Avakin now features a number of evergreen games that I designed. My favourite is almost certainly Forage, Harvest, Farm!
It stemmed from us wanting to test new tech for implementing interactive content on the fly. Known as Golem (I'll link to any posts by the devs if they post any) - it allows server-client interactions to be scripted in Lua, and deposited straight into the game without client updates.
But for me the most important aspect was what I got to create. FHF is an exercise in teaching players how to collect and manage resources.
Players are tasked with collecting various different resources.
Different resource nodes give different types of resources
Each node type requires a different tool
Nodes give out items based on rarity determined by a chance table.
Player inventory is finite - they must figure out what items to discard, sell, or keep. Additionally, tools have finite uses, and also take up an inventory slot. The rarest of items can be exchanged on certain days for premium currency.
The biggest design challenges of this came with balancing and minimizing repition without reward. For this, I created a balancing table:
Several iterations of rewards values, rarity chances, resource collecting times and tool tiers were tried. For about a week, my team went around constantly asking the rest of the dev team to play the game in order to make sure everything felt right.
Some other big challenges were just explaining all of these concepts to the players. Mobile players have a tendency to avoid reading a lot of text when they can (Me too, honestly.) so it was a case of keeping everything to small chunks. Explain things when players go to a point, or click on a bit of UI. At this point, when want to know about it; otherwise they wouldn't have gone there.
In the end, we had 800,000 players on the first day, with over a million rewards claimed. Over 10,000 players even grinded their way to the top reward in the shop after day 1 (A special profile badge designed to take a week of play to achieve!)
