兔来运转

OVERVIEW

"兔来运转" (Jump) is a game built by Sqkii for Shin Min Daily News, a Chinese newspaper company based in Singapore which is published by SPH Media. As its reader base tends towards older folks, they requested a game that would be challenging but easily playable for all ages well driving loyalty and engagement to encourage players to buy their physical newspaper copies.

MY ROLE

Deputy Game Designer

THE TEAM

Kehan Tan - Lead Game Designer
Leanne Tan - Game Designer

TIMELINE

July 2022 - Jan 2023

guest accounts created

20,304

newspapers purchased

6,068

gameplays driven

438,117

unique players redeemed prizes

4,946

SUMMARY OF CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Served as the Deputy Game Designer for this project and worked with other Game Designers and the Lead Game Designer to oversee the overall production of the game

  • Brainstormed and prototyped over 15 different games with the game design team

  • Illustrated lo-fi mockups of game screens for client and internal purposes

  • Balanced Energy amounts proportional to newspaper purchases and refreshes

  • Assisted in balancing the difficulty progression of levels 1 through 100, through vicarious playtesting, creating formulas and using developers’ tools to adjust the distance between platforms and the variance between those platforms

  • Wrote game design documents consisting of details about platform numbers, and energy requirements per level and broke down UI/UX screens into functions and features for all members of the team to easily read and understand,

Game Design

Our objectives for creating this game were to:

  1. Encourage players to purchase a physical copy of the Shin Min Daily Newspaper.

  2. Drive Loyalty for repeated engagement.

  3. Perform other brand actions from other sponsors.

  4. A game for all ages, yet challenging but simple so that even their elder reader base could enjoy and play.

After research, we decided to adopt a similar gameplay to WeChat’s 跳一跳 (Jump) which went massively viral in 2018 and was played by over 400 million users. in the first. 3 days of its release. We wanted to replicate its simple yet addictive “tap and hold” mechanics while adapting it to the Chinese New Year theme. Players play as a Rabbit that needs to travel across the great river by jumping from one floating platform to another. I worked with the Game Design Lead to consolidate and design most of the game mechanics:

  • Mini-Game ー Players simply have to tap, hold and release touch to move their rabbit from one platform to the other. The longer the players hold, the further the rabbit will jump.

  • Platforms ー The distance between each platform varies between levels to encourage repeated gameplay as players learn to master the game

  • Energy ー To attempt each level, players will exhaust energy that can be regenerated over time. Players can regenerate their energy by (1) buying a physical newspaper (2) reading a newspaper article online (3) following social media channels (4) visiting Chinatown

  • Levels ー The higher the level, the more energy is exhausted. Across all the levels, some offer limited rewards to the first few players who complete them. 　

  • Theme ー As a team, we brainstormed various Chinese New Year-themed games and concepts. As 2023 was the year of the Rabbit, we thought it would be cute and fitting to help a rabbit cross a river.

  • Prizes ー Players who advance to higher levels first can claim more attractive prizes and creates urgency for players to quickly complete all levels

Results

Overall, the game demonstrated its effectiveness in driving player engagement and newspaper purchases across the various demographics during the campaign period from January 12, 2023, to February 13, 2023, while also being visually appealing and engaging. Over 61% of survey respondents said they became more interested in purchasing Shin Min Daily News after the campaign. While older readers comprise the majority of the paper’s readers, over 80% of respondents from the second youngest age group (26 to 30 years old) also expressed increased interest in the game. This demonstrates the game's potential and effectiveness in driving reader acquisition, even among younger participants.

players with 50+ plays

1,837

players purchased 1+ newspaper

1,974

overall player retention

10.77%

players completed brand actions

3.259

Game Design Learnings & Reflections

  • We had expected the game to go viral with a K-score factor of at least 1. Although we had reached 6,065 onboarded players only 450 players were referred. We assumed this because of several reasons:

    • Language Barrier ー We believe that because the game was fully in Chinese, people found it more difficult to refer friends or people

    • Level of Difficulty ー We were unable to reduce the level of difficulty due to the client’s request/ prize limitation. For future iterations, we can introduce a retry power-up to help players revive on the spot and continue the level.

    • Level of Difficulty (2) ー Level Designing and balancing required more months of data to balance each level. These 31 days of data from the campaign will help to further improve the balancing in the future.

    • Acquisition vs Loyalty ー Due to the prizes and brand actions, the game felt more like a loyalty piece than for acquisition.

    • Lack of Prizes ー　The prizes ran out too quickly. This resulted in Players lacking the motivation to continue playing, and ultimately deciding not to refer their friends.

  • The game had a conversion rate of 15,47% which was lower than the predicted 25%. Of the 6056 onboarded players, 20% followed Shin Min’s social media platforms. The game also saw 31.47% of players buy a physical newspaper

    • Lack of Prizes ー Better control over the amount of prizes released and consider a staggered release in the future

    • Purchasing Newspapers ー Buying physical copies and digital copies of the newspaper can prove to be a hassle. To claim energy, players must receive a unique QR code from newspaper merchants if purchasing in person, adding another layer of difficulty to the process. However, due to client restraints, only a few select merchants were allowed to distribute QR codes.

    • Brand Actions ー The brand actions may have been too niche for a casual audience.

  • We also faced several challenges with cheating and using auto clickers. This caused several issues for our team, as the Game Design team worked with Ops and QA teams to ban players and redistribute prizes.

    • First Come First Serve ー The game may have been too skewed towards highly skilled players, encouraging players to cheat. In future iterations, we will consider adding a leaderboard so that prize crediting is done towards the end of the campaign since prize fulfilment was done at the end of the campaign anyway.

    • Autoclickers ー Although we had foreseen this mid-campaign, we did not believe it would be as big of an issue as it turned out to be. This could have been because of the lack of OTP where banned players can simply use a random number to remake a new account.