Solving casual PVP: Pokemon Go

So if you haven't been living under a rock, you've heard of Pokemon Go. It's the location based AR app that's taken the world by storm over the past couple of weeks. The game is as popular as it is buggy. Much of the design had been critiqued for employing Skinner box elements. But there are some gems of brilliance in the design. One of those in particular is the way PVP is handled.

Traditional casual PVP suffers from a couple of problems. The most obvious is Pay2Win. Some casual games bias the PVP heavily in favour the players that are paying. This alienates free players. And can make the game unpalatable in the long term.

A more subtle problem is game balance. How do you pit players against each other when they have different abilities and play time? How does the elderly grandma that plays once a week compete with the teen that plays every waking hour? Casual games that forgo Pay2Win often end up being Play2Win, and are heavily biased in favour of those with more play time.

So how did Pokemon Go solve this difficult problem? The trick is in asymmetric PVP. The game is heavily biased in favour of the player who is at the location at the time.

So let's look at how this works. First a quick look at Pokemon Go's PVP structure. Combat happens only at specific locations called gyms. Players attempt to gain control of gyms for their team. The attacker is player controlled. The defender is an AI controlled Pokemon left by another player. Combat is very heavily weighted in favour of the attacker, meaning gyms change hands at high frequency.

So the first layer of bias occurs at the team level. There are three factions a player can choose from, the factions are identical in all respects except for colour. This number three is important. It means that at any given time there are twice as many gyms to attack as there are to defend. Any given gym has twice as many attackers as defenders.

The second layer of bias occurs when a gym is attacked. The attacking player gets to choose six Pokemon to attack with. Most gyms are defended by two to four Pokemon, giving the attacker an instant advantage in numbers. On top of this multiple players can attack a gym at once, further driving the numbers advantage. Not enough for you? The attacker 'wins' and weakens the gym for beating just one Pokemon. There is no penalty for attackers Pokemon that are defeated.

I dunno about you, but six on one odds sound pretty good. No matter how big the other guy is. And that's exactly what Pokemon Go is aiming for.

So what about the team defending the gym? Players approaching a friendly gym can train it. This works by pitting one of the players Pokemon against the gyms Pokemon. For each Pokemon the player beats, the gym gets stronger. Let that sink in for a while, attackers get six Pokemon, trainers get one. 

So what does this mean taken altogether? It means players are incentivised to attack gyms. And with such bias towards the attacker, gyms are changing hands constantly. And that's a good thing. Even the newest player can successfully attack gyms. And the advanced players have an interesting challenge to try and defend the gyms they do capture.

What do you think of how Pokemon Go has handled casual PVP. Have you seen other games do it better? Let me know in the comments below.

Unity Developer Certification

So I got my Unity Developer Certification today. It was actually surprisingly easy. 

Key tips:

Do the practice questions on the certification training material. Many of the exam questions as are very similar.

Do a refresher on which components are in which menus. 'Just type it in the search box' isn't a valid answer for 'how do you add component xxx'.

Be broadly aware of the entire engine, the surrounding services, and the industry at large. You don't need to be an expert on any of these areas, but you do need to have the big picture. Examples include animation, coding, lighting, unity services, game genres, production pipeline and so on.

Relax. The exam is pretty easy. There are a few places where the wording is designed to trip you up. But ultimately if you know your stuff the exam will be a breeze.

And for reference, I'm Melbourne's first Unity certified developer. That's my claim to fame for this week.

Steam Greenlight - Lessons learned from Pond Wars

Two months ago I pulled a very cheeky move and put Pond Wars up on Steam Greenlight. As expected, the game didn't get anywhere. But it did give me some insight as to how the process works. So I thought I'd share that here.

Goals

Before talking about the process, its worth noting what I wanted to achieve. My goal with Pond Wars was to get a feel for how the Steam Greenlight system works. I also wanted to experiment with various methods of driving traffic to the steam page. And finally I wanted to see if just having a game up on steam could drive downloads of my game on other portals.

Beginnings - Organic traffic

I posted my game on April 26 (a Tuesday) at about 9 pm AEST. There was no special reason for this time, that was simply when I got all of my screen shots in. After one hour I had racked up a massive 25 views. 3 yes. 15 no. That proportion of yes to no stays pretty static throughout the initial portion of the campaign.

At twelve hours in my stats have climbed to 360 views, 44 yes, 193 no. The game is also 4% of the way to the top 100. There are a few positive comments, but they appear to be fairly generic. Seems that Steam Greenlight attracts a bunch of 'publishers' that are probably scams. Most of the genuine comments are negative, mostly saying the art needs improving. That doesn't come at a huge surprise, its pretty much in line with previous comments. Key take away - Steam gamers just don't appreciate Paint.

At twenty four hours I have 500 views, 50 yes, 255 no. The game is two thirds of the way down through the recent submissions page, meaning it will be in front of less gamers. Organic traffic from steam seems to be slowing at this point.

At thirty six hours the game is finally off the front page of recent submissions. So far its had 540 views. 53 yes, 292 no. Without the front page traffic has slowed dramatically. Interestingly enough there is no measurable flow through into my itch.io view count. Key take away - Steam Greenlight is not effective as advertising.

Traffic briefly picks up again going into the weekend. The peak is Sunday local time or Saturday in the US. On the face of it releasing a game on the weekend to maximise organic traffic while the game is on the front page sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure this would be totally effective, if there are a ton of other games also doing the same thing you might actually get less time on the front page. Key take away - You only get 36 hours on the front page, use it wisely.

By the May 9, only two weeks after launching the Steam Greenlight page, organic traffic from Steam has dropped down to nothing. In total I got 800 views from organic traffic, 67 yes, 434 no. Interestingly later viewers are more likely to vote no then yes, not sure if this is real or just an effect of my small sample size.

Social Media - Twitter and Facebook

For some context here my Twitter and Facebook following is pretty limited. I have 40 twitter followers, mostly other game developers. I have 250 friends on Facebook, mostly personal acquaintances. Sharing on both of these mediums netted me 40 new views, 3 new yes, and 6 new no. Its a small sample size, but it looks like my own friends and followers were more likely to vote yes.

YouTube

In the last phase of my experiment I made the Steam video public on YouTube. My channel there has about 1000 subscribers. Somewhat surprisingly I got no additional votes, and very few additional views.

If I was to do it again...

I would definitely spend more time on the art. The art work is the only thing that got looked at or commented on. Along those lines I would beef the video up to, possibly even paying someone else to make it.

I'd spend a little more effort promoting to my own social network. But ultimately my friends and game dev colleagues are not a huge market for actually playing the games.

I hope this helps someone else. And feel free to share your experience getting a game promoted on Greenlight in the comments.

Oh, and if anyone wants to see the Greenlight page, you can find that here.