Exonaut – New Exosuits and changes
New Exosuits!
For our 1-year anniversary, we took the Ben 10 exosuit, gave it a coat of paint for both Atlas and Banzai. It's cool to see the "poster" exosuit in the game.
A Big Change
There is an exciting change coming for Exonaut's 1 year anniversary. Exosuits will no longer be level-locked - if you have the credits, you can get the Exosuit!
Why Do This?
Looking at the breakdown of players, very, very few players reach high levels. Only 1% of registered players are level 40 or above. Players come to Cartoon Network because they love our characters. I don't want to loose players because the character they really want to play is too far out of their reach.
High-level Players
I know doing this might make our high-level players feel less special. I hope they don't feel this way. They are still at the tops of the boards and are still "Elite Exonauts". Our high-level players are our most loyal and I am planning to do something special for them in the near future. They need something new on which to spend their money 
I am personally very excited about this change. I hope it adds new life, diversity and players to the game.
Distraction vs. Engagement (or why I don’t play mobile games)
Mobile games are certainly the hot topic in the games industry right now, and rightly so. They are selling like hotcakes, and many of them are very, very good. I myself get very excited and buy many game. However, I never find myself playing them. I must have 50 games on my iPhone I have bought and never played. So I ask myself, why am I not playing these games? I think I finally hit on the answer, I don't play games as a distraction.
10 Minutes to Kill
If I have a spare 10-15 minutes, I will not play a game. I find this too little time to become truly engaged, to really soak in the enjoyment I find from games, so I eschew playing them entirely. When I do find what I deem an adequate time to play a game, say an hour or two, why would I play a mobile game? Compared to a PC or console games they pale in comparison as far as depth is concerned and that tiny screen cannot compete with my 56" TV. While touchscreen controls can truly offer a unique experience you cannot elsewhere, they are more often a hindrance, trying to unsuccessfully emulate console controls. Even when it's done right, I find another issue, the distraction of mobile controls.
Control Distraction
When I directly control a game with a controller, I controls become transparent, they are no longer there. My hands are in my lap, my focus is 100% on the game onscreen. However, on mobile, my big stupid hands are right in front of my face and the screen, even on top of the character I am controlling. The controls never get lost or become transparent. They are constantly grabbing my attention and I can never get lost in the game.
I want to like mobile games. I really do. I am working on a mobile game myself. So much of the interesting, new game design is happening on mobile but I just cannot get past these issues. At least now I understand my reticence to play mobile games.
Exonaut – Ultimate Kevin & Alien X
After our successful holiday event, just a month later we added two new exosuits, Ultimate Kevin and Alien X from Ben 10. I was very happy to get to add these, as Alien X was easily the most requested exosuit on the forums.
Animation Workflow with Corona, TexturePacker & Photoshop
I have made the jump from Flash to iOS development and the combination of the Corona SDK and TexturePacker has been super fast and efficient. I have set up a really fast workflow for creating my animations so I thought I would share.
Photoshop Animation Panel
The Photoshop animation panel is amazing. I animate faster in Photoshop now than I ever did in Flash. Here is how to set things up.
- Set your animation frames to 0.1 seconds
- Rough out your animations
- Export as Video at 10 fps (0.1 = 10fps) into its own folder
TexturePacker
Set up TexturePacker like you normally would. Bring in your roughs and make them into a sheet. Go ahead and insert your rough animations into your game. How does it look?
Keep working in roughs until you get the animation how you want it to look. When you want to update your animation you just:
- Export video again, replace existing files
- Click Publish in TexturePacker
Your sprites are updated in 2 clicks! It's so fast you can edit and check your animations in game almost instantly.
This has been a really big help for me. I hope it helps you develop even faster in Corona SDK.
The best code editor on Mac – Textmate
My transition to a Mac developer was a bit tough. My biggest lament was giving up FlashDevlop on Windows, my favorite code editor for Actionscript and its counterpart for Unity, UnityDevelop.
This didn't affect me too much until I started my iOS game in Corona SDK, using Lua, and was coding daily. I was using Xcode somewhat happily until an Xcode update disable support for Lua (Thanks Apple!) which left me code editor-less.
I tried about every editor and Lua package I can find and settled on Textmate. While many of the options in Textmate can be a bit difficult to find, it does everything I want it to: projects, smart code completion, that takes into account my defined variables, TODO lists, code snippets, method browser and bookmarks.
I have even jumped on a couple other recommended editors during my development and none of them stand up to Textmate.
So if you are an Actionscript developer making the jump to Corona SDK, buy Textmate, read a few of the docs and I think you will be happy.
Project Exonaut – Holiday Event
Update
We have another event for Project Exonaut! To compliment the Adventure Time holiday special, we made our holiday event Adveture Time themed.
Event Features:
- All Adventure Time exosuits (Finn, Jake, Marceline, Ice King and Princess Bubblegum) unlocked
- Players get 4x XP for playing as Adventure Time exosuits.
- Helix Grenades are snowballs and player receive a 4x bonus XP for hacks with snowballs
- Boosts look like presents and all boosts are random
- Numerous missions for picking up boost presents, which give players significant rewards in credits.
- Ice King is extra powerful
Goals
Most players are below level 10, this means very few players are experiencing the higher-level, branded, exosuits. I want the players to experience more content. Therefore we went a bit overboard with the XP bonus. I want to move that needle and see a much larger percentage of the player population move up the ranks. I also want to make these kind of events valuable to players, so they will come back often and check for new events
I complimented the XP bonus with missions that give big credit rewards, so as players rank up quickly they can have money to purchase new Exosuits, but not as much money as they have XP.
I am Brad Banzai or Brad Atlas. Look for me online.
TKO – new characaters
Update
It's hard to believe the last update to TKO was over a year ago but we got to make another TKO update for the Ben 10/Generator Rex cross over.
We added the following bots:
- Upgrade Rex (Ben 10/Rex crossover)
- Bobo Haha (Generator Rex)
- Van Kleiss (Generator Rex)
- Agent Six (Generator Rex)
- Clockwork (Ben 10)
- Shocksquatch (Ben 10)
We also added 2 new backgrounds and music tracks.
Again, we made new bots by recycling and shifting around existing moves but it resulted in some interesting combinations and created whole new dynamics.
As part of this update, though it went out earlier, our engineers fixed a huge lag issue that was introduced with the plug-in version of Flash Player 10.1.
Balance Update
There were some minor balance changes made as well to even out the bots
- Vilgax & Ultimate Echo Echo projectile recovery increased slightly
- Chowder's hitbox for his Kimchi attack is a bit larger
- Zak's claw has a better hitbox and slightly more damage
- Big Chill's freeze moves do slightly more damage
Looking at the balance data was very interesting. When we introduced all the new Ultimate Aliens (Release 4 on the chart) for 10/10/10, ALL existing characters' win percentages dropped sharply. The new bots win percentages were spread evenly throughout. After about 90 days everything evened out again, though new powerhouses like Ultimate Echo Echo remain high.
I find this extremely interesting since it's the exact opposite that I would expect. I would expect players playing the new, unknown bots to lose to players playing their old familiar favorites. I suppose learning the new bots is more difficult for the opponent than the player?
Still Fighting
While TKO is an old product for CN.com, it performs very well. I was very happy when a player contacted when about a month before the release asking, "TKO is dead, right?", and I was able to reply with a resounding "NO! New stuff soon!"
We still have more plans for TKO in 2012!
Witch’s Brew – Halloween game for pre-schoolers
My daughter is 3 and her school was having a Halloween party. They need someone to bring and run a game for the kids. Why not just design a new game?
I approached this design as I do all other designs, nailing down goals and constraints.
- audience: 3-4 years olds.
- goals: a game that incorporates movement and learning
- budget: $20 (I actually spent $26)
- timeline: 3 days
Witch's Brew
Items used:
- various colored spider rings
- various colored bracelets
- toy eyeballs
- toy spiders
- little rubber balls with spiders in the center
- tiny toy pumpkins
- various colored vampire teeth
Setup
The witch sits in a chair with a pot, bucket, etc. (I borrowed a plastic toy caldron) placed in front of them.
Cut strips of paper with words on them that describe the items, "black", "orange", "purple", "white", "spiders", "pumpkins", "round", etc. Multiple ways to describe the same items is ideal. For example, a bracelet can be "black" or "round", a spider ring might be "green" or "spider".
Every kid gets a cup (I had Halloween themed party cups) full of 6 "random" items. I generally tried to give a good selection.
A line is drawn a few feet away from the pot and all kids playing (6 or so is a good number) line up.
The Rules
The witch sits at the pot stirring an asking the kids to help make the Witch's Brew, or Magic Potion if you don't like witches. The witch picks a random piece of paper and calls out what they need for the pot. The kids must find one (only one!) needed item, run and drop it in the pot and then run back behind the line before the witch is done stirring. Keep the stir count flexible.
When a kid runs out out of items they get a prize bag! Keep playing until everyone is out and has a bag. Grab a handful of stuff and refill the cups for the next round.
Execution
My daughter helped me play test the night before the party and she loved it. She played it solo 10x and would have kept going if it wasn't bedtime. I knew I had a hit on my hands.
The next day was the party and having a plant who knew how to play, my daughter, helped things go smoother. The kids played and had a blast. Cycles of play got pretty chaotic and kids dropped into rounds at random times. There were many sad faces when game time was over so I suppose that's good.
Giving prize bags was a huge mistake. Kids got confused about what was a prize and what was a game piece. Prizes got mixed into the game and game pieces were taken away as prizes. Later rounds we just gave away stickers. I should have just given out stickers when players ran out of items.
Conclusion
This was such a fun opportunity as both a parent and a game designer. I got to have fun with my kid and design a game outside of my comfort zone.
iPhone not recognized by Xcode after iOS 5 Upgrade
After upgrading my 3Gs to iOS 5, Xcode would not recognize my iPhone for development. It just listed my phone with the old version of the iOS, not connected. After updating Xcode through the app store, (which does not actually update Xcode, you have to find and run the installer in your Applications directory) Xcode would still not recognize my phone as connected.
However, after I opened up iTunes and iTunes gave me the message, "You phone is locked with a passcode" and I unlocked my phone and went back to Xcode it worked fine.
I just wanted to share that weird solution with everyone.
Austin GDC recap
This was my second year at Austin GDC and again, it was fantastic. Austin GDC feels like GDC used to when it was held in San Jose, there is little press, no games reveals, no glitz and glamour. Just developers coming to meet, network and share their experiences and knowledge. It's a great places to learn something new or at least remind yourself about the things you are supposed to keep in mind, but have maybe forgotten throughout the previous year of busy development schedules.
Every year I like to recap the talks I attended so I can share them with others and not forget myself.
The Year in Social Games 2011 - Steve Meretzky & Dave Rohri
I was paying much more attention to mobile in 2011, so this was a good chance to catch up. Thee were some really excellent takeaways from this talk.
- Change is slowing down
- The long tail dominates - Old games dominate the top 20 (by Zynga). On Facebook, as opposed to consoles, games as a service is the path to a top game. Any new game requires a heavy commitment to operations.
- Facebook games have now entered the age of high quality, the age of blue ocean is over. The MVP (minimum viable product) quality bar has increased greatly. Any new games must have a rich feature set, high polish, good FTUI and balance. To escape this developers would need to release a very innovative game (i.e. a game with no competitors)
- What is most effective updates for existing games? Adding locations to base games, resetting currency and introducing new mechanics. Frontierville added whole new games in this manner. This strategy has little impact on user decline, since it is an expansion for hardcore players, but it creates more monitization opportunities for big spenders (i.e. whales).
- Casuals invasion! This seems like an easy win: overlapping demos and familiarity, good response to user acquisition campaigns and short gameplay is part of design. However, not many big successes. Only Popcap was a big winner.
- More "hardcore" players are coming to the platform which means competition as a core mechanic is becoming more common. ArmyAttack, empires and allies, social empires, city of might. War is profitable and breeds whales! Overall, players are getting more sophisticated and can manage more complex mechanics.
- Rise of IP - Are social games immune to IP power? Monopoly, Smurfs, Sims is biggest hit. Does it help or hurt? It makes user acquisition easier and content is supplied. However, added costs, business dev, royalties, approval, pressure to release. IP gets people in but does not keep them
- Text RPGs - all declining so they have evolved, a good example is Crime City. A number of examples like monster collection or light dungeon crawlers have emerged but are not getting good numbers. ISO RPGs work best. This is the genre to watch for evolution over the next year.
- Social games are a hard road. There have been big failures by otherwise successful companies. PlayFirst games performed very poorly. Big Fish games also. Pogo foray also very weak. Even big game companies like Sony. Why? Making social games is really, really hard. It requires a huge commitment.
Flash 3D Games - Lee Brimlow
Good demonstration by lee Brimlow about Flash's new 3D capabilities. Very exciting tech.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation of Players - Scott Rigby
This was the talk of the show for me. For the past couple of years there has been a pendulum swing about using extrinsic motivators. At first they were going to save the world and then 2 weeks later they we the devil incarnate. Scott Rigby has a good middle of the road way to handle them.
There are good and bad extrinsic motivators. Bad ones will net gains in the short term but fall off quickly. Good ones will sustain engagement over the long term. The definition between good and bad lies in whether the motivators are addressing needs or wants.
There are 3 universal needs for people:
- Relatedness - connection with others. This can be real people, teams or even NPCs.
- Automony - the ability to figure things out on your own or control your own destiny. Games should create opportunities for actions and communicate futureopportunities. A good example if players can think "What if?" about your game.
- Competence - displaying mastery. Most common example, visceral feedback in games (heads blowing off) but non-violent feedback is just as powerful. It just needs to make the player feel like they dominated.
So how does this relate to extrinsic motivators? If you are fulfilling one of these needs through your motivators, thats good.
Extrinsic motivators can be bad when they are controlling or purely external. Calling motivators "external" can be tricky. Does this mean "internal" motivators are better? Not always. If you motivators are building guilt, shame or pressure, you have a bad motivator. Avoid creating feeling of "Should to..." or "Have to..." in your players.
Extrinsic motivators can be good if they connect to the 3 universal needs.
Popcap keynote - John Vechey
Interesting but reading Black Swan has skewed my perspective on success stories.
Why We Buy - Nikolaus Davidson
Davidson's talk last year was far and away my favorite talk so I was very excited to see him speaking again. This year he built on his previous talk about economic choices and delved deeper into how people make purchasing decisions. Again, people are not logical and are predictably irrational.
When we buy, we match an opportunity with an emotional motivation.
There 3 types of transactions: the gain/loss, the deal and the gamble. It's important to recognize wich one you are presenting to players and if they perceive it correctly. Perception of the transaction is everything. You must be careful not to cross your trasactions.
Loss/gain - this is an event, can be earned or random. Keep in mind lessons from previous talk - losses hurt more than gains, threshold of triviality, etc.
The Deal - exhange, buying stuff.
The Gamble - hope for gain but not expect it. This can be very profitable but people are TERRIBLE at perceiving randomness and easily fall into gambers fallacy.
Now we delve into a bit of evil, how do we craft these emotional motivations to our favor?
- Anchoring - people automatically anchor to numbers (higher anchor = higher cost)
- Manipulate perception (% of savings,
- Red herrings (purposely bad deals for the users to "figure out")
Chaos in Motion - David Calvo
Chaos indeed. This was either the rambling of a madman or the topic went way over my head.
Marvel Super Heroes - Jay Minn & Jason Robar
This was such a great talk! They are using Unity 3D and Smartfox just like we are for Exonaut.
Since they are in the kids market, I like seeing their design tenants:
- Kids want to be the hero. Let them BE the hero, no one cares if they see 4 Wolverines.
- Kids want to succeed! Failure is impossible but a range of successes are possible (i.e. graded)
- If it's too easy for your testers, it's still too hard
- Kids love repetition
- Kids love direction
- 15 minute play session
- Rapid level progression
- Small delta between high and low-level players
- Invisible match-making
- ALL CLICKS SHOULD BE AWESOME!
I loved this bit they had about co-play, "Solving the Candyland problem", i.e. making a game that parents can play with their kids that is not painfully boring for parents.
Again the term "MVP" came up, ship the minimum viable product and then iterate on it.
Conclusion
Another great conference. I really feel energized and ready to get to work on our next game, whatever that is