It's been several weeks during which this blog has seen no activity, apart from newly discovered PBBG added in my list. Very busy with work, I had less time to roam the net and only little forces and time left to write new posts about my findings. However, after reading again
an old post I wrote last year, I have been thinking a lot about what makes a good PBBG. I have in fact been checking a lot of PBBG these months and here is some ideas that came to my mind.
If I had to build a PBBG, I would follow several rules to make it attractive and entertaining. Take them as they come, whether you are a player or a PBBG developer.
The welcome page is the first thing a player sees of the game. This page is therefore very important, exactly like the first minutes of a movie, you only have little time to catch the attention and wake up the curiosity of the audience with a good intro, interesting fonts and a catchy music. Translated to a browser based game, it means a nice game banner and/or matching colours. Do not overload this welcome page. Your site must appear quickly, all at once, even the first time. Remember that your game is a PBBG, it would not be bearable long to get slowness in such game. Downloadable MMOG often have slow loading website, heavy in graphisms, usually with sliced pictures, making the page jumps up or down while the browser adjusts the display and load everything in his cache memory. Exemple with a downloadable game I quite enjoyed:
Savage 2 website and this is far from being the worst.
This page still have to remain simple and easy to navigate. Avoid Flash or Youtube video on it, avoid sounds, avoid photography, prefer to it illustrated sceneries. A short intro (2-3 lines maximum) must be explaining what the game is about.
A link to screenshots is mandatory. The player has to be able to get a feel of the interface and the kind of game play. I have seen more and more "tour" as well.
A link to a F.A.Q is also a good thing to add. Keep the F.A.Q short though without entering into technical details. Keep it under 10 questions and answers mainly reminding the players what a PBBG is.
Please state clearly the monetization type of the game, and the F.A.Q is a good place to do it. Don't advertise the game is "free to play", if actually it is not. I always keep in mind that the words "Free to Play" only means
you are free to play it,
not that you can play for free. If you intend to make your game free, you can still add a donate box, if you want the players to support part of the hosting cost, keep your donate box, and extra features. Clearly specify that it would not give the player any tactical advantages on non-paying players, only more comfort or a distinction (a star, different colors, bigger avatar/alliance icons or pictures).
If you want to make money out of your game and "become rich" (hahaha), add premium account or a store allowing players to purchase more powerful items using in game currency. Monetization of a PBBG is always delicate topic to introduce in a game. You do not want to scare away the players, and as a game dev, even if there is nothing wrong in getting incomes from a game, it is always better keep your eyes smaller than your belly.
Adjust your game to your server. As a game owner, you want to keep the server cost as low as possible. Loading each pages with tons of graphics will play against your budget as it will take more bandwidth. Inselkampf is the example that immediately comes to my mind. Although I think this is a bit extreme.
For your items, don't use icons more than 200 high each. The smaller the better. Keep your game aesthetic, and practical. Think well your interface, the layout, the organisation tree, the colors and all the graphical aspect. You don't want players to go into a click feast each time they need a specific info or want to reach a section of the game.
If I would not recommend at all flash animation, sound or youtube video, Ajax is definitely a plus in a PBBG and really add a comfort in the game.
PBBG are mostly about figures and secret formula. I would advise to keep figures low. Some games are using extremely high numbers from the start. What is the point of having items costing 1000.000$ if everybody have an easy access to these items? It does not bring anything to the gameplay. Let's put the price at 10$ or 100$ and things will get less cluttered on the page and less confusing for the players. I would even avoid the Euro or dollars symbols if possible and replace them by imaginary credits.
Keep your game unique. It is easy to say and difficult to do, but it is obvious. You want your game unique but not too much out of reach for the players. PBBG are great places for roleplay. Players must relate to the game environment and understand its basics quickly. For instance you begin to create a class of character totally out coming straight from your imagination, let's say "Grerlings", needless to say that it will be difficult for a player to relate to it as he never came across them in a book or a movie. Call it them Gremlins and then he can.
Unique interface, unique formula, unique rules: I have seen plenty of game companies or network developing several games set in different environment or time that all followed the same rules and had the same interface (maybe different colours, but that's all really). Players, once they realise it are less motivated to play on the long term.
Animate your game: I have came recently across a PBBG that was dying. Hardly anybody online, and the owner seemed to have gone AWOL for an unknown time. I thought that people would come to play just because I was mentioning it a bit everywhere, but that was not the case. Maybe some had a look but they did not stay. Therefore the interaction of the game owner with the players is essential to the life of a game. Create activity, challenges, add new in-game features, maintain a blog, all these things that make a game alive. Of course, the interaction owner/players can sometimes turn bad and bitter and I estimate that up to 50% of a community could live a PBBG just because they dislike the owner or the way the game was managed.
Is managing a PBBG a one man job ? Definitely not. Or you would not last long. Once the game is live, you quickly need to build up a management team. Forum admins, game admins to monitor TOS violation, assistant coders to fix the game when it breaks or to correct small bugs, a main coder to continue to develop the game. Of course, some functions can be overlapped, but managing a PBBG alone is not something someone should consider on the long term. Even if you are only doing this. It may put the owner in difficult situations as he is the only one to take decisions and to rule the game.
Having all this team around you also means that the game will carry on even if you are not 100% on it for a while.
These points will strongly contribute to retain players, and the longer they stay, the more successful your game will become. Every player leave eventually. Consider that above 1 year of retention, you can consider your game succesfull. But it is very frequent to see people playing a PBBG for several years. This is how you can really rate your game. Many PBBG advertise the fact that they have 100.000 players. This is not often correct, even if it is hard to prove from the outside. Such games probably had more than 100.000 sign up, but how many 6 months old active players at any moment ? Again, this is often hard to rate a game. It all depends what you expect from it as well. You can find very good games with only 800 players, 50% of them had played more than a year, and awfull games with 5 times more people but with a very poor players retention. They can only announce such number of players because they were advertising a lot, attracting a lot of new recruits.
To try to conclude this post, the different points I described are important to keep in mind when developing a PBBG game. There are probably many other technical and practical aspects to control in a game to make it successful. I have not talked about PBBG promotions through advertisement, reviews or the social networks which can boost the number of sign up. Drop me a comment or a tweet to tell me what you think, whether you are developing a game or playing one. I hope that this short essay will help players find good games and new developers considering these ideas when designing their games. By the way, the screenshots were taken from the PBBG Inselkampf and Evolution.
