Jack sharke's List: Game Development Thoughts

• Developers can no longer trust that their players will make the effort of learning the ropes of their game through a set of challenges, just because they have spent tens of dollars to get the game at their hands.
• Because players of social games do not fork out money to have the chance to try out a game, their time is of precious quantity. Therefore developers need to catch and hold their attention both through viral spread and gameplay itself. The core mechanics and social benefits of the game need to be sold to the players in a matter of minutes. Otherwise, they might never come back.
• social proof: our tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it. If someone I regard a friend with whom I share values, opinions, or other social factors is playing this game, maybe I should try it too.
• Introducing a tutorial is a way to facilitate overcoming the familiar cold-start problem of a social game: Often a literally empty grid and possibly empty friends list.
• When a Facebook user follows a link to the game, he is essentially taken a leap of faith, and needs to be guided by hand to get on board with the game -- something especially relevant for non-gamers.

• The notion of onboarding originates from human resource management. Crumlish and Malone identify three key steps in onboarding: accommodate, assimilate, and accelerate. In terms of games, accommodation is about giving the necessary tools to the player, i.e. the necessary game mechanics and resources to start with.  

   

   Assimilation gains a specific meaning from the context of the social network: It accounts for assimilation into the progress of one's friends playing the game, and the benefits from playing parallel to your friends. Acceleration then is about getting the player to engage with the game's full feature set and its possibilities.  

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• What is relevant is that as the player is learning the UI of the game, he is supposed to learn the core mechanics of the game in the same sitting. Therefore social game tutorials integrate teaching key gameplay actions into a HUD walkthrough, in similar fashion as, e.g., RTS games do on the PC.
• It is important to realize where the three-step process of onboarding ends. Once the player learns the lay of the land -- quite literally, in grid-based farming games, for example -- they typically want to be left alone to explore. Yet this can be a breaking point: if the player has not internalized what can or should be done next, and the UI does not support re-discovering the core mechanics, the casual player is as good as lost.
• Mixpanel has reported that with social games, if the user advances beyond the second step, over 90 percent of the users stay for the whole tutorial, even if it has a significant number of steps. This is considerably higher than with other types of Facebook applications, which testifies for the pull of games in online social networks.

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• (Percent chance the player will die) X (Penalty for dying) = Difficulty
   
   It's pretty basic stuff: The higher the chance the player will die and the bigger price they pay for dying, the harder the game will appear to the player.
• Removing lives altogether lets the designer base difficulty more on the actual level design and challenge and less around the penalty of losing lives and restarting. In doing so, the formula for difficulty changes. The player no longer has to worry about dying, and the penalty for death basically turned into the amount of time you took to restart after death and the length of the current level.
• The player should always feel good about completing something hard, so what better reward then a reminder of just how hard that level was? Early in development, co-developer Tommy Refenes implemented the replay system, incorporating a mode that upon level completion would show the player's past 40-plus attempts all playing at once. This simple visual reward for taking a beating not only reminds the player of just how hard he tried, but also shows a timeline of how he learned and got better along the way.
  
• The dark world is an expert mode set parallel to the main game. As the player completes levels they will unlock expert versions in the dark world if they complete the level under a set par.
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• "I think [social gaming] is going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world," he told IndustryGamers. "People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that."
   
   He added, "There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum."
   
   "So right now we’re at the steep of that curve," he said. "If you extrapolate that out, it looks like 'Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in five years,' but of course the curve never stays that steep."
• "It’s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase," Wright said. "Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we’re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is."
• "What’s still remarkable to me is that there hasn’t really been a viable competitor for [The Sims]," Wright added. "Usually when a genre opens up you get several competitors coming in to fill that genre, but in some sense The Sims is a game of its own genre, which for various reasons nobody’s really copied."

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