Alphabear: Hardcover Edition’s Biggest Bear Mechanic

Paul Gadi
Paul Gadi
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read
Alphabear: Hardcover Edition by Spry Fox

A game in Alphabear: Hardcover Edition begins with you being given a set of letters. You use these letters to form words, with each adjacent letter used merging together to form a cute and oftentimes weirdly proportioned bear.

Wide gentlemen bears, tall zombie bears and tiny robot bears, this game has them all!

To give players a sense of urgency, letters that aren’t used immediately start counting down each turn. If you fail to use them, they turn to stone, preventing you from making bigger bears.

That stoney ‘R’ is making my OCD flare up

The main goal of each stage is reach a certain score. I find that when I play the game though, the score is usually an afterthought. What I really want to do is to make the biggest bear possible. So satisfying!

Now that’s a BIG BEAR!

The biggest bear mechanic isn’t unique to Alphabear : Hardcover Edition — it actually started out in one of Spry Fox’s older games, Panda Poet, and is a constant across Alphabear on all platforms.

Before Alphabear, there was Panda Poet. Multiplayer on the Web!

The strength of the mechanic is evident. While the different versions of the game vary their metagame, platform and even number of players, the biggest bear mechanic remains constant. It is core to what makes these games enjoyable.

Even Before Panda Poet on the Web, there was Panda Poet on the Kindle

Spry Fox games have always been my go-to sources for game design inspiration. Daniel Cook’s Lost Garden Site and his Chemistry of Game Design article shaped my mental model of what makes games compelling. I’ve always admired his scientific approach to game design, and its effectiveness truly shows in most of Spry Fox’s games (See also: Triple Town, the pioneer of the Merge-3 Genre popularized by Threes and 2048).

Another one of my favorite Spry Fox games, Triple Town

In Alphabear: Hardcover Edition though, the fun core mechanic is diluted by the weaker metagame. The loss of f2p mechanics, while something that some players like, may actually lead to less retention.

Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan’s research on player motivation had one very important guideline when giving rewards:

[Player rewards] are most motivating when they specifically enhance the player’s experience of competence, autonomy and relatedness

Being a heavily skill/competence based-game, Alphabear’s collectible bears would have been more rewarding if they allowed the player to enhance the skill they practice the most: forming words and (to me at least!) making bigger bears.

Rather than just providing higher scores, maybe some bears, for example, could change letters on the board. Perhaps there could be bears that allow the player to reveal unopened letters and use them. There could also be bears that remove the annoying rocks that block the player from making the biggest bear they could. Not being able to completely fill the board with a big bear really riles me up!

What if instead of a score bonus, the Bacon Bear gave us free bacon?! 🥓🥓🥓 🍳

These don’t stop the game from being enormously fun though. Recent game design trends have focused more on the metagame — D30 retention, gacha, experience grinding and appointment mechanics are almost expected. Even without taking the metagame into account, Spry Fox has already succeeded in crafting an experience that stands the test of time.

Today’s moment of Zen:

Autonomy is not satisfied by the act of choosing….The act of decorating your desk is not autonomy, that’s just fun… Autonomy is when you return to your desk the next day, and you see the things on your desk and you say, “Ahh. I Exist.” — Jason VandenBerghe in his essential Engines of Play GDC 2016 talk

Game Design Inspirations

Hello and welcome to Game Design Inspirations! GDI is a collection of bite-sized nuggets of brilliant game design, taken from the games that I play “for research purposes”.

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Paul Gadi

Written by

Paul Gadi

CTO and Co-Founder at Alto.io | Into Game Design x New Technologies

Game Design Inspirations

Hello and welcome to Game Design Inspirations! GDI is a collection of bite-sized nuggets of brilliant game design, taken from the games that I play “for research purposes”.

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