Be Curious, Test Your Ideas!

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

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!

How do you make a virtual world like Club Penguin?

Start Small.

Every day I get questions about how I made Club Penguin. People ask this because they want to make the next big world. My first answer is always the same: start small.

For 20 years I have been known as RocketSnail. The snail continues to remind me to start small.

For 20 years I have been known as RocketSnail. The snail continues to remind me to start small.

Two years ago, the original Flash-based Club Penguin closed down. In six months, Flash will be disabled in the Chrome browser by default. By the end of 2020, Flash will basically be dead.

It’s time to build something new. And it’s not just time for me to build something new. It’s time for you to build something new, too. I’d like to help you do that by sharing what I’ve learned.

Every big project must be broken down into smaller pieces. I built Club Penguin in small pieces by coding little experiments, like Experimental Penguins and Penguin Chat. We started building an audience five years before Club Penguin officially launched. If you’re looking to build a new virtual world like Club Penguin and an audience, it will take persistence and time. By breaking up your big idea into little pieces, it will be easier to improve things and finish the project.

Take this post, for example. I want to write a book for you and the Club Penguin community. How will I write a book? By starting small. Here on the RocketSnail website. And by sharing each chapter here on the blog, I can get feedback from you to what you want to hear about. Together, we make the book even better.

Why am I writing these posts?

My goal is to inspire you, the next generation of creators. I want to give back to the amazing community of fans like you.

I want to help you by sharing what I’ve learned in my journey from creating Club Penguin to starting a new company to building a brand new virtual world called Box Critters.

I want to answer the big questions — give you answers that don’t fit in a tweet. I want to celebrate the Club Penguin world and its history with you.

In case you didn’t know, I tend to be a slow reader and writer. My gift is with pictures and interactive toys. That’s why I’ve asked Club Penguin alumni Chris Gliddon (formerly known as Polo Field) to help me write this blog-as-a-book. Each post will be a potential chapter in the book. And you can help me decide which chapters are good enough to feature in that book.

How do I know where to start?

Start With Your Strength.

Whatever your skill is — start there. Just start.

Break it down. What is the absolute minimum thing you have to do? With Box Critters, I’m trying to demonstrate how to do it. At first glance, it’s one room with a character moving around. But it’s a little more than that.

Take one step back from that — “can I chat?” Meaning, can one connection know that the other connections are present, and can they all say something? If you can accomplish that, then it’s just layers and layers and layers.

Right now, I’m adding items and inventory. I’ve built it a little more complicated, though because I know what can come up due to my previous experience. I’m not adding animation or fancy stuff. I can polish later. Add small little layers, keeping it as simple as possible. Especially today.

A simple execution today is going to save you so much time and money. If you start complex today, your creation will become unmanageable much more quickly. MMOs are about scale. What happens when you have thousands of requests of adding that item on top? Don’t worry about that now.

If you’re an artist, draw. If you’re a writer, write. If you’re a coder, code. Work in Minecraft. Just find a place to start.

I’m still not an object-oriented programmer today. In fact, I’m going to spend the next two days learning about events to figure out why on earth I should create an event listener. Be prepared to learn on an ongoing basis.

I could hire people to work on Box Critters, too. But this project is too intimate. I love to do it. Eventually, I will have to hand it off, but I like doing it. And when I find people to hire, their solutions often end up too complicated — they build the complex solution. Then when I ask for a change, everyone is horrified. I end up shaking my head, going, “It’s not hard. Just go back to square one - a chat. The character chats and others see it. Keep it super-simple.”

If it takes too long to find a bug, then I burn the whole thing down and start again. I don’t write perfect code, I write it and trash it, write it and trash it. It’s my style. It’s much easier to change things when they’re simple, and you’re less attached to them.

Learn from Failures

What we learned from Mech Mice

The last couple of years of Disney, I listened to a lot of brilliant business people, many of them very educated, Harvard Business School-educated leaders. I learned a lot of great things from those people. I also spent too many years hearing that I don’t know how to program. That I wasn’t to standard. I kept hearing all this negative talk, and started to tell myself, “I’m not that good, I’m not that good.”

After taking some time off to mow grass and drive tractors (long story), I started Hyper Hippo Games. Our first project was this big new idea – a massive, transmedia IP called Mech Mice. I assembled a team of talented people, many of them former Club Penguin staffers.

With Mech Mice, I leaned into what I thought I’m good at, which is building worlds and stories and environments. Then instead of programming, I built a team to put all those pieces together to make something great. And we went after a really big IP.

  • Chris Hendricks (Screenhog) composed a great musical soundtrack

  • Cale Atkinson (2DCale) created some beautiful artwork

  • Johnny Jansen (Businesmoose) built some beautiful videos

  • Cody Vigue (Jabberwocky) wrote some hilarious dialog and provided some fantastic voiceovers

  • Clint Schnee (Screencaptor) designed great UI and a logo

  • Oktobor Animation animated some beautiful 3D assets

Everyone else, including project management and marketing kept everything on-track and on-schedule

We spent years working on Mech Mice, getting it ready for the world. And over two million dollars. There’s just one little problem...

At launch, Mech Mice made only a few thousand dollars. In its original form, Mech Mice was a complete flop. It was just not fun.

I failed on a couple of big things:

1) I didn’t intimately play, design or build the game world. I’ve since learned that I do have an incredible strength there. I may not be the best programmer, but I do have an intimate and innate ability to feel how the characters should move and feel. And that feeling on the screen just wasn’t there.

2) I didn’t listen at all to the audience. Not at all. I didn’t even ask them.

3) I didn’t test. I didn’t run a single experiment. At the end of Mech Mice, I looked back at what made Club Penguin work. And what made Club Penguin work? Experimental Penguins. Small projects. Intimately building with a small audience. Delegating critical technology decisions to help grow beyond my strengths. That all made it work.

Mech Mice was me, going “I have a great idea,” then I gave it to everybody else and waited for the end product. It very much applied the approach of what much of the AAA gaming industry does. I don’t like that process anymore, and I don’t even think about it. It’s almost like building a product to fit a hole, not actually building something that anybody wants.

Things that I’m great at: I killed Mech Mice.

Perhaps Mech Mice will come back in a new form in the future. The idea of Mech Mice doesn’t have to be dead, but the original execution just wasn’t fun. A great idea will always be a great idea, but a poor execution will always be a poor execution. Execution is everything.

Not a single person on the team wanted to kill Mech Mice at the time. But during post-interviews with the team, they said they wanted to kill it a long ago. They just kept working on it. There’s this mindset of “well, I’ve been assigned this and here’s the project list and the project list keeps showing up every day. So I’m just going to keep working on it. Nobody stops, pops their head out and goes, “should we build this game?”

When I ask them, they say, “no”. They don’t stop until it stops. So I stopped the game, which was a shock to everyone.

That’s when we went back to basics. We started small again.

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Question for You

What did you think of this first chapter? And what would you like to read more of next?

Items, Catalogues and Shops!

Here is a little secret, between hiking, biking, skiing and being the CEO of Hyper Hippo Games, I do find time to create Virtual Worlds. Usually I spend a couple hours in the morning, drinking coffee and rewriting all my code.

Today my focus is on items, catalogues and shops. I believe collecting is a core feature of virtual worlds. Overall I am planning a simple system. As a designer it is my job to reduce the users friction whenever possible. Virtual shops can be painful and many users will abandon games because of poor shop and catalog design.