I plan to go into specifics about game design, project management, investors, studios, mobile game business. As usual I will try to keep the subject matter fun and full of multimedia goodness.

I’ve put the slides up on the download page as well GameIndustryLessonsLearned.pdf 3.5MB

During development we add calls from the game client code (the software on your smartphone) to the game servers (where the persistent data, leaderboards, shop data, etc. are kept) that track how players are playing the game. This is called “instrumenting” your game. This tracking data is used by the project managers and game designers to make effective decisions about what is working or not working and what can be done to make the game better. This tracking is called collecting metrics. Then you analyze the metrics of many players for statistical properties using analytics to optimize your design and iterate for greater enjoyment. When players are engaged and having fun, the value of making an IAP or buying DLC makes sense. Going from a free player to a paying players is called conversion – and ultimately leads to the financial success of the game.

Like the casino industry, games have begun to call the converted players “whales” (big spenders) and when analyzing the spending habits new categories have emerged like “minnows” (small spenders) and “dolphins” (medium spenders). There is another important lesson from casinos that many game designers fail to recognize: “whales” come to a casino when there is a lot of other people having fun in a social setting - when there is a party going on the value is there. Games with lots of free players have a party going on, and the “whales” will come.

Like websites that use hit tracking to tune UX/UI design, we can track which game screens are visited and which interactions the players select. If players take too long in the tutorial they may leave before they enjoy the actual gameplay, we can shorten or redesign the tutorial reducing friction that the players experience getting into the game. If menus are confusing we can prioritize the buttons based on frequency of use to optimize the menu design. This process means tracking and analyzing many players gameplay behavior.

While building our Item Shops we can price items and track which ones are used most and which might be priced too high. Over time we can tune these values so the functional power and IAP price reflect the kinds of economic behavior we want the game to have. Not too easy to play, and not so challenging that players never experience the content we design.

I like to keep in-game money earned while playing the game (Grind Currency or G$) separate from the in-game money people spend to buy IAP and DLC (Premium Currency or P$). P$ can be purchased with real money (dollars, etc.) using the app-store interface all F2P apps use. I try not to use real money directly for IAP or DLC as it can lead to confusion when you adjust prices or have promotional sales. It is also motivational for players to earn a bit of P$ for achievements and to denote progress – “earn 10 gold for leveling up”. Giving them a real $1.50 probably isn’t legal. Grinding for in-game money is a big part of many games, I typically say that the amount earned from grinding is roughly equivalent to 1/10 the amount earned from using IAP or DLC – this gives real value to spending P$.

These same buddies who ask me about F2P also wonder if isn’t “evil” or dishonest. Like any power, F2P can be used for less than honest reasons. There are some companies that learned the F2P formula and then tried making games that would prey on the psychological addiction to games and racked up large profits only to find that players get tired of being mistreated. Players are becoming much more sophisticated and recognize being scammed into paying for energy or undoing time locks without actual value.

One agrument against F2P is that that “core gamers” prefer paying for the game up front and then just enjoy the 10 to 30 hours of gameplay they paid for. There is a terrific game industry blog that posted “Why Core Gamers Hate Social Games: Because Their Selfish Exploitation Of Casual Gamers Is Coming To An End” - basically it suggests that casual gamers have been buying, but not finishing games for decades… and those casual gamers have been subsidizing the core gamers buy purchasing games they don’t actually finish or gain the real value for, but the new F2P games allow the casual gamers to enjoy the game as they like while the core gamers actually spend the money needed to finance the game. The result is that core gamers gain a large pool of players to engage with (see above about “whales” coming to the party) and the casual players become engaged enough that eventually they become paying players themselves.

This is an interesting redefinition of what “core” and “casual” actually means – and may for the first time reconcile what is really going on. The “core” players are the one who pay for the game and “casual” players are the ones who provide the party or social atmosphere. I was always reluctant to believe the old definition by time played (core plays more than casual)  – my wife, who enjoys puzzles and card games, will play those for dozens of hours each week, but she would not consider herself a “gamer”, and as busy as I am, I generally only get limited time to play as many games as I like… and the ones I do get to play tend to be for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, but I definately define my lifestyle as “gamer” by choice. So I like the idea of “core” or “casual” describing a game player’s spending behavior, not the kinds of games they play.

When a game has real value - truly entertains the players, provides a means of social interaction with their friends, and provides a genuine community for player’s to engage in – then players are happy to pay for the IAP and DLC. Many of the games I’ve worked on have had incredible conversion rates, large viral growth, and enjoyed significant financial success. This wasn’t by abusing players, but by giving them what they want – real value to have some fun.

When choosing what metrics you are going to track and how to analyze the data remember that there is already a vast amount of work out there already. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, especially if you can partner with one of the tracking services that helps game companies instrument their games and have wonderful web dashboards to investigate those large data sets. Let them provide that service, while your team works on the game.

Hopefully this is useful to many of you, and if it generates more questions than it answers I am happy to answer them in the comments.

This time the topics goes into depth about steps and twists associated with heists and cons – in the fashion of TV shows like White Collar and Leverage.

As always you may download the slides too: RoguesInTheHouse.zip (171 KB) or RoguesInTheHouse.pdf (226 KB).

There are two parts – Designing your own RPG and Publishing your own RPG.

I’ve uploaded the whole presentation to the downloads section – DIY-RPG.zip – it includes some nice support files like Paul’s Open Office demo and my PocketMod for Serif PagePlus. I hope you enjoy the contents.

I plan to follow this post with more details than we were able to fit into the slides, including sections on what to include in the GM and world building sections of your RPG and a piece on game design in general to help people get started… look for those soon.

I also spoke on the panels for “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Dungeon” and “Fighting with the Brain for GMs” – both of which were terrific fun for me.

If you attended or enjoyed the slides and materials please let us know by commenting below.

1. Make friends like a dog, cuddle like a cat, and collect nuts like a squirrel.
2. You are what you do every day – think about it and then ask “What did I do today?”
3. Loving is the little things you do everyday for someone you care about.
4. Never stop learning – someone who doesn’t read is no different than someone who can’t read – a closed mind is “kaput”.
5. You can never know enough, but you can be too smart for your own good.
6. Sometimes it is much harder to say “yes” than it is to say “no” – but it almost always is more rewarding.
7. Never, ever, stop asking why?
8. Travel more – your point of view can always use a new map pin.
9. People are generally good – but some people are ignorant and some people are jerks. Don’t listen to the ignorant and don’t bother with the jerks.
10. Live your life like there is no tomorrow, but treat the Earth better than a library book.
11. Leave your campsite in better condition than when you found it.
12. Thank goodness women are built like they are – I can’t think of a better design.
13. Thank goodness women are understanding of the crazy stuff men do.
14. Thank goodness my memory works in such a way that I can’t remember the crazy stuff women do (see #12).
15. A messy desk is not a sign of a messy mind.
16. One man’s piles are another woman’s mess.
17. It is not actually all about “who dies with the most toys wins”.
18. If you aren’t very good at something, you might not be asked to do it again.
19. Believe every fortune cookie.
20. Luck is believing enough to make stuff happen the way you want it to.
21. Bad Luck is not understanding that what you think can actually happen.
22. Learn from the best: Spirit like Teddy Roosevelt, Ingenuity like Albert Einstein, Imagination like Dr. Seuss, Wisdom like Yoda, Leadership like Captain Picard, Compete like Captain Kirk and Enjoy life like Doctor Who.
23. Life is a journey – a journey with vista points, attractions, historical markers, souvenir shops, and some really scary public bathrooms.
24. Life is like a box of chocolates – some times you just have to take one, bite it, and spit out the bad ones.
25. Life is like an arcade game – you got to put a token in, you might not get to play what you want, sometimes you get a one up, some times you have to use the smart bomb, and when you win your only recognition is 3 measly letters that will disappear when it gets unplugged,

Cheers,
Randy Angle

In years past it has filled 3 halls in the LA Convention Center – this year the 3rd hall was closed. Which meant a bit less walking and I was actually able to see most things in a single day.

Nintendo 3DS
First, I braved the 1.5 hour line to get into see the new Nintendo 3DS – the lines got much longer after the initial rush when the doors opened.

It is INCREDIBLE! As a person who wears glasses I enjoyed a real 3D movie for the first time (I hate wearing the polarized lenses over my own glasses). I played games, tech demos, watched moves, took 3D pictures and had fun for almost a half hour. The accelerometer and gyroscope worked flawlessly and with own user-facing camera and 2 stereoscopic away-facing cameras the most fun was with Augmented Reality apps. Games like Mario Kart, Resident Evil and MGS were fantastic, but there were demos of simple vertical shooter games that had parallax layers of 2D graphics that really looked new and innovative again.

3DS Features:

• Faster CPU – we don’t know who makes it or how fast yet
• 3D display with adjustable slider for 3D effect (maximum to off)
• Larger touch pad display – 320×240 (old screen was 240×192)
• Analog control pad
• User-facing camera for face grabs
• 3D Away-facing camera for Augmented Reality and photo/video taking
• Downloadable games like DSi
• Gyroscope – knows exact orientation
• Accelerometer – senses shaking and movement
• D-pad, 4 action buttons and 2 shoulder buttons
• 50+ 3D enabled games at launch – compatible with all old DS games

The 3DS wins the show award for the most BUZZ – which is what E3 is all about. Buy stock now!

Nintendo General
I was not able to brave the second long line for the new Zelda game, but I did get to see it played and enjoyed what I saw. Wii Party and Kirby’s Epic Yarn looked particularly good as well. Golden Sun looked great. I really appreciated Nintendo having such a nice layout to the booth – it made waiting in line entertaining because I was still playing games and watching trailers.

Sony
Kind of disappointing. Everything looked like games I’d already seen, version X.0. Even Little Big Planet 2.0, which I was hoping would really innovate with the new 3D level building tools they promised looked like v1.0 with some harder to use tools. Move, Sony’s new motion controller, had some support. I believe that too many developers were just trying to use it as a fancy 3D mouse. It feels too much like a Wii-remote with Motion-Plus and a nunchuck controller to be called innovative.

Microsoft
Kinect, MS’s new name for Project Natal, had a lot of support and was playable in many booths including Microsoft, Capcom, Ubisoft, MTV and many more. An observation made by many people based on the size of the demo areas was, “I don’t have an apartment/house big enough to play Kinect games.” With all the jumping, running, dancing and bouncing around it does seem like you will want a BIG area to play in. The new tiny Xbox 360 with the built in WiFi and 250GB HD was very nice.

Disney
Epic Mickey and Guilty Party were both pretty impressive. Epic Mickey feels like a Zelda or Mario scale game made in the good old USA. It felt moody and cool and will be fun to play. Guilty Party was something brand new – it combines elements of the Clue board game, with mini-games and social party style games to create a very innovative mystery party game. It reminds me of Mortimer Beckett (I worked on the Wii version) and my friend, Keith Nemitz’s game, “Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!”

Unexpected
While watching the trailer loop for Nexon (Maple Story, Kart Rider) I found out that they have over 200 Million MAU for their Dungeon Fighter game – a arcade style side-scrolling beat’em up with tons of players and monsters on screen at one time. Numbers like 200+ Million make even Farmville seem small by comparison. It is a staggering number of users and certainly explains why they have decided to develop their own social network.

Innovation
I learned some years ago that many of the big publishers can’t innovate any more – they have their franchise brands and must release a new one each year or two, or the investment in that brand dies. So I treat E3 like a big Easter Egg hunt… searching high and low for games that explore new ground – trailblazers. This means I lurk around the back of booths, in the corners of the halls and chat with folks standing in lines about what they think was ‘cool’. Over the years I seem to get lucky finding small booths that mostly don’t even have primarily English speakers. Teams from Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, German, Sweden come to see if they can breakout and make it in the BIG industry of video games.

My E3 2010 favorites are:

• Dungeon Viva – a web-based Taiwan knock-off of the classic Dungeon Keeper with very cool graphics and funny story
• Nindou – a web-based multiplayer battle game that looks like it might have had 2 people working on it (1 artist, 1 engineer) – I think it was made in a game maker I’d never seen before
• Dragon Nest – An MMO like Dragonica from the great Nexon folks – cute graphics, epic feeling gameplay and story- easy to learn to play – I almost lost track of time I was enjoying it so much
• BlockParty.com – a social community build around all the Nexon titles for the hundreds of millions of loyal fans to share invites, hook-up for multiplayer, send messages, and provide the viral mechanisms that Facebook enjoys – but everyone is a gamer already

Weird
While searching for innovation I usually find the occasional weird stuff. This year was fascinating – Renken had a full hair styling studio on the main E3 floor and was styling girls hair – later I did find out that it was in promotion for a game – Busy Scissors – originally I just thought it was an excuse to give away free hair products. One company had a booth giving away samples of GamerGrub – bags of snacks especially designed for gamer’s tastes. The company that makes the slime that cleans your keyboards was selling bags of yellow goop for $5. The list goes on and on – but what did they have to do with games???? I may never know.

Schwag/Swag/Chotskis
I notice a trend to give away a link to a wacky picture more this year. Attendees dress up in a funny costume related to the game and then get their picture taken with a site to pick it up from. Some just built the set and assume you brought your own camera. There was still plenty of candy, t-shirts, and buttons. I didn’t find any key-chains. BTW – GamerGrub is good. My best schwag of the show is a bunch of black recycled fiber bags to carry my groceries in – Thank you E3 for making me a greener person.

Tell me what you liked, or ask me about what I saw – post your comments below.

Dragoons20

I started with the original Microlite20 RPG rules. I cut the text as best I could from various sources. If you try to redo this you will notice that most of the PDFs are encoded – probably in come form of UNICODE (UT8 or UT16). Occasionally I could find a text or doc version if I looked hard enough and at least a few people who have extended Microlite20 have published their PDFs in easy to clip form. I’ve tried to make it easy for those that follow my footsteps.

Once I had the basic rules in a good easy to edit MS Word document, I started the process of rewritting the rules and adding new sections. Some of it went pretty quick. Sections like laying out the character sheet and many of the tables I saved for later – in my Desk Top Publishing tool of choice Serif PagePlus. I started playtesting even this early version and felt like I was really getting somewhere very quickly.

Once I was happy with the sections and basic text I started importing the DOC file into PagePlus. First I create my master doc, a side folded 8.5″ x 11″ booklet. Then I create my master pages: one blank, one with just a border and one with a border and page numbers. Then I import the acutal DOC file in as a new text frame. It spills and jumbles its way on to a HUGE number of pages and looks like junk. It does preserve the idea of layout text so I have one header style and a normal style. Easy enough, I change those styles into something that looks like the fonts will fit into my tiny, but useful, half-pages. I always prefer to have one topic per page (unless sections are very small and grouped together). So next I insert a page break for all the big sections at the header. Now I have topics mostly on pages by themselves and a bit of room for tables and graphics. Tables are pretty easy for me to build – I either fake them in text layout or actually build them in MS Excel and then import the cells as a new table with cut and paste.

The graphics are from 30+ years of keeping a sketchbook and I pulled characters that fit my wacky sense of what Bantumwart is like. I love to draw, but never have been that good at REAL people – just monsters, beasts and fairy creatures. My fantasy world is filled with achronistic paradoxes and I have never taken my fantasy too seriously. When I read fantasy authors I prefer Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Patricia Wrede, Robert Asprin and great comic authors like that. My fantasy art tastes go in the wild directions and include Brian Froud, Frank Frazetta, Sergio Aragones, Mike Ploog, Tony DiTerlizzi, John Bauer, and others who mix fantasy and cartoons.

Then it is time to edit, edit and edit some more. I make my family and friends read everything so that they can fix my crazy grammar and funky way of punctuation. I count on grammar and spell checkers, because I was not a English major.

Most of the crazy little mechanics for adding humor come from over 30 years of homebrew rules and reading tons of other fine RPGs. I’m pretty proud of the results and my players seem to really like the ideas – even if they get frustrated when they visit Hell. Games run very quickly. Several combats and tons of role-playing all in about 3 hours a night. Try that with some of the more complicated RPGs out there – no offense to D&D 4E, GURPs, HERO System… but if you play with all of the rules in those systems you will probably bog down a bit while running the adventures.

To make the actual PDFs I export the non-booklet rules and character sheet from “Publish as PDF” in PagePlus. I use Print and send it to Adobe PDF to generate the booklet. Since PagePlus already knows it is a booklet because I told it so before I started it actually handles all the fancy page reordering and as long as it is done double-sided everything works out great. I notice one review mentioned that the booklet might be a PocketMOD. I love PocketMODs, but they only hold 8 pages. This one is 28 pages and becomes 7 double-sided printed pieces of paper. Pretty cool really. It also explains the one blank page – it is so that I have the back and front covers on the same page.

When I print the booklet, I print page 1 and 2 on two sides of on one piece of card stock. Then I print pages 3 through 14 on 6 double-sided regular printer paper pages. My wife is a needleworks master and knows a bit about saddle stitching. So she pokes 5 holes in the folded pages – 1 in the center, 2 are 0.5″ from the edges and the other 2 are bisecting those. Then she laces the pages together with good strong thread and ties the knot off in the center pages of the book.

I also considered buying a “long” stapler for this task. If you would like to try this yourself take a look at some of these fine sites:

http://howaboutorange.blogspot.com/2007/10/make-mini-saddle-stitched-booklet.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_5176140_saddle-stitch-booklet.html

Because I use a folded booklet template in PagePlus, making the booklet into an A4 booklet only took about 40 minutes. But I’m afriad it would take me quite a long time to tell it that I want each page on a single A4 sheet – I may even need to start from an empty project and re-layout the entire book using cut and paste. For now I’ll just post the A4 booklet and character sheets – maybe I will figure out a clever way to solve this problem Until then enjoy the game and let me know what you think about it or pass along your own editing and bind tricks. [EDIT - OK, so a few minutes later I realized that I didn't have to re-layout the PagePlus file - I just needed to trick Acrobat into printing over the old PDF with the paper size set to A4 - it worked and I've uploaded a A4 verison for everyone to enjoy.]

I’ve included both a PDF and PPT version of the slides for the discussion – unfortunately I won’t be able to upload the example movies due to copyright issues – but you can see which ones I used and find them yourself.

I’d be VERY interested in learning about your roguish adventures and any inside you might have in playing thieves or if you enjoyed Dragoons20.

Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves Slides
Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves slides in PDF
Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves slides in PPT (PowerPoint)

Several months ago I found a terrific Open Game License table-top RPG – Microlite20. An extremely abbreviated version of the Open Game License fantasy System Reference Document (OGL SRD). There are several versions, including some complete modifications to new settings and specific homebrew style rules. These are very inspiring to folks like me, who enjoy making new games as part of our hobby.

One thing lead to another and with DunDraCon quickly approaching I decided I might want to play a Microlite20 game at the con. As always, this means I have to break and change the rules to match my play style while GMing games. Microlite20 has no feats, I like feats, it also uses the standard magic systems and spell lists. I decided I would make a scalable powers list with ‘spell points’. I would also introduce a new skill or two to help slide it closer to RPGs that players are playing in video games these days. I added few funny mechanics like “Hell” and the fumble table along with a whole new experience points system meant to focus players on role-playing. Not killing things.

The rules came together quickly. I playtested it with friends from work. I refocused and re-jiggered the power rules and expanded the ‘Dungeoneer’ section for game masters. The rules started firming up and I found that players were enjoying the game. It feels like D&D, but without all the tactical rules and much more funny during play.

I released Dragoons20 today for free – I hope you all enjoy it. Please feedback with suggestions or concerns - my plans are to grow the game a bit more and then release a deluxe verison soon.