Or “A new season, a new mechanic for Jojo’s Fashion Show.”

Success is scary. When we finished making Jojo’s Fashion Show last November and prepared it for release on iWin.com and Gamelab.com I felt we had made a great casual game, one that we really loved playing. But I also knew we had a slightly unusual game. The game eschewed color and pattern matching in favor of a more obtuse system based on clothing attributes and keywords. The system allowed the player to be clever and creative in the clothing items they picked out. But it was also rather hazy. You could make some truly odd outfits and still score reams of points. I was worried players would be confused by the mildly objective nature of the judging.

Fortunately, my worries were for naught. Fans immediately took to the game, propelling it to the top of game portal best-seller lists. Fans felt Jojo’s delivered on the promise of a fashion game in a way that many of the other fashion-themed time management games did not. Our co-publisher, iWin immediately expressed interest in a sequel, which seemed like a really good idea to us too. We wanted to try and duplicate the success of the game before someone else did.

As we started specing the second game I was overcome with a whole new set of anxieties about building a franchise. Players liked the first game, despite its flaws. Do they simply want more of the same? Do fans simply want a new season’s worth of clothes? Or do they want radically new features?

Screenshot of Original Mode of Gameplay in Jojo’s

When you know people liked something you’ve created, it’s very hard to change it. Even moving characters around on the title screen seems dicey. I started combing through player reviews of the game, as well as articles on sites like Gamezebo and Jay Is Games for clues on what to change.

We’ve made a lot of games at Gamelab. And upon occasion we’ve made sequels to some of our webgames, like Junkbot and LEGO World Builder, but we had never done a big sequel to one of our downloadable titles. Diner Dash is of course now in it’s umpteenth iteration, but we only worked on the first one and provided some consulting on the following productions. We have generally focused on building new intellectual properties. So making a sequel was a new challenge for us—and probably one that we didn’t at first realize was such a challenge.

We immediately identified areas where both we and the fans felt the game could be improved. The levels needed more variance. The game lacked a second mode of play. But in general fans seemed to want more clothes, more styles—more of the same we thought. So we set as our main task expanding the world of Jojo’s Fashion Show by introducing new characters and new clothes. We really felt that expanding the world of fashion in the game would enrich the franchise. Our mantra was, “It’s about the clothes!” We also created several features like male models and challenges like Model Pairs and Style Sections to help vary the levels and smooth out the player experience.

Original Mock-up for Photo Shoots in Jojo’s 2 Design Document

Still we had the feeling we needed to do more. In looking at comments on other sequels we saw a common theme of “I like it, but not as much as the first.” As a developer this can be slightly confusing. You know you improved the game from the first iteration, so how can fans not like it at least as much? Making a second game and making it a little bit better does not equate to making something people will like better. It discounts the thrill of doing something for the first time. That is an extremely precious feeling. It delights people and engenders goodwill. The second time you give a player the same experience, though you may have improved it, you lose a bit of the goodwill.

Much of the thrill of the original Jojo’s came from its uniqueness. A number of other fashion-themed games launched around the same time, but they all used very familiar time-management mechanics, setting the play in a retail space and reducing the clothes to flat colors. Then Jojo’s Fashion Show came along and focused squarely on delivering beautiful clothes and creative outfit building and it excited people. Because the franchise was so different the first time around, did players expect that same delta in the sequel?

So how do you recapture the shock of the new? In thinking more about the challenge of sequels, I looked at sequels that feel fresh game after game and characters like Link or Mario that you eagerly join again and again. Nintendo is very good at keeping players on their toes, but their sequels are often more like different games using the same IP than gameplay sequels. This can be a smart strategy, but definitely presents a tall order. It also leaves real addicts of the first gameplay out in the cold. Technology upgrades also offer a great way to make a sequel feel new. They can allow for or even force new mechanics on a game.

However you can’t always create an entirely new game that just uses the same characters, especially if the game is slated for release six months after the first. In those cases I believe it is important to integrate at least one or two significantly new mechanics into the game. In the end it is the mechanics that make the game. The story, characters and the art polish the heart of the game, but we have to remember that we aren’t making movies, where the story lies at the heart of the experience. In a movie, a new story delivers the feeling of newness. But in a game, the mechanics deliver the thrill of newness. That thrill is essential. Once you feel you understand the game entirely, boredom can start to creep in. And you never want your players to be bored.

The trick is not just adding new mechanics for the sake of new play, but finding a mechanic which naturally expands on the original game. We didn’t want to tack on an in-game store or resource management to the game. We wanted something that grew naturally out of the original concept of the game. We considered a tool to let players design their own clothes. We thought this would be cool, but eventually backed away from it because it felt more like a sandbox and less like a game.

New mechanics also have the benefit of keeping the team motivated and challenged. It can be very hard to work on the same project for a long time or rollover very quickly into a sequel. You want to find ways to keep the project fresh and challenging for everyone involved. This keeps the team happier and more productive.

In the end we conceived a photo shoot mode in which players would play an action seek-and-find game. In this second mode players would find and photograph outfits that matched specific styles, essentially reversing the play in the main mode in which players created outfits out of individual pieces. The photo mode would be more puzzle-like and stand in contrast to the open paper-dolling of the original gameplay. Best of all it took advantage of the same clothing data structure as the original mode, making production easier. The management at iWin and Gamelab gave the team the greenlight to prototype the play and see if it would be a fun addition. Once we had a prototype working we all agreed that it would be great addition to the game.

Screenshot of Photo Shoot from Final Game

Including the photo shoots transformed what would have been a comfortable development schedule for the game into a very tight one. We now had to make changes to the original game, produce hundreds of items of clothing and create a whole new mode. But it was worth it and I believe it was vital to the continued success of the franchise. It is essential that players feel excited about the game and feel that thrill of new play. Though the game has just launched it seems players have taken to the photo shoots and that it will help keep the franchise feeling fresh for players.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.