Puzzle Strike Roundup

Here's a really detailed (and positive) review of Puzzle Strike from 2D6.

Edit: And here's another review of Puzzle Strike from Victory Condition.

There have also been a ton of articles about the development beind Puzzle Strike as well as strategies to play it well over at www.fantasystrike.com. Thanks to vivafringe, rabid, skeller, and the rest of the players who contributed to this growing storehouse of knowledge. Here are some of those articles:

Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Valerie & Geiger
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Grave & DeGrey
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Lum & Argagarg
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Jaina & Rook
History of Hundred-Fist Frenzy
History of Degenerate Trasher
History of Secret Move
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Midori & Setsuki
History of Midori in Puzzle Strike
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Valerie & Argagarg
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Grave & Rook
History of Zane in Puzzle Strike
History of Combine
History of Lum in Puzzle Strike
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Geiger & Lum
History of Four Minor Puzzle Strike Changes

And for some bonus, here's a recent glowing review of Yomi, as well as an article for new players about strategy. And here's a review of Flash Duel from Wired.

If you're interested in buying Puzzle Strike, Yomi, or Flash Duel for the holidays, you still have a few days left. Ordering from www.sirlingames.com by December 18th should still allow you to receive it by December 24th, if you're in the US. (It will ship anywhere in the world, just not quite that fast outside of the US.)

Enjoy this wealth of information!

Review of Pitfall on iOS

Rather than write a regular review, I will present my experience of playing the game as I played it. I was chatting with some friends as I played, and here is the chat log, with their comments removed for brevity:

Sirlin uh what is up with this

Sirlin a while ago I happened to read reviews of iOS Pitfall

Sirlin and everyone hated it, saying it was a fairly good game but the method of charging was totally terrible and way too much, way too required to progress, everyone said avoid

Sirlin right now it has 9,759 ratings, almost all of them 5/5

Sirlin ok I played the Pitfall game, I have a report

Sirlin it seems to be made by professional makers of games

Sirlin good controls, good production values, good art style, polish

Sirlin seems to have integration with various social medias and some sort of elaborate progression scheme or something to keep you playing

Sirlin hmm, if I reach a checkpoint (I didn't reach a checkpoint yet. Thanks) then I can spend a macaw token to start from there

Sirlin I can buy macaw tokens in the store

Sirlin Macaw token is gold.

Sirlin it costs 6000 silver bars + 10 diamonds

Sirlin oh man, this is so made by professional game makers

Sirlin I wondered how much diamonds cost to buy. In the store, one item is 8 dimaonds and it's FREE

Sirlin so that I get used to using the store

Sirlin I am amazed yet again by another thing

Sirlin I have a feeling this game is full of amazement

Sirlin Another store item is "2x treasure" and it costs $1.99. The picture is a silver bar transforming into a gold bar

Sirlin if you buy it, then all the silver bars you pick up as you play (there are tons, that's like the point) are gold bars instead, worth 2x as much

Sirlin "A great long term investment"

Sirlin I mean if I'm going to play the game, the earlier I buy this 2x gold upgrade the better!!!

Sirlin every time I play without buying it, I wasted something basically

Sirlin wow I can buy all sorts of barely different t-shirts for my guy, costing like $1 each sort of

Sirlin oh, this is confusing on their part

Sirlin actually the outfits are really different, but the icon for each outfit is a barely different t-shirt

Sirlin hmm how about 3d models of characters in Yomi, and you can buy alternate costumes

Sirlin I can buy consumable anti-venom tonics to cure bites and stings

Sirlin more amazement, it just does not stop

Sirlin today the bear outfit (one of the many you can buy) is the outfit of the day

Sirlin so it's free?

Sirlin no

Sirlin If I wear it, I get poison immunity today.

Sirlin So they could have made a poison immunity thing to buy, but this is even better because they can take away poison immune tomorrow.

Sirlin "Unlock the ability to get free diamonds in 5 more runs!"

Sirlin I get free treasure by liking them on Facebook, from within the app

Sirlin do you think it's even more incredible now, or the same level of incredible?

Sirlin if  you guessed more incredible, you're right

Sirlin I leveled up or something, twice. Also I passed a checkpoint

Sirlin and it tells me that now I can use Macaw tokens to start from there. To see how that works, press the store button

Sirlin already wow, but get this: you have to press the store button. You can't do anything else until you do

Sirlin then you can buy macaw tokens for 10 diamonds, by pressing the large pulsating button for that

Sirlin it's not optional!

Sirlin they give you some free diamonds to get you started

Sirlin and there is no way to do anything other than buy the macaw tokens right now. so again, they are training you to use the store.

Sirlin it's just never ending, the tricks

Sirlin now I died and there is a blue button restart

Sirlin OR

Sirlin a bigger, golden, gleaming, animated Macaw button to continue from last checkpoint

Sirlin By unlocking the checkpoint, I got 5 macaw tokens for free, but I can always buy more from the store!

Sirlin that's a line it said

Sirlin I clicked the blue restart button

Sirlin I would expect this to restart

Sirlin "ARE YOU SURE? Sure you want Harry to go all the way back to base camp, when you could use a *Macaw Token* to start at the last activated Checkpoint he passed?"

Sirlin I forgot to mention that each time I do a run, it starts with a sad horn honking sound as a t-shirt icon comes up that says "Outfit of the day: No Match"

Sirlin how do they keep topping themselves

Sirlin Now I unlocked the ability to get free diamonds!

Sirlin this sounds like a fantastic deal, who wouldn't want free diamonds

Sirlin I can click on "show me" to see how it works

Sirlin and it says by signing up for various offers, I can get the free diamonds now

Sirlin like sign up for discover card and freecreditscore etc

Sirlin I UNLOCKED the ability to do that lol

Sirlin wow I got a free diamond

Sirlin I completed one of the offers of watching a 30 second video

Sirlin I could get 106 diamonds for getting a free trial membership at freecreditscore.com though

Sirlin Playing this game feels like if Disneyland said "hey come to Disneyland free! As part of the experience, we will have a professional thief hold your wallet the whole time."

Some of these things are probably just good busines practice that I should consider for fantasystrike.com. More revenue means more ability to reinvest to make the site better. But taken all together, it's just so over the top in Pitfall, and the focus on money over actual game design is kind of frightening. It seems players are voting that that's what they want, as Pitfall on iOS has made a whole lot of money.

UPDATE: Hours later I turned on my iPad on the home screen, Pitfall notified me that my burst tonics have refilled, so it's a good time to get playing again.

Yomi in Tom Vasel's Top 100 of All Time—Again

Yomi made Tom Vasel's top 100 list of all time again. Not just this year, but ALL TIME! It's #13, and here's the vid:

You can buy the tabletop version of Yomi here, and you can play it online at www.fantasystrike.com. Thanks for playing everyone!

Project Horseshoe 2012: Kickstarter and Training Designers

I'll report to you about two topics discussed at this year's Project Horseshoe conference.

Defense Grid 2's Kickstarter

So, I went to business school at MIT a long time ago, and one of the main methods of learning about business is carefully going over and discussing case studies. A case study is business situation where a company has one or more challenges, and decides what to do about those challenges. They usually have a bunch of data that that helps point the way toward what a good decision would have been.

Jeff Pobst of Hidden Path Entertainment presented what I think is the "perfect" case study about his company using Kickstarter to raise money for Defense Grid 2. They had a clear goal, they had a very large number of possible ways of going about it, and they had a mountain of data before, during, and after the Kickstarter campaign. We get the benefit of hindsight to see exactly what ended up mattering in all the confusion, and it even makes a good story because of the punchline.

If I understand things correctly, I think they were probably going to make this game no matter what happened with the kickstarter, but by doing a kickstarter they could potentially make a much bigger scale of a game. That makes sense, and I do think it's a fair use of the fundraising platform.

They asked for $250,000, but I think the REAL goal was to hit $1 million. What makes this case study so interesting is that they treated it like it was going to make $1 million, and they invested heavily and did tons of work to make that happen. They did so much work and tried so hard, that it created even more data for us to look at, to see what really ended up mattering and what didn't. While publicly, the project appears successful because it raised $271,726, Jeff's presentation showed that the real story is it wasn't as successful as it appeared. They really made less than $50k (that can be put toward development) on the kickstarter after subtracting all the costs they put into it. It was sure a good try though, and it meant they got to take a good solid swing at the $1 million mark, but not lose money in trying for it. It's also generous of Jeff to share this data with developers, so that we can all learn from it. Most companies consider it way too private to share.

Jeff Pobst seems to know everyone, so he was able to talk with Tim Schafer, Jordan Mechner and other big names about their experiences. Everyone says the video at the top of your kickstarter project is really important. Having a well known figure pitch the product also helps, and they felt they didn't have that so they put twelve different famous game industry people in their video, endorsing their product.

You have a lot of knobs to adjust in a kickstarter project. How many tiers of rewards should you have, what exactly should each one be? How important is the reward structure compared to all the other things going on? Is it super important to have some rewards that are really really expensive? Or does that only matter like 1% in the end? What about upselling people? That means getting a person who pledged to later decide to change their pledge to a higher amount. Jeff had heard that this was actually the single most important factor of anything: how good you are at getting that upsell.

There's a whole bunch of other things you might focus on too. Using Facebook and Twitter to make sure your current fans know about the kickstarter. Also, getting mentioned on various news sites. They hired a PR firm who was relentless in following up many, many times with every gaming site they deemed important to their cause. You can also used paid advertisements to get the word out: google ads, facebook ads, or ads targeted on specific sites like Penny Arcade.

Hidden Path also did some less traditional forms of promotion. They made new content in their current game that was designed to hype people for the new game. They even had the opportunity to work with Valve by putting some Portal 2 ARG (alternate reality game) stuff into their game, in order to promote Portal 2, and this also helped promote their own stuff.

Finally, Jeff had the clever idea of approaching companies too big to participate in kickstarter, and made them an offer. He said if those bigger companies would give him free stuff to give away, he could promote them and their brands through kickstarter. This also gave these companies reason to mention his particular kickstarter project. It took months of negotiation to pull off, but Jeff finally got 100 gaming mice from Razer and 600 video cards from AMD. He pulled it off.

And now for the look back at it all. Of all this stuff they spent all this time on, what really did anything in the final analysis?

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Project Horseshoe 2012: Conference Design

I was a speaker this year at Project Horseshoe. Horseshoe is an exclusive, somewhat secret, intentionally small conference about game design. It has a code of secrecy and a code of blabbing. I hereby invoke the code of blabbing in order to share knowledge with all of you. I'll cover some of the ideas discussed in another post, but here let's address:

The Design of Project Horseshoe Itself

A conference is like a game, after all, where the creators design "mechanics" which then result in certain "dynamics" amongst the players. The goal is for those dynamics to meet the "aesthetic" goals of the creators. That's called the MDA framework in game design (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics).

My initial reaction to Project Horseshoe was that the conference was poorly designed because it didn't produce what I assumed the goal should be. But along the way, I saw that I was using the wrong "lens" to look at the problem. By changing lenses (a term from Jesse Schell), I realized the "aesthetic" goals were something other than I expected. With the right lens, you could say the conference achieves exactly what it wants to in a somewhat magical way. There is perhaps a lesson there when it comes to the design of any community (such as your gaming community or forum community).

What I was originally looking for was to maximize the exchange of good information. That's the lens I looked at the NYC Practice conference conference through last year, and that conference did very well at it. If that's the most important quantity, then you want presentations that convey as much information as possible in the most efficient way possible. I don't really mean the amount of data per second, but more like the number of ideas per second. The meat, the real substance. I was looking only for substance and nothing else. Anything that took time away from that—even fun diversions—was a loss. By having presentations (at the NYC Practice conference last year) that gave lots of detail on exactly what people are doing, working on, struggling with, etc, it lead to spontaneous hallway conversations of very high quality. Even at the start of a conversation, you know all sorts of stuff about the other person's beliefs and experiences. This leads to finding kindred spirits and it leads to heated arguments as well. It's intense. It's a crucible of ideas.

Horseshoe, by contrast,

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