Steps might be include visit three friends, build a bakery, collect ten strawberries or that kind of thing. A task is usually quite simple, involving three or four steps. The game continues to guide you with tasks. You can also send them gifts which cost you nothing (such as free energy). You can apply to other players to let you set up franchises of your businesses in their cities. You can harvest other players' crops for them, which generates mutual awards, such as XP, reputation points and game cash. This has the effect of immediately giving you energy awards and boosts, as well as offering activities that you can do. You can also visit other player's cities. And for a bonus effect, your energy recharges every time that you gain a new level. Levels unlock more buildings and rewards, which in turn let you make more stuff, increasing your maximum energy. And, globally, the game monitors all your actions with an energy statistic that either regenerates over time, or you can buy more of with the game's cash.Īs you do these activities more and more, you earn experience points (or XP), which increase your level. You can only collect coins from a building every X minutes, for example, which encourages you to check into the game one or more times a day. This activity all proceeds a-pace until you run into timers. Instead you manually collect coins, deliver boxes, pick up prizes, click to plant crops, click to harvest crops, and other actions. As buildings generate revenue, need supplies, or crops are grown, the game does not automate those actions. Each click builds a phase of the building, and there may be three or four stages before a building is actually finished. It is click-heavy, meaning that to build a building you don't just place it and let it be built. Rather than throw all of this detail at you at once, the game intersperses it with challenges, things to pick up, collect, friends to visit and so on. Starting with a couple of streets and buildings, the game guides you through various tasks that you can perform (sowing crops, building bakeries, laying road, etc.) in bite-sized chunks. It has taken Zynga quite a while to get in on the city-building game theme, but they have taken the time to build out their own game with their own mechanics rather than the more direct copying that they and many developers practised in the very early days. It is the latest in Zynga's range of light sim-style games ( FrontierVille, Café World and of course FarmVille being the main examples), and very much in the same vein as other titles like Social City, Millionaire City, City of Wonder, or My Empire. What is CityVille?ĬityVille is the latest in a series of city-building games on Facebook, and was released about two weeks ago. Hopefully it will give you some idea not just of what social games are doing right, but also why players might play games of this type. This article, which will come in two parts, goes into the specific features and explains what they do, why they work, and what I think they could be doing better. I decided to write an article about how games like CityVille manage to be successful. Although clearly the most successful, the other top developers also manage to up-end the natural order of things as most media people understand it (which is to say, brands).Īt the same time that Ubisoft have managed to scrape together 1.2 million users for their CSI: Crime City title, another game more generically named Crime City (no relation) has acquired 6.4m users, with no brand at all. While TV companies in the UK have dipped their toes into social games, such as Corrie Nation, they have had pretty miserable success rates.Īnd yet here comes CityVille, another Zynga game that looks quite a lot like other developers' games, they waltz in, do their thing, and boom! 12 million users in a week, and multiples of that shortly afterwards. I know what many of you are thinking: How does Zynga keep doing this?Īt the Getting Social event at BAFTA (In London) a few days ago, this was the question that everyone was asking. Check out the latest Appdata graph for Zynga's Cityville - that's right, it now has nearly 70 million monthly active users, and the Facebook game only launched in early December.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |