Poker Pals was developed at Aspyr Media and published by Chillingo. Part of a 3 person team, we set out to create a poker game inspired by Words with Friends. I was responsible for art direction, interaction & visual design and content creation. Additionally I was the primary resource for creating most marketing content used to drive social media campaigns.
Starting A New Game / Product
As a new product the team worked with a number of assumptions about our future customers to measure and test in the market place.
Goals
- Establish a develop processes for launching and updating a live product as a team
- Gain experience measuring user behavior and adapting game features, designs and systems to improve user experience and retention
- Test various monetization approaches
Assumptions (Build)
- Customers will be predominately males wanting to play friends in competitive head to head competition.
- Customers will prefer real opponents over Ai opponents.
- Casual player growth would come from invitations to play through social networks.
- Customer behavior and retention would be similar to Words with Friends.
Reality (Measure)
- Users engaged in random match play with total strangers at a very high rate.
- Rematches with Random players accounted for significant percentage of matches.
- Players engaged in Ai matches at a much higher rate than expected.
- Casual player adoption did not materialize through social invitation as expected.
- Match abandonment was much higher than expected.
Synthesis (Learn)
- Customers were not willing to regularly wait for competitors to take their turn.
- An individual play of hand in a match lacked a level of engagement that invested the player in a particular match.
- The combination of these two observations appear to be the primary factors leading to match abandonment and lower player retention.
- Customers did enjoy single player (Ai) matches and those engaged in single player matches tended to abandon multiplayer matches at significantly lower rate.
Key Insights
Guiding and encouraging the customer to engage in a challenging single player experience complimented by competitive player vs. player matches resulted in higher than average retention rates and lower match abandonment.
It is this understanding that the team used to design and develop its next game, Sushi Mushi.
The Poker Pals Persona
The adopting audience proved to be:
- Highly driven
- Predominantly male
- Impatient
- Competitive
- Strategic
Flow Map
The user is immediately engaged in game play from the moment the game is launched. A short guided experience teaches the basics and then frees the user to take control.
The following is the full game flow with a blowup of the game mode UI. Poker Pals has a CLASSIC and EPIC board sizes. The New Game UI flow for both modes is identical with a different color background/board so that the user is clear what mode they are in.
