Game Analysis
Austin vs. Lily (part 1)
One month into 2020, I achieved an important gaming milestone — I finished level 2020 on Gardenscapes and level 1010 on Lily’s garden. This post is about them.
(I’m attempting to make this post descriptive / subjective from my point of view as a player — instead of looking at numbers and whatnot. Tell me if this is good, or you’d prefer if I stuck to quant!)
I play an unnecessarily large number of mobile games, for both entertainment and research. Some of those mobile games are casual. And some of those casual games are puzzles.
Two Casual Puzzles that I have played a lot of in 2019 are Gardenscapes and Lily’s Garden. They are both extremely interesting games from a business / industry perspective, and there is a lot to learn from both of them.
Value Proposition
The casual puzzle genre is notorious for being overpopulated. Way too many developers make match 3 games, all the top games are mercilessly cloned, and the CPIs for paid installs are quite high. It is difficult to break through and be successful in this genre, and both these games had to bring in something new.
To understand how both these games innovated, we need to look at their origin story.
Gardenscapes entered the mobile chat back in 2016. This Deconstructor of Fun article talks about its journey from hidden object to match 3 — when it finally landed on the scene, it provided two things that none of the incumbents had:
- a repair meta game
- a story rich with characters
The repair meta
Base-building and decoration isn’t new to mobile games, not even in the match 3 genre. Base building metas start with a blank canvas, with the player adding buildings to the base as they progress. In fact, Fishdom — what Playrix had already launched before Gardenscapes — relied on a base decoration meta, where the base was an aquarium.
Repair metas are similar, however the player does not start with a blank canvas — the base is already populated with buildings, albeit in a dilapidated state. The player must “repair” all the damaged buildings on their base.
It is my opinion that repair metas have a higher long term retention than plain decoration metas, especially in puzzle games with linear progression where the action of building is not part of the game’s core loop.
Why?
In both cases, the long term goal for the player is to have a fully built base (or aquarium / garden / whatever). The way to get to that fully built base is by powering through as many levels as possible. In the base decoration scenario, the ultimate base is a thing in my head, purely in my imagination. In the repair meta however, the ultimate base is in front of me, at all times — its just broken. This constant visual reminder of potential future success (and current lack of it) drives the player to keep on progressing.
Additionally, in Fishdom, my ideal aquarium might not be the same as what Playrix’s ideal aquarium is.
Playrix : “The best aquarium has all the things in it!”
Me: “My aquarium looks nice the way it is, I don’t need an additional statue.”
Result — reduced incentive to play another level.
In Gardenscapes, however, Playrix and I are in agreement.
Playrix : “The best garden is fully repaired!”
Me: “To have the best garden I need to repair everything!”
Result — incentive to play another level.
Long story short, a repair meta helped Playrix deliver a high retention game in the genre.
Story rich with characters
Gardenscapes also introduced the concept of a detailed narrative to casual puzzles. I’m not claiming Telltale levels of narrative design, but just the presence of a single unifying storyline with a multitude of characters to make the meta more interesting. For example, a player knows that Robbie the carpenter and Austin the butler were childhood friends who played in this garden and went fishing in this pond when they were kids. A player knows that Austin has a crush on Jane the scientist. On the other hand, what is the back story of the Yeti in Candy Crush? Yeah, no player cares enough to know.
Gardenscapes did hit on a gold mine in terms of value proposition. The play store was flooded with games with the same repair+story combination. Playrix too launched Homescapes — where you repair a home instead of a garden.
This flooded market was what Lily’s Garden attempted to enter in 2019. How did it differentiate? by doubling down on the narrative.
Lily’s Garden has an incredibly detailed story. Not only is it more grown up and adult (there’s a dialogue in it where Lily makes an innuendo about Luke’s junk while they’re clearing out some junk from the garden), it is also vividly intricate. There’s a mysterious will, an aunt with many secret identities, love triangles, narcissistic mothers, secret gardens, scandalous photographs and a custody dispute. There’s enough twists and turns and intrigue to fuel a soap opera. By contrast, the only expositions in Gardenscapes are about rebuilding wooden structures.
The garden is almost secondary in the game — the reason for progression is wanting to know what happens next. Discussions such as these aren’t uncommon on the game’s facebook page:
To conclude, Lily’s Garden provided a unique value proposition in terms of being narrative driven.
To be continued — features and monetization comparisons
