On game design
Years ago, in 2009 or so, my little design company took a job to build a mobile version of a fairly popular social game called Spymaster. If you were on Twitter back then, you’d likely remember it as it was extremely popular—both to play and to hate on. For me, this was an interesting new area of design as I was getting into mobile design, and while I was a pretty big gamer, I’d never done anything related to a game.
I learned a lot in the years that followed. About game design, viral loops, marketing, mechanics, content creation, art direction, and more. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to enter that space now. What would that experience have been like with tools like the blockchain and AI?
Before I get too far into it, two things stand out as universal in gaming. Two essential tips:
It has to be fun. Fun is job number one for a successful game. No amount of viral trickery, sideways incentives, or guilt-based engagement practices will get you farther than a simple focus on fun.
It has to be simple, at least at the start. Complexity can and should come only after the core mechanics have been mastered.
Back to the reflection. When I started working on Spymaster, it was a divisive game. Some people LOVED it; many others HATED it. I think there were some valid reasons for that hate, and I also totally get why people loved it. The core mechanics involved were entertaining, at least at first, and it was relatively simple to play, relying on social engagement via Twitter to work.
But it wasn’t a game for me. I worked on that mobile interface, and that went well. Well enough that I left my company—which I’d founded and grown successfully—to join the company that made Spymaster. The big carrot there was that I’d be able to design and pitch a game of my own design. As a designer, who loves to learn and try new things, this was…well, I feel extremely lucky to have had the opportunity.
I spent quite a while studying game design and thinking about what I liked about games. I concluded that games needed to be, at their core, fun to play. This might seem obvious—but I assure you, it’s not obvious to everyone.
I looked around at the other successful games at the time: Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc., and did not understand them. They weren’t fun. I can’t tell you how many arguments I got into with folks around this over the years. The prevailing attitude was that “gamification” and “viral loops”—and other jargony bullshit—were the things you needed for a successful game.
I went in the opposite direction. I created a game—Shadelight—that was fun first and used some of the social gaming mechanics to enhance that fun instead of trying to paint an unfun experience with pretty colors and characters, which most other games at the time did. I did this largely on my own at first, using stock photos and my meager illustration skills for the assets. I wrote all the content and designed everything from the UI/UX to the mechanics and economics.
Shadelight as it looked in 2010 or so
Thankfully I was able to convince my small team this was worth working on, and in about three months, we had an alpha and began to add players. They loved it. The game was fun—the core mechanic was a kind of social choose-your-own-adventure with a heavy focus on story and choices. Imagine one of the original Bioware games in a Facebook social game format, and you’ll have an idea. It had factions, classes, skill-based UI games, and lots of small sinks—mini-games, PVP, equipment stores, and the like. There was a lot to do, and we added new modules and adventures, most free but a few pay-to-play, almost every week.
It was popular enough that we were acquired by IGN and were funded to work on Shadelight for about a year or so, unencumbered and, while on a tight budget, pretty much free to do what we wanted. We doubled down on the creative, hiring another writer and some illustrators, and putting a lot of effort into upping the quality of the content and adding mechanisms that supported that content. The game grew and was doing well. However—of course, it couldn’t last—we reached a point where, while we were doing well, were profitable, etc., we couldn’t scale. We kept adding players, but the costs to create new and engaging content became too expensive.
This wasn’t what killed the game, not exactly. We could have kept it going for a while, and it would have continued to grow slowly. No, what killed it was the business, hungry for growth and not seeing the forest for the trees, bringing in people who wanted to take our ideas and spin them off into other ventures. This might sound ok, but the core game mechanics of these other ventures weren’t fun. We tried this, leaned into it, and tried our best to make it work. The whole time I just wanted to work on Shadelight, the game we knew was fun and could keep going, but the suits involved kept pushing us away from quality content and fun towards something they felt was more scalable.
And, not to throw too much shade on them. Quality content is hard to scale. But here’s the lesson: without quality content—without fun—there is nothing to work with. Scaling shit lands you more shit.
Thankfully, this didn’t last long. Seeing the end of fun and that this road we were on was going nowhere, my team began to quit. I was one of the first out the door, but the core team was gone in a couple of months. I went on to do more in the social gaming space, and that was an adventure—though not a very fun one—but my game was dead. The suits tried to keep it going, but not knowing what fun looked like and hell-bent on viral growth, they drove it to the ground.
I look back on this and can’t help but think we were before our time. Had we access to blockchain technology to help with the economics of the game, I think it would have been better for our players and us. We would have been able to monetize in a much more sustainable way and also likely have devised mechanics that would have been able to add fun and revenue into the mix.
As well, with AI tools, we could have likely kept our content creation costs in check. I think I would still like to have the skills of talented artists, but we could have supplemented that to help realize ideas and storylines much more quickly. As well, wow, that first version of the game would have been so much more polished.
I had so much fun working on Shadelight, and I’ve always longed to do something like that again. I’m not sure now is the right time for me, but I’d love to get back into it someday. This time, I’d keep the focus on fun and quality content but lose the investors and need to grow. I think it could be a sustainable lifestyle business with a great relationship between the creator and the players.
Someday.
