Bringing a Retail Franchise
into the
Social Gaming World
Demetri Detsaridis
Caryl Shaw
Executive Producer Sr. Producer
Area/Code Maxis/Electronic Arts
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Maxis is a wholly-owned studio
of Electronic Arts.
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Number of employees at kickoff:
9,920 (EA)
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Known for titles Spore, SimCity
and The Sims
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Based in Emeryville, CA
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Area/Code is an independent
game developer.
Number of Employees at kickoff:
16
Known for titles Parking Wars
(Facebook) and Drop7 (iPhone)
Developers of location-based,
mobile, web-based and social
games
Based in New York, NY
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PC Game
Designed by Will Wright & Maxis
Released in 2008
Metacritic: 87
Over 3M copies sold
Facebook circa 2008 had…
• Slightly more than 100M
users
• Games like Lil’ Green Patch,
Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, Friends
for Sale, and Who Has The
Biggest Brain? were surging
toward the 5M user mark.
• Spore is more “casual” than the
typical boxed PC title.
• This fits Facebook’s userbase and
EA’s efforts to diversify its
audience.
• Spore was always supposed to be
multiplatform.
• Create a new Spore game for the biggest
social platform
• Begin learning how to develop for Facebook
• Stay true to the key concepts of Spore
• Generate microtransaction revenue
• Minimize costs by outsourcing to a team with
relevant experience
Goals
• Develop a successful Facebook title with a
AAA publisher
• Prove indie-style dev works on huge
“franchise” games
• Bring real multiplayer into the single-player
Spore experience.
• Make a fun game, worthy of mention
alongside Will Wright’s name.
Goals
• Social Games – expanding into an area where
we had little experience
• Delivering a true “Spore” experience
• Will it make money?
• Can we capture a new audience for an
established franchise?
• Would the developer be able to keep up?
Risks
• Area/Code’s 1st traditional publisher
collaboration – would cultures clash?
• EA was new to social games – would they
listen to the lessons we’d learned?
• Spore never quite captured core gamer
hearts – could we count on them as early
adopters?
Risks • EA and A/C both wanted a more hardcore
game than Facebook’s norm – was it just us?
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Proposal
Contract Negotiation
Design
Project Schedule Planning
• Or um… should Design come first?
Kickoff
As we got started, we were also reminded of
one other very important reality…
Risks
Area/Code!
Relative Sizes* of the Spore Islands Partners
Do user testing – and believe it!
We did focus groups, but their lessons
sometimes pointed in scary directions
We addressed most issues in Open Beta, but
we could have started sooner!
Lesso
ns
Spore PC promised to let you see your friends’
creatures on your home world.
Facebook seemed made to deliver on that
promise – and this became our #1 design goal.
We wanted players to:
• Build their own life-forms
Design • Place them in an environment
• Evolve them to thrive in their surroundings
Ultimately, our discussions came down to one
central choice: are we building a “sim”?
If so, this slightly scary stuff would be true:
• Build-tweak-repeat is the game’s core loop
• User actions don’t give prompt feedback
• We’d need big time server infrastructure
Design
• No role models on Facebook to study
We really struggled with going the sim route.
Design
Pros:
• Leaning on Maxis’ skills and experience in
the genre is kind of a no-brainer.
• The Sims showed there was such a thing as
a mass market simulation game.
• Doing a sim would allow us to be deeper,
cheaper via procedural content.
We really struggled with going the sim route.
Design
Cons:
• What is a multiplayer sim anyway?
• We wanted competition, but PvP and sims
both skew hardcore. Too much for Facebook?
• Given hardware demands, persistent realtime was impossible. But without it, creating
player agency is difficult.
Those are some big challenges.
But we decided to go for it. As indies, gameplay
innovation is the way we succeed. It’s scary and
risky, as it is elsewhere in the industry, but this
is iterative game development.
It’s also how the bar is pushed on Facebook:
before FarmVille there was Farm Town.
Design
Risky
– Lessons learned on Spore PC
– Worried it was the wrong platform for a
hardcore sim
– What would the second-to-second gameplay
look like?
Design
• Waddaya Want?
– Stay true to Spore PC
– But be appropriate for Facebook
• Creativity, creativity, creativity
• Area/Code’s pre-conceived notions
– Had a great knowledge of past Maxis titles
– Not trying to make SimEarth, guys…
Design
We called it Spore Ecosystems and it would be
Facebook’s first “on demand” sim:
• When users want to see their creatures’
progress, the server looks at creature and
environmental stats and generates results.
• To avoid boring text, we would show the
results of those “on demand” sessions
graphically as mini-cartoons.
Design
We used Spore creatures as character portraits
with “toy” versions in the result animations.
At this stage, it looked like a cross between an
X Wars game and a casual PC title.
While our Art Director worked on the UI, we
play-tested a prototype internally with
promising results.
Development
At the Alpha external playtest, though, gamers
liked it…but non-gamers were having a hard
time connecting with their creatures.
This was partly UI, but partly game design –
players spent lots of time watching creatures
interact without doing much themselves.
Not too different from X Wars, right?
Click, then see your results. But the Development
complexity made it different enough.
Taking game design risks is an important part
of competing on Facebook.
But novel designs make social gaming’s
nimble development practices hard to follow.
Early user testing, taken seriously, lets you
act quickly on potential trouble spots.
Development
Tutorialize the game experience
We didn’t leave time to create dynamic help
and instead delivered more standard clickthrough text boxes.
It wasn’t ideal and it cost us users.
Lesso
ns
We all know Facebook users aren’t hardcore
gamers, but sometimes we forget just how
much that matters.
Cramming a tutorial in late in the cycle is nuts
when your players don’t even know the
basics of the genre.
The tutorial must be ready for user tests, so
start it at prototype.
Development
Explain the game to your users as
you figure it out for yourself.
Agile works
…especially for high-speed, rapid-iteration projects.
It gives partners excellent visibility and eases
planning.
But you have to use silly words.
Not that big a deal.
Lesso
ns
Area/Code was switching to Agile
Development when we began Spore Islands.
The new process created a few hiccups, like
getting used to the intentional transparency.
It also took us some time to adjust to shared
task lists and weekly client builds.
Development
There were eight staffers on the Spore Islands
team: mostly veterans, most full time.
Maxis added another 1 ½ full-timers.
One of us had used Agile before.
Uptake difficulties aside (and you will have
them), we recommend Agile heartily for
Facebook development.
It helps keep you nimble and, as we
Development
said…you need that.
Total brand fidelity is unnecessary
We spent lots of time worrying about
confusing users by diverging from Spore PC
They… didn’t care.
Lesso
ns
• What to do? What to do.
• Art style deliberations
• Executive oversight
Production!
Metrics are your friend
We learned a huge amount from data
collection, from purchase details to UI usage
Track as much as you can…then track more.
Lesso
ns
• Make them a priority
• Shared between Dev & Publisher
• Process to take action
• Identify required reporting early
• Take Action!
Production!
Metrics came late to the party for us, as our
studio-wide stat package wasn’t ready until
after launch.
Open Beta is when it should have been ready
…but creating reusable code was vital.
Metrics, like user testing and Agile, help you
turn faster.
We can’t stress enough how
important that is in making social Development
games.
The high road leads nowhere
You are in business to make money, especially
with a big publisher.
Don’t scam your users…but if Purple Cows
work, use Purple Cows!
Lesso
ns
Our plan was always for Spore Islands to be
supported by microtransaction revenues.
Early in the design phase, we started talking
about how to integrate MTX opportunities
wherever possible.
Even so, revenue generation should have been
a greater focus, earlier in the dev cycle.
$$$$$
We studied the Facebook microtransaction
market and saw that there are two basic tracks
to MTX revenue:
• Customization: Allowing users to pay to
personalize their experience in the
application (aka “dollhousing”).
• Convenience: Giving users the option to
pay to cut down on time spent grinding (i.e.
automation of repetitive tasks).
$$$$$
We spent much time and trouble assuring
balance between paying and free-play
customers in the system.
Area/Code and Maxis/EA saw this as a vital part
of maintaining the integrity of the brand, on a
par with avoiding “scam” offers.
$$$$$
It turns out that our player base, at least, had
caught up to where Chinese gamers were five
years ago.
When we made it possible for players spending
more real cash to get ahead in the game faster,
they were fine with it.
Don’t ignore potential revenue
$$$$$
streams unless you’re sure they’re
poisoned.
• Only used one form of currency when most
other successful games were using two
• Cut a “dollhousing” feature that could
potentially have been a good MTX feature
(Island customization)
• Didn’t allow players to Buy Observations at
launch
$$$$$
• Choosing a vendor
• Setting up accounting in EA
• Hosting and stuff
$$$$$
Don’t change all of the rules at once
Innovation drives success in growing markets
like Facebook, but can confuse mass audiences.
Small changes to known systems make new
experiences easier to swallow.
Lesso
ns
As designed, Spore Islands had no levels, at all.
We were avoiding Facebook RPGs’ tedious
treadmills and their 20-year-0ld problems.
But in our Open Beta, players begged for some
kind of leveling – anything at all.
We quickly implemented a system that would
let them level up their titles from
one island-themed rank to another. Development
But even then, the players wanted more. They
wanted to increase their stats.
Our elegant zero-sum system was designed to
trade grinding for subtle systems mastery, but
the average player didn’t understand it.
We resisted “making the game more ordinary”
but missed that players were just
looking for a familiar hook in a sim Development
genre brand new to Facebook.
When we first started on Spore Ecosystems, it
used Spore artwork for player-created
creatures.
We moved away from this quickly, however, as
it risked confusing players of the PC title…
…as well as alienating the more casual
Facebook audience with its very
“hardcore” 3D looks.
Development
Over several revisions, we pushed the
creatures and illustrations in a much more
Facebook-friendly direction.
With customization part of our business plan,
we needed a familiar art style that Facebook
players would love to look at over and over.
Between the Agile process and an early
start on art, we were able to make Development
huge changes in response to
research, testing, and publisher requests.
Competition is Tough
We took a risk on true competitive multiplayer,
but learned this: if there are five players and
one winner, there are four losers.
…and losers don’t buy cowboy hats.
Lesso
ns
After launch, we addressed the hardcore nature of
competition by building in some treadmills that
eased the pain of losing.
At its core, though, Spore Islands was at its most
fun when played against – rather than with –
friends.
Hardcore competitive games, like Scrabble, have
“made it” on Facebook, but it’s not easy or
common. Keep this in mind if your
design (or brand) is all about the PvP. Development
Advertising works
If your game’s not going into a huge social gaming
network (and if you’re an indie, it’s not) than you or
your publisher needs to buy ads. LOTS of ads.
Facebook is a platform – your game is not an ad, it’s a
product and it needs its own campaign; luck is not a
strategy.
Lesso
ns
Before Spore Islands’ Open Beta, we carefully
planned out our Facebook touchpoints, Userto-User, and App-to-User messaging.
We cribbed from Parking Wars and designed
the game to reward players organically as they
added friends for their creatures to prey on.
We didn’t think hard about our ad plan or
about newly popular virality methods –
we had a system.
Virality
We were…
• Proud of our design-based virality solution
• Concerned about our Spamminess rating
• Suspicious of “hard sell” Feed-spamming
• Wary about giving EA another Spore-related
customer service black eye after DRMgate
So we erred on the side of caution.
Virality
• Advertising budget was small
• Social gaming network was not available
Production!
Life begins at launch
Bazillions of people are going to play your game. They will
discover things you didn’t know and find problems you
didn’t think you had.
You must respond to things you only learn after the game
goes live. If you can’t, your players will leave as fast as they
arrived.
It can’t be said often enough: launch is the starting gate,
not the finish line.
Lesso
ns
• Timing
– Production ran long
– Beta ran right into Spore Hero for the Wii
launch date
– But needed to get out before any other
major corporate announcements
Production!
As social gaming matures, AAA properties will
increasingly enter the space, but they’ll need as
much love as on any other platform.
Innovation is important, and that means
sometimes things aren’t going to work out as
planned. Be prepared, and roll with it.
With a full toolkit and full support, a strong
brand can and will bring the same power to
Facebook as anywhere else. But, of course,
it it always needs to be a good game first.
Lesso
ns
Bringing a Retail
Franchise into the Social
Gaming World
Demetri Detsaridis
Caryl Shaw
Executive Producer
Sr. Producer
Area/Code
Maxis/Electronic Arts
demetri.detsarids@areacodeinc.com
carylshaw@gmail.com
twitter: detsaridis
twitter: caryl_s