Monster Mash

Collaboration Breeds Creativity at Big Blue Bubble

You’ve most likely played a mobile game; I mean how can you even avoid it at this point, especially when many of them are free. It’s one of the largest entertainment industries in the world, yet most people don’t know anything about the creation process. The mobile industry is a unique beast simply because it’s all virtual, which creates a sort of disconnect from the players when there isn’t any physical connection to getting the game or buying anything in the game. This illusion of a “company in the sky” creates the thought that new mobile games can just rain down easily; this is very far from the truth.

This is also what differentiates Big Blue Bubble from everyone else. We conceive, design, and build our games with passion, thoroughness, and a very high bar and we work tirelessly to continually reshape and evolve our games to keep them enjoyable. It is far from just tapping “Get It”.

How does the game begin?

It starts with a single idea, much like everything else. It can be something as simple as “music games are always fun to play” or “jelly physics are pretty interesting”. Once we start thinking of a general premise, that’s the last time the idea is a lone thought. It then becomes a collaboration of concepts and sometimes completely outlandish ideas that get compiled into emails, word documents and an unreasonable amount of Post-It Notes. The ideas will come from any person whether it’s someone answering emails in Customer Support, or a developer on a completely different project; no idea is a bad idea. While many of the ideas are pruned from the core concept of the game, that doesn’t mean they’re thrown away; some of them are stored for future updates.

Once the scope of the game has been narrowed down, a Game Design Document, or GDD for short, is created. In the GDD is a full breakdown of everything within the game; it’s the pitch. These documents are usually not something done overnight. This is the roadmap of the game; it will have images, menu and HUD concepts, story snippets and a large amount of data. This is the tipping point where a game is “greenlit” to go forward, declined but put into the back pocket for possible later ideas, or lit on fire and never spoken of again.

How Does the Design of a Game Change Over Time?

My Singing Monsters released in September 2012; it had a total of 23 Monsters and 2 levels to play on. Two and a half years later, on top of the multiple new in game features, there are over 80 monsters, 8 levels and even more coming down the pipe. The Idea to add monsters and islands was in place since the initial development of the game, but not to the amount that the game is currently at. Player demand, the thirst to create and celebrity collaboration drove the game additions and expansion forward, and that’s just characters and levels. The design of the game shifts slightly as the game progresses, it never fully changes its focus though, just modifies itself to continue creating fun and engaging moments for the players. The only time a game truly would change is if the core concept of it was something that wasn’t strong or too interesting; but in the case of My Singing Monsters the unique sounds and characters were more than strong enough to carry on without change.

Another facet to recognize is listening to what the community wants in the game. As much as Big Blue Bubble has a team of brilliant minds, sometimes the simplest suggestion on the Facebook page can be one of the best additions to the game. Listening to your community can also bring up additions that are solutions to problems that are appearing in the game. It’s incredibly vital to listen to the voices.

What Kind of Analytics are Used?

In the Free-to-play game world there are countless things that are tracked. What country people play in, how many times players log in, how often users stay online, how many players have made purchases, how many times users watch ads to earn free currency. The list can go on forever, and honestly I’m pretty sure you have better things to do. What’s the reason for all of this? Simply put for advertising partners, future development and promotion tracking. Obviously, there are other reasons, but these are the primary reasons for the analytic tools. Big Blue Bubble runs promotions most weekends, so having information about purchases, log in, country, device type, and average play time can dictate what promotions are effective and which ones to avoid running again. Many of the advertisers want to know the average amount of ads watched by players, which is why the amount of players logging in and how many clicks on the ads are recorded.

How is the Information from the Analytics Results Used to Advance the Game?

Information about what the most popular and the most deeply despised characters in the game is very important for advertising; why would BBB use ads with a character that people flat out hate? Thankfully we don’t have any characters like that but its those considerations that can be useful to create a higher engagement level with the players. If we notice that when Big Blue Bubble runs promotions on a specific character and the purchase amount on currency packs is much higher, we’ll probably know that, going forward, this particular character is sought after. It also shows comparisons to like character promotions and if the stats match up the same, or if there is a drop off, to which we can explore numerous other analytics to see if there was another reason for the drop or if it was natural causes. The analytics give us a window into the habits and preferences of the players, and from there we can adjust the game to them rather than what we want them to do.

It can also explain, in the rare moments, why something broke. We can take a look at the player traffic and see if the server issues are related to that, to an ad network not working right, if a connection to Facebook is functioning as it should, and many other things.

Doesn’t Seem Too Hard, Does it?

The mobile games industry is an interesting world. There are hundreds of thousands of games available at the touch of a button, and you have to try and make something that people would download from just looking at a brief description. If you’re lucky to have the player download it, you now need to make sure there’s enough substance to keep them engaged, and not just that day, for months down the road. Seems simple enough, right?

Acknowledgements

This article was written by Patrick Leyland, from Big Blue Bubble.

To hear more about the story of My Singing Monsters, check out this video: Big Blue Bubble, Western University, and My Singing Monsters