On Avakin, I was put in charge of an initiative known as “evergreen games”. We identified that too many of our minigames were temporary. The solution to this was to design minigames that:
A) Can be engaged by players at any time.
B) Rewards players without impacting overall progression or cannibalising IAP revenue.
My favourite is almost certainly Forage, Harvest, Farm!
It stemmed from us wanting to test new tech for implementing interactive content on the fly. Known as Golem, it allows server-client interactions to be scripted in Lua and deployed straight into the game without client updates.
FHF is an exercise in teaching players how to collect and manage resources.
Players are tasked with collecting various resources.
- Different resource nodes give different types of resources
- Each node type requires a different tool
- Nodes give out items based on rarity determined by a chance table.
Player inventory is finite – they must figure out what items to discard, sell, or keep. Additionally, tools have finite uses and also take up an inventory slot. The rarest of items can be exchanged on certain days for premium currency.
The biggest design challenges of this came with balancing while minimising repetition without reward. For this, I created a balancing table:
Several iterations of rewards values, rarity chances, resource collecting times and tool tiers were tried. For about a week, my team went around constantly asking the rest of the dev team to play the game in order to make sure everything felt right.
Some other big challenges were just explaining all of these concepts to the players. Mobile players have a tendency to avoid reading a lot of text when they can (Me too, honestly.) so it was a case of keeping everything to small chunks. Explain things when players go to a point, or click on a bit of UI. At this point, when want to know about it; otherwise they wouldn’t have gone there.
In the end, we had 800,000 players on the first day, with over a million rewards claimed. Over 10,000 players even grinded their way to the top reward in the shop after day 1. A special profile badge I intended to take a week of grinding to achieve!
Declan Peach 