Lessons learned from producing a music-themed voice game
For the ‘One game a month’ #1GAM challenge, I used much of my free time in February 2018 for producing a music-themed #VoiceFirst game. Despite having produced a ‘minimum playable product’ version, I’m putting this game on hiatus. Let’s investigate why I made this decision, and what I learned from this project.
Can you give us a short recap on what your game was about?
‘My band’ is a simulation game where you (as the player) help a music band on their way to greatness. Progress is determined by how many points you have in the categories ‘talent’ and ‘fame’, and you can get these points by either directing the band to rehearse, promote or perform for several hours, or by completing ‘missions’.
These missions all have the structure ‘While your band is making progress, they face a decision. Do you want to choose A or B?’, with both A and B having different kinds of positive effects on the band’s talent and fame score.
New missions can be unlocked on a daily basis, but only if the points in talent and fame are balanced (i.e. neither one being below 70% of the other). This balancing condition is interpreted in-game as ‘artistic frustration’, and blocks the band from performing.
Er… Why did you think this would make an engaging gaming experience?
I know, the description makes it sound kind of boring, but I conceptualized the game so that individual sessions would be short, but enjoyable, and the motivation to return to the game would be high.
Here’s what I had in mind to maximize both engagement and retention:
- Compelling missions
I aimed for creating about twenty missions that are interesting, and maybe even educate the player about the music business. - Increasing rewards over time
At the beginning, the player would get 3 points (e.g. talent) per hour of training (e.g. rehearsing), and then this would linearily increase with the total score of the respective stat. - ‘Charts’ (leaderboard)
This doesn’t need much explanation — Players would simply get ranked by the sum of their stats. David Karich refined this plain idea by suggesting to update the charts only at fixed times, such as every day at a given time. - Five-second sound clips at each interaction
E.g. ‘Welcome back! [sound clip] Your band has rehearsed for 6 hours…’. For each session, the sound clips would come from the same song, with rotating songs between sessions. - Engaging tone of voice
Instead of making Alexa a neutral observer/narrator, I made her part of the player’s team, by making her say e.g. ‘What should our band do now?’.
This doesn’ sound all that bad. Why do you put it in hiatus now?
By the time of this writing, I have invested about 32 hours in developing this game, and the game mechanics and response texts/sounds are all implemented. The reason I’m neither continuing or publishing the game right now is that the only chance to make it moderately successful is to create a lot of content.
Without content, most of the sessions will have the following structure:
Player: Alexa, open my band!
Alexa: Welcome back! Our band has promoted for 12 hours, and earned 96 fame points. What do you want the band to do next?
Player: Promote.
Alexa: Great, be sure to check back in in a few hours. Bye!
With content, at least once a day one session will be longer and more interesting than this. But even then it doesn’t feel very enjoyable to me.
One other possibility to enrich the gaming experience is to add ‘events’, which have a constant chance to occur per session, even multiple times per day. Events could grant the band a small bonus without neccessitating a decision by the player, and could thus motivate a more frequent invocation.
But even with this possibility in mind, it feels wrong that interesting content should do the main driver of retention, effectively countering the boring base gameplay.
Especially since writing content is not my strenght. I tried to leverage crowdsourcing for content generation, but even on day one, when countributions should have been at a peak, it wasn’t enough to give dense coverage of the game.
What lessons did you learn, then?
I guess my main lesson is that you can’t take a lame concept, and hope that solid implementation and a nice user interface make it a great game.
On a more fine-grained level, I learned that
- producing content is hard
- I personally should avoid making content a main pillar of a game
- you can get great royalty-free music at Bensound
- using a custom slot and my own basic natural language processing works quite nicely (more on that sometime later)
- I need to learn more about the psychology of games
- it feels good to declare a project a failure and move on :)
What do you think about this decision? Should I rather have gone through with this game? With which points do you agree or disagree? I look forward to your thoughts!
