Hell Mary's (2014-2015)
Hell Mary's is a card battling game based on DeNA's Hell Fire system. Players acquire, capture and evolve their decks. Using a simple flick mechanic, they can battle against waves of enemies in the hopes of capturing those cards. Combining like-cards evolves them, creating more rare and powerful cards.
​
My Role
System and art was already defined based on DeNA’s HellFire game.
I used tools to create additional weekly raids, stories and cards.
​
​
Lessons Learned
Playing to Understand the Game System
While unfamiliar with DeNA's card system games, playing extensively helped me understand what users look forward to when they come back every week for new raid cards. A lot of these patterns and drops needed to be designed around skinner-box-like payouts.
​
B.F. Skinner
Skinner was a famous psychologist who studied animal and human behavior in the 1930s. One of his famous discoveries was the Skinner Box. Pigeons were placed in a box and taught to press a button that would dispense food. The idea was that by rewarding behavior, you could change an animal's choice or reinforce a particular behavior. The pigeon was able to learn that pressing a button delivered food, and would continue to engage in that action.
There were three parts to his discovery:
-
Even though the studies were on animals, the same principles can be applied to humans.
-
If you give the food randomly or in set intervals, you have a much more powerful motivator for the action. Adding randomness instead of a one to one reaction between action and reward can create addictive properties.
-
There are 2 types of rewards. Biological rewards, like food and mating, after a certain point an organism will have no need to acquire more of the reward. (You can only eat so much.) Then, there are Abstract or Non-Biological rewards, like money or social status. For this, there is no biological moderation so the drive to acquire can be indefinite.
​
Lots of games use these types of random rewards to drive engagement. There is an element of fun and excitement when you are waiting for that one card to appear or that one event to happen so you can continue to capture special power ups. The base mechanic of the game is simple and not all that fun on its own, but mixed with an economy of various cards it becomes a fun experience of trying to maximize your chances of acquiring rare cards. However, because of this structure, games like these require ongoing content. Without this continual content drop, players' engagement quickly fades. Economies also need to be balanced: Without proper sinks, the ecosystem can quickly get out of hand causing rapid inflation or the need to introduce more powerful content eclipsing earlier game elements. One way Hell Mary's (as many other card battling systems) achieve this is by the need to combine lower power cards into more powerful ones, creating a need for these "feeder cards". However, there can still be the need to create ever more powerful card unlocks as the weeks go on, slowly causing some inflation creep.
​
While Skinner Box conditioning behaviors are found in various game genres, old and new, there is a danger using such techniques on educational or training games. Because of the nature of conditioning, you can undermine someone's natural drive to be curious or exploratory with the content you are trying to teach. I talk more about this in my UX thoughts.
​
Tools are your Friends
It was my first game using dynamic cloud-based tool systems for creating content and I learned a lot about the powerful effects of spreadsheets and automation servers.
These tools allowed my to easily edit, test and push new and existing content seamlessly.
​
​
​
​
