Setting the difficulty bar for Sun Stones

Sun Stones has plenty of powerful analytics built into it, so after launch we should be able to tune difficulty to really serve our audience well.  But in these final weeks before launch, we're still making blind guesses about difficulty.  I thought it might be interesting for our readers to get some insight into our difficulty tuning process, as it's played out these past few weeks.

1 - We want the game to be accessible.  This means that we need to avoid places where players cannot proceed.

2 - To ensure that players understand our mechanics, we want to very explicitly introduce our two main mechanics (discarding stones, and creating new stones.)

3 - Creating individual teaching levels for each mechanic means a lot of very simple levels.

4 - Too many simple levels at the outset give the impression that our game is trivial.

5 - Any sort of difficulty spike in the initial levels turns away some significant % of our trial users.

6 - Repeat steps #4 and #5...

We were stuck in this loop for quite a while - how do we get to the good stuff quickly, without moving too fast for some users?

The biggest part of our solution was to break up our mechanics into pods - rather than allowing players to use all our mechanics, we put in place a system to "lock" some mechanics out.  This allowed us to introduce just two key concepts, then build complexity around them, before our next teaching sequence.  This gives our game more of a shark-fin difficulty flow, rather than an upward-curve.  We hope this will create a good experience for all our users - not just one group or the other.

One sort of odd consequence for the "locking" mechanism is that if you go back and play the early puzzles after unlocking more mechanics - you can often get better scores, or earn more achievements.  Will hard-core players be upset that they can't earn every trophy on their first play-through?  Will players actually go back and discover that they have more flexibility later on?  It's not clear.

As a way of selling this mechanism, we've implemented in-game achievements for each unlock.  These are closely modeled after Xbox-live achievements, and they create a pretty strong reaction in play-testers who are familiar with that sort of reinforcement.  Our assumption is that people who will go back and re-play early levels with new mechanics are probably the sort of folk who recognize achievements - but maybe we'll be proven wrong?

Team is hard at work already, after a long Thanksgiving break.

Kicking into high gear

As promised last week, this week marks the start of our Kickstarter Campaign.  For those who don't know, Kickstarter is a process for collecting startup / investment funds for projects.  For a specified period (usually a month) anyone can make a pledge to the campaign.  If enough money is pledged by the end of the campaign period, all of the pledged money is transferred to the owners of the project.  If the campaign fails to meet its goals, no pledged money is actually taken from contributors.

The Kickstarter community has become a bit of a metagame - if you "bet" on projects which will become successful, you gain reputation.  Your losing bets cost you nothing, so you only actually put money into the community when you "win" - that's pretty much the inverse of the old Arcade Model, where players would only put in a new quarter when they died.

So, please check out our Kickstarter page, and pledge generously.

It has been our intent from the beginning to make Sunstone Games more than just a one-game studio, but a strong showing from our initial product would really do a lot to facilitate a faster production cycle for the next project.

Sun Stones - first teaser trailer!

As alluded to last week - we have our official Teaser Trailer ready for the world.  Bashi Ale, our CEO, worked hard on this all week to get it ready for the world.  The rest of the team was pretty harsh and specific with our early critiques, but I think the result is interesting, visually appealing, and (most importantly) gives an accurate sense of the mood our game seeks to evoke.

So much of our game is about discovering and exploring the consequences of our few simple mechanics - we were not sure how much to "give away."  After a few different approaches, we settled on a strategy which perhaps errs too much on the side of obfuscation in favor of stylistic integrity.  I guess if people want to get a teaser trailer of Excel sheets, they probably aren't looking for that on youtube.

Without further ado, I provide THE VIDEO.

Preparing our best foot...

This week, we are polishing up our visuals to put together the first official Teaser Trailer for Sun Stones.  This trailer is important not only because it will be an important visual introduction of Sun Stones, but because the Teaser Trailer is the cornerstone of a Kickstarter project - and we're hoping to get some of our startup costs repaid through a successful Kickstarter campaign.

For those who don't know, Kickstarter is a method for crowd-sourcing startup-cost funds.  You pick a target dollar amount, and ask people to donate.  The cool twist is that, until donations reach that target dollar amount, no money is actually transferred.  This means that people can "play" kickstarted by guessing which projects deserve funding, and which do not.  If you guess wrong - you lose nothing.  If you guess right you donate to a project which lots of other people picked - so you spent money on a validated project!  It's a very clever package, and it has been quite successful for some people.

The next question, of course, is how can we best position ourselves to be one of those success stories?  We have one advantage in that we are largely complete already, so we have a fairly polished product to show.  We also don't need money to make the game - we're just looking to earn back our start-up investment funds.

So the questions we're asking ourselves, while putting together this Teaser Trailer, are things like "How much do we explain our mechanics, and how much do we just wow them with visuals?"  "Do we explain the Hopi influences in the game?"  "Do we mention every platform we're on explicitly?".

Next week, we'll be providing the link to our Kickstarter Campaign.  Check the site out, make an account, and  see how high the bar is for other projects.