f13.net forums - Appealing to everyone, the success story of Pyro.

I already have a thread about my game, Pyro, but this is a revisit to the game on the topic of it's design and success. This board moves slow, so I'm making a new topic for it.

Recently, Pyro launched on Big Fish Games, a really large casual gaming portal. I took notice today that over 2,000 people are concurrently playing it past midnight on the East Coast. This makes it, at the moment, the 20th most popular game on Big Fish. I can't see how many plays it's gotten total so far, but it would not be foolish to assume over the one million mark. Big Fish is one of those older women demographic casual sites you hear so much about. The bejeweled clones litter their top 20, and the most popular game on the site is called, I shit you not, "Chocolatier 3: Decadence by Design".

So my casual puzzle game is successful with older women casual gamers, this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Pyro also did quite well on AddictingGames.com, garnering the top content slot for over a week and earning nearly 2 million plays in that time. It's approval rating is 87% positive, 13% negative. AddictingGames has a pretty wide demo, but they trend far more toward the "teenagers playing at school on the library computer" than the older moms at home taking care of the kids crowd. So, Pyro seems pretty good with the kids too, and to further back that up, Miniclip has bought a license and it will go live soon there as well, where I expect it to do quite well.

Pyro *also* did well on Kongregate, where achievement-minded, more "gamer" flash gamers gave it a 3.7 out of 5 stars and played about 800,000 times. I would say this is actually one of the weaker results compared to the first two, but still without a doubt positive.

It's been played 300,000 on a Turkish game portal with no translation available, and has been hosted in several other non-English speaking countries where it has done significantly well, though not close to how it was received in the states. Still, this is impressive to me.

By no means is Pyro the best game ever made. It's not the best game this year, it's not even the best game from the month it was released. However, it has mass appeal to a huge variety of audiences, and I think thats worth discussing with other potential developers, and keeping in mind for myself as I go forward making more games.

Pyro has a few things going for it. For starters, the game play concept is nearly self explanatory. You throw the fireball at the torches. The torches light up. Light all the torches, play the next level. This makes it easy to play in any languages. By contrast, my first game, Oh, Buoy! required a good deal of textual explanation to grasp the concept of the game, and it failed miserably. Sunk like a stone, I suppose would be a good pun.

With Big Fish not factored in, because I cant possibly know the number, Pyro has been played more than 4.6 million times in the three months that it has been released. This has generated over $10,000 for our two man dev team for a development time of around 6 weeks. By all measurements, this is a successful game.

Pyro's development focused heavily on a top-down style of design. By this I mean, the idea was hatched because the fire effect already existed. My programmer made it years ago for an effects package. I thought t looked really nice, and I was like "Man, what can we do to make that toy into a full fledged game?"

The concept for Pyro was generally established in a day, and a prototype was ready within a few hours of us filling in the blanks of the idea.

My general model was Bloons. A game well known for its wide appeal and huge distribution success, as well as its sequels and spin-offs which have made it's 2-man dev team into one of the most successful flash partnerships in existence. I'd like to tell you that I know what makes mass appeal, but I don't. What I do know, is what games have mass appeal and what games do not, and I know how to suck out the essence of that attractive game without looking like I'm cloning it and stealing their thunder.

Bloons has a few great things going for it.

1) It's unoffensive.
2) The idea is easy to get, and requires no text explanation.
3) It's forgiving. The levels are hard, but its easy to try again. You don't feel like you suck if you cant get it the first few time.
4) The pace is good, and the game saves your progress so you can come back later if you get stuck.

I added a few things to this:

1) An attractive gimmick. Fire.
2) The "Ace" mechanism for talented gamers who want a challenge.
3) Unlockable levels based on that "Ace" mechanism, to encourage further play.

One of the most important things to me in making Pyro is that there is no delay between winning level 1 and starting level 2. No stats screen, no congrats screen, nothing. You just go - Boom boom boom. No time to quit, just keep going. I've been told by many people that Pyro is addictive. I believe this aggressive attack of levels on the player is a big reason why. I don't give you a convenient excuse to quit, except the retry screen, but I may change that for the sequel to keep the pace even faster. In the world of flash games, if you get bored for one second, its time to go play the other thousands of games available for just-as-free as this one.

Pyro is easy to get in concept. The instructions are "Grab the fireball, throw it." But I can make this even better, and future games will do just that. The purpose of grabbing the fireball is moot. There's no reason to make players actually grab it, and that fact is the only issue that could be presented in foreign language gameplay. Instead, the aiming arrow should be presented as soon as the level starts. This should always be present to make sure the player has his hand on the mouse and doesn't try to use any keyboard controls, unsure of how the game starts. This is probably the game's biggest flaw.

It is forgiving. Retrying is not a big deal, there is no life system. It never says "Sorry, you lose, start over." Death penalties have no business in a flash game. I know some NES games were hard as fuck, but just because this is 2d doesn't mean it's NES. You need to be forgiving, because if you aren't, the players will just go play something else. You can still be a difficult game of skill without being a dick to your players.

Acing wound up being one of the best assets of the game, and I think it was the greatest improvement over the Bloons doctrine. Each level in Pyro is possible to "Ace" by completing it with only one shot. There's actually 3 levels that require 2 shots, but we've made those give you "Ace" status if you make it in 2. I would have purposely made sure not to design any levels like that if I realized all the others were going to be possible to ace, but we really thought that only 30 or so were possible and didnt put much thought into it. It was an afterthought. Soon after release though, players were making youtube videos of how to ace every single levels, and ultimately Kongregate made that into one of their badges. It's kind of unfair because to Ace some of them, you really need to do some glitchy shit, but I think this made the game much more appealing to those sort of intense gamers who really get deep into a game.

For everybody else, the ace is just a mental reward. It says "Woo, I did better than normal! Huzzah!" it's just a mental reward. I feel like the aces and game pace are what give this title its "addictive" quality, along with the fact that fire is really pretty to look at. As it turns out, all of these things combined seems to appeal from the youngest male to the oldest female. From casual gamers who can only get a few levels in, to hardcore players who have aced every shot and brought their total game time down to ridiculously low levels. Its the perfect story of easy to learn, impossible to master, with a sprinkling of nicotine addictiveness on top to keep them interested.

Ultimately, I did not make a new Bloons. I have not gotten anywhere close to that level of success, and Im sure there's a variety of reasons why. However, I hope and believe that Pyro has left an imprint on it's players minds strongly enough that a sequel will do better than the original, and I'll continue to move in that direction of Bloons success.

If anyone is an indie dev, or professional designer I suppose, and wants to chat about this sort of market and game design, let me know! I'm by no means an expert. Just a novice with good intuition, but I'd really like to bump heads with other people who have the same interests.