Peter conference talk from a while ago.

Casual Connect: Inspirations for a New Design

Peter Molyneux

Good, could I just find out who everybody is. So if you're a developer, if you could just put your hand up if your a developer okay. If you're not developer if you put your hand up. great your all real developers that's good that's good what I thought I talk about is that I am in a very interesting stage

I've gone from PC home computers to consoles and now I'm on the journey of mobile and multi-platform, and I thought it would be interesting for you to get an insight into what is obsessing me at the moment.

And what I've learnt from the horrendous mistakes that I have made over the past two to three years. so

let's go through this talk I've only got twenty minutes or so. to go through.

I want to bare my soul.

I thought about doing the talk naked, but then I thought, mmm, I don't know if that would really, you know be a good thing for the Amsterdam audience.

Right lets move on.

So first of all. I am absolutely fascinated with this term gamers, and, and we, we, we've got lots of sort of definitions, and lots of thoughts but, but I've, I've had to think to myself what is a gamer?

How do we define a gamer, and I think the best definition I've come up with is someone that spends more than X on gaming a year, and let's just say X is a thousand dollars.

That's a reasonable thing, whether they buy a new console, or whether they spend on free to play or whether they spend it on league of legends, lets define it as that and let's break that down, it's a fascinating thing.

Firstly the amount of money spent on mobile gaming is kinda changing a little bit. It, it's, it's no

longer going as sharply up as it was. The amount of gamers, that's people that spend money on PC gaming

seems to be, have increased dramatically over the last decade. Especially if you include Asia.

The net of all this for me as a designer is that there are millions, no tens of millions, hundreds of millions of gamers out there. And my job absolutely is to give them experiences that they've never seen before.

That's my job. That's how I define myself.

Now whether and how do you go about doing that.

Well firstly understanding your audience a little bit more, were gonna go through that so.

Over the last, over the last two years as I said I went from console to mobile and what I found was that.

The experience of an old console developer/designer moving to mobile has been an incredible one. It, it's

everybody says this one line and it's a fascinating line and that line is. You know.

The day of release is just another day of development.

And nothing could be more true and it's taken me two games on mobile, Curiosity and Godus to really

appreciate what what that means, what it really means is do you have to be more fascinating more

innovation more inspirational, with the title that you make, after it's released. Than when it's initially released and what, and that means esentualy to the new piece of IP that I'm working on, is that you've got to plan that right at the very start.

It's no good and this is with the approach that I took.

It is absolutely no good to release the title and just see how it goes.

What we did with Godus and it was a fatal mistake.

Is we released it.

We would have a brainstorming session, what should we do next?

And then we would release a patch and we know we've changed the game significantly as it's gone on.

But the problem with that is it means the poor coders have to re-engineer the central core of the game all the time. So that is the biggest difference the other differences that the energy that your team has to, has to be more after release whereas consoles it's, it's, it, it, is you know, you use all your energy up, up to the day release.

So as I said we have because of my obsession with trying to understand this new audience that's out there.

We have gone through these bizarre steps.

We've released this thing called curiosity.

Did anyone one see curiosity?

Did anyone one tap on it?

Yes, quite a few people tapped on it

We released a Kickstarter. That is a whole talk on Kickstarter and my feeling of Kickstarter is that it's a wonderful place for ideas too, for games too evolve in rather than ideas go from nothing to something.

We have released Godus on early access.

Way too early, if I'm, If I'm honest with you.

What we should have done is waited until we have finished every little piece before releasing into early access and then we released a godus on IOS and in fact today. No, Thursday it's coming out in Asia and Godus has been fantastically successful.

It's you know, and everybody seems quote these numbers these days. It's been number one in 54 countries, it's had 280,000 five star likes.

Its had, it's, it's my most successful game that I've ever worked on.

More people have played Godus than any other game though I've ever done.

Which is an incredible feeling.

There seem to be more as many people who have question marks about it.

We've had about ninety thousand concurrent users, that means 90,000 people sculpting sort of on the server at one particular time, and you know the curve of its success has, is very much like the curves you see in many mobile games.

lots of people at the start when you get featured, and trailing off. But even though successful there was a huge amount of lessons to be learnt. And the first lesson is and I guess this is a lesson for any developer, out there.

Is on PC it was a paid app, and on mobile it was a free to play app.

I don't think I'd ever do that again.

Because that meant there was, there was the PC audience really found it challenging to think that they had a different game from the mobile audience.

A lot of people got very very upset and I blame myself for that.

But also the the game itself was just so complicated, there was so many moving system for that 10,000 numbers to balance, and this could this could, this could drive you absolutely insane so if you are going to be doing this as one of my lessons learned.

If I was going to do a free to play game again. Then I would definitely focus on a few meaningful, very meaningful systems and the trouble is with an open world game like Godus. Where every pixel of the land can change, and the flow of people, people's progress can be radically different from one person to another person, makes it insanely challenging to balance, especially to balance around the monetization nature.

But we did experiment with quite a few things, there, there's a lot of talk about events. You know this, these time-limited gameplay that if a player gets to a certain level, then they get a reward and if they, they do that within two days they get the reward, if they don't they never get the reward, they never get that content.

The problem with that is, whilst it's quite nice for people. I think there's a lot of people so jumping on that bandwagon, the problem is for something like this, and this would be a problem in a role playing game or a problem in and you know an RTS, or is it distracts the player from the core gameplay and that's a real lesson that I learnt.

Is that if you distract the player from the core, what the core of the game is, they kind of lose their way.

So in Godus people would plan their world and they would sculpt their world's out and then there was this event going on, you could see through the numbers.

They join the event, and then forget what they were doing in the main world.

So all of this is great lessons to be learnt.

I'll let you... we've got a video of the gameplay. did I, no I won't play this, I've only got 20 minutes.

So here we are now, we've Godus fully released, and and we've got a fantastic amazing team of people, incredibly passionate people.

Our choice now is simple we split the company.

Most of us on the new IP.

But a totally dedicated, about a quarter of the company still remaining on Godus because its, it, you know there are DAU's across all the formats of hundreds of thousands a day, and its making tens, if not hundreds of thousands if it's a good day of revenues so we you have to keep that team there.

And we have a new team of, a team working on the new IP.

And this is a problem by the way for any studio. Anybody that's out there that's developer. This is another problem is that you, we hired those people to be innovational, and to be daring about their approach to problems, and then asking them to to become essentially service people that, you know just put out a content pack after a content pack. Is asking a lot is asking them to change their personalities, so for us you know we define ourselves by the intonational content that we are working on.

So with this new team, and new IP with the mistakes that I made with Godus.

What are we doing well we're working on a new piece of IP and it has to be.

I mean my job, if I define myself at all. is to do something completely unexpected.

And so I'm gonna talk to you now about the obsessions. And why these obsessions for me
are important, my aspiration is this.

As a designer my aspiration is to make a game that quite simply everybody on the planet plays. that's what I want, it's not much to ask, really, you know, DAU's of seven billion, or maybe well I'll discounted it a little bit, we won't include the Welsh or something so you know 6.9 billion.

That's what I get obsessed about, and I think while that sounds ridiculous. I think when you're sitting

down and creating a new IP. That's what you have to think about. You have to not think about.

I think it, it's the worst thing that you can do to say. I'd love to be in the top 10. Or wouldn't it be great to knock clash of clans of that number one spot.

That will destroy you as a designer.

In the first instance because you're limiting your ambition. my obsession and ambition is to make something so delightful, so inspirational, so different from anything else that's been seen before that I don't limit my creativity. And the first ingredient I'm gonna put in this, into this pot, is this word commune.

Now clash of clans has been enormous, incredible success. I'm enormous fan of it. I've personally spent money on it and it took me a long time as a consumer, and as a designer. Too really understand what was going on.

And my sort of flash of inspiration, was it's nothing about the mechanics, you know there's lots of apps where you build stuff, what it really is, the secret is, and its so obvious, is in the title, clash of clans.

And what they did brilliantly is persuaded me gently, that I should join a clan, and this idea of clans, has got helluva lotta mileage to it. So what we're gonna do is this.

We're gonna find a new. totally new way.

Completely new way of bringing people together. And forming them into, I'm not going to say clan because I think that's limited. Into a group or commune and give them a goal which is so meaningful, so natural, and meaningful they cannot resist to continue playing.

Now how are we gonna do that?

Well it's not gonna, one thing's for sure, it's, you can't have a lobby.

The people, my belief is, is to go back and look at things like world Warcraft, who played World of Warcraft who met a person on the route in the world of Warcraft?

That's what happened to me I met someone while I was playing World of Warcraft, and it was very clumsy, it was quite clumsy but we traveled together for a while.

I think that's a fantastic moment of inspiration.

Is imagine we could have a game where you discover your best friend. Could that be possible? would that be insane? I don't think it is.

So what we are doing, is thinking of a completely new way of persuading people, gently, to come together in groups. Now some of those people in that group maybe friends, some those people maybe people that you've never met from different cultures,from different lands speaking different languages.

I'll give you a clue, one of the things we're not going to do, is allow people to chat.

Because for me chatting, typing and texting in a group limits what the emotional impact of that.

You know that there's a, if you go on live role playing. Anyone done live role-playing. no you look too sensible to do live role playing.

If you've done live role-playing you go along to this thing you dress up as a wizard, or you dress up as a you know, or as an elf or whatever, and you've gotta stay in character, you have to stay in character if you don't get stay in character, you get, you know. you get thrown out.

And that's the problem with chat, its fine if everyone stays in character but is very destructive if

everyone starts using chat, so were, to do the commune side we're having to reinvent the way people do chat, and in fact we're making communication part of the leveling up strategy.

Also another thing to say this is that when you an, if you have, if you are in a group of people and you have a meaningful, a meaningful destiny for that group, then you're much more likely to spend money.

Much, because you're not spending on yourself you're spending on the group so it's all great goodness there.

The next thing that I am absolutely fascinated with is this const... concept of exploring.

Imagine a world.

All I have to do to excite someone about a game is, you it get to explore this beautiful world.

DONE!

Job done.

Especially on these devices.

So can we give a world so beautiful, so fascinating for people to explore in.

But the problem is on mobile, is a disastrous one, and that problem is simple and tedious.

It's about navigation, it's taken us two decades. Really if I'm honest to get navigation right on

consoles, to get the thumbstick just right, I did a game called for the fable series.

We spent ages getting the, the balance and the running of the, of the hero right, we have to go back for me, we had to go back to the drawing board to give people this feeling that they were exploring an entire world.

But to understand how to do that, they had to be able to navigate, and move within two seconds.

In other words, I could give you a device a PC or a mobile. I could give you this and within two seconds you would have to be navigating through the world.

I love the thought, if you have a beautiful, incredible open-world.

I love the thought, what's around the next corner, what's over the next hill, and if you talking about retention thinking about people coming together as a group, and that thought about what's around the next corner is the first night.

The next thing...

Gosh I'm running out of time.

The next thing is about interaction, now it's tempting to think that we've already squeezed all the goodness out of touch.

No, not in the slightest.

For me, the, the, we are still making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

Now I think a lot of people have got rid of thumbs. These thumbstick sticks simulator on mobile great.

But we need to now look at some of the other millstones that are hanging around our necks, I'll give you an example.

A simple example and that is about inventories.

You know, do you know those things if you're playing a role playing game or your pretty much playing you know it's a generalized system.

You have some sort of, sort of pack and you put stuff in the pack and when it fills up that's it.

That needs complete reinvention because that was designed for a style of game, and a method of input which is now decades-old.

So don't think that if you're working on a touch based game that you can just do swipe forward, swipe back, hold and press no. You need to think innovationaly about the interaction.

For me the word I love is tactile. Is, is tactile.

I must be able to feel. That what I'm doing, it must be a physical action, it must make sense. it must not be abstract, and when I show you finally the game. I hope you'll see what you, you mean.

So that is what I wrote up on the wall tactile and natural.

Whatever we do there must be an emotional connection.

You know if you are, with that sort of emotional connection, I'm, I'm talking about. Is the emotional connection you get when you stroke a dog. It, it, it illicits a feeling inside you.

And I played around earlier on, with that sort of connection, that sort of interaction. In a game I did called black and white.

And in Black and white you could spank your monkey.

And, and you could you could hit it, and you could you could tell it off by hitting it.

Now that interaction, was what I mean by natural and meaningful.

People, when people saw people's hitting this monkey they, they got the instant emotional reaction. And this device especially is great for that, and I still don't see enough of that on there.

The next thing that's obsessing me is the thought of making stuff.

I love making stuff.

But if I'm gonna make something, it's gotta to be totally and utterly unique to me.

I think there's an enormous opportunity here that, we make people feel, allow them to feel creative.

Allow them to feel like, that what they're doing is unique to them, now, so what we've got so far lets list this through. We have got the ability to come together as a group. Exploring a vast beautiful, incredible land. Interacting in the world in a very, very unique way, and making stuff.

I'm giving you some the things that I don't feel I've seen many times before.

And then lastly is beauty, and this is a dangerous thing for us to get involved with, but because of everything I said so far, really I think our focus has to be on the higher-end devices.

We have to look at those low end devices and say you know what, yeah, they're just not doing it for the ambition that we've got.

We've gotta be forward-thinking, and that frees us up, to allow us to use this hardware in very exciting ways, and you can do things on this device especially, the iPhone 6 but the 5s as well.

Alot of the samsung devices are higher in, so that you can do just jaw-droppingly amazing things, and so for so long. I found myself limited by the need to support every single format under the Sun, and then this realization simply came.

You know what are the devices that Apple are selling and what is the likelihood that they're going to be continuing to sell the 4s for another five years?

Probably 0.

So making it emotionally meaningful, making it visually unique. Making it everyone talks about you know they talk about discovery.

There is, There is a simple solution to discovery.

Forget about user acquisition, the discovery is this, and it was here on the early stages of this phone, is people look at when the people play your app, they feel the need to show other people.

That's discovery, that's all you have to do, you don't have to do anything else you just have to do that.

Make it so charming, so beautiful, so delightful, that discovery you never have to spend a single penny on discovery.

If fact we never spend any money on user acquisition for Godus, so those are the things the obsessing me are steps at the moment, are with choosing a middleware.

I'm, I think you have to these days use middleware.

If you're gonna make a big title and so we're we're choosing the middleware.

We've been looking unreal, we've been looking at Unity, I love unity by the way. We've been looking at some third-party and software, so where we're, We are still choosing that.

We're developing a prototype. Were loving the mistakes, I think if you're making something innovational,

love your mistakes if you don't make a mistake, your definitely doing something wrong. So love the mistakes, be honest with yourself, try and get outside views when, when they're ready to get.

Evolve the design, don't just write the design down, evolve it.

To use words like tactile and, and, and feeling.

I have now run out of time.

We are very, very, desperate for another designer.

A passionate insane creative designer.

The less industry experience the better.

In my opinion, because we don't want someone with industry experience we want someone who just doesn't know the rules because we want to break the rules.

And we want a, an amazing and driven coder, again, prefer someone with less experience, rather than someone with more experience. We found that the people with less experience have that drive and energy and craziness and that's what you need is crazy, out of the box thinking.

If you know anybody, or if you are you are the person yourself please email me directly at pmolyneux 22cans.

have we got time for questions?

Yes or no?

Hall director

We have time for one question if its two minutes or less

Peter Molyneux

Or no, no questions, we do have one question.

Hall Director

whose hand was first? whose hand was first? Excuse me, coming through, coming through...

Audience Member

so is said to us social aspect is really important in the community expect but do you think the competition is important because you didn't mention it?

Peter Molyneux

I think group to group if you form people together in a group then the then those groups competing with other groups is absolutely essential. and and and competition within the group as well is is who is the best within the group as long as that's done in a delightful way I think that works well

Great thank you very much everyone.