Making Casual Games

You’ve probably heard the news about about WiiWare. (Newsweek broke the story here.) In a nutshell, developers can buy a Wii SDK, create games for the Wii, and get them sold online through the Wii’s downloadable interface. Nintendo says that there will not be any screening of game ideas, and gave the impression that the Wii will soon have an exciting free-for-all of downloadable games for sale.

This is huge news for casual game developers, because the Wii audience should contain a very large percentage of people who are looking for short, engaging games, rather than long challenging games. In other words, they might buy our casual games!

The bad news:

• Although Nintendo calls their SDK “virtually free”, the actual cost of a development kit for one developer seems to be around $2500. And that’s not including any middleware you might need to buy.
• Your game must pass Nintendo’s QA process to be allowed to go live. You better believe that the developer will be footing the bill for this (much as developers foot the bill for Microsoft’s Arcade QA pass now).
• Developers are required to get the game rated by the ESRB before it can go live. I can’t find the cost for this online, but if I recall correctly from my days working on brick and mortar games, I’d say you should put aside $1000 for it.

The bottom line: you’ll likely need to be able to pony up $10k to $15k to get your game on the Wii. That’s in addition to the $5k to $6k needed to buy art and sound assets. This is chump change for a small studio, but it certainly keeps the riff-raff (like me) out of the running until we’re really confident that we have a money-maker on our hands, or we can convince a publisher that we’re a sure thing.

I’m still excited about the possibility, though. If I had a less-expensive way to take a shot at it, I’d love to port Starcrossed to the Wii.

Should a casual game have easter eggs? Before we dive into that, let’s see what successful casual games have done:

• Bejeweled 2 has a large number of codes that affect the game’s appearance. There’s also one easter-egg game mode.
• Zuma Deluxe has a few easter egg commands.
• Bonnie’s Bookstore has hidden interaction easter eggs.
• Galapago has brilliant, wonderful hidden interaction easter eggs.

Most games don’t have anything resembling an easter egg, at least that I have found. (I used Google to help refresh my memory of a dozen other games.) So obviously easter eggs are not super important to a game’s success. But they don’t hurt, right? And some games do have easter eggs. So when do you include them and when not?

We struggled with this one when making Starcrossed. Here’s a list of reasons to add easter eggs:

• Secret codes give you things to talk about. When PopCap sends out a newsletter to people who bought Bejeweled 2, they can include a few secret codes. It creates content for you (or your publisher) to parcel out later.
• Interaction easter eggs make the game feel more polished. When you randomly click on the bell on the Bonnie’s Bookstore main menu, it makes a sound like a bell. This makes you smile. When you click on the shrunken heads in Galapago, you hear hilarious commentary. It makes you laugh.
• Having hidden codes means having things for other sites to talk about, too. If your game has secret codes, then the various code collection websites will collect yours. Hey, any publicity is good publicity, right? Well, maybe? It can’t hurt, though we don’t have any evidence that casual game players ever look for codes on other websites.

In the end we added a few easter egg codes, but our most important easter egg, which was a hidden game mode, became unlockable content instead of secret content. We figured having it there on the menu but grayed out (until you beat other game modes and unlock it) was better than it just being hidden away. It’s better to see the cookie at the end of the trail than to have an invisible cookie that only a few players might stumble upon. Okay, that’s a weird analogy.

So to sum up (and add arbitrary subjective opinions):

• Hidden interactions that players stumble onto are good. It makes the game feel more polished, assuming players stumble into them like they’re supposed to.
• Minor easter eggs that are unlocked via secret codes are good if you have a newsletter. Other than that, they have dubious value-add.
• Easter eggs that reveal hidden game modes are less effective than making those game modes into unlockables instead of easter eggs.

The “casual or hardcore” distinction has a lot of problems. First off, nobody can agree on what “casual” and “hardcore” mean. When I was the producer of a massively-multiplayer RPG, I was often amused by players who played the game for 20 hours a week and called themselves “casual players.” These people had the equivalent of a part-time job playing a video game, but because they saw other people playing even more than they were, they assumed they were “casual”. Needless to say, this breed of “casual” player isn’t what we’re marketing to when we create a “casual game”.

So before we can use those words, we need to add some meaning to them. I think there are really two axes involved here: what challenge people want in a game, and how much time they can allot for a game. Let’s tackle each axis separately.

Casual Test #1: Do you want to be challenged by a game, or engaged?

Although many people switch back and forth between these two, it’s still a useful distinction. People who play “casual games” like to be engaged by the game. People who play “harcore” games like to be challenged by the game. An engaging game isn’t too easy or too hard. It doesn’t expect you to get dramatically better at the game, at least not at too fast a pace. A challenging game ramps up the difficulty quickly, or else it has points of extreme difficulty (such as tough boss battles), forcing pretty much any player to practice repeatedly until they’re good enough.

I have a confession to make, one that would get me kicked out of the Hardcore Gamer Guild if there was such a thing: I played most of God of War 2 on “easy mode.” I was just in the mood for something engaging — not too easy, but not too hard — that would keep me preoccupied for an hour each evening. On “normal mode”, I found that I had to repeat boss battles�many times to learn the techniques, and I just didn’t want to.

God of War 2 is a pretty challenging game: it constantly pits you against obstacles that you are probably not good enough to beat. You will be forced to repeatedly face these obstacles until you succeed. It can be played as an engaging game if you set it on easy mode, but there’s a significant stigma attached to playing a game on “easy”. This stigma is probably intentional!

If you’re playing the game on normal mode and you’re repeatedly failing, the game will ask you if you want to switch to easy mode. This is brilliant, because it makes hardcore gamers feel better about themselves. If they keep practicing, knowing that they could have chickened out at any time, their eventual victory is all the sweeter. People who don’t want to practice a video game over and over again just switch to easy mode and don’t look back.

Let’s look at other games via this lens. Grand Theft Auto 3 is somewhere in between: it’s challenging, but only when you choose to be challenged. You can also just play engaging mini-games for as long as you want. So I’d say GTA is accessible to both casual and hardcore players. This is reflected in the large number of people who played the game in unusual ways.

Bejeweled is engaging without being too challenging. However, the XBox 360 version has some very challenging aspects: it’s extremely difficult to unlock all the XBox 360 achievements in Bejeweled 2. This gives the game some hardcore appeal, at least to some players.

I often switch back and forth. I do sometimes want to be challenged by my video games; it really depends on my mood. I think games that have a mix of engaging and challenging aspects have the broadest appeal. Mixing the two elegantly, now, there’s the tricky part.

Next up: casual question #2.

Early this morning, Starcrossed was sent off to our portal publisher! Hurray! It might be another month or two before it shows up on portals; the whole process is much slower than we had imagined. Of course, when it’s finally available you’ll hear about it here.

I’m working a contract job for the rest of this month, but my thoughts are already turning to what game I should create starting next month. If I had a lot more money for art, I’d love to do a web-based role playing game. The format might not end up being accessible enough — I’d have to try it and see — but it’d sure be fun to make

I’ve been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest recently. It isn’t as sticky as some would have you believe — I think some of the people who say that it’s “incredibly addictive” haven’t played enough modern casual games. Which brings me to my surprise finding: even though it’s based on Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest is not intended for casual audiences.

That’s okay. It’s just not what I expected. When you first start a Puzzle Quest character, you’ll be fighting “battles” against bats and rats and vermin. Each “battle” is actually a game of Bejeweled, with you and the opponent taking turns. You’re going to lose. You’re�going to lose a LOT. Now, there’s no penalty for losing a battle, you can just try again. But they don’t baby you and let you win at first. In fact, the game gets much EASIER after a few hours of playing — not because you get better at Bejeweled (you don’t), but because you get better powers. By the time you’re fighting zombies and rogue wizards, you’re actually having more fun, because you have power-ups that can be combined in interesting ways.

It’s fine to make a Bejeweled game for hard-core gaming audiences. I’m happy that the game is receiving good word of mouth among RPG fans: it deserves it! But with only minor tweaks they could also have reached the casual gaming audience:

• Start out with fewer colors. Puzzle Quest starts with 7 matchable colors. This is a lot of colors for a Bejeweled game. They could have discarded a color or two (say, the “sacks of gold”) and made it much easier to find four-in-a-row matches.
• Make the monsters dumb at first. Since you and your opponent take turns on the board, you can’t really set up any clever moves — your opponent always takes advantage of your setup! The first few opponents should have been dumber. Let the AI get smarter as the game progresses.
• Start players out with more useful powers, even if they’re just temporary powers. Why does the level 2 rat have more impressive powers than a level 2 player?
• Give players more information about “leveling up”. Players have to make very difficult decisions when leveling up. Spending skill points the wrong way can ruin a character, forcing you to start over from scratch. There’s not nearly enough information for people to be able to make informed decisions about something so important. At the very least, the game should offer a “recommendation” about where to spend their skill points.

Hardcore players might call these changes “dumbing it down.” On the other hand, I don’t know anybody who actually had FUN during the first hour of gameplay. So if dumbing it down means “making it more fun”, isn’t that a worthwhile trade off?

Maybe not. This gets into the “casual mindset versus hardcore mindset” discussion, which is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that a steep barrier to entry is appealing to some players. It creates a “we’re better than those peons” sense of pride, which is very important to some people who self-identify as hardcore gamers.

However, I have to imagine that when you’re making a game for Nintendo DS, you’re better off appealing to casual gamers than to the most hardcore niche. Or am I wrong about who owns a DS?

Also, the background music has to go.

Sandra and I both come from the non-casual games industry, so our idea of a QA checklist is very heavily flavored by that experience. I don’t know what other casual game developers use, but here’s how we made our list.

• By necessity, we needed to roll balance-testing and bug-testing into the same QA sessions. (Of course, at some point, you have to declare balance-testing “done” and then only do bug-testing.) So the QA checklist needed to be granular enough to support useful comments of either type.
• We’re too small to bother with a bug database; instead, bugs can be reported right on our QA sheet.
• We only have two QA people, so we used a table on a wiki page. One column was for my comments, and the other column was for Sandra’s.
• We repeat the QA checklist again and again with new builds until everything comes out just right.
• This QA checklist was for very late in the process; we’d done unit-tests before this, as well as a full beta cycle. So some�minor tests weren’t on this final list.

So, here’s our QA test list. Imagine that this is a wiki table that either person can edit. When the sheet is full, we make a new build with any needed adjustments, and try it all again. We know when we’re done when both people have entered “OK” or some other comment for each entry, and no further builds are forthcoming.

Starcrossed QA Test List

With a release build on a clean install (delete all game registry keys, too!) test the following:

• General Considerations:
• Can you safely left-click, right-click, and double-click all buttons in the game?
• Does the user name look fine on all GUI screens when using widest-possible name (lots of Ws)?
• Start an untimed game from each of the Resume Points, play a full level
• Quit game during play and resume (make sure auto-save works)
• Quit game during a cut-scene and resume (make sure auto-save works)
• Quit game during a pop-up tip and resume (make sure auto-save works)
• Exit game to main menu, switch between menus rapidly, and return to game (x10)
• Press Alt+Enter repeatedly to switch back and forth between windowed mode and full screen.
• Press Alt+Tab repeatedly to switch from full-screen app to some other app.
• Does the game look correct on wide-screen monitors in full-screen mode?
• Make sure cheat code #1 works as intended and can’t break anything in-game
• Make sure cheat code #2 works as intended and can’t break anything in-game
• Make sure cheat code #3 works as intended and can’t break anything in-game
• Verify Account Screen Works Correctly:
• Create and delete an account. Does it leave tracks in registry?
• Try creating 50 accounts. Everything fine?
• Try deleting all 50 accounts, including the currently active one. Everything behave correctly?
• Try creating accounts with the same name as existing accounts. Correct behavior?
• Try creating accounts with illegal characters / no characters / too many characters. Blocked correctly?
• Try creating account names with spaces before or after the name. Cleaned up correctly?
• Verify Options Panel Works Correctly:
• Slide knobs up/down (then hit OK between changes) and make sure changes take place
• Quit game while viewing the Options screen. Any problems?
• Make sure changes are saved between game sessions
• Test the “3D support” box; play a game with/without this checked
• Verify Tutorial Screen Works Correctly:
• Does it look correct?
• Quit game in mid-tutorial screen. Any problems?
• Verify that “Don’t show this again” checkbox works
• Verify High Score Screen Works as Intended Regardless of How You Get To It:
• Are relevant tips displayed?
• Is the proper score screen shown (when arriving from a game mode, show that game mode’s score; when arriving from main menu, show the previous game mode’s score, or Untimed mode if no game)
• Is the last game’s score highlighted?
• Do scores move down appropriately when new higher scores are added above them?
• Does the high-score list look fine with entries that are the widest-possible name (lots of Ws)?
• Does the high-score list look fine with names of varying sizes and shapes?
• Verify Data:
• Check for usage.log [our log file]. Shouldn’t exist in final version!
• Check readme.txt for up-to-dateness
• Make sure install bundle does not include inappropriate files (.PSP files, raw .TGAs, etc.) left over from development sessions
• Verify all tips.txt are valid and useful, and are in the right categories
• Untimed Game Mode
• Play�game to end-screen.
• Play an entire game in ones session, start to finish.
• Does beating the game unlock Mastermind mode?
• Verify highest-level-reached is stored correctly even if game is not completed properly
• Story screens make sense? Right order?
• Music changes correctly?
• Notes on sound issues:
• Pop-up hints useful and appropriate?
• Balance/Bug Notes on Level 1:
• Balance/Bug Notes on Level 2:
• Balance/Bug Notes on Level 3:
• [etc. up to level 33]
• Timed Game Mode
• …

And so on. The list goes on and on, with similar sections for all six of the game’s modes. We were pretty confident with the game at this point (it went through beta testing with hundreds of users and no major bug sightings), so this is really just the final-stage pass. Even so, we’ve discovered several bugs and tons of balance issues.

In the end, you just can’t skimp on the gameplay time. The QA list intentionally requires us to play through the game many times to make sure we see lots of random game situations. Games with lots of randomness need lots more face-time to find unusual cases.

People don’t seem to talk about the QA process very much, but it’s pretty important. Few things sour a game’s presentation more than a sudden crash or an obvious glitch.

The beta for our upcoming casual game is winding down, and the results from the survey were very interesting. I thought I’d share a couple of the results:

Timed vs. Untimed Gameplay: not really surprising, but players overwhelmingly preferred playing the untimed version of the game to the timed version.

Story Didn’t Matter: most beta participants said that the game’s story didn’t matter; it would have been just fine without it. This isn’t necessarily an indictment game stories in general — I mean, our game’s story isn’t exactly super exciting. But it does reinforce the idea that if you can’t do story really well, you probably shouldn’t bother.

Web Features Irrelevant: our game has a feature called the Weekly Web Challenge, which presents players with a new challenge every week. Did they find it boring? Did they find it interesting? Who knows! What we do know is that the vast majority of them did not even try the feature. Apparently that menu item, along with the little explanatory blurb, was so unappealing that people didn’t even want to click on it to learn more.

Other features did get clicked on — people tried the “Challenge Grid” feature, and many people tried both timed and untimed gameplay. But the Weekly Web Challenge was a bust. So we’re removing the web feature and sticking all the downloadable content into the Challenge Grid feature.

This surprised me, just a little. I knew that our target audience would never want to try a web-based PvP feature. They aren’t interested in competition with random strangers. But I thought that they would find the idea of free weekly content updates to be interesting.

And who knows, maybe they would warm up to it after they’d bought the game and played for many hours. But a delayed interest is much less useful to me than a feature that catches people’s interest in the first hour, while they’re still in the trial version.

After a very long wait my game has now entered beta with the publisher! Although the beta is short, they say that they get many hundreds of testers, whose usage patterns are recorded and analyzed. They can also fill out an optional poll about their experience. I’m very excited to get feedback, and I can’t wait to see what problems they have and where they get stuck.

Sorry for the lack of a game evaluation this week, oh imaginary readers; while I did evaluate a new game, I haven’t had time to write up the results yet. I figure that with no users reading my blog, it probably isn’t too big a deal.

Today we analyze a pretty little match-3 clone called Galapago. It’s nothing too special, just a clean and simple match-3 clone. By far the best thing about this game is the easter egg on the main game screen: the heads can talk, and one of them says very funny things. I was surprised at how much improved my opinion of the game was just due to this entertainment factor.

Another interesting aspect of Galapago is its menu — the main menu also doubles as a level-selection screen. After you beat a level, you return to the main menu, where you can pick another level, or quit your gaming session. It feels very clean, albeit simple.

I ponder this and much more in the full analysis of…

Galapago