Franchises — "CityVille" has a unique feature that allows you to add permanent additions to your neighbors' cities by expanding your existing businesses. You can do this by first building the desired business in your city and then visiting a neighbor's city with an available empty lot.
You can expand any of your existing businesses, but you must reach certain levels in order to increase the maximum number of franchises you can own. One great part about franchises are the franchise Headquarters. Every time you expand your franchise your HQ will gain a floor until it reaches its maximum height.
Remember how we talked about payout bonuses? And 2 of them have not yet reached their maximum height. By carefully planning the placement of your HQs you can maximize the profit from all nearby businesses. Goods — Recall how we mentioned that the previously discussed sources of goods are the three main sources?
Well there are more. One of the best additional sources is your neighbors. Every time you harvest your neighbors' crops you gain 25 goods; in addition, you also gain reputation points and every time your reputation level increases you gain bonus goods appropriate for that level.
Neighbor visits bonuses — One other way visiting your neighbors helps you is that you gain a bonus once per day from each neighbor up to your reputation level another reason to raise that level ; the bonus consists of energy, xp, and coins. Franchises — Not only do you benefit by expanding your franchises to your neighbors' cities, but you also benefit from letting your neighbors expand their franchises to yours. By doing so you gain a free business, and a daily bonus of good, coins, and energy, as long as your neighbor supplies it daily.
Balance the main attributes and franchise! Take advantage of every feature and help your neighbors. Use these tips to build the city of your dreams! Start playing now on Facebook or CityVille's website. You can also find more help over at the official community forums. Understanding retention is essential to achieving sustainable growth and revenue in a social game like CityVille. In order to understand what's really going on with a game, you need to look at the daily active users DAU as well as the monthly active users MAU.
Tracking services like Appdata provide useful summaries of these statistics, as well as a calculation of one over the other. The percentage for CityVille started off extremely high. That's not unusual in the first week of a game's launch however, because everything is new, users are only discovering it for the first time, and the MAU figure has not had a full month to build up. A more stable example is FarmVille :. FarmVille has long been a standard-bearer for engagement on big games.
Quizzes: The reason why Crowdstar in particular has a low percentage is because one of their most popular apps is a quiz engine. This often gives a skewed impression of how important a company might actually be in the social game space. Visibility Strategy: This is a bit of a repeat from the first part of the article, but the prevalence of publishing options in particular creates more hooks for lapsed players to return to a game.
The Facebook economy works geometrically and exponentially, and that applies to retention as well as initial interest. Game Activity: How Zynga structures its games, particularly with respect to time- and click-based dynamics, encourages players to remember to come back and play some more. That's what I'm going to talk about mostly in this article. Late last year, Playfish released two games that they probably shouldn't have. One was Poker Rivals and the other was Gangster City.
Each was, in its own way, a better execution of the incumbents in their genre, Zynga's Texas Hold'Em and Mafia Wars , and yet each has proved to be a failure. The lesson is not that you can't fight Zynga.
Crowdstar faced off a challenge from Zynga trying to eat its Happy Aquarium market with FishVille , and while both are well past their heyday, FishVille proved to be the loser. A hidden, but determining, factor for retention is whether this is the first time that players have encountered that game type. It's therefore important to be the first one of that type that the average user sees. Interestingly, this may have significant consequences for CityVille. After all, social city-building games have now been around for a while, and although CityVille is doing some things differently, the game may end up falling into the same trap as FishVille or Gangster City.
It's far too early to tell. The core game dynamic of CityVille is click-to-do. Click to build, click to collect, click to plant, click to harvest, click to deliver supplies. So much clicking is oddly compelling. My current city in CityVille is only a couple of streets in size, but when I do expand it out significantly, I think I might find the extent of such manual maintenance becomes boring. Timers prevent endless clicking. As I described in the previous post , social games like CityVille employ two kinds of timer: Specific timers on buildings or crops, and general timers in the form of energy.
Timers are deliberately staggered. Planting strawberries takes 5 minutes for them to grow, a cottage generates coins once per hour, and corn takes 24 hours to grow. So you can see why these activities encourage repeated visits. With FarmVille which uses the same system there are many apocryphal stories of players getting up in the middle of the night to harvest their virtual beetroot.
In fact this sort of timed game dynamic goes at least as far back as the Excel-in-space game Planetarion. Energy works another way. It is a limit on the amount of click actions that you can take in a short space of time. Some clicks, but not all, dock the player a point of energy.
Constructing a building docks energy, but clearing dead crops is free. Energy is resupplied on its own timer at a rate of one point every five minutes, or replenished if the player attains a level. Timers used in this dual fashion are incredibly effective. What they do is to deliberately set up a conflict whereby players have to wait to do everything they want, but in the mean time can do some of the things that they want.
Rather than use one global timer, as Planetarion did, the use of multiple timers creates the sensation that there is always something to do while waiting.
The mix of the two is highly compelling. While players enjoy the click activity see above , timers essentially introduce delayed gratification, and then CityVille offers premium ways to circumvent some but not all of that delay. One of the foundations of monetisation in CityVille is buying more energy, for example.
This gets you more activity and more clicks. The sheer number of rewards in CityVille is intriguing. Pellets are basically any object that appears on the ground when you collect from a building or harvest from your crops. They include:. The trick with pellets seems to be that the fundamentals required for the game economy to function coins, experience and goods in CityVille need to be constantly available.
The game might occasionally reward an extra drop of one of these pellets as a part of a regular click action, but the player expects a baseline for their hard work. Otherwise the game feels unfair. The other kinds of pellet thus become delights. A delight is a reward of happy circumstance and the perception of luck. In a TED talk by Tom Chatfield , he describes seven ways that games reward the brain, and he talks about how the perception of randomness and actual randomness are two different things.
Often when players are close to completing a set, for example, they start to feel as though the game is denying them the last piece unfairly. So games perhaps CityVille is one of them increase the likelihood that the last couple of items in the set will drop.
Delightful pellets make a game like CityVille feel like more than just a box of functions. Have a cake! Delightful pellets make the game seem more charming, and they become compelling in their own right. Unlocks are a more long-term kind of reward. An unlock opens up new areas of the game permanently for the player, allowing them to do new things that they could never do before, and altering their game experience.
Unlocks extend the game dynamic, or in some cases add whole new dynamics, and extension is one the core ways to prevent games especially amusements from becoming boring. CityVille has, broadly speaking, three kinds of unlock: Levels , gates and task trees. Levels: Levels are a global monitor of how well the player is doing in the game.
As the player earns XP from his activities, this goes toward attaining his next level. When he attains his next level, the game replenishes his energy, increases his maximum energy, gives him 1 game cash the much harder-to-earn game currency , and unlocks new parts of the game. Unlocks might include new kinds of building, new crops or new whole areas that you can access such as shipping. Gates: Gates are specific parts of the game that will not permit you to progress unless you complete either a social action or you spend game cash.
In the example picture, I have maximised the available population in my town and am required to build some community buildings.
One of those community buildings is a police station, and to complete the building I must staff it. Staffing the building requires game cash which basically means I need to buy some with my credit card or inviting my friends to staff my station for me. Gating used to be a policy violation in Facebook games because the games used them as compulsory viral mechanisms, but these days games like CityVille use gating as an optional thing to do rather than basing the entire game around it.
Task Trees: Task trees give new goals to the player to complete, but space them out. As I described in the first part of the article, CityVille gives goals to the player in a steady fashion, monitoring a few at a time and requiring that they complete them before moving on to the next.
The use of task trees creates quests in the game, such as a quest to set up a bakery or collect 20 cakes, and they ensure a steady supply of medium term rewards. Task trees are a significant part of reinforcing to the player that there is always something to do, or some new delight around the corner. By carefully planning the placement of your HQs you can maximize the profit from all nearby businesses.
Goods — Recall how we mentioned that the previously discussed sources of goods are the 3 main sources? Well there are more. One of the best additional sources is your neighbors. Every time you harvest your neighbors' crops you gain 25 goods; in addition, you also gain reputation points and every time your reputation level increases you gain bonus goods appropriate for that level. Neighbor visits bonuses — One other way visiting your neighbors helps you is that you gain a bonus once per day from each neighbor up to your reputation level another reason to raise that level ; the bonus consists of energy, xp, and coins.
Franchises — Not only do you benefit by expanding your franchises to your neighbors' cities, but you also benefit from letting your neighbors expand their franchises to yours. By doing so you gain a free business, and a daily bonus of good, coins, and energy, as long as your neighbor supplies it daily. Balance the main attributes and franchise! Take advantage of every feature and help your neighbors.
Use these tips to build the city of your dreams! Start playing now on Facebook or CityVille's website. You can also find more help over at the official community forums.
I started playing Cityville as I was interested to see what Zynga's second gen of gaming was all about. First impressions were it was very nice art, very well done but very, very spammy. I'm at a stage now where I want to increase the population of my city. To do this I have either get my real friends to take tasks in the latest community building or use real money to pay for fake staff to take their place.
Without doing either of these my city just stays at a small level and my interest in the game withers. I have this strange concept with my Facebook account; my Friends List is full of, well, Friends. Not people I say hello to in the office; not people I used to go to high school with 20 years ago but people I like now and consider friends. Consequently I've only got 75 friends still feels too many and because they're my friends I don't want to send them all CV requests.
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