YAY! it’s Andrew!

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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Saving games is really important. Being able to save and continue not only allows you to fit gameplay into your own personal schedule, it also allows game developers to create experiences that span more than one game session. Saving may be one of the core technologies of video gaming, but the ways we save haven’t changed drastically in the last decade. I’m sure there has been at least one time in your life where you felt like a victim, your hard work or hopes plundered by a game’s save system. Maybe you ran out of save slots to use, or you overwrote a save with 40 hours of progress, or you can’t copy your save game data to another memory card. If this sounds like you, then read on. In this article I will explain your plight to the masses and then propose the next generation of save game systems.
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