Commerce, SDK 3 and more in LiveFire and Touch Pets Dogs


Two weeks ago Apple invited us to their campus to get an early look at iPhone SDK 3.0 and provided us with an opportunity to implement some new 3.0 features into our apps. I’m producing a couple of games that have a natural fit with 3.0 functionality and we chose to focus on them: Touch Pets Dogs, our virtual pet game with an embedded social network and LiveFire, our new multiplayer first-person shooter.

Now that SDK 3.0 is out and we’ve demonstrated some of its features at the announcement event, this seemed like a good time to provide some additional context and insights into how we’re thinking about 3.0.

There are many cool features in 3.0, but the ones we chose to explore over the past two weeks are “Push Notification” and “In-app Commerce”

Push does what you might expect – it lets apps push messages and alerts directly to users’ iPhones, with an option to cancel or view the message. A push looks a lot like an SMS message, but it can play a custom alert sound, modify an app icon’s numerical badge and launch the app when viewed, taking users directly to the content implied in the push notification. Today we demonstrated push to initiate a playdate in Touch Pets Dogs and we used push to send a call for help from inside LiveFire by inviting a friend into an FPS match as a teammate.

The other feature we showed is In-app Commerce.  This feature allows users to purchase content packs and other product extensions from inside an installed app instead of having to buy a separate app whenever a game is modified or extended in a significant way. We showed how In-app Commerce might be used to buy an expansion pack in Touch Pets Dogs or to purchase individual items (a rocket launcher in our example) in LiveFire.

With In-app Commerce, it’s important to point out that although it will be possible to purchase content and/or features directly within a game, ngmoco will always give the highest priority to game balance and the integrity of the core experiences of our games. We won’t use In-app Commerce in ways that break our games, but we do think there are a lot of interesting ways to use the feature to enhance our games over time. In this post I’ll shine a light onto some of the ideas we’re exploring internally. We want to consider external as well as internal feedback as we refine our thinking.

What about LiveFire?

above: screen shot from the LiveFire sneak peek we demoed at Apple’s 3.0 SDK announcement

We hadn’t announced anything about LiveFire until today, so it’s no surprise there’s a lot of interest in that one! We’re not ready to say too much about the game yet, but I think there’s value in explaining what was shown today as it relates to SDK 3.0. We showed a wifi network game (we’re hosting the server infrastructure to ensure best connectivity) on a global server (the game plays identically over 3G as well, but we showed on wifi because of the high number of 3G phones in the house - I bet there were 300+ in the Apple theater, so we didn’t want to risk drops). All of us players were on iPhones with 3.0 OS. Tim Omernick was already on the global server when I launched into the game and was hiding out waiting to ambush me during the demo (Tim was in the audience, but connected to the servers). I showed how the “touch anywhere” controls work to allow for simultaneous movement, look/aim, crosshair zoom and jump (using shake). The control scheme for LiveFire is the next evolution in the ‘touch anywhere’ system first developed in our game Dropship and refined for FPS. When Tim popped out from behind cover, I opened up with a double-tap, which allowed me to spray and aim at the same time. But it was too late.  Tim took me out. Then I used push to call for help from Neil, who joined as the third player and member of my team.  Then I used In-app Commerce to buy a rocket launcher and together Neil and I hunted Tim down … and blew him away.  The environment was more of a proving ground than a final look, but it did the job for the demo. Expect the game itself to evolve considerably in the coming weeks. We’ll also reveal more details of our SDK 3.0 feature integration as we go.

The push notification feature we showcased is pretty straight-forward. Say I’m in a multiplayer match getting handled by some highly-skilled players from somewhere in the world and I really wish one of my friends was in there helping me out  Just open your friends list (this functionality is enabled by ngmoco’s networking platform that ships in TouchPets) from within the game, tap on a friend’s badge and the game sends them a call for help via push notification. When your friend accepts the invite the game launches automatically and you can fight alongside a buddy instead of a stranger.

The In-app Commerce implementaton in LiveFire is still being designed, so nothing we showed was final.  But we were able to demonstrate that the feature works. The design direction is to allow players to earn credits within the game that can be used to redeem upgrades in the form of new weapons, armor and other gear to modify their capabilities in combat. The more you play and the greater your skill, the more credits you will earn relative to players who rarely play — not unlike an EXP system.  So it’s fair to assume that dedicated players will have some pretty awesome gear earned during the course of playing.

Players will also be able to purchase content packs using In-app Commerce. If you’ve played a lot of first-person shooters over the years, you’ve probably played an expansion pack at some point. It’s not a particularly new idea, but it is new for the iPhone and SDK 3.0 makes it possible. As the development of LiveFire continues, we’ll be fine-tuning the creative, experiential and business decisions affected by In-app Commerce. The SDK is still in Beta, but the potential is already there.

During today’s demo I used in-app commerce to purchase a rocket launcher for 99 cents within the game. That moment is going to stimulate some healthy discussion and debate inside and outside ngmoco, but again, the point was to show in-app commerce working, not to imply the specific availability or pricing of weapons. It was a demo. 

Take comfort in knowing that you will be able to earn enough credits through normal gameplay to buy that rocket launcher in-game without paying extra for it. Does that mean we shouldn’t allow someone to pay real money for it if they haven’t earned enough credits in-game and feel the value is worth their money? That’s a good question. In traditional packaged goods games buying advancement has been frowned upon.  But the advent of social network gaming has started to change that. Many of the social network games (like the ones you might play on MySpace or Facebook) were designed by people who migrated from traditional gaming because they simply don’t have enough time to play traditional games anymore. As a result, social network games often institutionalize the concept of buying your way to progress. Tradition would say this can’t work and the players will go elsewhere, but in reality some of these games have become extremely popular, with tens of millions of players every day engaging in games with paid progression (usually in addition to earned progression). The iPhone is a disruptive device that doesn’t map exactly to either a traditional packaged goods gaming platform or to PC / social network gaming – it embodies elements of them all and adds its own twists. For this reason, I think we need to keep all options on the table, even if it means breaking with certain conventions from packaged games if we can improve the entertainment value for the maximum number of people playing our games. We will probably end up with traditional expansion packs for LiveFire as well as individual player upgrades you can purchase from iTunes instead of earning them all through gameplay achievement. But we’ll definitely allow players to have a meaningful, balanced and fun gaming experience directly after download from the app store. We’ll closely consider each decision related to In-app Commerce to ensure we’re doing the right thing for the game.  

Let’s move on to Touch Pets Dogs

Touch Pets Dogs, like many popular simulation games, has a deep in-game economy and shopping system core to its design. The game will release with a large number of items… toys, gifts, food & treats, care items, mission items and all kinds of apparel. As you play the game you’ll earn “puppy points” that can be redeemed at the Touch Pets store in-game. It’s a proven mechanic that fosters a rich gaming experience and sense of progression. The more you play, the more stuff you can get at the store, which enables even deeper gameplay.

There are two big reasons why In-app Commerce can be a big benefit to players of Touch Pets Dogs.

The first reason is that it provides access to even more content. We plan to produce content expansion packs for Touch Pets Dogs — another common practice in successful commercial video games, particularly in the life sim genre. Now I realize that a lot of games on the app store provide content updates for free, but you usually see that for games that were pretty light on content to begin with and are doing the right thing by making up for the short development cycle they originally launched against. There are definitely exceptions to this rule, like our recent 5-level content update for Rolando, a game that was 36 levels strong when it launched. But for the most part you don’t see big content updates (especially expansion pack caliber updates) for free on the App Store for obvious reasons. When you consider Touch Pets, there are obvious opportunities for expansion down the road. Whether they’re toy packs or breed packs or clothing packs – or something else. It’s a natural extension of the genre so it’s great to see Apple supporting it with SDK 3.0.

The second reason is that a lot of gamers lead busy lives… they don’t all have the time to experience the game as designed and they are willing to pay to see more of it sooner than the original design allows. Is that the best way to experience a game; to unlock all the content up front? I think the answer to that question depends on the player and their situation, but for many people time is money and they would rather pay for a compressed experience than to play it out as designed. Personally, I’m glad I put in the time to play through a few WoW characters to have that well-crafted experience. But by the 4th character, I wanted to jump ahead and get all the cool talents. Eventually I had to give it up because Life intervened. Some of my friends hired their siblings or friends to play their new WoW characters for them just so they wouldn’t have to grind through all those levels again every time they started a new character. The fact that the game design requires that grinding doesn’t make it a bad game. Quite the opposite – It’s a finely crafted and perfectly tuned experience… the first couple of times at least.  Touch Pets is a totally different kind of game from WoW, but some of the same trade-offs exist. You train your dog to do new things, dogs develop relationships and a ton of other things can happen if you put the time into it. What if someone wants that deeper experience but just doesn’t have the time? Either way there’s a cost. One experience is going to be preferable to another for each player. We want to use iPhone 3.0’s In-app Commerce to give players a choice: play the full game experience as designed at the pace it was designed, or you fast forward and see what the end game is like,  without having to invest the same amount of time as someone who played it as designed. I think we have to consider all options. Me? I’d rather let the guy who wants to pay for it to have that opportunity. Sometimes that guy is me (and millions of people playing MTX-based games in Asia and elsewhere). Maybe the better question is, why not allow it?

We have not made any final decisions yet on how In-app Commerce will be used in Touch Pets. For purposes of the demo I showed a store full of items that can be purchased with puppy points earned inside the game (this is the current design we intend to ship with – we’ll post a video of it in action soon), then I demonstrated how in-app commerce works by purchasing a shirt pack for 99 cents. It’s worth noting we do not have a 99 cent shirt pack at this time – you’re more likely to see packs of mixed content - but in a demo, the shirt pack was a useful demonstration of what the SDK can do.

So that’s the rundown of what we showed at the iPhone 3.0 SDK announcement today and some color commentary on what we’re talking about at ngmoco. Now that SDK 3.0 is in Beta we can begin answering those questions and we invite your input as fellow developers and stakeholders in this exciting world of app entertainment.

We’ll be posting more about both of these games very soon, so please stay tuned to the ngmoco blog.

If you missed the 3.0 SDK presentation, you can check it out here… http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0903lajkszg/event/index.html

Cheers

-chris