YAY! it’s Andrew!

Look at that troll bait headline! To clarify a bit, everything you know about video games is actually right, but only when talking about a niche of game players. This niche is called hardcore gamers. What makes you wrong is when you try and apply all your insights about this niche, years of information gathered from thousands of hours playing games, to the much larger set of all game players in existence. A surprising amount of professionals are making this mistake RIGHT NOW. Not making this mistake actually puts you in a minority of people that are poised to be successful in the coming years of video gaming.

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Back in November I flew to San Diego to meet up with the rest of the Urbansquall team for our annual get together. This year’s theme was a game in a week. We rented out two hotel rooms, opened the connecting door in the middle, and spent five days doing non-stop game making. The fruit of our labor was a demo for a little game we called Bloody Fun Day. After another couple weeks of updating the game in my free time, we were ready to release it into the wild. And what happened then?

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Hello, everyone! I present a case study on the dangers of misreading the player feedback loop.

Zilch: The name of the game and the amount of respect its developers have for the players

Recently a game made its way onto Kongregate called Zilch. Zilch is a simple dice rolling game similar to Yahtzee. Players take turns rolling 6 dice trying to find dice sets that score them points. They can then put these dice sets to the side and roll the remaining ones. As long as another scoring set can be found in those remaining dice, the player can score more points. They continue rolling less and less dice until one of two things happen. Either they score with all 6 dice, which lets them start the whole process over and rack up even more points, or they roll their remaining dice and are unable to find anything to score with. The latter case is called Zilch, and you lose all your points for the round. Strategy becomes similar to Pass the Pigs, where as you continue to roll on your turn and rack up points, it becomes more likely that you will roll a Zilch and lose all those points. The player must balance risk and reward and stop before he loses all his points.

Hopefully that was an ample description of the game. If it wasn’t, here’s a link to Zilch so that you can play yourself. This kind of game isn’t for me, because of how much luck is involved, but it may be your thing. In any case, this is all side talk. What I want to talk about today is the most common player feedback Zilch’s developer has received, and their inadequate response to it.
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