Stonesaga

We launched another board game today! Stonesaga! A cooperative, campaign style, survival crafting board game set in a unique, persistent world shaped by your choices.

My thoughts on the Metaverse

I don't know. I do know Club Penguin was a virtual world. A digital space that you created a character and played with your friends. Club Penguin itself was never a game, it was a community. A community that gathered around events and celebrated together. Shared stories and activities connected the community.

As a game designer we often have to consider the metagame. The game about the game. The game that lives outside the game.

Perhaps the Metaverse is the community outside community.

Just some thoughts

How Many People Does It Take to Make a Video Game?

TL;DR… A game could take many people or just a few. My suggestion? Stay as small as possible.

I love what Supercell says about teams — "the best teams make the best games." It’s true.

There's a common belief out there that you need a big team to make a game. From my experience, you don’t. At least not when you're starting. From my point of view, having a big team is a big liability. 

At its peak, over 1,000 people were working full-time on Club Penguin. We had offices in Brazil, Argentina, Canada, England, Australia, and the United States, with full-time people showing up to work, sitting at desks. It was a lot of work. 

We grew from a team of four to over 1,000. Growth was the hardest thing. It was insane. 

As you grow a game, you're likely going to think that you need more and more. But when the teams become bigger, the politics and process become bigger, and the work can get less and less fun. Although some people find politics and process fun, I do not. Everything gets more complicated as the team and the process expands. 

Take a look at this picture, for example. It shows all the lines of communication between people with smaller teams vs. larger teams:

See how much simpler it is to communicate when you have a smaller team?

I believe in small teams just like Supercell. I've experimented a lot with team size. I've found the best quality comes from small teams focused on their strengths.  

When we started Club Penguin, there was no Mailchimp, Amazon Web Services or the Cloud. There was no Intercom or Zendesk for support automation. We had to solve those problems ourselves, and we ended up hiring people to help.

But today, email deliverability and server scaling are solved for you. You can lean on third-party resources like Playfab and Community Sift to help you keep things simple and keep your team small. 

What’s Your Vision?

Personally, I want to inspire and delight a billion players! I want to create games that generations of players will play.

Technically, I want to see 100,000 concurrent users in a single room. That's my vision.

To get there, I can't do it alone. And I wouldn't want to, either. 

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -African Proverb

You can build something alone — but it's much harder, and it will take a lot longer. I could have built Club Penguin by myself and had it launched by 2010. Instead, we built a team and launched five years earlier, in 2005. 

Back when I started RocketSnail Games, I had 3 goals written on my whiteboard:

1. Inspire others with imagination

2. Build with a team

3. Change the world

If you want people to join you on your crazy mission, you'll need to have a big vision or idea. A "why."

The "why" is what will keep you focused on your mission even when times get tough. 

SIZE YOUR TEAM

If you're starting and want to make an MMO, you’ll need to start a team. But how big should that team be? And where do you start?

I would start with your first 3 people. You should all have different abilities.

Do not build your team just because you like each other. The goal is to have people who fill your weaknesses and cover your blind spots. 

Then work your way towards 5 people. That's going to give you the expertise. That's going to get you from prototype to product. 

TEAM SIZEs

Team size has always been a struggle for me. And it continues to be a challenge.

The truth is, there’s no “right” way to size a team. We experimented with this a lot at Club Penguin and Hyper Hippo, for example. In team sizes, I've felt that 3, 5, 7, and 12 are good. And I’ve always felt that 5-7 people is really strong. 

The Pair — 2

The simplest team is 2 people.

A pair is the most basic team. It's the smallest starting point. A pair usually consists of one person with a big, crazy idea (what Seth Godin calls a "heretic" in his book, Tribes) and the first follower. The heretic is the nutbar with the idea that no one understands yet.

There's a great video about the first follower. Fantastic story. You watch as there's this person out there, dancing by himself. And then the first follower comes along:

The first follower validates the idea. You need your first follower to validate the idea. Then you have the beginning of an audience. 

The Trio — 3

A team of 3 requires people who can wear multiple hats. In the case of AdVenture Capitalist, Cody was the creator, writer, game designer, and voice actor. Cody wore multiple hats. 

Cody was the heretic with the idea that no one understood, including me. It wasn't until he got his first follower that his idea was validated. 

Early screenshot of adventure capitalist alpha

A team of 3 (a trio or troika) needs generalists with skills in multiple areas. But when you have a team of 3, you don't have specialists yet.

I’ve not seen examples of best-in-class experts joining a team of 3 and executing on a product. I find that specialists trip in a team of 3. I think it’s because the experts tend to not become generalists. 

Hex-Sized — 5

At 5 people on a team, I feel like I have the bases covered. From what I’ve seen, it's not until a team of 5 that you start to have specialties on a team.

5 is fun. It gives you that cool, SWAT Team-type feeling. Gaming is hard because it's a multi-disciplinary industry. 5 may be your absolute minimum in gaming. 

In a team of 5, I’d start to see a team with some specialists, and I’d have a clear lead. I’d get a really good artist and a fantastic designer. I’d have a great writer. And I’d have an excellent programmer to build it out. 

5 is about enough to sit down and show expertise in each field. But if you’re building a team of 5, you also have no redundancy or backup plan. 

Lucky Number — 7

(Pretend there are actually 7 hippos in this picture)

In agile project management circles, some recommend a team of 5, 7, or 9.

At 7 people, you can start to get into pairs. You can have two writers. Two programmers helping each other code. Two artists helping each other. Two designers helping improve each other's designs. 

I'm amazed when I hear numbers from teams like Supercell. You would assume that they have big teams, but instead they have tight, focused small teams. From what I understand, they have seven people on a project, and that's it. They call them "cells."

Big Team — 12

At about 12, you dive deeper into pairing.

You can now have 3 programmers, 3 artists, 2 writers. So teams are now starting to collaborate, and you get some really decent work. You will begin to have senior and junior members on your team. Mentorship begins.

Magic happens right on that edge for the product and the team. But at this size, things are starting to feel big…

Too Big? — 20

When I’d get a project that starts to get large (like Mech Mice did), I would break down teams into multiple teams. I would have a writing team and a game team, for example. 

As you get close to 20 team members, I've found that you start to bring in the managers of people. Teams begin to focus on ‘disciplines’ at this point. Now you have an art team vs. a product team.   

At 20, people start needing to have a manager. I don’t like the team of 20 size, personally.

At 20, you have a layer of managing people in addition to managing the product. Now there is more distance between the team and the audience, and things start to get less effective. 

The team starts to serve a producer, and the producer begins to serve executives. And at that point, nobody's talking to the audience, as they're too far away.

The producers start to serve the executives rather than the audience. At this point, I believe there are too many layers. This is the breakout point where nobody's talking to the audience because the layers are so far apart.

The bigger teams get, the more they become a big system with policies and procedures and process. 

My Approach Now

I believe in small teams. It’s worked best for me.

This may not work for everybody or every project. Big teams can work for some companies, but I prefer to focus on keeping teams small.

But if you do build a large team, it’s probably best to break that team down into smaller teams of 5 or 7.

Remember, what matters most is that you start!

Just start small, and do what you can to keep things simple.

I continue to learn and experiment to help my teams, and you’ll need to do the same if you’re looking to build an MMO like Club Penguin or a lifestyle game like AdVenture Capitalist.

Be Curious, Test Your Ideas!

Run Experiments, you never know which of your ideas will work

Run Small Experiments

When you're building a game or a world, you should start small. I made the mistake of not starting small with Mech Mice, and it hurt. I want to help you avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

Some people call early versions of games 'prototypes'. I prefer to think of them as 'experiments.' A prototype comes later, after learning from experiments.

Each experiment tests the growth, retention, and conversion of a game. For example, with the Box Critters experiments:

• Experiment 1 - growth

• Experiment 2 - retention (collecting items)

• Experiment 3 - growth and retention

For example, only 1 in 1,000 players that started Mech Mice returned to play again. That's less than 1% of players. In contrast, 20 out of 100 players (20%) return to play Box Critters. And that's just with an early, one-room experiment.

Hide Easter eggs

In Box Critters, I launched an Easter egg hunt. And afterward, someone from the Hyper Hippo team asked me, “Why? What’s the importance of the Easter egg hunt?”

The truth is, I could care less about the Easter egg hunt. What mattered about the Easter egg hunt was that the Critter character could now activate a trigger on the server. A trigger feature was required before I could add a second room to Box Critters. Otherwise, the doors couldn't link.

Triggers link rooms and will make the game. Every game is really just a set of rules. If you play any of the LEGO games, it’s really just, “do you have the block, did you build the block to get the door open?”

When you're starting small, you have to take tiny steps. A trigger feature is a little step. With the Easter egg hunt in Box Critters, the trigger feature was being heavily tested — and there were so many bugs. I couldn't even believe how many bugs there were with the Easter egg hunt. I didn't expect as many bugs as we found.

Start with a big idea

The very first step in building a world is to have a vision. It can be grandiose. You have to have a vision, and you have to race for it.

With Club Penguin, I had this big Snow Blasters idea - a massive, Advance Wars-esque, multiplayer snowball war game with thousands of concurrent players on-screen. The idea was huge. I had the idea that you could take all these stacks of blocks and build your fort higher and higher and higher like in Minecraft.

But the idea was too big.

At the core of the idea was, "can you chat?" Because if you can chat, you can do anything. It’s a signal back-and-forth. Can I make the characters display on-screen, and can I make the characters move? And that sounds so simple — can you chat?

But there is one feature in there that is incredibly difficult, and that’s not the chat. It’s the persistence of joining the session. In a regular chat room, you just join. You enter and the next message is received, or you see a log of past messages.

In Club Penguin or any virtual world, the state of the world in its current form has to be passed to the users when they arrive. You have to maintain that state. Not only do you have to preserve the state, but you have to relay the state.

"I am currently standing here, facing this way. I don’t care what I said because that was the past. But my state is the present state."

That’s a lot of work. It's a big feature to update the state.

Learn as you go

Start with one room, one character moving around. Get that working. Then go from there. You’re going to learn as you go. That’s the learning. Eventually, you’ll get enough of your tools together that you can build a product. Your product might not look like your experiments. You need to learn each of the steps before you get to the product.

In my mind, a product connects your core game loops to the player's motivation. For example, a Collector player has goals, like, "I can display, I can earn, I can collect, I can organize." In my mind, once I have those loops done, then I have a full feature, and then a product.

After that, you can start to build a business around the product. Product tests go a little further - does something in that loop create value that I will generate income from? Then it’s a product.

Test the important stuff first

The next big thing I'm adding to Box Critters is the ability to collect items.

Based on lessons learned from Club Penguin and AdVenture Capitalist, items are essential. In the early experiments leading up to Club Penguin from 2000-2004, there were no items. Items were added in 2005 to Club Penguin, but they weren't in the experiments.

We learned that ITEMS ARE IT. The items are WHY YOU SHOWED UP. My DAUs (Daily Active Users) and retention are through the roof now because of items. The 30-day retention rate of Box Critters is near 10% right now. And it’s being driven by this drip of people showing up and collecting the items.

Remember, I'm still keeping it super simple. One room. One character. Now with items. And I have a flood of items coming. One room. One character. Items.

Traffic is valuable

I held myself back years ago. In 2004, I used a robot.txt tag to say that I’m not a Flash game website. At the time, RocketSnail was one of the top 3 Google searches for Flash games, up there with Miniclip. I was getting tons of traffic from people just visiting my own website. I didn’t realize how valuable that traffic truly was back then.

I had a million users per month visiting this website and playing games. If you look back at the site via Alexa, I was trending much higher than a lot of other websites.

So when I put the Penguin experiments up, they immediately had traffic. Thousands of people every day just browsing around the internet looking for something fun.

Experimental Penguins was here on the site. It was just an experiment to see if I could build a multiplayer game. It was the first experiment of many, and I learned a ton. It just exploded. It took over most of my traffic, got featured on Cool Site of the Day, and got tons of links.

But back in 2000, the bandwidth was just too expensive. I couldn’t afford to run the server. It was actually being run at my friend’s office. We didn’t have proper hosting for it or anything. I still had dial-up at the time.

I took Experimental Penguins down, and it was gone. But people never stopped asking for it to return. The problem was that the hosting was so expensive.

Freelance work can help you grow

At the time, I was spending more time making games. How it worked at the time is that sites would pay you a small one-time fee, take your game, and put that game on their website. Then I would upsell. If they wanted their logo on it, they'd pay a little more. If they wanted their characters in it, they'd pay more again. If they wanted the source code, then they'd pay a whole bunch more...

I started getting all these sites wanting the Penguin Chats.

Contact Music wanted a music version of Penguin Chat. What was different about those plans is that I said, “I can’t just license it to you, I need you to rent the servers, too.” So they started paying for all the servers. Over all those years, I had more and more people paying the server costs. And it was where I was making the most of my money.

Later ones, like the Crab Chat and Goat Chat... they were built on the Penguin Chat engine. So I decided to update the engine. That’s where we broke all the code apart, where you had separate characters and background and artwork just like Club Penguin. So I could maintain and build more than one chat. That’s also why Chris Hendricks was hired. I hired Chris to help me make custom versions of my games for clients. He did Crab Chat and a couple of other ones like Goat Chat, which was just for a short event.

So I built up a more robust engine to keep selling these Chats. And of course, the Contact Music guys were paying me money, so I kept upgrading the engine every Wednesday night, Fridays, and Saturday mornings. It wasn’t a bad gig. I was making over $60,000 a year from my side job, and RocketSnail just kept growing.

What people don’t get is that there’s actually only a Penguin Chat 2. There is no Penguin Chat 3. There’s Penguin Chat 2.0, and then there’s 2.1. The only difference between those two is that one of them added a database where you could save your character (2.0 couldn’t.)


Penguin Chat 3 is Club Penguin. They are the same. It’s what I’m doing with Box Critters. Done live.

I stopped working on my old server system. The gauntlet was thrown down when Rob from Miniclip wanted to launch Penguin Chat on his servers, but I couldn’t handle the capacity. I couldn’t scale Penguin Chat past 100 users on the entire server. That’s when I started researching SmartFox and Electrotank and two other ones at the time. I was trying all of them.

A new server was built. Then I started building a new client to use the new server with all the new features in it. That’s where the Ninja came in.

The Ninja was entirely there just to test - “Can I clothe or swap items on a character?” (plus I just like ninjas...) That was the only item.

Penguin Chat 3 (aka Club Penguin), it had multiple rooms, items, different colors, storage, etc. It had all the feature set needed for my vision of a big world. My vision was really just a safe place for kids to play, with a chat filter, multiple rooms, mini-games, and getting items. That was it — that was the feature list. The rest of it was just content, like "here’s my idea for a room, here’s my idea for an item." Rooms and items are not really features, they’re just more content.

Remember, my original pitch document for Club Penguin was only 2 pages long. Your vision can be big without a big document.

What experiments will you create?

Here's my challenge to you: create a vision document.

Make it less than 2 pages long. For inspiration, check out my original pitch document for Club Penguin.

Then figure out what your first experiment will be for your vision.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!