Review: Lemonade Stand
This #VoiceGame didn’t receive a lot of publicity, and it’s ‘featured’ rank in the Games subcategory of the US Alexa Skill store is a modest 82, but its brilliant execution and the fact that is a finalist of the Alexa Kid Skills challenge and the winner of ‘Best Educational Skill’ prize make it a hidden champion — And one of my favorites in the management simulation category.
What is this game about?
This #VoiceGame puts you in the ‘thirst-quenching business’ — You are a young entrepreneur making money by selling lemonade, and Alexa is your secretary.
You have a 5 $ of seed capital, and you can work with this money on a daily basis. These are the degrees of freedom:
- Weather
In the beginning of each day, Alexa tells you the current weather and a forecast for the remaining day. The conditions range from wet and cold to hot and dry in several steps, and there’s a varying likelihood of the weather changing during the course of the day. - Lemonade supply
Lemonade always costs 15 ¢ per cup, and the amount you can purchase is only limited by your liquidity. Any lemonade you didn’t sell by the end of the day is disposed of. - Marketing assets
You can increase demand for your refreshing commodity by renting outdoor advertising space, at a fixed daily rate of 15 ¢ per ‘sign’. - Price
Alexa lets you sell your fast moving consumer good at any non-negative price, including for free.
All these factors, together with a bit of randomness, determine how much revenue you make. Figuring out the relation between the those degrees of freedom, and trying to make profitable predictions and decision, is basically what this game is about.
The game is open-ended, so there’s plenty of room for experiments. Just for this review, I’ve tried out what happens in case of bancruptcy: Alexa bails you out and gives you another 5 $ to make lemonade great again.
The Skill is directed at children and is explicitly meant to educate in an entertaining way about basic economical relations and probability. It’s nevertheless complex and interesting enough to be suitable for some adults like me.
Amazing! But doesn’t it get boring if every day has the same structure?
It is not, and this is one among the main reasons why I am so inspired by this #VoiceGame! Here’s what keeps the gaming experience engaging:
- Varying response texts and sounds
Some prompts like ‘How many cups of lemonade do you want to make?’ are constant, but most of the response varies from round to round, for example: There’s an optional introductory song clip, different ways of stating how many days you’re in the lemonade business already, optionally one of several sound effects to illustrate the day’s weather, and various ways to state and comment your operative results. - Entertaining comments from Alexa
Alexa feels free to comment on the weather (mostly she wants to stay inside), praise or encourage you depending on your business result, and to give fun remarks when your answers are unexpected.
This makes the dialog less monotoneous and transactional, but it comes with risk of irritating the player, either because Alexa is not acting in character, or because she takes up too much ‘screen time’. ‘Lemonade Stand’ gets this balancing act very much right. - Experimentation and challenge
I already mentioned it when I described the base mechanics of the game, but it is actually what makes you play ‘one more turn’: You enjoy getting gradually better at making lemonade money and your capacities increase, but even after 50 days it’s difficult to make 100 $ on a good day. - Frustration-free voice user interface
This should be a standard requirement instead of an engagement feature, but this game has two nice solutions that stand out. For one, you can always get context-specific help by saying ‘How’s the weather?’, ‘How much money do I have?’ and so on. Also, the responses for invalid values or intents are humorous and partly even eastereggs (try purchasing a negative amount of cups).
But every game becomes boring after some time. What mechanisms does ‘Lemonade Stand’ use to extend its lifetime?
This #VoiceGame uses two very obvious retention hooks, namely badges and a leaderboard. In this case, however, both mechanisms are so skillfully executed that it’s worth taking a closer look.
- Badges
Several games have badges, and in ‘Lemonade Stand’ you earn them for tiers of revenue, glasses of lemonade sold, and days played. What’s special about the badges is that the game offers its own intent ‘Show my badges’ that sends a list with all your badges to your Alexa app. On the left you can see my most recent badges — Just for illustration and not to show off, of course! - Leaderboard
Several games have leaderboards, but what makes this one stand out is that it tells you not only your current tier (E.g. ‘You’re among the 50 most successful players’), but also how many more cups of lemonade you need to sell to make it to the next tier (‘You need to sell 2149 cups of lemonade to make it among the top 20 players’). Having such a precise goal provides a stronger motivation than simply rising through the ranks.
What’s your conclusion?
‘Lemonade Stand’ is an excellent game developed by Mark Einhorn, an expert developer (check the lower third of the Skill’s devpost page, and get ready to be impressed!), but there’s something in this #VoiceGame that I personally find very inspiring and empowering, especially in contrast to ‘Yes Sire’, another magnificent management simulation game: In both games, the game concept requires the player to make the same kind of choices in every round. But here, the mid-term engagement is not based on creating a huge amount of great content (which I find hard to create), but on varying parameters and a reward function that is difficult to predict.
Did you try out ‘Lemonade Stand’? How do you like it? Where do you agree or disagree with my analysis? Is there something you found helpful or missed in this article?
