Here’s the feedback we keyed in on, based on what you wrote on our survey:

• The game is too punishing. It stinks to type in the correct answer milliseconds too slowly. (one player described this as suffering a “headshot” the moment he entered the game. Well-put!)
• Most 10-player games ended with 3 players on the scoreboard, and everyone else with zero points. That’s no fun!
• You should be able to accomplish something in the game even if you’re not the fastest typist.

Ch-ch-changes

So since this is a fun game and not grade eight gym class, we took your suggestions and made some changes. Here are the Rules of Play for the next iteration of Interrupting Cow Trivia:

How to Play

• You’ll see a hint and up to three clues fill the screen.
• After the clues are finished, the letters in the answer start to fill in.
• When you know the answer, type it into the blue box and press the ENTER key.

Answer Order

• Everyone has a chance to answer. As your opponents answer, green checkmarks appear beside their player names.
• When all players have answered, or the question times out, we’ll give the Streak to the player who answered first.
• All players earn points according to how quickly they answered.

Scoring

• All questions are worth 1000 points.
• The longer the question stays on the screen, the fewer points it’s worth.
• The first player to correctly answer a question gets the Streak – a multiplier that boosts a question’s point value.
• The Streaker’s multiplier increases with every question he answers first.
• Any player can break the Streak and become the Streaker by answering first.

BIG thanks to Squize at Gaming Your Way for specifically suggesting these changes, and to all our other testers who suggested similar tweaks. We’ll try these rules out in our next multiplayer test. If they’re great, we’ll keep ‘em! If they suck, we’ll chuck ‘em!

Everybody Wins!

Our next scheduled multiplayer beta test, “Everybody Wins!”, is on Thursday January 14 2010. We’ll do two tests:

• Everybody Wins! at 4:00 PM EST
• Everybody Wins! at 8:00 PM EST

If you’ve played the game before, we’d LOVE to hear what you think of the new rules. If you have a friend who’s never played, here’s a fact: WE ADORE VIRGINS. Invite that special someone along to play with you.

The doors open at 4PM and 8PM sharp at InterruptingCowTrivia.com. See you in the game!

Moo.

PROTIP (and something i didn’t realize until now): soliciting directed feedback from people gives you far, FAR more useful advice than asking for any old feedback.

BAD:

Q: What do you think of my dress?

A: You should be wearing a pantsuit.
A: It doesn’t make your ass look as fat as that other dress.
A: Let’s talk about your shoes instead. They’re terrible.
A: Get an entirely different dress. That shade of blue makes me think of the Korean War.

GOOD:

Q: How would you tailor this dress to make it fit my body better?

A: i’d take it in at the waist slightly.
A: Needs to be tighter at the waist – perhaps lower the neckline.
A: I think it fits pretty well.
A: A bit loose around the middle. Maybe shorten the sleeves.

Ah, this – THIS feedback is the stuff of my dreams. i’ve had a rough road this week with catastrophically bad news at the office, and a steaming pile of terrible feedback from certain game developers who should know better (but of course i’m not talking about you, dear reader). No one was having fun in the game alone, so we rounded everyone up and scheduled two play times for Interrupting Cow Trivia. Everyone popped in, the test ran for an hour, and we locked up the game again. Then we asked players to fill out a short survey. The difference in the quality of feedback was like night and day.

Or rather, it was like the difference between getting shot in the gonads with a crossbow at night, and day.

Lobbying for Change

One mystery that remains to be solved is the feedback we’ve received about the game’s lobby. We may not have asked enough directed questions about this, but general consensus is that the lobby UI stinks. Without more pointed constructive criticism, i don’t know how to address this.

So let’s tackle it together! Here’s a shot of the Lobby that players saw in our recent playtests:

Here’s a list of the things you can do here:

1. The “down” arrow next to “High Scores” expands that box. Player scores are listed there, along with your ranking (if you’re logged in).
2. The blue arrows scroll the High Scores list.
3. Filter the list by Friends, Foes, Members, Guests, etc. by using the drop-down.
4. Click on any player name to see the Profile Pop-up (as long as the player is a member)
5. Roll over the tables to see the table name and category.
6. Click the “PLAY” button beneath any table to join a game.
7. Click on a table to get the Table Details Pop-Up, which tells you who’s playing at the table and what the table settings are.
8. Click to see a list of who’s online.
9. Click to start your own table.
10. Click to refresh the table list.
11. The blue arrows scroll the table list.
12. Click to return to the Game Options screen.

It Was Fine Until People Had to Use It

Here’s a summary of feedback:

1. Many players suggested we build a High Scores feature. This, despite the “High Scores” label in a 22-point font at the top of the screen, with a sparkly pink udder crown next to it.
2. Some players sat at this screen and waited, expecting something to happen. They did not know that action was required on their part to join a game.
3. Some players did not recognize the large circles under the heading “Tables” as tables where games were taking place. The metaphor was, perhaps, unfamiliar.
4. The three icons went unnoticed.
5. A few players came to this screen in private beta when no one else was playing, and concluded that the game could not be played solo. They complained that they should be able to play by themselves. (i admit, this one mystified me … just join a table if you want to play. Doesn’t matter how many other players are online.)
6. Generally, enough players came to this screen and were confused as to what they were supposed to do.

During the private beta, we thought the problem was that the screen contained too much text, so we tightened it up in a number of places, and changed some textual buttons to icons with text pop-ups to remove visual clutter. Here’s a before and after comparison:

We’re Giving Her All She’s Got, Cap’n

Apparently, based on our more helpful feedback in the multiplayer tests, we haven’t done enough. Can you help us play detective and figure out why this Lobby screen causes people so much grief, and make specific suggestions to improve it?

One idea we have already is to actually add text – a call to action that tells the player something like “CHOOSE A TABLE AND CLICK ‘PLAY’”. Something like that.

Idea #2: kill the “tables waiting” text, because it’s not that useful.
Idea #3: redesign the arrow buttons
Idea #4: Put the category in the middle of the table, instead of the word “waiting”. Perhaps players wait at this screen because they see the word “waiting” everywhere?

Is there anything we’re missing?

You Should See the Other Guy

To digress, it amazes me that we’ve had so many complaints about the lobby. For your amusement, please take a quick look at the game selection screens for these competing trivia products:

And before you ask, no – i didn’t go scouring the Internatz for the worst interfaces i could find. These games enjoy the top slots on a Google search for “multiplayer trivia”.

… but not for long. ;)

Moo.

And since the game is a thousand per cent more fun with other players, we’re scheduling two MULTIPLAYER PLAYTEST-A-THONS:

• Thursday January 7th 4:00 PM EST
• Thursday January 7th 8:00 PM EST

That’s tomorrow!! Unless you’re reading this at some point in the future, in which case, YOU MISSED IT! What’s the future like, space man? Don’t you wish they’d invent a time machine so that you can go back and play in one of the MULTIPLAYER PLAYTEST-A-THONS?? … What’s that? They already have?? Wel, then! See you tomorrow!

What’s New?

If you’ve been following our Designer Diary for Interrupting Cow Trivia, you know that we’ve lined up some amazing background artwork for the game. Tomorrow, you’ll see the full monty. The game is fully skinned with a fabulous 50′s look. There’s new content, new features, and a new cow. Here’s a run-down of what you’ll see at 4PM or 8PM tomorrow:

New Cow!

As endearingly brain-damaged as our old cow was, we’ve put her out to pasture. Our new cow has been specially formulated to appeal to Japanese pre-teen girls and gay men over 40, which we count as a win/win. Plus, she wears ROLLERSKATES!

New Trivia!

A number of testers have complained that our current content is too difficult. To these whiny bitches, we humbly recommend nutting up. There’s plenty of pasture in Farmville to let your brain slowly go to mush. To the rest of you smart cookies who were BORN to school sucka MCs at trivia, we offer these awesome new question packs:

• Movies – Actors We give you the genre, year, and three actors. You tell us what movie they starred in.
• TV – Actors Same deal as Movies, but the screen is smaller and the actors make less money and usually die tragically.
• TV – Characters Given three character names, can you name the TV show they were in?
• Music – Lyrics We’ll give you a band name and the lyrics to a famous song. What’s the song called?
• Wordplay – Idioms This one sounds like it’s for nerds, but it’s fast and easy and super-fun. Finish the popular phrases:

  Too many cooks ***** *** *****.
  A stitch in time ***** ****.
  Crazy like * ***.
  Mad as * ******.
  Two heads *** ****** **** ***.

New Features!

Get a load of our lobby, where you can check out high scores and join games. You can create a custom table with the trivia YOU want to play. Your XP bar is now front and center, so you can keep a better eye on how you’re levelling. And, as before, you can click any player’s name to see his or her stats, and add that player to your Friends or Foes lists.

DID YOU TOTALLY KNOW? Your Friends and Foes lists persist across the Untold Entertainment message boards. HOTSAUCE!

Join the Herd. Follow the Cow.

We’ve created a special Twitter account for the game, and are working on some great Twitter features for you Twits to enjoy. Follow @ICTrivia for reminders about when the MULTIPLAYER TEST-A-THONS are starting, and the cow will keep you in the loop. and hook you up with the link.

See you all tomorrow at 4PM or 8PM EST!

Moo.

A Different Kind of “M” for Mature

Through early play-testing, i realized that young people don’t like trivia. Trivia’s no fun when you don’t know any of the answers. And the younger you are, the less likely you are to know stuff. Based more on a hunch than actual market research, we decided that our target audience was this guy:

Cliff Clavin is male, middle-aged, a baby boomer, and thinks he knows a lot of stuff about stuff. Cliff is our power-user – the guy who’s going to discover Interrupting Cow Trivia and burn through all of the content in a day.

Here’s another type of customer we suspect will be interested in the game:

These are college-aged smarty-pantses who play weekly trivia at the pub, but can’t always afford the six-dollar beers and the time away from the dorm.

Design by Hunch

Put that all together, and we came up with the idea to stage Interrupting Cow Trivia at a restaurant, to re-create that social pub feel. Specifically, it’s a 50′s-style diner, in a nod to the baby boomers. And not a grungy, dilapidated diner like something out of Fallout or Bioshock. It’s a shiny, sparkly 50′s diner in its heyday. We hope that the theme will make older players feel welcomed and comfortable, while younger players will dig it as a retro curiosity.

So a 50′s-style diner needs a 50′s-style User Interface (UI … or “MOO-I”, as it says in the title of this post, because we’re under contract to include at least one awful cow pun in every ICT Designer Diary entry). We carefully studied menu designs from retro 50′s diners, and put this together in our first attempt:

We actually started to build the game with this look – there are vestiges of it in the current alpha version. But after completing the painted backgrounds of the game’s diner, we realized that we needed to ratchet the visuals up a few notches. We took some cues from the A&W chain of retro burger joints, and various other sources. Here’s a taste of how it’s coming along:

This has the right amount of “pop”, both visually and stylistically. Expect the beta version of ICT to be packed with fun, bubbly 50′s UI that’ll make players want to stay in the game longer, and will encourage players to buy an ICT Diners Club Card for some groovy perks.

Moo.

This week, we’d like to show you another shot of the game. This is the background for the game selection screen, where you can choose to play a Multiplayer Game, Challenge a Friend, or tackle your awaiting Challenges. We pan down to this shot from the game’s logo, a big neon sign flickering against a starry backdrop.

The cool blue hue and lonely atmosphere of this shot deliberately juxtapose the warm, bright and busy interior of the diner. The party is clearly inside, after you click the “Multiplayer” button.

Next week, we’d like to show you the game’s 50′s-riffic user interface design, which you’ll definitely recognize if a) you’re over 60 yrs old or b) you’ve ever bought pants at Old Navy.

If you haven’t played Interrupting Cow Trivia lately – or ever! – be sure to give it a shot while we’re still in alpha. We’ll be rolling out advertising along with these newfangled graphics, so take a moment to enjoy the game for free without ads.

Moo.

For at least a decade, all my game development endeavors had one thing in common: none of them were ever finished.

With these words, indie game developer Jacob A. Stevens established himself as my soulmate, and endeared himself to my heart forever. From this point forward, i will be there to peer into his kitchen through the shrubbery outside his house, as if locked in a trance.

That is to say, i can’t recommend Jacob’s Gamedev.net article Practical Tips for Independent Game Development highly enough. Our experiences and opinions are so common, i have to wonder if he actually dug through my trash and assumed my identity to write the piece.

Hang on a tick …

Alright, i’ve just looked out my kitchen window and have discovered that Jacob is actually peering through my shrubbery at me. i’ve waved to indicate that he can come inside, but i think he just wants to watch. Oo-er, missus. Soul mates indeed.

Jacob drops so many truth bombs throughout the article that i believe he should be arrested and tried for truth crimes. Here are a few salient points that stood out while i read:

Build the Game, Not the Infrastructure

It’s easy to get distracted by tasks that don’t directly contribute to the final product, like building tools and editors. Hardcode the levels.

i’ve spoken to many a fledgling game developer who’s said “our engine is 75% complete!” Good for you. How’s your game doing? We technically-minded perfectionists (myself included) are often so caught up in making pretty, slick tools that by the time we burn out on a project, we haven’t actually produced something a person can play. It’s far better to have something tiny, playable and rough around the edges than a slick level editor that you abandoned at 75%.

Are You Sure You’re Cut Out For This?

Lots of people think they want to make games.

To quote Jack Black, “i’ve got sour news for you, Jack. It’s not that easy. Are you willing to make the commitment to rock-hard tasty abs WASHER-BOARD STYLE, glistening in the sun??” The classic fable of the little red hen comes to mind – everyone wants to play games, and everyone wants to have made games, but very few people are actually equipped to deal with the mental and physical anguish involved in making games. At the end of the day, most of us are ducks, cats and pigs, rather than little red hens.

“Who will help me code the user interface?”
“Not i,” said the practically everybody.

Just because you enjoy eating ice cream, doesn’t mean you’d enjoy working for minimum wage in an ice cream factory! Try on game development in small doses, and decide – really decide – whether you want to play games, or make them.

Self-Propulsion

In trying to find the right people to partner up with, even if those people have never made a game before, Jacob says:

The key is to look for demonstrated self-motivation.

We have a saying in our family: the drive is the talent. None of us are particularly good artists, musicians, programmers, businessmen, jugglers or bow-hunters, but we do possess a heaping helping of drive, or ambition. That drive is what possesses us to go ahead and learn bow-hunting when it’s called for. And though we may not emerge the world’s best bow-hunters on the other side, at the end of the day we got it done. We’re like those characters in Heroes who can absorb other superheroes’ abilities. Or we’re like the writers of Heroes who re-trained to become accountants just to escape their jobs on that show, because it friggin’ stinks.

When i got my first job in the games industry, i was hired for my drive. It certainly wasn’t for my artistic or programming talent – i had neither. And i had never made a game before in my life. But there’s a lot to be said for motivation. i don’t know if this is an ingrained quality in a person, or whether it can be practiced and improved upon. Either way, i’d be more likely to partner with, say, a decent and motivated artist than a fantastic artist who was somewhat of a slouch.

U Ay-yi-yi

A common misconception is that a great game starts with a great idea. StarCraft, Zelda, and Resident Evil are genius games because their creators painstakingly refined the details of the games until they were virtually flawless.

My opinion here may be due to the current struggles we’re facing with our games, but in my up-to-the-minute opinion, the very best strategy is this: start with a game concept so small, you figure there’s no possible way it could possibly stand on its own as a complete game. Then build it – that’s the easy part. Then go build the UI – the buttons, the title screen, the win and lose conditions, the log in, the sign-up, the high scores, the level selection screen, the error messages, the credits and the modal dialogues. If you fail anywhere, that’s where it’s gonna happen. You can always go back later and expand the game idea, but bear this in mind: 10% of the work is building the game, while 90% of the work is building everything surrounding the game.

i can tell whether i’m going to enjoy a free online game within the first three seconds. If care and attention have been paid to the intro logos, the title screen and the Play button, i know i’m in good hands. But if i see an unincluded font outline on that Play button, or an amateurish load bar, i don’t stick around long.

If you put together a complete game, with all the fixings that i mentioned above (registration and high scores are optional, of course), then you can go back and start building out your game’s features. In fact, if i were to teach game development to students, i’d be tempted to have them start with the front-of-house donut, and work in the actual gameplay once all that jazz was in place. Your appetite for feature creep will be a LOT lower once you consider all the UI you’ll need to support it.

Why Haven’t You Launched Any Games?

Case in point: both of our original games in our development queue, Kahoots™ and Interrupting Cow Trivia have been finished for months. We haven’t worked on the Kahoots™ gameplay since about February. This whole time, we’ve been programming the dozens of dialogue pop-ups and screens that facilitate the gameplay. And we just released a first look at ICT‘s graphics and theme yesterday – now we’re faced with the grim task of doodling up the scads of checkboxes, input fields, windows, prompts, scrollbars and messages that comprise the game’s visuals.

So you want to be a solo indie game dev? Start out by testing your passion for being an indie UI designer, and see where that takes you!

So we’ll space them out. This week, it’s the interior shot of the Interrupting Cow Trivia diner.

More to come next week, as we slowly transform our graphics-less game into a veritable visual wonderland!

If you haven’t played Interrupting Cow Trivia yet, or lately, be sure to jump in with a couple of friends and try out the new features while we’re still in alpha. We love to hear and implement your feedback!

Moo.

Well, oh ye of little faith – feast thine eyes on THIS!

We Need Your Help

Many months ago, we commissioned character artist Kelly Conley to draw a cow for our game. His only direction was to “draw a retarded cow”. After many revisions of cow facial expressions that ranged from inane to confused, and from bewildered to aloof, he finally nailed that elusive retarded cow look that everyone wants but no one can have.

We’ve been sitting on this cow design the whole time, wondering whether or not the world was ready for it – wondering whether society was willing to accept such a free-wheeling but intellectually-challenged bovine. So after much deliberation (and a desperate need for new content now that we’re writing daily posts), we decided to leave the deciding up to you.

If you feel passionately either way about this cow, please indicate on our poll whether you hold this cow character design to be totally Awesome, or udderly N’Awsome:

As with our previous poll about fake British town names for Kahoots™, your feedback could decide whether this cow becomes the unfortunate face of Interrupting Cow Trivia, or whether it’s back to the (literal) drawing board.

Not Your Father’s Cow?

And if you have played the game but don’t really like it, we don’t really care what you think! Go show the cow to someone who’s into trivia games … your dad, for instance. Yes – please show this cow to your 40+ year old father and ask him what he thinks, because we have a hunch he’s our target audience. You can go back to your tower-defending and zombie-shotgunning once you ask dear old dad to answer our cow poll.

(note: be sure you possess the strength to pry your laptop from your father’s white-knuckled death grip once he starts playing Interrupting Cow Trivia and gets hopelessly hooked, ’cause that’s gonna happen.)

Moo.

What’s MOO (<- did you see that? That was it.) In Interrupting Cow Trivia

Our unstoppable (except with bullets) game developer Jeff (ue_jeff) found a break in our current contract to add some HAWT new features to Interrupting Cow Trivia. If you haven’t played the game lately to check them out, check them out:

Join a multiplayer game and you’ll see a new in-game leaderboard ranking you against the other players. Each question you answer earns you experience points (XP). By some cruel fluke, i don’t rank very highly on this list. Stop laughing.

Click on your player name in Multiplayer Mode to see the Player Profile. You can see your current XP, and the number of points you need to level up to the next rank. We’re also tracking the number of Challenges you play, the type of trivia you like the most, and your questions seen/questions answered/accuracy stats. We’ve even installed a tiny camera in your shower so we can watch you clean that filthy, filthy body of yours. Oh yeah. That’s it. Clean that body.

Click on another player’s name to see a similar profile page. The difference here is that you can add other players to, or remove them from, your Friends and Foes lists. We’re piggybacking on the Friends and Foes list in our phpbb membership system, so the same lists you maintain on our Boards are the same lists you see in-game. And they’re the same lists you’ll see in future Untold Entertainment games, so this is a great time to start curating your list of fast friends and bitter rivals for the coming gameplay apocalypse.

But It Still Looks Like Ass

These scoring features were next in our feature queue for ICT. As designed, there are two more crucial (and much more involved) features to build before the game is ready to launch … and then we can follow our previously-posted launch plan (see Cash Cow Part 1 and Cash Cow Part 2).

But the other missing “feature” is, obviously, sound and music. i divided the game’s graphics into three different concerns:

1. Character design
2. Background art
3. User interface

i’m taking care of UI myself (unless you can recommend a good freelance UI artist in Ontario?) A few months ago, i commissioned an artist to design our cow mascot for the game, and i’m excited to show you that design NEXT WEEK OMG PANTS ON FIRE. And the week after THAT, i hope to show you the game’s background art, which is guaranteed to blow a hole in the back of your brain and land me in the slammer for long-distance Internatz MURDER. For realz. Prepare to have your brain exploded.

We’ve also been writing more trivia packs that you Movie and Music fans just HAVE to check out. Keep it glued to THIS BLOG RIGHT HERE to see ICT blossom into the best online multiplayer trivia game on this here planet Earth.

Moo.

But man cannot live by site traffic alone. With the advent of numerous microtransaction systems for Flash games, including MochiCoins, GamerSafe, HeyZap, and Nonoba, there now exists a simple framework that will allow us to take money from our players.

There are three levels of players in Interrupting Cow Trivia: Hobos, Members, and Owners. Let’s take a look at each in turn:

Hobos

These are the players who hop off the nearest freight train, bindle in tow, looking for a free entertainment hand-out. They’ve chalk-marked various areas of the Internatz where people are most likely to help them out with a hot entertainment meal and a warm barn to sleep in for an hour – namely free-to-play portals like Addicting Games, Newgrounds, and Kongregate. Hobos are not loyal to us. They’ll take their entertainment any way they can get it. Our primary concern is to convert these shiftless Hobos to productive Members of our game’s society.

There are two important points that i want to make here on the care and handling of Hobos. The first is that you should always relentlessly tease a Hobo. You should constantly remind a Hobo of all the fun he could be having if he became a Member. The benefits of Membership should be obvious, and compelling. The process of becoming a Member must be simple.

The second is that you should never make Members’ options invisible to Hobos. Members and Hobos should always see the same buttons, the same interface. If ever a Hobo clicks on a button to access a Members-only feature, that’s where you hit him with the “Sorry! This feature is for Members only!” This pop-up is a great opportunity to list a few other benefits of Membership, and to provide a fast link to the Membership sign-up page.

Hobos are our frontline – the bottom of the pyramid. There will always be far more Hobos hitting Interrupting Cow Trivia than Members. One big difference between a Hobo and a Member is usage: while Hobos represent a high number of unique visits, Members will account for a larger percentage of repeat visits. Members come back for seconds. Another difference is that Hobos are anonymous, but Members give us their email addresses. That crucial differences opens up a dialogue between us and our players – we can send newsletters and surveys, send special offers, and personally connect with our customers.

We mentioned in the last article how we turn a Hobo into a Member, but here’s a quick refresher.

Members

Both Hobos and Members can play the game for free, but only Members can:

1. Display their board avatar next to their names during the game
2. Be tracked on the leaderboards
3. Build a cumulative score across repeat visits
4. Quickly Challenge a Friend from their Friends/Foes list

There are two other features in the queue that leverage membership in a powerful way, but these are enough for now. Since Membership is free and compelling, it’s quite easy to convert a Hobo to a Member. But converting Members to Owners (paying players) is the real challenge.

Owners

Both Hobos and Members can play Interrupting Cow Trivia for free. When you click to join a multiplayer game, you’ll to see a 15-second ad served up by MochiMedia. Then you get to play through x questions. i haven’t decided on this number. There are ten questions in a round. If you have any ideas here, please let me know!

After they play those x questions, Hobo and Member alike are unceremoniously BOOTED from the game back out to the lobby. If x questions were enough to show Hobos and Members a good time, they will click to re-join a game, at which point we show them another 15-second ad. And so on.

So in-game advertising is the first revenue stream for Interrupting Cow Trivia and, based on our past experience, the weakest. We’re including it in the game to make money in a very indirect way.

Fact: ads are annoying. i don’t like watching them, and most likely neither do you. But ads pay the bills. What do you do if you want to consume media without watching ads? You either steal it, or you pay for it. With its multiplayer integration, Interrupting Cow Trivia will likely be a hard game to steal, so that leaves paying for it.

Charge Once or Charge Often?

So an Owner is a Member who pays for the game. There were a few different ways we could go on this. Do we charge a one-time fee, or do we charge a monthly subscription? Well, the idea of a one-time fee doesn’t excite me because i know i’ll have to keep writing trivia packs to keep the game fresh. i’ll be sinking hours and hours of work into the game past the point of conversion, yet i’ll only ever have the x dollars that Player A paid me. What if the game really takes off and it’s popular for ten years? i can’t constantly sink hours of development into a game that doesn’t constantly sink money back into my bank account to fund that development.

The other problem with a one-time fee is that i don’t think people will pay it. What if i charge $10 for Interrupting Cow Trivia? That’s a total rip-off, because it’s a Flash game. And we all know that Flash games are free. Plenty of other games to play that don’t gouge me for my hard-earned money. Screw you, Untold Entertainment. How DARE you?

But let’s look at a subscription model. Let’s say we low-ball it and charge people a buck a month to become owners. A buck a month – that’s RIDICULOUSLY inexpensive. And we can even give them a month for free if they opt for a year’s subscription. So a year’s worth of Ownership on Interrupting Cow Trivia runs them $11. And i think that since we changed the player’s perception, and have hit that magical 99 cent mark for game content (even though we’re charging it multiple times), we’ve gone from an unattractive flat fee of $10 to a dynamic, monthly fee of $1, which comes out to $11 with the free bonus month, which is one dollar more than the flat fee would have been.

And with the short attention span of gamers these days, i sincerely doubt that anyone is going to stick with the game for over a year. But for those few adoring players who do, we’ll see a fresh, crisp $11 bill in our account when the year is up.

Let me stop myself, because i really want to hear your opinions: good idea, or bad idea? Is $1 a month too low, or are we hitting the nail on the head here? If it were your game, what would you do?

MochiCoins Subscriptions?

So we’ve begged the question: how do you handle subscriptions with one-off currency systems like MochiCoins and GamerSafe? i’m going to come right out and admit here that from this point on, i’ll be borrowing a lot of strategy from OOO (Three Rings) and their ground-breaking game Puzzle Pirates.

Picture a game where the player can buy a sword. The sword is time limited – it degrades every time the player uses it, and eventually it breaks and becomes unusable. The player is effectively renting that item with real money. In Puzzle Pirates, you buy a gamer badge that allows you to play certain mini-games for a month. Once the month is done, you have to buy the badge again if you want to enjoy unfettered acess to those games again. It’s the same concept as the sword, so as long as you’re set up to offer rentable/degradable items, you’re set up to handle subscriptions.

In this way, we can sell an item (badge, hat, medal, crown – whatever) that makes the player an Owner for a certain period of time. Interrupting Cow Trivia will likely sell 1-month, 6-month and 1-year items (remember: one month free when you commit to a year).

But why stop there? Three Rings shares their financial info, and it’s no secret that Puzzle Pirates has pulled in a lot of well-deserved booty for the team. So let’s borrow one more idea from them: a content schedule.

Puzzle Pirates has a few mini-games that are available to Hobos right off the front page of the site – no need to download the game client. Inside the client, there are a number of mini-games that are available to (non-paying) Members on a rotating schedule. For example, the Drinking mini-game is playable on Tuesdays and Fridays. The Poker mini-game is playable on Mondays and Saturdays, and so on. What the Puzzle Pirates gamer badge actually does is it allows Members to play any mini-game on any day, breaking players free from the content schedule. Of course, there are leaderboard hooks and in-game money-earning incentives that make this an even more attractive item to buy.

We will build the same type of content schedule for Interrupting Cow Trivia by splitting the content packs across different days: Music Trivia will be playable on Tuesdays and Fridays, Movie Trivia will be playable on Mondays and Saturdays, and so on. The secret to keeping traffic up is to offer your most popular content on both your highest- and lowest-traffic days. If Movie Trivia is the most popular, we need it available on the site so that the biggest number of Hobos can enjoy it. We also want it on our lowest-traffic day, so that it will boost traffic on that day.

So now there are three compelling benefits to converting from Membership to Ownership:

1. No annoying ads
2. Play for as long as you like without being interrupted
3. Get access to all trivia packs on all days

And it’s a realtive cinch to add one more benefit: when we release a new trivia pack, Owners get to play it first for, let’s say, two weeks. (Maybe a month? i dunno. You tell me.)

So the benefits of converting from a Hobo to a Member are clear and compelling, and conversion is easy. The benefits or converting from a Member to an Owner are clear and compelling … but there’s obviously that enter-your-credit-card-and-part-with-your-hard-earned-monays barrier that we have to overcome. But all of us Flash devs eyeing microtransactions are facing that same problem.

Brother, Can You Spare a Die?

If you’ve had any experience with Hobos, you’ll know that most never pay. And especially in the free-to-play Flash free-for-all, i think there are many Hobos who have a tremendous fear of commitment. Can i really expect them to plunk down a whole shiny dollar for an entire month’s worth of play? Hobos are moths that will flit from shiny game to shiny game. If i really want to make a go of this thing, i need to come up with a way to take money from shiftless Hobos.

My limited research into micropayments has turned up evidence that offering multiple types of payments will net you more cash than one rigid payment system, like our subscription scheme. So alright – this is a little nuts, but try it on for size:

Hobos and Members click to join a multiplayer Interrupting Cow Trivia game. They’re served a 15-second ad. They get to play through x questions before they get booted back out to the lobby.

BUT … there is a die. The player rolls this die to earn bonus questions.

Let’s say that watching the 15-second ad buys you 15 questions. You play 15 questions, you get booted out to the lobby. But after the ad and before you jump into the game, you click to roll the bonus die. The number you roll adds to your question count. So if you roll a six, you get to answer 15 + 6 = 21 questions before getting booted out to the lobby.

Suddenly, Hobos feel that they’re getting away with something. If they roll a high number, they can buck the system. They’re really only allowed to answer 15 questions, but one sweet roll will keep them in the game longer than they’re supposed to be in there. This ability to stick it to the man will really resonate with Hobos.

So what are we going to sell to Hobos and Members? More dice.

Hobos and Members can, for a nominal fee, purchase another die. Suddenly, players have the potential to roll a 12 – max 6 pips on the standard die, and max 6 on the purchased die. 15 + 12 = 27 questions before getting the bum’s rush. A die will cost maybe fifty cents. That’s HALF the cost of the extortionist monthly subscription fee. Players can buy multiple dice – we may even sell three dice for a discount in a bundle – to stay in the same play session longer.

Dice, of course, are degradable.

I Second That Emotion

The folks who are really raking in the dough with micropayments are the ones who build up the player’s passion and sting him for cash at the most fervent, crucial moment: Alright, i’ve spent two hours playing this game. i have ZERO continues left, and i NEED to buy the Implausibly Large Gun for $1.50 to get to the next level where there’s a Save Point.

Emotional impact. Impulse buys.

One way we could do this with Interrupting Cow Trivia is to offer some kind of incentive – say, a Double Points day – on certain trivia packs. Answer questions from the Music Pack and earn double points. Of course, today is Friday, and the Music Pack is only available to Hobos and Members for free on Saturday. But man, i just GOTTA get in there to earn those double points to increase my player rank and overtake Member markergreen in the leaderboards.

i click the Music Pack, and the pop-up tells me that i can pay the subscription fee to access ALL trivia on ANY day of the week. But who am i – Ritchie Rich? i can’t afford a subscription.

But wait – there’s one more option available to me. Apparently, i can pay fifty cents – HALF the cost of a month’s subscription – for a Day Pass. That’ll get me into the Music Pack to earn my double points. Deal of the Century!

Of course, this might have the opposite effect on the discerning consumer. “i can pay fitty cents for a single day, or one dollar for an entire month? A month is, like, thirty-five days or something. That’s a way better deal. And who knows what other double points promotions they’ll have this month? i’m going to pay the buck.”

And then:

“Waaait a second … you mean i get one month free if i buy an annual pass? That’s, like, a 40% savings!”

And finally:

“HOLD ON! There’s a DONATE button?? So i can actually dump two months’ salary into this game to show my gratitude and appreciation to the amazingly talented developer? Well clearly, that’s the best deal of all!”

You should come live inside my brain. It’s a good time.

Armchair Presidents

i’ve lovingly detailed all this strategy to you because i’m lucky enough to have some of the smartest people in the industry visting this blog. i’d really like your feedback on whether this plan is solid, or whether you think we’ll crash and burn. i would, of course, be thrilled if you knew of any brilliant ways to monetize Interrupting Cow Trivia that i haven’t thought of.

And if this article has spurred any thoughts towards how you can monetize YOUR upcoming game, superb! Our game world may be filled with Hobos, but curiously, there’s an awful lot of money stuffed into those bindles.

Moo.