Chasing the Feeling: Story of creating Party Gods

There is no single right way to make games. Something may work for this kind of game, something may not. Something may work for your team, something may not. What is also true is that there are ways to make games that make it much longer and more painful process than it needs to be.

In this article I’m going to share with you the way we, Chopsticks Games, developed Party Gods, and it will become clear to you that this is far from the optimal way you would want to make any game. However, here we are and failing is learning. This is going to be our lesson from game design to you. Doing things the wrong way and reflecting on it is the surest way to learn. If you can’t learn from your mistakes then….well, you have some thinking to do.

This is going to be long and it will require you to at least try to understand our thought processes I’m explaining here. Don’t expect list of 10 most frequent mistakes game designers do in 2015. This is our story and people learn well from stories. With that said, let’s get to it.

Party Gods

First off, let me quickly pitch the game so you’d get the idea of a game itself if you haven’t already heard about Party Gods. Party Gods is a rhythmical game about fighting bunnies while they’re trying to steal your dancing spot… Is it good enough Rami?

This game. Very simple. Although it may now seem that the core gameplay and idea behind the game – “party anywhere, on your mobile phone” is pretty clear, it has just a little connection to what we’ve had in minds at the start of the development.

Beginnings are easy!

It’s August 2014 and why do we even start to make Party Gods? We had no clear mechanics in mind, no specific context we wanted to set the game in, we only had a feeling. We had a feeling of rave party - the feeling of strict rhythm, self-confidence and joy. At the time this feeling was embodied by this song. We also knew that we wanted to make a mobile game, simple and centered around one core gameplay mechanic.

We have a single clue – feeling we want to convey and we want to make the game. After short brainstorming session we’ve come up with our protagonist, Wolf, and his eternal enemies, sheep. The game scene looked basically how it looks now – wolf dancing in the middle with sheep coming to get him. All that accompanied by EDM song of our choice. Goal? Earn as many points as you can, by killing the most bunnies you can. Shortly after development started, wolf was replaced by much better party animal – rhino and sheep were replaced by bunnies.

First looks, energy bar is already there

Gameplay was boring. Really boring. You could tap on the screen as fast as you wanted so no amount of sheep could be a challenge to you. It doesn’t take a degree in Game Design to see that what we needed was to constrain the player’s action in some way so he had to be more careful with his tapping. And yes, we did see that, and yes we don’t have a degree in Game Design. This was THE issue for us. How to constrain player’s ability to make explosions in some meaningful way? It took us around four months to answer this question.

Shitty solution no. 1

What’s easily the most common way to constrain player’s action? It’s been done in virtually every game genre there is and you’ve come into contact with this around gazillion times according to latest research at the MNU (Made up Numbers University). If you don’t know what I’m thinking about, it’s because you’re too lazy to think about it.

Of course I’m talking about resources. You don’t want player to spam this ability, or build as much of X as he wants – you use resources. Simple and effective. It works most of the time, but sometimes it just doesn’t. That was exactly our case.

We’ve tried adding energy bar that fills up with the time and each explosion depletes about a third of the bar so you can make three explosions in rapid succession, but have to wait afterwards. This definitely constrains player’s actions, but not in a good way. Now the gameplay consisted of short bursts of activity followed by periods of waiting for the energy bar to refill. What we now have is action game, which has waiting as integral part of gameplay. NO. FUN.

One of those early versions, I'm not quite sure where exactly to place this one so here it is. Notice the cool bunny crowd hanging at the edges of the screen. Upgraded shitty solution no.1 – shitty solution no.2

Since we don’t want player to wait, why not make him responsible for the refilling of the energy bar? This seems like a reasonable idea. And it looked like the solution for us back then. What we did is, we made each bunny drop a battery on death and enabling player to collect the batteries by holding two black circular buttons on the bottom of the screen. Now gameplay consists of taping to kill bunnies and finding the right moments to refill the energy bar. Rinse and repeat. At this point the game is pretty fun (not very fun, but a reasonable amount), BUT a) the gameplay is doing nothing to convey that party feeling we wanted to (We watched our friends play it and looking if they’re ‘party’. They weren’t “party” at all. In fact they looked absolutely non-party. They looked like they’re playing some quick reflex-based high-score game with their teeth clenched really hard), and b) the gameplay has no depth, there’s no progress, nowhere to go, nothing to achieve and gets boring really quickly. At the time we didn’t have such clear picture of what’s happening and what’s the real problem (the core gameplay is not that engaging) and so we happily ignored the definitely more important a) point and addressed the second point.

Very trippy! The step in a wrong direction

What’s the only way to solve boring core mechanics? Change the core mechanics. What’s the stupidest way and the exact way we chose? Put on Feature Glass and start adding features to your game, whose only reason for existence is to cover up bad core gameplay, and they’re very bad at that. In case of Party Gods this meant creating “interesting” formations of bunnies that would approach you (bunnies in circle, group of bunnies, bunnies coming from alternating sides…). Also, we absolutely needed more kinds of bunnies, the ordinary bunnies were too boring so we spiced things up with fast bunnies, fat high HP bunnies, bunny summoners and others. We had it all planned out. We would have items that afford permanent upgrades, powerups that drop from bunnies and a lot of achievements to top it off. But as our ideas came to actual existence, the game wasn’t any more fun than before. It seemed that way on first look but it got boring very, very fast.

It’s now interesting to see that the game that was to express party feeling, which is at its core music experience, used music just as a background soundtrack, not affecting gameplay in any way. What were we thinking?

I haven’t talked about a goal we set for the player yet. So far, the goal was to get the highest score. We’ve tried different goals – no score, just last as long as you can. Each 60 seconds is a single level and when you completed it, you reach the next, faster level. Nothing worked. Nothing worked and we were desperate.

This was end of November 2014, so we’ve already spent around four months on development of the game that had nothing interesting to offer, got boring after 5 minutes of playing and didn’t look particularly stunning. When the whole magnitude of game’s shittiness hit us, we were depressed. It was clear that we’d been blindly spending our time and energy on solving problems of game designs that weren’t suited for our game. At all! It seemed there’s absolutely no way to make this game fun. No way at all. But we slept on it and went back to core gameplay.

Party rises

It’s crazy how far we went without actually taking a good look on game’s core mechanics. At this point there was no way around it, so that’s what we did.

Stripping down every unnecessary feature, what’s the problem with the core gameplay? It’s a series of fast taps followed by holding two weird on-screen buttons. And what’s the core of party feeling we wanted to convey? What could possibly be making the parties and the whole music genre so simply appealing, so strict and ballsy? What could be the factor that creates that united feeling in all EDM listeners?

Rhythm! Simple, strict and more importantly – same all the time. Rhythm. Rhythm. Once again – rhythm!

Is there ANY sign of rhythm in our gameplay?

NO!

Now we’re getting somewhere.

So we want to add rhythm to our gameplay. What are player’s necessary actions? Tapping on bunnies. Let’s combine them – make player tap the bunnies to the rhythm. Incredible! Revolutionary! How have we not thought of this before?

And here comes the Party God! First version where you play to the rhythm.

So we want to make player tap the bunnies to the rhythm. How to do that? Since you can tap only to the rhythm, there has to be appropriate amount of bunnies on screen to be able to kill them all. How to be sure of that? Spawn one bunny on each beat (beat is unit of rhythm (I know that this is technically not correct at all and music theory guys would eat me alive for such statement, but for the common people, I hope it’s a good explanation)).

This is solid gold. This is the party we always wanted. Amazing. But as soon as we put it in hands of someone that doesn’t know that he’s supposed to tap to the rhythm, he doesn’t. He does what he did before – kill all bunnies as soon as he can and then wait for more bunnies. So this brings us to our last game design problem – how to teach player to play rhythmically?

Very cool, right? Shame we had to change the graphics style and this didn't get into release version. Motivate to the rhythm

What are some ways to motivate or teach person to do anything? (I like this style of writing - I ask a question and then I answer it. Makes me feel smart. I’m going to continue doing that) There is positive and negative motivation of course. Reward and punishment. What does that mean in the context of Party Gods?

Light ancient theme, still too hard to recognize bunnies sometimes

Since we’re positive guys and you always hear that reward is better for teaching than punishment, that’s what we did. We did following: you earn points by killing bunnies in any way. But when you do it to the rhythm – you get combo multiplier. How to get highest score? Have the highest multiplier you can – kill them to the rhythm.

I'm not even sure what's happening here

Did it work? Not at all. People who tried it didn’t immediately understand that’s what they’re supposed to do and even if we explicitly said it to them, they still couldn’t resist and they killed bunnies whenever they wanted. And without playing to the rhythm, all fun is lost. Positive motivation didn’t work. It’s time to get evil.

Punishment is the way

You don’t tap the screen to the beat? Too bad – nothing happens (except warning “OFF BEAT” showing on screen), no explosion, no defense against bunnies. You missed the beat. Wait for the next one. Now you’re forced to play the game to the beat. Nothing else is possible.

This is it, this is what you get

Our friends playing the game understood this quickly, they had no other choice than play to the rhythm and that was the right way to play. This is it. This is the game we wanted. This is Party Gods.

There's even bull here!

This has also brought option to leave the high score model behind and make the game more simple – you have one 60 seconds long level, difficulty slightly rises as the time progresses and when the song ends, the level ends. Simple. Having no high score meant leaving out the competitive element, but we were OK with that. It was supposed to be a party after all and having high score so far was just the way of coping with bad core mechanics.

Finale

At this point, the core gameplay didn’t ever change. We made some changes on higher level – added new characters and levels, but the core gameplay is the same. Since we first introduced it, we’re very excited about it. We haven’t seen this mechanic in any other game. Guitar Hero? It's close but you have very strong visual cues to play by there, you don’t have to rely on your sense of rhythm. In Party Gods, hand-eye coordination is not enough, you need a hand-eye-ear coordination. That’s something.

If you’ve played the game, it may seem to you there’s not much to do, difficulty doesn’t vary so much and after some point there’s no challenge lurking there. That’s true. What, however, there is, is that party feeling we wanted from beginning. It doesn’t require challenge or achievements, it’s only about the experience, the feeling when you’re playing it and you’re killing it. You don't expect anything from the game once you play it, you just enjoy the moment, just like at a real party. I’ve played the game at least a thousand times and even after all that time, when I play it nowadays, I still feel pumped after playing one game. You can’t say that about every game. I feel that's partly cause of how simple the game is - there was no way around having boring game mechanics, we just had to make them fun. And once game's core is fun, the game is just fun to play no matter what.

Party Gods is coming to iOS in early December, so you can check it then out if you're curious what exactly I'm talking about.

What’s the point?

I hope this story gave you some insight into our development of Party Gods. I left out a part about game graphics that we had to change several times (you've already noticed that from all the different pictures) to better complement the gameplay. We’ll maybe put it in another blog post.

The biggest point I tried to make is this: Think hard and make sure your core game mechanics are good and fun. Do they express what you wanted to express? If you ignore that, you may wake up one day with shitty game on your hands and in your case, they may not be a way to fix it. Either way you’ve lost time and energy because you didn’t face the real problem, but rather tried to cover it up with useless features. That’s what happened to us and we wouldn’t want it to happen again.

It’s not realistic to say that you can think through any game’s mechanics and its consequences before making the game. This kinds of “oh shit!” moments can happen even if you thought about your core gameplay and were sure it’s fun. Sometimes you find out only when it’s actually made. That’s not the message. Message is “Think hard and honestly before doing anything” and it’s target is you game developer, who knows deep down there that his/her game mechanics isn’t that fabulous and original and what he/she is doing is just covering it up.

It’s probable, almost certain, that even after reading this some of you will make the same mistake, because “hey – you’re different!”, but if this makes even one person think and he/she realizes this is the situation they’re in and they shouldn’t be in, my job here is done.

This post was originally posted at: http://blog.chopsticksgames.com/chasing-the-feeling-story-of-creating-party-gods/