Nowadays various mobile games have a lot of modes that don’t require any gamers’ actions.
Now they shouldn’t even hold a phone in their hands to start gameplay. They just need to run the application and let the artificial intelligence do the rest.
Initially, it even sounds boring: press the button and get a prize. Is it fun at all?
Seems like the developers should make their products more addictive and interesting for its fans, instead of adding dreary auto-mode to it.
But digging deeper, one can find another interpretation of this innovation.
Free mobile entertainment developers often focus on game mechanic design but usually, it is a lost cause. The best tactic for them is to concentrate their strengths on giving their audience more attractive leisurely decisions’ experience.
Battles are the major lure
The central highlight of the role-playing game genre is the presence of fascinated combat mechanic gamers can use – this “hooks” them and makes them dive deeper into the virtual world. So if there is no control option, they don’t consider it’s a game.
Starting a new battle, the player expects to influence its course. Summoner’s War provides gamers with attack place and time choice. At first, it is interesting, especially for the beginners, but it makes them tired pretty quickly.
People are ready to pay for perfectly polished, fun, and professionally made games, so a beautiful battle demonstrates the gameplay as artwork from the very beginning, forcing the user to experience plenty of exciting emotions during the fighting.
However, when gamers go through a huge amount of battles, its technique inevitably becomes boring. The game design history boasts just a few games that succeeded in keeping people interested in their basic game mechanics (for example, Tetris, chess or card games) for years. It happened because these are not multiplayer games, but casual ones where the potential interaction difficulty is restricted – that is where the secret of their success hides. In theory, it was possible but extremely hard to realize.
Then how to maintain a sustainable interest in the games, while providing an opportunity to gain interesting primary mechanical skills?
Bitcoin billionaire
The genre of this very game is strange enough to be classified as a known one. This is partly a simulator with endless progress in the main style. The aim is to accumulate plenty of bitcoin by continuously clicking on the screen.
Nothing fancy – tap the phone screen with your fingers and rejoice your money grow.
No matter how strange it may sound, after 40 seconds the fingers get tired – this engagement as a whole is a little tiring. Since people won’t be relentlessly clicking all day long, the game is able to encourage them for invests to make money while they’re resting of crazy tapping.
This technique serves the player to get away from the boring basic game mechanics to more attractive stuff: investment management & development optimization rate.
The Bitcoin billionaire has introduced a nice trick: the gamer distracts attention from clicking the device and turns dependent on buying sources of revenue. This game is a great example of how to get gamers out of a tiresome core mechanic into the more interesting thing from the long-lasting perspective.
This switching is precisely what all games should provide for efficient enduring customer retention. So how it is possible to integrate this into other genres?
The automatic combat exemplifies how this technique should be embedded in role-playing games. Ultimately, the developers realized that giving direct control over the gameplay was relevant any longer. Decoys and substitutions make choices beyond its core mechanics a bit more exciting.
Though the automatic battle doesn’t imply simple implementation. It has both advantages and disadvantages.
Before starting the automatic battle system implement into the game, two questions worth to be asked:
🎮 Session design: auto-battle or job system?
The automatic battle system means that the user can only select where to enter, leave his phone with the game open, and come back to get a “trophy” in a few minutes.
Will it make a positive session design influence?
The fact that users let the apps to be open for a while will have a great KPI impact. But successful games encourage gamers to frequently app’s revisits withing day and concentrate them on making purposeful decisions. So why require the application to remain open in the fighting process?
Games’ job systems have existed for years. For example, it was enough to press a button in Mafia Wars to turn off the device for a while and to come back for rewards after some time. It was a pleasant assignment method for gamers that forced them back into the game, but it was still obsolete due to the fact it only used a control system. However, it can supersede the need for automatic battle.
The more attractive option can be offering the user a choice. In one case, the gamer can allow himself to leave his fighting men out of his control for 10 minutes, after which they will return with a loop, or he will have the chance to complete the battle himself if he considers artificial intelligence will only spoil it. Thus, users will be able to determine the type of game that suits them best.
🎮 What’s interesting outside of battle?
If the only game goal is a few taps a day, it can quickly get boring. Receiving awards and items could become a pleasure only if some efforts were made. The auto-battle introduction into the game will significantly reduce its complexity, so a sufficient amount of other interesting functionality outside of battles should be able to retent fans’ interest for months.
Many entertainment apps have a very sophisticated, polished loot system that allows players to make interesting decisions, such as weapon choices. In particular, relics in Summoner’s War were an interesting way to modernize the game.
However, even despite a powerful loot system that allows for long-term collecting, players still need progress indicators. So the automatic mode is great, but only if in the end players will get the opportunity of an epic boss battle. Such auto-battles will cause the gamer to expect something new and exciting.
