Lumines Live not doing so well?

Lumines Live shipped on XBox 360 last Wednesday, to mixed reviews. The big sticking point was its high cost compared to other Live Arcade titles ($15), and the fact that this didn't get you the "full game" -- the menus include various stuff you can't actually use until you pay more for them. The "Advance Pack" is the first available add-on, and it costs $7.50.

Considering the base game has so few skins, it's hard for me to think of the game as complete unless you buy the advance pack to get the other skins. But that word "advance" there really throws me. I mean, I'm not a shabby Lumines player, but I'm also not amazing. My high score is 220,000. As of this writing, that makes me slightly over 1000th place in the leaderboards for this product. That means only 1000 people are better than me. Before you go assuming that I'm amazing at the game, take into account that in order to unlock the score-related Achievement, you need to earn 500,000 -- more than double my highest score. Clearly, the designers expected a relatively dedicated player to be twice as good as I am. And there are far less than 1000 people with scores that high. So how many people have bought this game, if my paltry score can be so high in the rankings?

What's worse is that I don't feel like buying the Advance pack because I don't feel advanced. If most people think like I do, that means that there are fewer than 1000 people who feel compelled to buy the Advance Pack. Of course, I have no idea how any of these products are actually selling. But I suspect they made a blunder with their pricing scheme.

For the record, I do feel like I was a little cheated. I expected the base game to have at least half the amount of content as Lumines 1 for the PSP did.

The Best-Get-Better Reward Scheme

Let's start by thinking about reward schemes. I'm currently working on a casual game which is supposed to reach the same market as Bejeweled or Luxor. The recent market survey from Popcap.com has some great information in it. As you read it, you get a mental picture of the stereotypical casual game player.

These gamers are more often female than male. They tend to be older. Most of them play casual games to relieve stress and to stimulate their mind. In other words, casual games are filling the same niche that crossword puzzles filled a generation before. However, casual games are deemed a lot more important to these people than, say, watching television, reading a book, or even spending time with their family. These games are important to them! "Casual" might even be a bit of an oxymoron here.

I'll be thinking about various aspects of the casual game market demographics for a while. I particulary want to talk about how traditional game design approaches mesh with this data. First up, let's talk about reward schemes.

On XBox 360, casual games and old retro arcade classics are lumped together as "Live Arcade." There's no distinction made between the different types of games on there, and you may be tempted to assume that most of these games are in fact "casual games." Well, if we use popcap.com's demographic data as the target "casual game player audience", then most of the games on XBox Arcade are not all casual games. This makes sense, if you think about it -- naturally the audience for Popcap.com's Web-based PC games is going to be pretty different than for XBox 360 owners. In fact, it's fairly surprising that people lump them together at all.

So what makes the Arcade game Astropop more of a casual game than, say, the Arcade version of Galaga? Both are space games where you pilot a little ship; in one, you move blocks around, in the other, you shoot aliens and dodge bullets. Is Galaga less "casual" because of the violence?

No! That's not it at all. There's no data to suggest that the very mild violence shown in Galaga would be inherently unappealing to casual gamers. There are many differences, including initial difficulty levels, but one very important difference is the reward scheme that Galaga uses: I call it the Best-Get-Better reward scheme. It was incredibly popular with old coin-op games, and is still popular with many game designers today. It fits some markets, but it doesn't fit the casual market.

What I mean by the Best-Get-Better scheme is that the game rewards "good" players far more than it rewards average players. Let's look at Galaga. You remember this old classic -- it's the Space-Invaders-esque shooter where you can let your ship get captured by the aliens, and then shoot the alien captor and have two of your ships on screen at the same time. If you can manage to do this by level 3, and keep both ships alive, you'll have a very easy time with the first Challenging Stage -- with enough button mashing, you'll get a perfect score on the challenge, which will give you a huge point boost. These points will usually be enough to get you an extra ship, which makes you all the more likely to be alive for the next Challenging Stage.

The game is designed to reward the good players much more than the average player, to let them really stand apart from the average players. The difference between a good Galaga player and an average Galaga player is pretty dramatic. Casual games tend to use a less sudden reward curve.

Let's look at some other games which reward this way. The incredibly fun Arcade game Geometry Wars uses this reward scheme as well. If you play well without ever dying, your point multiplier goes up. If you can avoid getting hit for, say, five minutes of play, your score will be huge. If you get hit halfway through, the score multiplier resets and your score will be mediocre. Once again, the difference between a good Geometry Wars player and an average player is huge -- stupendous, in fact. The difference here is much more pronounced than in Galaga. If I had to pick one of the two games to be "more casual-friendly", Galaga would win hands down.

Of course, you can't avoid this stratification completely. The best players are inevitably going to be orders of magnitude better than the average player. But a casual game should have a smooth advancement curve, not a steep one like Geometry Wars has.

Why do I dislike the Best-Get-Better reward curve for casual games? It doesn't fit well with the target audience's play time. Even though you might play a casual game for only a few minutes at a time, you still need to feel like you're making progress. For games with scoring, that means you need to keep getting higher scores each time you play! In Geometry Wars, you quickly hit a score plateau, and you won't get past it until you've played the game for many hours.

I guess this is a nice rule of thumb for any game, actually: after each play session, the player should feel like you are getting better or making progress at the game. You shouldn't hit a plateau in a game -- that's what makes people give up on otherwise-fun games. This problem is especially sensitive with casual gamers because they don't play for very long at a time, so you have to be extra sensitive with the reward curve.

Contrast this to a coin-op game, where you want the average play experience to be a fixed length. It might make sense to have a steep advancement-skill curve here. Or compare it to a game aimed at teenage boys, boys who tend to play the same game for three or four hours at a setting. They don't need to get better every few minutes. As long as they can reach a new milestone with every play session or two, they'll be fine.

Now, having a linear progression curve doesn't mean the game has to be easy. I dislike when people assume casual games have to be "dumbed down" compared to other game types. Now, there are certain things your casual game should do to better hit that market, but that doesn't mean you should just make ultra-easy versions of other games.

Games which can be both easy and difficult are obviously going to be in a better position, but I'll ponder on that in a later post.

Hello

Hi there. This is a new fresh blog for me to talk about game design and development.

Let me briefly give my background, and why I'm talking here. It'll sound cocky -- it's hard to talk about yourself without sounding cocky -- but bear with me.

In college I was very successful at ACM programming contests, and went to the international level twice (which is the maximum number of times you are allowed to go). After that, I became a coach for future ACM programming contestants. This taught me about speed coding, pair programming, and formal whiteboarding... and more importantly, it taught me when to use each! I would recommend college programming contests to anyone who wants to be a coder.

Since then I have been an engineer for well over a decade, often as a lead. I've been in the games industry for about five years, and in the past three or so years, I've branched out into other roles:

- I've been a producer for the MMORPG "Asheron's Call 2"
- I've been a lead systems designer for AC2's expansion pack
- I've been a designer on other game titles (which didn't launch or have not yet launched)

I'm not the most experienced designer or producer in the world -- but I'm learning fast. I've always been a self-study sort of person, so I've been picking them up quickly.

So why am I writing this blog? It seems like the games industry doesn't really think about what it's doing a lot of the time. And thinking about what you're doing -- that's the most important thing when you're planning any sort of project.

One of the worst things about the game industry (and the MMORPG industry in particular) is that it seems to create a permanent rush sensation. Everything has to be done now! There's no time to think! But because we don't think, we end up making mistakes which really do set us back considerably.

I've recently started my own personal game company -- it's just me and remote contractors at the moment -- and I've been trying to THINK before I do something. I can't say my thinking has yielded amazing insights -- but I've had some good ideas I want to share. And I've found various research I'd like to talk about, too.

The goal of this blog is to share my thinking with other game designers and developers. Since I've been thinking about lots of game design topics, I wanted to share my thoughts with other designers.