Introduction
When you make a game and you want to achieve replayability, first off forget about trying to say to the player “Don’t leave, please come back! we have free things you know?”, which is usually translated to daily rewards and free coins.
If you want your game to have replayability you want it to have flexible results, not a rigid outcome. A story game like uncharted has a rigid outcome, is one intro, one argument, one conclusion, there’s no decisions, no changes in the narrative, just one rigid outcome that has to be the best for it to be played to the end, and once it’s played to the end, the game ends, the money was spent and there’s not much to do after that, you can replay the game but it doesn’t have replayability because you know the story, you know the outcome and you can’t change it.
So, when you play the game the first time
The second time you play it from the beginning you will get this instead
How different, isn’t it? it’s because uncharted 4 has a rigid outcome. Yes, it has a solid foundation, the game is fun, but it has a rigid outcome, so playing it once can perhaps end up resulting the same way the next time. There is differences between the first playthrough and the second one, though, maybe the first time you play it you died 300 times, and the next time you replay it you die just twice, which can make for a more enjoyable experience sometimes.
So we know that Uncharted, a game in a platform we’re not connected at in any way, shape or form, has a rigid outcome, how do we apply this to Roblox?
You can apply this same logic to simulators and tycoons. A simulator has one rigid outcome whose ending cannot be changed based on your actions, you have to click to make points and when you make enough points you get to make more points by clicking, that’s it, everybody could look at that click game concept and thing “how can this succeed? it’s not even fun!”.
But not every simulator is the same. A simulator where you have to click all the time can be just about that, clicking, but the clicking can be mutated to have different outcomes. You can mutate it to click on a car and, when you click, you shoot and hurt someone, you incentivize combat in a map, which most of the time has different outcomes. You can mutate the click to mine in a cave, yes, you’re clicking, but you are put into the aspect of not knowing what you will find, mysteries everywhere, what happens if I click here? what happens if I click there? WILL I GET DIAMONDS??? there’s clicking, yes, but the clicking can give different results, flexible outcomes, either by clicking itself or by something else.
A tycoon usually falls flat in outcomes, and tycoons tend to have zero replayability when they’re done terribly. Done terribly is when the building you have to build is established by the dev and there’s no powerful impact on the gameplay when you decide to do something else on the place. Like, if I decided to build this instead of what others do, will I get rewarded a lot more? if the answer is yes, if the player decides to take an independent decision by themselves, with nothing being told to them, and the decision they took favors them later on, you did a good job as a dev, you motivated them to experiment, in your game, that’s a keyword.
Allow them to experiment in your game, don’t make it have a solid outcome where you can’t change what will happen, allow the players to improve if they do something different
So how do we achieve to make a simple roblox game, like a simulator and a tycoon, have replayability in and on itself?. This will be long, so you’re advised.
**1. THE SITUATION ON ROBLOX**
One of the things devs do when it comes to simulators and tycoons is give their game a sense to replay it from the beginning, like prestiges and rebirths in simulators, and new game files in tycoons. But how do you manage to make that second playthrough not have the same rigid outcome from the first one?
Well, think about it this way: Replayability in games comes from the idea that the value of the second playthrough won’t be the same as the previous playthrough, it’s based on the concept that it doesn’t loop in the same, exact cycle it did before, but it loops in a similar cycle with different values.
One of the most common things people do is make the rebirth function, where they have to replay from the beginning to get better things, but you don’t want to make it exactly the same as the one before it.
Let me put it in an example. Let’s say you make a simulator where you have to jump a rope, it doesn’t have a solid foundation but this is what I came up with in a few seconds. To level up you need to click inside the game to move the rope forwards and jump on the perfect time to gain one point, you can add double rope-swing or jumping on a long rope with two people, but anyways. What you gain once you gained a lot of points is higher jumping abilities and more rope loops through your body, at some point the player jumps really high and makes 4M loops in the rope, then they reach the max level and they can be reborn to start over with. Some players will be reborn because they want to get the 1 point in prestige and that’s it, the player starts over and will have to jump once for 1 loop, back to the start. While this is how rebirth is meant to be, I feel like there’s no replayability on it. How can you add replayability to it? I’ll explain later on. Let me explain replayability (or, at least, how I see it)
2. CONCEPTS ON DESIGN
A game with huge replayability tends to have flexible outcomes inside the game, and those flexible outcomes are not similar to previous outcomes, they have to be in the range of the traditional , the known to the player, and the innovative , what changes in everything and what they will appreciate, the pixar formula, I’d say.
That formula, an ugly Venn diagram that I had to made with paint, where your project is right in the middle of the traditional and the innovative, is the pixar formula because a lot of pixar movies have the human aspect of it, what people know by heart, and the innovation of it, what people are interested to know. (toy story has andy as the relatable part of people’s childhood, and the innovation is the fact toys are alive. Monsters inc has people working as the traditional aspect, and the innovation is that the people that work are monsters. Try it, check pixar movies and see for yourself how they mix the innovation with the tradition).
Let me give you an example of a game with flexible outcomes: Team Fortress 2. If you’ve ever played that game you will notice that a lot of the players there have more than 400 hours in game, some even managed to make 10 thousand hours in game, it’s crazy, but how do they achieve this? The game has replayability, yes, but why?
Let me show you with a graph I had to pay to use.
**2.5**
Easy to learn, hard to master
That’s one. The tools of the classes can be seen once and you learn them to heart, but not only is it hard to master the skills needed to use each class effectively, every time you play the game you get a different outcome.
Scout has around 6 primary weapons for himself, 6 more for the secondary and around 12 for the melee. These weapons are NOT RESKINS THEY HAVE TO PAY WITH MONEY, but weapons with different attributes set to it, that don’t make one weapon more powerful than the other but that makes the combinations with each different. To learn one single weapon you need 200 hours total, you can somewhat translate those weapons skills to another weapon, which is a good thing, but to learn the new weapon, the innovation of what’s traditional to you, you need another 50 hours for it, there’s 9 primary weapons, there will be around 600 hours to master all of the weapons. Then there’s the secondaries, which have different attributes that make each better in some cases but worse in others, and you have to learn to use them for 200 hours, too, maybe more, maybe 1000 hours. And then there’s melees, which make for about 20 hours because they’re usually not used often in game (or 1000 hours if focused on melee only). Once you’ve learned to master that class you can use it all you want, you will still have fun because:
- You can change the weapons and have different outcomes, you can have 1200 different combinations of weapons, making things never be the same twice, which in turn makes replayabilty.
- You can play around weapons you feel strong because once you master them you will have to adapt to the enemies, who will also have different weapons every time. One day you meet a scout with a scattergun and you deal with it as you usually do, you meet someone with the Force-A-Nature? you now play differently in the game, you adapt, your outcome is different and you have replayability to a certain situation.2.1. And you can just flow with your skills and have fun with them.
All of this in just one class, one of the nine classes, each with different playstyles and sub-playstyles
Give people the tools to change their playstyle, not make straight upgrades. You don’t want to just make a weapon that gives 100 more health every time you level up, you want to make a weapon where you have to play the same class a different way, a different outcome. It takes creativity to know what the weapon will do.
In turn, when you play TF2 and you have managed to win on each one of the maps, which are about 70, when you replay them again one match can be like this.
And when you replay it it can be seen like this
Same class, a different outcome every time. This is a flexible outcome with a lot of replayability. Playing the game once should not be the same experience twice. Now, a picture like this one doesn’t say much, but consider that you won’t get the same match twice when you play that game. It also makes for a good info source to get to know on game design, if you manage to see how it’s made, just don’t get too hooked or you’ll be spending 4000 hours of your life on this, that plus the amount of gray hairs you’ll get if you don’t turn off your brain while playing.
**3. GAME PHILOSOPHY**
Lastly, the game has to be fun a huge amount of the time. You can’t make a game with no philosophy put into it and also try to motivate players to keep playing. I’m not saying life lessons pixar style, it’s more like a message of how to play the game. If I play it safely will I get rewarded? you can get two philosophies from this, maybe three or more: Yes, No and sometimes it’s best to risk than to play it safe.
Some tycoons have a philosophy in the logic of “the fun of this game comes from the idea that everybody wants to be rich”, this did work when tycoons were a relatively new thing, but now it’s everywhere, the same philosophy and, in turn, you have to share your playtime with others, it’s no longer about how much time they spend in YOUR game, it’s about how much time they spend in tycoons, that includes yours (YOU’RE GETTING IN A PYRAMID SCHEME, SORT OF), making, in turn, that your game has little to no playtime, even less there’s no replayability. But every once in a while comes a game like lumber tycoon 2 that basically blows up the way people can make tycoons, and this is one of those moments where you have to observe and learn to see why does it work, and most importantly, if you want to make your game as fun as this one. Lumber Tycoon 2 is big, it’s fun, engaging and replayable.
- It’s fun because there’s a sense of exploration around the map, and exploration is a primitive instinct, meaning whoever has it will have fun with it.
- Engaging because you are shown that there are mysteries around the island that you have to know, and that your house will not stay incomplete
- And Replayable because not every tree you chop will be the same, not every tool you have will be the same, and you are driven to upgrade your things, which will give you a lot of time. Thats a keyword.
Give the players a feeling to come back. Don’t make it daily rewards cheap, give them a mystery they want to solve, a mystery you yourself want to know. Make them have a long goal they feel they have to complete, and once they complete it they feel satisfied ,
but not before spending 300 hours on it, average I’d say, these are roblox games, they’re usually made to play sometime and then leave, not stay. You want them to have fun with your game, but it will also come at a cost of having the responsibility of making sure they don’t have a hard time playing. My little brother usually has a hard time playing roblox games because they focus a lot on competitiveness, getting killed by criminals as a cop who is getting gray hairs because of how hard it is to get the most skilled players. Getting mad at the game because they’re always crashing his car (to the devs of car crushers 2, please make sure they can’t crash your car from the server side or something, sometimes they crash my brother from the ghost of himself that is behind and he cries because it’s unfair to him). Crying because there’s a bug that is killing your experience with the game and, in turn, you can’t put the microwave on top of the table because that function wasn’t thought through.
In the end, roblox is a phenomenal place to make games with no huge budget, but a lot of the playerbase is children, and they don’t have the skills to be able to kill every player they meet, which is why a lot of them decide to end in tycoons and simulators: there’s no huge conflict they have to face against other players, they only face challenges they’re given by the system, and in the online aspect oftentimes it’s used to socialize, not fight against.
**4. Let me come with the example I gave before about tycoons and simulators.**
In the end, when you play the game to the end, when you manage to reach level 400 which is the max and you decide to be reborn, instead of giving everything as it was on the beginning, now they play at a bigger size, but not big as in just increasing the size of the player from 1 to 10, I’m saying that they grew up so much they’re now jumping across planets, in space, one platform is the earth (we can make it flat just for map design plus some unique concept that doesn’t have to be realistic), one is the moon, another is mars and so on. You prestiged, you jump once and you loop through the rope once like at the beginning, but now you’re in outer space. Even better, instead of starting out here
(which looks very fun by the way, you could make a game on this concept.)
you start out here.
the supposed quantum realm, and make your way through here to the size of the universe, increasing in size only with rebirths. This way there’s no repetitive playthrough, there’s differences between them. There can also be the fact that the rope can be used to hit other players so it doesn’t feel repetitive to just jump all the time. Also give the ability for players in a lower prestige to see the giant players who they can’t interact physically but with the chat box, after all we don’t want to make them feel alone when they become big.
You could also make some mechanisms that are around the map which activate new activities. Give the players an ability to explore the quantum realm or the playground, and find a gate to a cave, where there’s the ancient rope jumping giants who the mini jumpers admire, and then another path in the place that leads the players to a castle where there’s people jumping ropes all the time, and they teach players some things, like the ability to jump higher by pressing space at the right time. These are more of engaging tools but they also add something else to the game to not feel that there’s just clicking and jumping, there could be a story behind all of this that doesn’t impact gameplay but that it gives players a reason to go there while they jump with the rope in the meantime.
**CONCLUDING**
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To have replayability you want to make your game have flexible results, flexible outcomes. Playing once shouldn’t be the same as playing it the same way the next day, the differences should be noticeable between the first playthrough and the second one.
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To have replayability you also need to have a solid foundation on your game, find a philosophy of how players have fun and stick to it, and if that game philosophy is well planned, there won’t be much trouble
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You want them to be able to experiment, and when they experiment you want them to succeed in what they tried, they can fail, but it shouldn’t be top priority to force failure on new things. You want them to discover their own adventure while they play, and make it different each time
“There’s a cave right there, what happens if I burn this stick and use it as a torch, instead of having to buy a torch at the store like I did before. will it work?” -
You want them to have an easy time learning the game, but when it comes to mastering you make them spend a lot of time. It’s hard, but it’s rewarding for you if you achieve it. One example of this is speedrunning. If your game has speedrunning potential perhaps it will be a good thing.
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And you want them to be engaged with the game, show them something that will make them come back. You can make a daily reward or a daily discount, changing the shop every once in a while, but I want you to try to make something better, like showing them whats next to come, in the up update. I can’t see this text so it might be bad formulated, so I’m sorry for it, but I just can’t see it.