Wooga: Building a Successful Social Game by Combining Metrics With Emotion
July 20th, №3
In Monster World one type of consumables is the magic wand. Magic wands can be used in the game to either revive plants or to skip-over their growth time and harvest them immediately. In the real world our magic wands would equal fertilizer. Today wooga is the biggest seller of virtual magic wands in the world.
After understanding the importance of consumables, we added another one to the game: woogoo. Just recently have a series of new features that relate to woogoo been added into the game. We introduced Roberta, a character who has a constant demand for various products that cannot be manufactured without woogoo. Users can gain woogoo by selling to Robert, by harvesting, by asking their friends (via requests) or by buying it.
The game’s inherent woogoo supply is balanced to be below sufficient, but still the user has a chance to get woogoo without paying for it. It is just never enough. To fulfill all of Roberta’s demands or for example to use the auto-harvester the user needs more woogoo, than he finds by harvesting. He will always be able to sell some products to Roberta, but if he wants to sell more, he needs to either be viral or pay..
Consumables in that sense either help the user to progress faster in the game or allow him to prolong the playing sessions.
The Report Guy
As stated above, to enhance a game like Monster World you really need to know your metrics and need to analyze them on a daily basis. We are in the privileged position to look into the KPIs of over 1.2 million users daily and we do. An in-house reporting tool, built by wooga, is offering us a valuable insight into our games. Our “report guy” sends out automated report mails on defined KPIs, that we are interested in tracking daily.
Aside from all the metrics, there is a whole universe of non-metric related factors that have helped us to make Monster World a successful game.
Usability testing
From the very beginning of the development we invite people outside of our project teams to participate in usability tests at wooga. My first test on Monster World was done on a paper prototype, with a pen, which served as a mouse. I showed the prototype to possible users and asked them to use the pen and “click” as if it were a computer screen. The page behind the click would be the next step in the user flow and was also prepared as a paper prototype. By testing early and often, we tried to avoid conceptual mistakes at a very early stage, before we even began development.
During the development of click-prototypes, we started to test with real computers. Most of the time, we would just watch our test users. Not answering their questions or directing them would help us a lot in understanding the current iteration’s design flaws. The well known: “We listen to our users!” is changed to ”We look at our users.”
We test our games every two weeks. Product staff is always in attendance. Right after a test the “watchers” immediately discuss their findings and decide upon priorities for the next development cycle. We regularly invite everyone from the team to join a test. For developers and graphic people in particular, those sessions give a very deep insight into the world of user behavior.
Release Cycles
We work in weekly release cycles using a mixture (or, as we say: the best) of Kanban and Scrum. Every Tuesday we release a new version of the game on Facebook. The next development cycle begins on Tuesday and continues until that Friday. Over the weekend we refresh our minds and prepare to fix the bugs found in the new version that Monday.
These short release cycles are tough, and every team member must work in a very disciplined manner to avoid delays caused by inter-team dependencies.. But it pays off. We move fast, but we are still flexible enough to change priorities on a daily basis. Once a feature is finished, we usually release it while still maintaining the weekly cycle on top of that. Therefore, if someone in the team has an idea (or a finding of a usability test) today, it can be included in the next version—if its priority is high enough. In my experience, this direct impact on a game really motivates everyone on the team.
Localization
We localize our games in seven languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Turkish and German. From the early days of development onwards, we support different languages in the game via XML. Supporting accents is as important as the solution to the problem that some languages just need more space than others. Consequently, no text is embedded in images. wooga offers localized customer support, localized fan pages and virtual goods localized within the game. For example, during the soccer world championship last year, we had French, Italian and Spanish tricots hanging on washing lines in the game.
