F2P Game Balancing: Data Movies
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•562 views
This document discusses using data visualization and movies to analyze player behavior in free-to-play games in order to aid game design and balancing. It outlines the core gameplay loops and how game design factors like fun and difficulty influence player retention and monetization. The author describes how their company collects millions of player data events daily, loads them into AWS, and analyzes them using R to generate data movies that visualize player progression, boost usage, and outcomes at the level, session, and cohort level to provide insights for balancing difficulty across thousands of levels. Qualitative analysis through these movies can help game designers identify issues and ask questions to improve sustained success.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (14)
Similar to F2P Game Balancing: Data Movies
Similar to F2P Game Balancing: Data Movies (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
F2P Game Balancing: Data Movies
- 1. Data Movies Visualizing Player behaviour to aid the design and balancing of F2P games Thomas Hulvershorn Operations and Analytics Manager Outplay Entertainment Amazon Appstore Developer Summit, London, 4th October 2016
- 6. • Start! • Select Boosts • Play!
- 7. • Win • Play On
- 9. Replay Boosts No Boosts No Boosts Win and move on Lost New Casual Games Core Loop Boosts Start Play Shop End
- 10. Replay Boosts No Boosts No Boosts Win and move on Lost New Broken Loop Boosts Start Play Shop End • Frustrating, Too hard • Annoying, Impossible • Boring, Too easy
- 11. Game Design influences Performance • Two Factors – FUN – Difficulty Less Difficult Retention Monetisation
- 12. Game Design influences Performance • Two Factors – FUN – Difficulty More Difficult Retention Monetisation
- 14. 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 • …
- 16. 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
- 17. Game Design influences Performance • Two Factors – FUN – Difficulty Challenge • Balance each Level! • Balance the Flow between Levels!
- 18. 56 chained Loops
- 19. 705 Levels in 38 Areas (09/2016)
- 20. 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’
- 22. How to make sense of this? How to make the right decisions?
- 24. Experiments
- 25. Game Design influences Performance • Two Factors – FUN – Difficulty Alternatives • Quantitative Analysis –Answers Questions objectively • Qualitative Analysis –Raises Questions subjectively
- 26. Lights Camera Action Data Movie Director
- 27. Movie Selection and Setup
- 28. Detail View One Player
- 29. 800 Players
- 30. Events per Level
- 31. Detail Analysis, one Event
- 32. 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
- 33. Movie Configurator Game Events (Olga) Player City ETL Load MovieGenerator Cohorts, Selected Events, Time Frame Generate Level DataDLC Raw Events API (Helios) Sessions/IAPAnalytics Communication Level Editor Workbench Provide Insights Data Movies On Demand/ Batch Integration
- 34. 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
- 35. “I know that eventually I can beat every level”
Editor's Notes
- I’m Thomas Hulvershorn
- This is my wife, playing Mystery Match on her Computer. This is something relatively new and I couldn’t imagine happening say 7 years ago. What drives these players to play our games?
- We Outplay Entertainment are developing these Games. How do we know the games are great, how do we make them Fun but also profitable? Let’s look how these games are constructed.
- We are proud of the quality of our products. Successful growth since the start.
- Level Progression and Core Level Boards, example Mystery Match as typical Free to Play casual Game
- Core Flow Elements of most casual games
- Core Flow Elements of most casual games
- Core Flow Elements of most casual games
- Path 1: Start Game, Loose, Replay, Use Boosts, Win Game Path 2: Start Game, replay until you win Game
- Path 1: Multiple failures, no pass Path 2: Using Boosts doesn’t help passing the level Path 3: Too easy, direct win
- Mood of the player coming out of the loop determines mood of player starting the next level
- We got hundreds of levels to balance