It’s intuitive that people play games to complete
goals. At any given moment, players are
trying to satisfy a goal on some level, even if it’s a goal they’ve set for
themselves. An idea that may be less
intuitive is that goals can exist on different timelines, and that your game
will generally need to provide objectives along each of these vectors if you
want it to have solid retention and the long-term stickiness indicative of
meaningful gameplay.
Pictured above: the left image from Candy Crush Soda Saga
shows how a level's objective can be easily summarized, and on the right we see
how Wizard of Oz Match tries to add goals for a play session through quests.
While casual puzzle games have traditionally had concise, appealing short term
goals, long-term goals have been second priority or nonexistent. Until
recently, these further out objectives have taken a back-seat despite their
potential for making a more engaging experience for players and increasing the regularity
of their sessions.
We can look at the most well known casual puzzle game as an
example, the match3 mega-hit Candy Crush Saga. Candy Crush, and match3 games in
general, have clear short-term goals tied into their easy to understand
mechanics. For every match3 game, on a
base level the player is looking to put 3 of the same things together. Matching 3 tiles can easily be communicated
to the player, but a surprising amount of depth can come out of the system’s
randomness and content layered on top of the matching. This accessibility and
depth is a big contributor to the genre’s mass appeal.
In the case of Candy Crush Saga, every level revolves around
immediate short term goals:
Find matches
Identify the optimal match for your current goal
Create the match and repeat
With the player base for Saga style Match3 games likely
being completionists on some level, we can assume the long term goals align
pretty closely with the game’s structure:
Beat every level in a group (e.g. "world",
"island", etc)
Beat every level in the game
With mobile match3 games essentially being required to
follow the F2P model, the traditional “beat the game” goal is out, but “beat
every available” level is a suitable enough stand-in. The segmentation of
levels into different areas of the map adds a sense of progression from
clearing all the levels in a group. To
help refresh the interest curve for the player, generally new mechanics are
introduced on a regular interval, but it’s not uncommon for funding for these
to dissipate over a game’s lifecycle.
So, if beating every available level isn’t enough to keep a player
logging back in (e.g. you want to broaden your player base), OR you want to
extend the amount of time your players spend in game (i.e. session length), OR
you want to add another engaging mechanic that incentivizes existing revenue
streams, what’s a game designer to do? Recurring in-game events to the rescue!
The image above, taken from an article by game designer
Stone Librande in Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value, and Meaning, visualizes
the reward scheduling for a single game session of Resident Evil 4's
Mercenaries. Just as there can be second-to-second, minute-to-minute,
day-to-day, etc. rewards in games (described in an excellent article by
Librande here) these rewards can correspond to objectives given to players on
the same schedule. As mentioned before, casual puzzle games typically have
second-to-second and minute-to-minute objectives well defined, but lack the
more long-term goals for players to work towards. When implemented correctly,
in-game events are a possible solution, superimposing additional long term
goals and rewards over the game’s core loop.
Present in Candy Crush, Cookie Jam, and Candy Blast Mania to name a few,
these events range from “reach level X within the time limit” to team based
piece collection with leaderboards. The majority of these events are targeted
at the existing player base, meant to increase monetization and session
length. Through the introduction of
secondary objectives with explicit rewards, a lot of these events meaningfully
enrich the player's’ experience.
For example, the
“Global Events” present in Storm8’s Hungry Babies (a game I worked on) introduces
any number of secondary goals revolving around the game’s core mechanic: making
matches. A piece is designated as the
event’s focus, and collecting that piece adds to your event total. Multipliers are added for making larger
matches and clearing levels, which adds a layer of rewards for player
competency. Additionally, totals are
tracked via an event leaderboard and players can be grouped into teams
depending on event type, with larger rewards for teams that perform
better. Smash tiles while smashing your
opponents!! It's questionable whether competition alone plays a large part in
match3 player motivations, but striving for more boosts is sure to get a
puzzler’s blood pumping.
The bottom line is that events modify or strengthen key
areas of casual games to improve the player experience:
Improved scheduling:
Human psychology has a strong relationship with schedules. Who doesn’t
like to look forward to something? Having different events on different
schedules gives players something to look forward to. If there is downtime between events, then
anticipation can build as well.
Dynamism / Gameplay Depth: Regardless of how well designed
your levels are, players may become desensitized to similar gameplay after
funding for new mechanics is diverted.
Events create an additional layer of progression through event resources
and their cyclical structure creates discrete moments of closure F2P games
Add value to existing mechanics: If your event gives x2
points for tiles cleared using special tiles, suddenly purchasing a boost to
beat a level becomes a better deal for the player. The player gets to beat the level that they
have been stuck on and get extra points towards earning event rewards. Visit https://mobilefreetoplay.com/
Match3 games have evolved to the point that a lot of newer
titles include the meta structures present in events in their core loop. In my next post I plan to talk about the
integration of these concepts in games like Gardenscapes and Toon Blast, and
how this signifies that player’s basic literacy in matching games has increased
allowing for a third generation of tile
matching games to emerge.
