Development of layered reality games

Jonathan of Electric Bat Interactive talks about their layered reality games

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http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/layered-reality-games-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Jonathan: My name is Jonathan Hanna, and I’m the Executive Producer at ElectricBat Interactive.

Interviewer: OK. What do you guys do?

Jonathan: We are creating what we call layered reality games, and basically the concept of that is that you can download a game bar, and then you can play games on the Internet. It’s different than other games where you have to go to that game’s website. So, if you want to play a baseball game, you have to go to Facebook and log into Facebook and play the game.

In our games you go to whatever website you want to go to. So, if you’re a big fan of Disney, you go to Disney and you play our game on Disney. If you’re a big fan of Nickelodeon or you’re a big fan of Car and Driver, you play the game on Car and Drive. It’s wherever you want to play. So, we’re essentially layering these games on top of people’s web surfing habits.

Interviewer: OK. And so, that’s why that’s different than augmented reality gaming because you’re layered on websites.

Jonathan: Right. And really, we’re not changing. Augmented reality kind of implies that you’re changing your reality. We’re just layering this on top of something you’re already doing. The best example is actually something like TiVo where it’s not a different television program. It’s not new TV programming. It’s changed the way people watched television, and so this is sort of changing the way people will surf the Internet and turning the Internet into a game. But, again, it’s not a new website. It’s a new way to interact with the websites that you already go to.

Interviewer: How do people play this game? Can you do a simple walk-through of exactly how it would work?

Jonathan: So, people, first they download the game bar, and then they create an account. Once you do that you can play any of the games associated with the game bar, and as we release new games you can just start playing those games. You don’t have to create a new account or go to that game’s website. It just appears as an option in your game bar and you can play.

So, once you’re logged in to a game, I’ll use WebLords as an example; so I log in. I select WebLords from the suite of games and I log in. Once that happens, the game bar updates to reflect that I’m playing WebLords. Now, any site that I go to, in WebLords it’s a game about attacking and controlling websites, all in fiction. It’s not actually affecting the actual website at all.

But once you log in to WebLords, whatever site you’re on, you can attack it. You can defend it. You can get resources from it, and it doesn’t matter. Again, if you’re reading a website, you’re reading your favorite blog, you’re reading your high school’s website calendar, you can go in there and battle on it and just fight for control of that website.

Interviewer: So, it’s kind of like Four Square for websites then?

Jonathan: Yeah. It’s like a virtual, right.

Interviewer: Can people win achievements on these sites, kind of like in Four Square? You can check in, you can become mayor, stuff like that. Is there something like that?

Jonathan: There is an achievement system that’s probably a little different in that, again, WebLords is a fantasy game. So, there’s dragons and ogres and trolls rather and other things. So, those achievements might be things like battle on Google a hundred times or kill five hundred dragons. It doesn’t matter where, just wherever. And so, you can mark those off and get little rewards for doing all those different achievements.

Interviewer: And you have a casual version, the more fantasy oriented version of this game called Weblings. What’s that about?

Jonathan: So, Weblings is a very different game from WebLords. So whereas WebLords is player versus player, Weblings is player versus environment. So, you’re basically fighting AI controlled. And the concept, going back to WebLords for a minute, WebLords is a game about controlling websites, battling fantasy, big armies.

Weblings is a very casual game about collecting. And what you’re doing is you’re collecting these creatures called Weblings, these cute, cuddly different types of animals, very fantastical creatures. And the fiction is that these bugs are attacking the Internet. They’re creating all the crash sites and the 404 errors, and the game bar is your sort of portal into this world where you can now help and collect the Webling characters.

Interviewer: Why did you decide on key player versus environment for that game, versus player versus player or a cooperative game?

Jonathan: Well, what we’re trying to do with the games that we make is to try and create games for diversity of markets. And so, WebLords, being a player versus player fantasy game will probably skew a little on the male side. It doesn’t mean that women won’t play it, but it’ll probably be just by the nature of the game, males 18 and up.

And so, Weblings is a game that we definitely feel will be more female oriented. Again, guys might play it, too, but definitely more female oriented, probably 35 and up for this. And it’s also probably going to appeal, hopefully, to kids. And so, we’re actually making sure that the game is COPA compliant. So, if a child under 11 decides to play this game with their parent’s permission, they’ll be able to play the game and play in a safe environment where people can’t message them and can’t interact with them. And they can just play the game by themselves without being interrupted.

Interviewer: What’s next in store in terms of… Are you going to, based on your experience and testing it out on other players, are you going to add any new mechanics? What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had just seeing people use this system?

Jonathan: So interestingly, we actually launched a version of Weblings a while back, and we thought it was pretty cool. We actually did a bunch of focus testing before we did that with the art style and the whole game play concept. A few months into it, we started getting a lot of feedback from the players that they loved the whole concept, but the art just wasn’t what they were looking for. It’s beautiful art and it’s really well done, but people weren’t connecting with those characters.

And so, rather than just staying the course, we listened to our community, and we’re in the process right now of revamping the heart, completely changing it from what it is now. We’ve actually told all our players this, and we’ve told them how we’re going to transition them to the new game. The nice thing about our platform is that we can do that very quickly. This entire change-over is not just the art. It’s a bunch of game systems that are changing, too. It’s going to take us about eight weeks.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the game systems that are changing?

Jonathan: So, in the card version of the game, the one that’s being replaced, when you want to collect a Webling you have to fight. The Weblings are broken up into categories, celebrity, family, food, et cetera. So, if you want to collect a food Webling you have to fight on food sites. What if I don’t want to go to food sites? I’m not a food person. I like cars. I go to Car and Driver. I go to Auto Trader, whatever. I don’t want to deal with that.

So, we’re changing that food system where you get generic pieces of these tokens that you can spend on whatever Webling you want. So, now you can fight anywhere you want. In fact, if you just only want to fight on one website and that’s it, that’s your choice and you can do that. So, we don’t want to interrupt your web surfing habits. You tell us where you want to play, and the game just works for you.

Interviewer: With the explosion of these social games, there are all these social mechanics and bringing your friends along and stuff like that. Are you looking into that to put in your system, or do you think that’s important in the type of game that you’re making?

Jonathan: Absolutely. The biggest way to get new players is to get your existing players to recommend the game to their friends. That’s the number one way people get into games. It’s because their friends say, “Hey, this is cool. You should play it, too.”

So, we’re integrated into Facebook Connect. They can also send an email to their friends and invite them in, and as a rewards for doing that – for example, in the Weblings game there’s a special Webling. It’s actually two Weblings called Willow and Chase. And the only way to get Willow and Chase is to invite five friends into the game. And so, if you like the game you’re going to do that because you like collecting and you’re going to want to complete your collection. And so, you’ll find five of your friends and get them into the game, too.

But, it’s not something you have to do, you know. If you’re not ready to invite your friends yet, that’s OK. You can go collect the other Weblings.

Interviewer: With Facebook Connect then, you just allow them to post, maybe, what site or what battle they’re doing.

Jonathan: Right. They can post a big achievement, or they can post what site, like, if they took Ghoul. That’s a big achievement or if they just collected a super, super rare Webling they can do that as well.

Interviewer: Any other challenges you see as you develop this system? What are your concerns?

Jonathan: I think the biggest challenge is the fact this is new.

Interviewer: I mean, that’s the thing. You don’t really have that much to reference. So, are you keeping extensive analytics to kind of learn from your data, or how does that work?

Jonathan: Yeah. We have a tremendous amount of data that we collect, and again most of it is sort of aggregate data. We’re not interested in tracking individual people’s surfing habits. It’s not what we’re about. We’re a game company at the core. So, you know, what we do want to know is how effective our game play is. So, we have a quest system and if that quest says. “Go fight on Google” we want to know how many people fought on Google.

I don’t care individually who did or who didn’t, but if we had, say, a thousand people play today, I want to know if 900 of them actually did the quest or only 400 of them did the quest and then find out why not. Not only do we look at data, but we also survey on players and we have message boards. We have a full-time community person who’s out there talking to our players as well.

Interviewer: How important is that full-time community person? I think that’s kind of interesting, given that you guys are kind of a start-up, to dedicate someone full-time at this point. How is that going, and what are…

Jonathan: We actually hired the community person before we even started the Beta for either game. Actually, my background – I got my start in the industry as the Community Manager for Ultima Online, and so I’m a big fan of talking to the community and getting their feedback. And so, you can never get the feedback too early. It’s always important to put the feedback in the right context, especially in Beta, where players may not be playing a full version of the game.

For example, in WebLords players are telling us that it’s too easy to get resources. Well, that’s because the castle system which you can spend resources to build up a castle isn’t in yet. So, of course, they have too many resources. So that feedback is something that we kind of put to the side, whereas another piece of feedback where they say, “Hey, dragons are too powerful”, that part of the game is in and should be balanced and clearly it’s not. So, we need to go and react to that.

Basically, we hired the community manager before, well before Beta to put together the strategy for Beta. For us, Beta is far more about player feedback and game balance and making sure the game is fun than it is about bug testing. You can see that with Betas. More and more people are looking at Betas as previews. Rather than fight that and tell players, “No, no, no. You have to test and submit bugs”, we have a Q/A team. It’s there job to find the bugs. Players, you guys tell us if the game is fun. That’s what we want to know.

Interviewer: Aside from developers, are there any other types of folks that you’re eying to kind of develop the community or learn from the community? The reason I ask this is because with these social games, you know, with MMOs it is about community. It’s everyone is kind of in a centralized community, but it seems with these social games, and you mentioned using Facebook Connect. It’s really about these games empowering the friends that you already have. So, it may not even necessarily be about a community manager more than figuring out some kind of paradigm where you’re just empowering friends to kind of challenge each other as you’re surfing and stuff like that.

Jonathan: Yeah absolutely. In addition to the community manager who is also very well versed in social media and social networking, we actually have a full-time social media, social networking marketing person on staff. And they’re actually part of the same department so they work very closely together, and she’s doing a great job, basically teaching me – who I’m not really a social media expert, I’m a game developer.

I don’t consider myself an expert on Facebook Connect or anything like that. And so, getting her feedback from what she knows, from her experience and also from users is really important.

Interviewer: In preparing for this interview, we were discussing how you were having this quest system and it’s kind of driving more people to specific sites. Can you talk about that more?

Jonathan: Sure. So, one of the big parts of these games is they are free to play. There is a micro transaction model players can play, items for their character in WebLords or decorative items for their Weblings game, but at the end of the day they are free to play and we want players to have fun whether they’re spending money or not. But, we’ve got to generate revenue, right? And so, the main way that we think we can do that is by driving web traffic which, of course, for the player is free.

What we do is we make a deal with the website. We say, “Look, you guys are going to be the quest of the day or the quest of the week. And your site is going to be more valuable for this week, so in the context of WebLords, maybe, there’s more resources on that site and in the context of Weblings it’s like a scavenger hunt. And so, if the player does this quest, they get benefits. They get extra loot in WebLords, or they get extra experience points in Weblings. Maybe, they get a cool item, or they can fight more for that game.

What we’re doing is we’re essentially driving these players to a website. And interestingly, in the current Weblings game we have this quest system in. We’re going to port it over to the new one, and we see that between 80 and 90 percent of the players who log in on a given day do the quest, too, because it’s integrated into the game. They know it’s advertising. They know that we’re pushing them to websites and it’s OK because first of all, hopefully, it’s cool sites and secondly it’s part of the game, that the game is about battling on the web.

And so, if this website, let’s say it’s Disney, is worth twice as much as usual, well I care about getting the resources and, maybe, while I’m there I’ll also click the ad or whatever it is that Disney is promoting. Again, that 80 to 90 percent surprised us even because it’s so much better than the banner ad which is lucky to get a quarter of a percent. We’re talking 80 to 90, and it’s just a question of making sure that it’s fun and that’s the key thing. The game’s got to be fun first, and then we add that layer of driving people to websites on top of it.

Interviewer: You guys are located in Austin, Texas. How is that for game development? It seems like a hot spot for some of these emerging online games and stuff like that.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, I’ve actually been in Austin for a while now, and it’s definitely one of the cool places to be for game development, especially online game development. Austin’s got everything from these huge 200+ MMOs in development all the way to guys like us with 40 people working on two or three games at the same time. And there’s everything in between. It’s a really exciting place to be right now for game development.

Interviewer: Moving forward, where do you see layered gaming going or augmented reality gaming or some of these kind of mixed in between gaming and reality and what you’re doing. Where’s that going to go, and also how important is mobile going to be because some in Japan and some of these Asian countries are actually accessing the Internet more through mobile than the web.

Jonathan: Sure. I can actually answer the mobile question a little bit. Mobile gaming is huge, especially with the iPhone and iPods being so prevalent now. So, we’re actually developing an iPhone version of WebLords so that people can actually battle on websites, and it’s the same game so I can be at lunch. Then, I’ll get a message that says my website is under attack or a friend says, “Hey, let’s go attack Google” and I don’t miss out. I can actually log in through my iPhone, battle on Google, finish the battle and then go back home a few hours later and see what I did by logging on to my Pad, my Mac or my PC. So, it’s actually, literally, the exact same game. You can just decide which platform you want to play it on.

As far as the future of this, we’re just getting started. I think what we’re seeing a lot now is companies need to be creative about how to get people to their websites. People take the web for granted now. It’s not some new, magical, special thing any more. It’s no different than anything else in our lives. We have kids that are growing up with it. They don’t know what the world was like beforehand.

And so, getting people to go to your website as opposed to the millions and billions of others that are out there is going to be really important for businesses, especially now when people are being tight with their money and being careful with their money.

It’s obvious that banner ads are pretty much – they are as effective as they are going to be. There’s always going to be a place for banner ads, but you’re not going to get that 10 percent click-through on a banner ad. You’re going to be lucky to get one percent. So, if you can figure out ways to drive people to your website with an 80 to 90 percent click-through, that’s huge.

Interviewer: Great. Where can people find out more information or play these games?

Jonathan: So, right now the Weblings game is being revamped and that’s going to launch at the end of April, the new version of it. So, they’ll be able to play that game, and WebLords is currently in closed Beta and that will launch sometime in the summer. If people want to check them out, they can go to Electric-Bat.com, and then there’s a products button there that you can go to the actual pages and sign up for the Beta or sign up for more information.

We actually constantly inviting new people into the WebLords Beta. So, definitely now is the time to sign up.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.