 2006, we all had high hopes that the game would do well on portal sites. When the game didn’t perform up to our expectations, we decided to strategically redesign the game. This essay is about that redesign: what we did, why we did it, and what we learned. Within our experience on this particular game, there are lessons here about the design and the development process of casual games in general. By sharing our experiences here, we hope you’ll find something useful for your own projects. Inventing Play at Gamelab But first, a bit of context. Gamelab is a game development company based in New York City. Founded by Peter Lee and Eric in 2000, Gamelab currently has a staff of 35 and focuses on creating original downloadable games, including Diner Dash, Plantasia, Egg vs. Chicken, and Plantasia (and several more games launching soon). We also create multiplayer online games, educational games, and do strategic design consulting. Gamelab is a creatively-driven company, which means we always look to invent something new in our games. That “something new” includes new kinds of aesthetics, new content themes, and new forms of gameplay. And because this means we often give ourselves problems that we don’t exactly know how to solve, our production process has to be flexible enough to accommodate experimentation and iteration. Our process methodology is based on rapid prototyping and constant playtesting. Design decisions are based on our ongoing experience of playing the game, as well as from playtester feedback. At the same time, Gamelab has to survive as a commercial studio, and we can’t afford to endlessly iterate our ideas. The moment in Shopmania’s development that we write about here is a great example of the tension between innovation and project completion. The content and gameplay of Shopmania deviates from the norm: early on in the project we changed the game theme from fast food to shopping, and the Tangrams/Tetris/Bingo/resource management gameplay was not a direct copy of an existing game. So as with other Gamelab titles, there was much about Shopmania that we had to invent from scratch. And it was these very innovations that proved quite challenging in the design and development of the game. All the Makings of a Hit Game Many aspects of Shopmania represented an attempt to do something new. The theme and storyline of the game (an ironic narrative about a domineering megastore dedicated to unapolagetic consumerism) was closer to Ren & Stimpy than the more neutral casual game content. Instead of the comic book style cutscenes we used in our last four games, Shopmania had animated interstitials. The gameplay, if not wholly unfamiliar, mixed inlay gameplay with resource management and color matching in new ways. Of course, we weren’t just making a vanity game. While Gamelab believes that the key to capturing the attention of the casual market is to create genuinely new game experiences for players, the newness of the game – its departures from expectations – should not alienate the very players for whom we’ve designed it. For us, one of the goals of making something special is to reach as many players as possible. A few months prior to the pre-launch rush, the Shopmania development team had met with Gamelab’s Design Advisory Board (a collection of local design and industry professionals outside our company that we use for expert critical feedback) for a reality check about the direction of the game. The Board assured us that Shopmania had a shot at being a hit title: it had fun content, intuitive and innovative gameplay, as well as great looking original art and a unique audio palette. In Shopmania, we had a game with something new and also “all the makings of a hit title!” We began to consider Shopmania’s future market success a given – an overconfidence that turned out to be premature. We were eager for the time when players could download the game, play it, and see all of the silly consumer products we’d made for the five departments and the gameplay elements we’d created and then designed levels around. There were interactive, visual, and audio punchlines throughout the game, and the core mechanic seemed solid. Peter Nicolai, a programmer at Gamelab who was working on another title, remarked about Shopmania, “If this game isn't a hit, there is something is wrong with casual games.” Excitement Prior to Launch As development of Shopmania was wrapping up in April and May 2006, there was a bubble of excitement around the Gamelab office. After months of brainstorming, questioning game mechanics, playtesting, revising gameplay, endlessly revising the game interface, reworking the narrative, writing and revising in-game copy, improving our approach to the audio, creating animations, recreating animations, and generating playful visual and audio effects, the launch of the game had become highly anticipated. All that the Shopmania team really had left to do was to get through the Quality Assurance testing process with the help of our publisher, iWin. The game would shortly thereafter be available to the public! Then we would finally be able to send emails to our friends and family, proudly announcing the culmination of our hard work in the realization of another fun game with a 60-minute trial and a reasonable price tag. The end was in sight. Gamelabbers both on and off the Shopmania development team snuck in superfluous play sessions to play the part of Lewis, addictively filling up shoppers’ carts and fulfilling their requests. Staff and advanced playtesters alike were genuinely having fun making strategic choices about which upgrade powerup goodies to use and when to use them: Increase the size of a shopper’s cart? Make another angry shopper patient again with a sweet? Upgrade the conveyor belt? Force the shoppers to make requests by investing in advertising? Or try a new combo of approaches? We were using the data generated from all of these play sessions ensure that point goals were properly balanced for both novice and, particularly, expert players. We felt that we had made something special and we couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Something is Wrong On May 22, 2006, iWin announced the release of Shopmania on iWin.com in its newsletter. This was it! Both iWin and Gamelab had been looking forward to this day for so long! We anxiously watched the reviews on iWin.com and, later, Big Fish Games and Yahoo! Games, hoping to bask in praise. After all, we were convinced that Shopmania had all the makings of a hit game. But Shopmania was not a hit in the casual game market. We watched it receive lukewarm reviews on iWin.com. When it launched on Yahoo!, the reviews were polarized. By June 6th, Shopmania was already entirely off the front page of Big Fish. People either loved the game or hated it. Worse than that, nobody was buying the game. According to iWin, Shopmania was generating a lot of interest and had an unusually high volume of downloads. But Shopmania apparently wasn’t following through on casual gamer expectations and so they weren’t “converting” – that is, they weren’t buying the game. Something was wrong with Shopmania. As designers, it is our job to anticipate a player’s needs. Though gamers can be a bit finicky and seemingly unpredictable, we know that they will reward a truly well-designed game with lots of playtime and a high purchase rate. Diner Dash was a bit unusual for the market when we first released it in 2004, but players loved it and its success story goes without saying. Shopmania on the other hand wasn’t succeeding, and we couldn’t just blame the fickleness of the casual market (as tempting as that may be after spending months of hard work making something wonderful for them). Gamelab had somehow failed on a design level. We hadn’t properly anticipated our players’ needs. A Second Chance After Shopmania fell off the front page of Big Fish Games, iWin contacted Gamelab via e-mail to begin a dialogue about the game’s poor performance. iWin assured us that they still felt that Shopmania had “huge potential” and asked Gamelab to “evaluate what steps can be taken that can result in a performance bump.” Since Shopmania hadn’t launched yet on most of the major portals, there remained time and opportunity to make revisions. Everyone at Gamelab was disheartened by Shopmania’s low conversion, tired of working on Shopmania, and already in development on other games. But we had a second chance. And it is rare to have a second chance to fix something that is wrong. Gamelab began approaching its second chance by working with iWin to coalesce useful, critical reviews and data. Players seemed to be having difficulty with the conveyor belt. They seemed to either get the game 100% or not get it at all. Yahoo! reviews included statements like:
- After 20 minutes, felt like I saw the whole game...
- ...after about five minutes it bored me.
- This game seemed a bit simple at first and then took off to where I found myself wanting to get to the next level to see what other obstacle was going to be put in my way!
- Could entertain for hours, very fun, great for almost all ages.
To: staff@gamelab.com
Subject: [gmlb-staff] pretend you're a casual gamer with $20 to burn or notburn... …and go to iwin, download shopmania, and play. After 5 minutes, ask yourself “do I want to keep playing? Why? Why not?” After 30 minutes, ask yourself “how about now?” After 45 minutes, ask yourself “what will I do when my trial runs out?” After an hour ask yourself “should I buy this? Why? Why not?” After this experience, reflect, brainstorm, create a list of ideas – wild, mild, and in between – of what we can do to turn this very-popular-to-download but not-very-popular-to-buy game into The Next Big Thing and a commercial success. There’s nothing wrong with the gamers or the game – just the first 45 minutes or so… PLAY IT! Although we had a build of Shopmania available for easy access on Gamelab’s internal network, it was important that Gamelabbers go through the actual process of downloading and installing the game onto their computers to get a more authentic perspective on where we were letting down Shopmania’s first-time players. The request for feedback was immensely successful and there was a spirit of solidarity around the Gamelab office. Staff dropped everything to go to iWin.com and pretend to be a casual gamer for an hour. Everyone knew that Shopmania by all means should and could be performing well. Gamelabbers were excited about the design challenge and acutely aware of the novelty of having the privilege to revise the game. We were lucky: lucky to have the chance to revise the game; lucky that our publisher was still looking to us for design solutions rather than assigning them; lucky that Shopmania hadn’t yet launched everywhere. Feedback about Shopmania came from all arms of Gamelab: visual designers, programmers, the office manager, project managers, interns, and friends. Catherine, as the team project manager, coalesced all of the various feedback that came in via e-mail and IM conversations and led a company-wide meeting just one day after the call to arms e-mail was sent around. The meeting began with a recitation of everyone’s feedback, just to set the tone for “anything goes” and “critical feedback is good feedback.” As a company team, we narrowed in on the design flaws in the game, and we agreed upon solutions. Many of the solutions required pretty significant additional production, but we knew that all the solutions were imperative for an effective revision. We had a second chance, and we didn’t want to blow it. What we did The end result of our process, of course, was to change the game itself. Eric, as lead game designer on the project, worked with Catherine and the rest of the project team to select the actual new features to implement. We didn’t have the time to do a whole new round of redesign, implementation, and then testing to make sure that we had gotten it right (both for reasons of cost and because of our desire to get the redesigned game out to portals as quickly as possible). Instead, we had to be quite decisive. While we did do a bit of user testing during the redesign process, especially to see if we were getting the game tutorial and the first 30 minutes right, for the most part we jumped right in, both feet first. In the next several sections, we detail the primary changes that we actually made to the game. This list leaves out lots of small fixes and polishes that were made to the visuals, audio, and text. But it summarizes the most important aspects of the redesign we implemented. Each set of changes concludes with the “design takeaways” that we learned through the analysis and redesign. The New Player Experience In the original version of Shopmania, we approached the first several levels of the game as a gradual tutorial that introduced the player to the basic game elements and the core gameplay. This approach was based on the generally held casual game wisdom that downloadable games should be very easy to play, and that the frustration of losing a level should be minimized. However, the problem with going too far in this direction is that the game ends up feeling like interactive muzak: you can play forever and not really lose, and the essential tension and challenge of a good game are lost. From our analysis, players were telling us that the first seven or eight levels felt like a tutorial. By the third or fourth level, we had playtesters exclaiming out loud, “I get this game. Can I skip the tutorial?” This is bad news for a title that has to live or die on whether the first hour of play is truly compelling.
Our mantra for the new player experience became, “The first level has to be FUN!” Rather than feeling like a hand-holding tutorial, the very first level of the game needed to provide enough challenge and excitement so that it felt like a real game. Because Shopmania’s gameplay was not a copy of an existing game, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the player knew what to do right away while also giving them an enjoyable and engaging level from the get-go. Our adjustments to the game help and tutorial (which we describe in the next section) also worked into this design goal. So we made the first level and the several levels that followed busier and more hectic. We introduced special objects and items into the game much sooner. This resulted in a more challenging game overall, and to compensate, we ratcheted down other aspects of the gameplay to make it more forgiving. For example, we made the shoppers that the player is assisting more “patient” so that they wouldn’t penalize the player by leaving quickly. We even superficially varied the way each level looked. We had thought that new players would want a familiar, standardized level layout – at least until they became more familiar with the overall gameplay. So the first 10 levels really looked very similar, and we didn’t start playing with the level layouts until much later in the game. Luckily, levels were structured modularly, and so it was easy for us to play with the arrangement and format of different level elements. In this way, the early game felt less like a monotonous tutorial and more like a fully rich game space that the player was exploring. If there is variety in the early levels, then players will assume that variety continues throughout the whole game.
One other small change we made was to modify the opening main menu so that first-time players knew exactly what to do. Although the arrangement of the options on the main menu highlighted the button for PLAY LEWIS’ STORY (the main game mode), we tweaked the design to emphasize this button even more, including the addition of strategically placed animated sparkles. The last thing we wanted was a player confused about what to do even before the game started! The changes to the main menu, combined with the idea of making the early levels genuinely enjoyable, were meant to get the player right into the fun of the game as soon as possible. Design takeaways:
- It’s OK to make games challenging. Don’t make games – even casual games – too easy.
- The first level of a game should be FUN, right from the very start. Don’t make early levels feel like an extended tutorial.
- Providing variety in early levels is important. Make players feel like the game has a lot to offer in the short- and the long-term.
- Players should know exactly what to do the first time they reach the main menu.
The results were positive. Players were able to “grok” the general flow of the gameplay from the animated help screen. This meant that even though they might skim through the later pop-up tutorial windows, they were comfortable with the basic shape of the game and could figure out the details themselves. Streamlining the tutorial interruptions and shortening the text also kept players in the game, which was key in making the first few levels fun and engaging, as discussed above. More than any of the other changes, these redesigns of the new player experience were instrumental in our strategy for increasing conversion. Design takeaways:
- Help players understand the “big picture” of the gameplay as soon as possible. Don’t be afraid of an instructions screen.
- Keep tutorial interruptions to a minimum.
- Reduce the amount of text whenever possible.
- The core mechanic of your game should be as smooth and easy as possible at all times. Look for moments when it becomes awkward or unintuitive.
- Only redesign aspects of your core mechanic with great care, because it can have many unintended repercussions.
- Beyond a fun interactive core mechanic, a game must signify the results of player action in a way that is clear to the player.
- Identify the “power moments” in your game where players are achieving success through action and make these moments as satisfying as possible.
In essence, we had reframed “normal” game items into special rewards. While this may seem like a simple slight of hand, once the merit badge system and screens were implemented, they felt very natural in the game’s world and in the flow of the gameplay. More importantly, they provided players with a strong incentive to continue playing. Silhouettes of merit badges yet-to-be-earned tantalize players with the possibilities of what the rest of the game has in store. Even though players can look through the help section and see all of the customers and powerups that will eventually appear as merit badges, the experience of earning and unlocking each badge over time creates a strong experience of reward and achievement. As with other aspects of the redesign, we never expected that a player would purchase Shopmania solely because of the merit badge system – let alone the simple change of seeing Lewis move on the level landscape regularly – but we hoped that these changes, taken cumulatively with everything else, would make the difference. It’s not enough that the moment-to-moment play of a game is fun. Players need to be made aware of how their long-term involvement in the game is also reaping rewards. Design takeaways:
- Long-term progression through a game must be made meaningful and significant for players.
- It is important to have many game elements and levels for players to discover over time: it is equally important that players are aware of the existence of those elements and levels before they are unlocked.
- Returning players to the “level landscape” is a good way of keeping them in touch with their progression through levels.
- A “rewards” system that gives players periodic medals or badges is useful to provide players with a sense of gradual and steady achievement.