Some 20 years or so after the birth and proliferation of the so-called "match-3" game, here we see an entry that brings something new to the genre. (Yes, really.) As I tweeted the other day: if you can innovate in match-3, you can innovate anywhere.
Each turn you're given an object to place in your town in any empty space. If you place it so that it forms a group of three or more contiguous objects of the same type, they combine into a single larger object (3+ grasses become a bush, 3+ bushes become a tree, 3+ trees become a small hut, and so on). Chain reactions are possible, if for example you place a third bush in a space right next to two trees. There are also enemies that must be placed, which wander around and temporarily block you from placing on specific squares (these too can be combined in sets of 3+), and special blocks that either act as a wildcard or eliminate what's on a square. There's a scoring mechanism that rewards you for combining more than 3 of something.
By combining, space is cleared up on the playfield. You play until all spaces are filled with nothing that can combine. That is pretty much the game in a nutshell, although the strategy is surprisingly deep (as I can already see by the 10x score difference within my own social network).
The game originally launched on the Amazon Kindle (!), as the first ever third-party game to be developed for that platform. The version linked to above lives on Facebook; as of launch it limits the number of moves you can take at a time (you can wait for them to refill or buy extra moves with in-game currency), although given the developer's M.O., you can expect that anything about the game is subject to change if it is found that it makes the game better for a majority of the players.
nothing new under the sun?
If the innovation is that the three objects combine into a higher-level object instead of disappearing, that's been done, in the flash game Combine. The gameplay will obviously be different -- instead of placing one thing anywhere, you're dropping two connected things (Carl Muckenhoupt says Match-3 started with Columns, so this would be a reversion to the old school).
Combine doesn't have enemies or specials, so it surely plays differently even beyond the gravity/no-gravity difference. And a lot of the strategy comes from the way matches resolve (always down and to the left); I don't know how that works in this one.
They collapse into the
They collapse into the last-placed item of the three.
Memory Exercise
The game is also available on Google+.
I'm currently having a love-hate relationship with it.
Basically, since objects collapse into the last one you've placed, you are not allowed to nail down an object's exact position until you've placed its third component. You need to remember where you want it and avoid that spot - but only with objects one level below it. For instance, if you want a hut on a given spot, you need to avoid putting trees there, but bushes are mostly okay (unless you're planting a third tree, for which you actually need the final spot to be free).
If you have something more advanced in mind (such as a house or a mansion), you have to keep using spots that you're going to have cleared in a few turns. You're basically rewarded for remembering your entire plan.
That's 3 moves for a bush, 9 moves for a tree, 27 moves for a hut, 81 moves for a house, 243 moves for a mansion, etc. Currently, I have trained myself to the point where I can build houses. Mansions are beyond me.
Then there are churches, cathedrals etc. which form a similar chain, only you make them by killing bears, which keep moving.
Then you don't always get to plant grass. Sometimes you draw bushes, trees and other stuff that speeds up your construction on one hand, but can screw you royally on the other, because at any given point it may or may not fit anywhere (due to the need to keep some spots unoccupied). It's good to have a contingency plan, if at all possible. So now you have two plans to keep in mind.
In other words: it's a genuinely deep and rewarding gameplay with a really nasty random number generator on top of it. Half the time it feels like I'm being clever and I'm being rewarded for it. The other half it feels like I'm being clever and the game is actively trying to sabotage me.
I can see it in my scores, too. My second playthrough ever set a personal high score that I couldn't beat for a good few days. I'm now good enough to get scores twice as high, but the spread is huge.
Regular bears can be contained, but then there are ninja bears who occupy any spot on the board at random (they jump to a different spot each turn). They can only be removed using "imperial bots", which have an annoying tendency to appear near the beginning of the session rather than later on, when they are most needed. You can only have one object set aside at any given time, so there's no way to create a strategic surplus.
Or rather, the in-game store is your surplus. The game trains you to get used to purchasing stuff by giving you lots of coins during the normal course of gameplay, but at the same time forcing you to buy new play turns pretty much every session (the automatic refill is *slow*). By making long term plans you risk that the random number generator won't let you complete them. But the store lets you take significant shortcuts and buy higher level objects right away.
Not only is this "pay to win", but it also uses some mechanisms of a gambling game. And I think it's deliberate.
It's also smart enough to only lure you one small step at a time. There is no "premium currency", for example, they're just using the effects of scale. Buying extra turns is fair enough, because you earn enough coins for those through normal gameplay. But if you want really good scores without being at the RNG's mercy, you need to start spending the same currency ten times as fast.
I just can't shake the feeling of being treated like a lab rat in a maze.
Long story short, genuinely good game, nasty monetization. Social games are evil, period.
Ditto.
JZW seems to have just said everything I wanted to say after a couple of days play :)
Once you reach a certain level of skill, the game quite blatantly and obviously stops giving you what you require without spending money: it hands out ninja bears much faster than the only resource you can possibly use to destroy them. It reminds me of the boss fights on those arcade machines in the 80s... you know the ones, the 'Alright, you've had your 50p's worth, now fuck off' bosses.
It's so easy to make a mistake in your placement of pieces that I really, really wanted to quit and restart A LOT when I reached an intermediate level and started realising how to build larger and larger structures; but the game won't let you.
Hopefully, there will eventually be a premium version of this where I can pay $5 for the entire game and skip the rather underhand monetization system. If it was balanced properly, I'd pay for it. Mind you, that's a very big IF, from what I've seen I certainly wouldn't assume that a complete version would be anything like balanced.
Duplicate Post
Deleted duplicate.
Designer notes
Some notes (previous post seems to have been eaten):
- If you think Triple Town is a game of luck, you are playing it wrong. :-) A skilled player will always best the score of an unskilled player. Intermediate players score in the 600k-1000k range consistently. Top players reach several million.
- The random number generator is random. There is no AI algorithm watching your progress and forcing you into situations where you must pay. The drop rate for bots is higher than that of ninjas and if you manage for the long term, you should be fine.
- The game is currently balanced so that intermediate players never need to pay. You earn enough coins by playing that you can buy most things in the store. IMHO, rewarding skilled players with free games is the opposite of evil.
At this stage of development (and it is still early) I'm mostly interested in getting people to fall in love with the game. Not a lot of effort has been put into monetization, but we'll eventually find a fair balance.
BTW, I'll have to share the data on this game at some point. The difference between real player behavior and critical response in reviews / comments is very surprising. There are big issues with the game (which is why it is in beta), but they have nothing to do with microtransactions. Fascinating stuff.
Appreciate everyone who is playing the game,
Danc.
www.lostgarden.com
www.spryfox.com
Danc...
Your comment reminds me of the typical "restaurant decline" pattern. It's easy to increase profits at a restaurant: raise prices, buy cheaper food, and have a lower ratio of staff to guests. You can pretty much guarantee your numbers will go up and you'll probably only hear back a couple comments about this or that. Nothing to worry about when the money's rolling in.
Oh - and six months later, there will be a new restaurant where yours was.
What you have in those comments above is a gold mine in terms of understanding how players view your game. Don't dismiss the thoughts because those ideas aren't showing through in the numbers.
And I haven't played your game, but from the above it sounds like you should probably switch to a more managed random distribution for spawns. It's obviously key to how players perceive and play the game, so why leave it just to chance?
Re: Managed Distribution.
Re: Managed Distribution. This is an option, but it has its own pitfalls. What we'll likely do with the random distributions is signal outlier sequences more clearly to the user by making them into exciting events instead of mysterious moments of bad luck. The variation of 10 bears in a row is ultimately a good thing since it creates epic moments. Often a game needs valleys to make the highs so much stronger. It is tempting to nerf such moments, but not always good for the game.
The restaurant metaphor is a good one. Triple Town is going to keep evolving. Games like this are services that will likely be running for years. I'll consider it a success if we have folks that happily play for many years to come. We certainly won't get there by being evil. However, it is also completely reasonable to ask people to spend on their hobby if they are having fun with the game.
take care,
Danc.
PS: I must admit I'm amused by the 'Social games are evil, period' comment. The same design principals are at work in many of my other games (Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God and the upcoming Panda Poet). Yet these comments don't arise because they are on slightly different platforms. There's a bit of a kneejerk reaction in certain communities that appear to occur independent of the actual game. It honestly is very hard to tell if someone is being a blowhard moralist or if there is a real issue.
For example: We did a test where buying turns was essentially free and the removal of all pressure to purchase had zero impact on retention or fun ratings. The singular issue that irritates a certain group above all others literally does not matter. (Odd as it may seem, the biggest issue with Triple Town is actually the tutorial)
For a very small minority of vocal people, just the *idea* of a social game using micro-transactions is scary. A game becomes an opportunity to push a particular point of view instead of something to be treated objectively (not that I expect players to treat games objectively!) Criticism becomes an unthinking and heavily justified expression of ideology instead of a form of constructive feedback.
Just musing out loud. :-) I'll be curious how the indie community eventually adapts to free-to-play games. Because nice indie devs like myself, Scott Brodie (Hero Generations) and many others are going to keep on making them. And a good number of them will be experiences that you really don't want to miss.
take care
Danc.
www.lostgarden.com
www.spryfox.com
Hell, it'll be interesting
Hell, it'll be interesting to see how FTP games adapt to FTP games. I look at something like Brian Reynolds' games, which quickly get to the point of unplayability unless you are willing to spam copiously or monetize, and think: this may help short-term monetization, but at the obvious expense of long-term retention. Or to put it another way, I quit in disgust because the demands the game places on me are too high.
In general, the metrics-driven model is good at capturing short-term benefits in monetization, but not so good at predicting long-term deleterious effects, so you introduce a change, A/B test it, say "it makes more money," push it game-wide, and, without knowing it, you've just reduced your average player lifetime from 3 months to 2, something you don't notice for another month, and can't then separate on the basis of the data from all the -other- changes you've implemented in the meantime.
In other words, I think eventually the analytics dweebs have to back off and say "Yes, we thought otherwise, but it's true: gameplay comes first."
But then, I'm a dreamer.
Curious what you think of
Curious what you think of Realm of the Mad God's monetization. It is generally quite light touch with nothing sold in the game that you can't earn by playing. With all our projects, we are trying to get fun/retention first and then after that is solid focus on the monetization in a way that doesn't hurt the baseline. In other words adding paid items should either result in no change or improvement in the already high fun and retention scores. I'm not interested in making games that crash after 6 months. It is so much better to have a community that lasts for years, especially if you are a smaller shop with limited capacity to turn out new IPs.
take care,
Danc.
www.lostgarden.com
www.spryfox.com
Indeed
I must admit I'm amused by the 'Social games are evil, period' comment.
I think that to a certain extent all developers in the social game space are suffering (and will suffer more) for the sins of a few.
I'm not overly well traveled in the space myself, but I know a lot of gamers that bolt as soon as they see the option of buying power pellets. They don't stay long enough to find out whether the transactions are abusive - they just won't commit to a game that includes them. They got burned once, and it will take them a long time to forget.
Oh, and, I thought Mad God was very well made. I didn't stick around very long - it's not really my kind of game - but it's well made and balanced, players seem to be having a good time, and the monetization didn't seem at all abusive (very light handed, it seemed).
'The game is currently
'The game is currently balanced so that intermediate players never need to pay.'
This is a statement which desperately needs clarification. I mean, no-one needs to pay, your moves increase slowly and automatically. The question that I address to myself most often playing the game is this: Can I, with my current level of skill, get a higher score or lengthen my game right now by spending money? The answer is always yes, and that sets alarm bells ringing.
Personally, as a gamer I need hard limits to the gameplay. Getting enough resources to have a 'perfectly reasonable game', or some other woolly term, is no use to me. The hard limit which I set myself, which seemed to suggest itself most obviously, is to never spend any coins in the shop at all. This generates no revenue for the developer, which is I expect not what he wants. The other hard limit I could try is always cleaning out the shop; I confess I haven't tried this because I'm concerned about how much it might cost me. A wise man doesn't try gambling for a while just to see if it's addictive. However, because I haven't chosen this route, my high scores are meaningless compared to those of others online.
I suppose I'm not really this game's target audience, as I'm not a social gamer, so you might not care what my opinions are. Fair enough. I'd just say that if you pitch this game at me right I would pay for it in a heartbeat because the basic gameplay mechanics are awesome.
Some observations
A fascinating game, and quite addictive. I've held myself to the rule that I only buy time and nothing else, which puts me at a slight profit for most games; I really appreciate a game that allows this approach (as Danc notes, it's the good-players-get-free-games model, which is gratifying).
While the random number generator seems mostly random, I do suspect it of a bit of serial correlation -- given that bears are about 15% of the draws, drawing six bears in a row should happen about once every 46000 moves, but it's happened to me more often.
I have to admit a moment of despair when I discovered that floating castles aren't the last piece.
Anyway, I've have enough friends playing this game on G+ that I'm inclined to think that you've built the ultimate game for compulsive systematizers. Even my 4-year-old wants to play (though I don't let her -- she'd burn through my precious, precious moves...)
Hm, maybe I should write an agent to play this game for me -- I bet computers would be awesome at this...
What to buy?
> I've held myself to the rule that I only buy time and nothing else
I think it's after you've unlocked unlimited turns (which costs a whopping $3.99 on Android, making this what Myles na Gopaleen called a bleeding gory bloody livid bargain), and started spending your coins on bushes and trees, that you have a chance of getting really good scores. I remember thinking, "ha ha, lame 7-tree limit, who would waste money on trees?" Well, now I know.
I think eventually I'm going to decide that this game is a stupid repetitive exercise and stop playing it, but that's not going to be happening any time soon.
Refreshing the store
Actually I think this is a nicely designed game. After buying unlimited turns (one off purchase) I never have trouble running out of coins - though I may go through all the store products: however, occasionally the store refreshes itself - my question is, is this randomly generated, or a reward of some sort for accumulating time? A second question: occasionally I do something that makes all the ninja bears vanish but havent worked out what it is - any tips?
And I think creative people should be rewarded for the fun they create - to expect to be rewarded for one's efforts is not evil, and so far I've had many hours of fun for the price of a couple of cups of coffee - how cool is that?
bitter aftertaste
JWZ and Shteev hit the nail on the head. Great game mechanics but the microtransactions have broken the game for me, which is a bummer because it's really addictive.
What the developer has done here is no different to Blizzard requiring additional payment to get the best gear in WoW.
I've had a bit of fun and I'm out, without spending a dime. If it was a once-off buy, I'd have bought it for sure. I wonder how many others would have too.. I'm guessing most in these comments.