GDC 2012: Chris Plummer on mobile social RPG Skyfall, ngmoco’s first DeNA-inspired freemium game

DeNA's acquisition of ngmoco was one of the big news stories of 2010.

It's taken time for the social expertise of the Japanese company to feed through into the US publisher's first party output, though.

The first big project is Skyfall, a game currently in beta for Android.

Executive producer Chris Plummer spoke about the development process in his postmortem - 'Delivering delight to savvy gamers on the go' - in the Smartphone & Tablet Gaming Summit at GDC 2012.

"RPGs are big, complicated games to make that require a lot of content, which is why we hadn't made one. But we played Stoneship, a simple turn-based exploration game on iOS. That was the spark of inspiration," he revealed.

"Exploration was the thing we thought was missing from current RPGs on mobile."

Of course, being a mobile game, or "a legitimate MMOG for mobile", means converting the compulsion loops from PC/console into a more mobile-focused pace, which sees cool events happening every 5 to 30 minutes to keep players occupied in the short and medium term.

There also crafting elements, while the company will be running week-long events to drive retention.

As for the process of making an online social games, especially an RPG; "You also have to commit to your game, and love it through good times and bad," Plummer said.

"It's like a marriage. You really shouldn't make a game unless you can commit to it, now and for the longterm."

Prototyping happening using Powerpoint to keep the process very flexible. Also, at this early stage, the team didn't have much engineering resource.

The inspiration for the turn-based combat was taken from golf games - using a two tap method.

"We stood up a lot of the game design using Powerpoint," Plummer explained. "About half of our mechanics came from traditional RPGs, but we evolved elements such as exploration and combat."

"Our biggest risk was how people would interact with these mechanics on a mobile device."

In terms of process, Plummer said that development was traditional, although adding "The most important thing we did was to take a step back and assess the game before we went into beta.

"We changed our tutorial, added a ton more content, and better social interactions."

The game has been beta for a month for certain Android devices, with ngmoco's focus being about engagement of users.

Indeed, DeNA usually releases its games in beta without any monetisation included just to see if people want to play, although Skyfall does have some monetisation included.

Yet early retention wasn't as good as expected, prompting the company to tweak the initial part of the game.

"A lot of people were cutting out the character creation process, so we improved it," Plummer said. "We were also losing people during the first or second combat."

Fixing this included better user interface and making it impossible to die.

The result was churn in the tutorial was reduced by 22 percent, but retention remained weak.

Digging further into the issue, it became clear that players were dropping out because of loading times; so that's been a major focus for improvement.

As for the longterm, ngmoco has 'points of no return' that it considers to be such cool missions that if players reach then, they will become committed.