Download - F2P Game Balancing: Data Movies
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Data MoviesVisualizing Player behaviour to aid the design and balancing of F2P games
Thomas HulvershornOperations and Analytics Manager Outplay Entertainment
Amazon Appstore Developer Summit, London, 4th October 2016
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• Start!• Select Boosts• Play!
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• Win • Play On
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• Continue• Shop
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Replay
Boosts
No Boosts No Boosts
Win and move on
Lost
New
Casual Games Core Loop
BoostsStart Play
Shop
End
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Replay
Boosts
No Boosts No Boosts
Win and move on
Lost
New
Broken Loop
BoostsStart Play
Shop
End
• Frustrating, Too hard• Annoying, Impossible• Boring, Too easy
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Less Difficult
RetentionMonetisation
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
More Difficult
RetentionMonetisation
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Broken Level
Retention Monetisation
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Influencing Difficulty• Initial moves • Variations of Colours • Type and ratio of Blockers• Goals• Restrictive Tiles• Mechanics• Size and Shape of Board• …
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Two Chained Loops
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Fun• Impact
– Greater Tolerance– Higher Monetisation– Better Retention
• How to design “fun”?– Quality in everything (Visuals, Animations, Audio, FPS, …)– Celebrate Achievements– Time to complete a level– Appropriate Difficulty
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Challenge• Balance each Level!
• Balance the Flow between Levels!
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56 chained Loops
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705 Levels in 38 Areas(09/2016)
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Game Analytics• Measuring
– Pass Rates (Outcomes)– Boost usage– Time to completion– Moves left, Star Achievements– …
• >1 Millions Data events per day per game (already sampled)
• Data stored in AWS, accessed with SQl, analysed with ‘R’
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How to make sense of this?How to make the right decisions?
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“Classic” Quantitative Analysis
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Experiments
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Alternatives• Quantitative Analysis
–Answers Questions objectively• Qualitative Analysis
–Raises Questions subjectively
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Lights Camera Action
Data Movie Director
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Movie Selection and Setup
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Detail View One Player
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800 Players
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Events per Level
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Detail Analysis, one Event
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Data Model• Pacers
– Event Counter– Day– Session
• Context– Player ID– Level Number
• Content– Events Type, e.g. Loss, Won
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Movie Configurator
Game
Events(Olga)
PlayerCity
ETL
Load
Mov
ie G
ener
ator
Cohorts, Selected Events, Time Frame
Generate
LevelDataDLC
RawEvents
API(Helios)
Sess
ions
/ IA
P
Anal
ytics
CommunicationLevel EditorWorkbench
Provide Insights
Data Movies
On Demand/
Batch
Integration
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Game Design influences Performance
• Two Factors– FUN– Difficulty
Summary• Balancing one Level is hard• Balancing of a thousand Levels is harder
• Getting it right is the essence of sustained success for a F2P Game
• Qualitative Analysis can support the effort by raising questions and providing context and insights
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“I know that eventually I can beat every level”
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