游戏邦注：本文作者为PlayFirst工作室游戏设计经理Patrick Baggatta，他在文中详细总结了《Diner Dash》系列游戏开发过程中的经验和教训。

关于《Diner Dash》系列游戏

《Diner Dash》的原始版本发布于2004年，它的出世为休闲游戏带来了新鲜空气。玩家在游戏中的任务就是扮演神采奕奕的女服务生Flo，伺候客人用餐，在忙碌之余腾出手来为同事解围。从那时候起，Flo就成了休闲游戏的经典角色，其地位堪比掌机游戏中的马里奥（Mario）。

作为最具影响力的游戏之一，《Diner Dash》也难逃被克隆、效仿的命运。在这款游戏发布六年之后，这种时间管理类游戏已经是遍地开花，其中的热门游戏也不乏其数，而且都掌握了一定规模的用户群体。这种类型的游戏今后还会大量涌现，只是时间早晚、发布渠道有所不同而已。

继集版本同样需要新智慧

当时我已经在PlayFirst呆了一年左右，从事的是游戏设计工作，在负责《Dream Chronicles 3》和《DinerTown Tycoon》这两个项目的时候，我才第一次听到《Diner Dash 5》项目组的怨声载道。当时他们的开发工作已经持续了好几个月，但项目进展并不顺利。

开发人员还没想出《Diner Dash 5》这个继集版本的新功能时，公司就已经对它寄以厚望，希望它再次重磅出击市场。作为旁观者，当时我就很困惑，开发这个版本能有多难呢？我们不也已经推出了前面四个版本了吗？

任何想当然都是游戏开发过程中的大忌，但当我们接二连三地推出游戏继集版本时，我们还是会不知不觉地想当然，认为自己开发了这么多年的游戏，早已经是心中有数，所以很容易在还没弄清这款游戏的状况时，就急于动手做事情。

与原始版的游戏不同，继集游戏一开始就背负着一堆硬指标。首先，设计者必须开发第5个版本的《Diner Dash》；其次，它还要考虑游戏销量、开发成本等问题，与之前的继集版本相比，它的投入产出比是多大，原创团队需要多少人手才能找到新灵感，开发周期是多长，需要增加多少新功能等等；总之，这个过程中可以让游戏设计者彻底崩溃的理由有无数多种。

教训1：把那些硬指标全部抛到一边，把它当成新游戏来看待。即使这已经是第5个版本的游戏，那也得让它亮出自己的个性。

通常情况下，大家都会把继集版的设计看成常规的游戏内容更新，也就是说在《Diner Dash》中添加新的餐厅、关卡、顾客类型、升级功能和故事背景等。

但这种观念也很不可取，你总不能把所有游戏内容塞到时间有限的关卡中，也不能只是片面加快游戏虚拟形象的行动。更重要的是，这些都是众所周知的游戏元素，没必要在第5个版本中重炒冷饭。用户需要的是一些明显的、全新的、更令人兴奋的改变。

其次，“年度最佳时间管理类游戏”的评选也让设计者承受了更大压力，对他们来讲，如果没进入“最有影响力、最出色的游戏”的行列，无异于游戏作品的失败。

这些压力总会让开发团队接连几个月坐立不安，这其实是一种自上而下的心理恐慌。公司高管不会告诉开发团队该怎么操作（游戏邦注：PlayFirst也并不采用这种管理方式），而是让大家卷入了一个急于求成的漩涡。

教训2：一个长期享有盛名的游戏系列，开发继集版本时总得有所创新，否则就是自甘堕落，自取灭亡。有这种想法很正常，这种情况有点像一个职业喜剧演员去参加一个聚会，人人都用充满期待的眼神看着他，要求他“来一段搞笑的！”游戏继集版本要推陈出新，可以像其他游戏一样，再挖掘一些灵感，让继集的表现同样出彩。

可想而知，如果我们的游戏还是经过了前期制作，在原来的基础上添加了新功能，虽然它的内容是更丰富了，但却找不到准确的定位了。

教训3：甩开思想包袱，该怎么做就怎么做。对继集版本的开发来说，删繁就简与锦上添花的作用同样不容忽视。

注入新鲜元素

在首批目标用户的游戏测试结果出来后，公司才意识到游戏开发出现了问题，决定扩大团队规模，增加设计、工程和产品管理人员，让游戏产品看起来更加体面。但公司仍对这款游戏抱有很大的希望，开发团队不得不在重重挑战中缓慢前进。回顾当时的情形就会发现，我们没有及时刹车，先摸清游戏的发展方向后再作打算，这一点实在是很失策。

我不止一次两次地向别人提到，我之前从未带领过时间管理类游戏的设计，也几乎没玩过《Diner Dash》。因为我对《Diner Dash》知之甚少，之前并没有参与它的开发工作，我对它也没啥情感牵绊，我只知道必须尽快找到游戏的症结所在，所以在该项目组的头几天中，我毫不讳言地提出了许多细节问题。事实证明，这些意见具有很高的参考价值，远比陪伴《Diner Dash》多年的开发人员所提的想法更切中要害。

那些日子中令我印象最深刻的一件事是，大家提出了许多很棒很有创意的想法，但走的都是不同的路线。时间越来越紧迫，大家不得不将“年度最佳时间管理类游戏”的评选搁置一旁，先完成《Diner Dash 5》的开发工作再说。在这个时期，大家就用户期待、产品定位等问题进行了广泛讨论。这个过程并不轻松，但最后总算敲定了符合大家一致意见的游戏简介动画原稿。

在前期制作过程中，得到大家普遍支持的是游戏的故事简介。Flo’s Diner这家DinerTown中的标志性建筑爆炸了，Flo的余生就只好在大街上不停地忙碌了。

游戏简介的结尾是，Flo站在自家小店的废墟中宣布，“如果大家不能来用餐了，我们就送货上门。”我们对这个故事背景很满意，所以最终拍板决定保留这个简介的动画效果。

从那时候起，我们开始从创意角度筛选游戏元素，不适合的东西坚决摒弃，哪怕我们再喜欢也不能勉强保留。这个继集版本终于首次突破了在原版基础上叠加新功能的效果，它已经成了一款全新的游戏，拥有自成特色的游戏任务。

不可强加新功能

我们早些时候的另一个想当然是，玩家希望获得全新、富有刺激性的新功能。我们想了很多新功能，却没有深入考虑这种操作是否欠妥。早期的用户测试效果很不理想，最好的情况是，他们被新功能弄得不知所措；最糟的反应是，他们出离愤怒了。

在前期制作过程中，探索大量的新功能的确是很有益、可激发灵感的做法，可以为玩家带来有趣的游戏体验，但我们显然超过了这个度，甚至还认为我们必须采用新元素来迎合玩家的需求。

教训4：要尊重游戏原来的创意。如果是在前期制作过程，就承认并接受游戏的创意；如果是在开发阶段，就尽量让游戏富有创意。

经过磕磕碰碰的开发过程，我们终于为游戏添加了一些比较自然的新功能，将新功能数量压缩为三个，使整个产品看起来更上台面，更容易取悦用户。

慎变核心机制

在游戏开发进行到这个阶段，我们又发现即使填充了那么多新内容，游戏的核心机制也还是不够深入人心。难道我们可以只管为用户提供新鲜的刺激元素，不理会用户是否重复挖掘游戏的核心机制吗？得承认，只要一想到这个问题我就抓狂。开发出色的时间管理类游戏并非易事，许多游戏开发者都不得要领，但我们却做到了，我当然不希望《Diner Dash》毁在我手中。

在提出关于游戏核心机制的设置建议时，我至少自问了150遍“《Diner Dash》该怎么做”，虽然我的局外人看法对游戏开发带来了不少帮助，但因为与开发团队共事的时间越来越长，我的思维也渐渐向他们靠拢。我并非首个尝试这款游戏的设计者，我之前提的150个观点很可能早就以其他形式体现出来了。

《Diner Dash》的核心机制是，顾客进入餐厅排队等候服务。玩家得替顾客安排好座位，伺候他们点餐，清理桌子。如果招待得很周到，顾客离开时就会留下一笔很可观的小费。在任何一个版本的《Diner Dash》中，玩家都要体验这个游戏过程。

其实没有必要为了增加而增加新步骤，替换或者删除这个核心机制中的任何一个环节。当时我开始意识到了继集版本设计的另一种窘境，为改变而改变，改变游戏核心机制成了一种不得不执行的任务。我发现自己经常在想“这里还有什么地方需要调整？”，但事实证明这真是一种过犹不及的想法。

教训5：只为了让游戏看起来有所不同，反而把原来的机制改得更糟糕，这种做法实在是不敢恭维。如果游戏本身有漏洞，那就要及时修复；如果它还有改进的空间，那就优化它。对用户来讲，一项设计慎密而熟悉的功能远比“它是新功能”这种浮云来得更可靠。

我们知道这款游戏的核心机制（游戏邦注：包括座位、服务、收费、抹桌子等）的设置很严密，但仍然从中找到了可以创新的突破口，增加了一项名为Townies的新功能。这样玩家就能在四周拉客，让顾客到自家店中排队用餐。这种简单的新功能又开创了一种新玩法，为原来大家熟悉的游戏策略平添了一些亮点。这种操作并非为改变而改变，而是一种积极有益的优化。

Zoom功能碰钉子

还有一项走上岔道的新功能是Zoom，它是前期制作过程中关于游戏设置的一个新创意，因为它的作用实在太过于显眼，以至这个继集版本在出炉后的头几个月一直被称为《Diner Dash Zoom》。

它的创意来源是：因为游戏内容比原先更丰富了，摄像头所捕捉的场景也应该适当放大，这样用户才能看到更多桌椅、客人等东西。

骨灰级时间管理类游戏玩家习惯在顾客还没点餐之前，就频频点击鼠标，等待执行操作。但增加了Zoom功能之后，我们发现镜头缩小了，这就降低了用户点击的准确率。休闲游戏玩家可不像玩《Halo》这类硬核游戏的13岁青少年一样身手敏捷，Zoom的功能设置让他们的错误点击率大量上升，导致不少玩家极度抓狂，甚至认为自己的水平下降，难以招架这么多新顾客的服务需求。

不幸的是，我们在头几个月并没有砍掉这项新功能，因为我们认定Zoom是一个很好的新点子，它正是符合用户需求的功能，大家舍不得让它还没见光就夭折在摇篮里。

讽刺的是，Zoom的登台只引来了嘘声一片，从测试版的用户反馈来看，它真的是一个败笔。令人惊讶的是，把它砍掉以后，我们发现它原来的作用确实是微乎其微，没有了Zoom，《Diner Dash》的用户反馈反而更好了。

设计新关卡

在这个过程中，我们光顾着添加新功能，却把关卡设计的优化给抛到脑后了。关卡设计是游戏开发必不可少的一环，我们一直都很清楚这一点，但却没有看出它在继集版本中的可提升空间，没有意识到我们费尽心力增加这么多新功能，其实完全可以结合着关卡设计一起完成。

所幸我们找到了一个新的关卡设计师，他之前与《Diner Dash》毫无瓜葛，在该游戏的原设计师Nick Fortugno的指导下，重新设计了《Diner Dash 5》的关卡。通过新老成员的联手，再加上对游戏新功能的润色处理，我们终于为这个游戏系列创建了这几年来最新鲜有趣的关卡。

教训6：千万别因设置新功能而忙得团团转，疏乎了游戏关卡的创新，得适时撤下已经落伍的关卡。我们最初认为，新关卡并不足以体现我们所需的兴奋点，但整个游戏成型之后，我们才发现新关卡与新功能之间是相辅相承的关系，二者都不可偏废。

与时俱进

对一款有些年头的系列游戏来说，市场机遇和发展前景总是在不断发生变化，更何况这款游戏已经开发到了第5个继集。在这个过程中，我们又发现了一些之前从未遇到的机遇，那就是社交游戏的兴起，这就意味着人们将以全新的视角来看待这款传统的下载游戏。

于是我们决定在游戏中植入Facebook Connect功能，并将其命名为Flo’s Super Sneakers，通过Facebook的礼物赠送系统，强化用户的游戏体验。

添加任何新功能，比如这种Facebook元素，就需要开发团队在充分保留游戏原来特色的前提下，对游戏功能重作调整。这样一来，我们的游戏就有可能充分发挥自身优势，创造全新的社交游戏体验。

教训7：这一点是老生常谈——开发任何一款游戏（无论它是继集还是原创版本）都需要摆脱惯性思维。

用户测试反馈

虽然我们的开发团队已经认定这款游戏“大功告成”，但最终效果如何，还是真正的无名英雄——游戏玩家说了算，他们可能才是最了解《Diner Dash》的专家。

最初进行用户测试的时候，我估计这用户反应与其他游戏的测试结果差不多，但很快发现这种想法大错特错，继集版本与原始版本的测试根本就是两回事。我从来没遇到如此主观、偏激的用户反应，“嘿，怎么把我最喜欢的环节删了？”或者“这个环节的感觉跟以前不一样了，我不喜欢，把它换回来！”

这种极端情绪化的反应倒真是让我措手不及，玩家已经对这个系列的游戏产生了心理情结，我们本想为他们创造更丰富的游戏体验，结果却成了画蛇添足。这个测试结果犹如醍醐灌顶，所以我们就不敢再掉以轻心，这种用户测试也就一直贯穿游戏开发的始终。

最后推出大规模的公开测试时，一切进展都很顺利，大家总算是松了一口气。虽然我们付出了这么多，可结果还是略低于我们的预期。我们原本认为还有足够的时间可以进行优化和润色，但砍掉游戏最大的功能之一后，为了不延误发布时间，大家不得不仓促地把游戏重新拼凑起来。尽管这个修改决定非常正确，但没有经过用户测试，我们心里其实还是没有底气，不敢把这种临时抱佛脚的东西拿出来见人。

教训8：继集版游戏要进行翻倍的用户测试，要提前并时常测试效果。要选择新手、游戏迷、骨灰级玩家等多种类型的用户共同测试，这样才能更准确反映游戏的总体情况。

我们早先提了大量新点子，想把它打造成无所不包、无所不容的大作，但游戏真正出炉时我们已经变得更务实了，我们所创造的是一款逻辑严密、含有创新功能、精良而独具特色的新游戏，这种感觉太棒了。

总结

《Diner Dash》数周后出击市场时马上受到了欢迎，销量和用户评论都非常理想，更重要的是，它真正满足了玩家的需求，通过推陈出新巩固了游戏品牌在玩家心中的地位。

值得反省的是，我们为争取“年度最佳时间管理类游戏”大奖而耽误了太多功夫。不管怎么说，这个过程也许本来就是天意，我们别无选择，只能沿着开发继集版的漫漫征途一直走下去。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Finding The Game In A Sequel To A Sequel To A Sequel

[PlayFirst game design manager Patrick Baggatta tackles the difficulties in process that arise when developers struggle to make meaningful change to a sequel in a popular franchise -- in this case casual game 'time management' champ Diner Dash.]
Diner Dash 1, 2, 3, 4, and…

The original Diner Dash launched in 2004 and changed the face of casual gaming. For those who haven’t tried it (or won’t admit it), you play as Flo, a spunky waitress with can-do spirit to spare, waiting tables and nobly rescuing her friends between shifts. Think of Flo as the Mario of casual gaming — an unassuming hero type with a dependably great game series to back her up.

Automate Game Builds with FinalBuilder

As with most breakthrough games, it wasn’t long before others were out to emulate the success of Diner Dash. Six short years later, the time management (TM) genre boasts several hit series, each with its own style, plucky hero, and loyal fan base. The question is no longer if Flo (and her fellow TM heroes) will be back in another installment, but when and how.

Combine fan expectations with casual gaming’s breakneck development cycles of nine to 12 months, and you quickly find yourself working in Stallone-esque sequel numbers.

Even Sequels Need a Vision

I’d been designing games at PlayFirst for about a year; head down on my projects, Dream Chronicles 3 and DinerTown Tycoon, when I first heard grumbling from the Diner Dash 5 team. They’d been at it for a few months and things weren’t going well.

The bold new ideas dreamed-up during a “new features” offsite weren’t coming together, but the company was already counting on its next big hit. From the outside looking in, I had to wonder, how hard could this be? Hadn’t we already made four hit Diner Dash titles?

Assumptions of any size are a potentially fatal temptation in game development, but by the time we embarked on our sequel to a sequel to a sequel, it turned out we’d already made the biggest assumption of all. Because we’d made so many of these games over the years, we assumed we “had a game” by default and started moving forward before anyone was able to specifically say what it was supposed to be.

Unlike an original IP game, a sequel is born as a set of numbers. There’s the sequel number itself — five, in our case.

Then, there are the “bankable” sales numbers, predictable development dollars, the percentage of assets to be leveraged from previous games in the series, the number of original team members required to “recapture the magic,” the number of months since the last one was released, the number of new features required to make it fresh, and, of course, the sequel number that will ultimately break the camel’s back. The ways in which these numbers can paralyze a game designer are, ironically, innumerable.

Lesson Learned: Set the numbers aside as quickly as possible. Begin by giving your game its own name — even if it only represents the feeling you ultimately hope to capture in it. Every game, even the fifth in a series, needs its own identity to go the distance. Uncovering its unique identity is the biggest favor you can do for your game (and sanity).

And so it was that we set out to give our set of numbers some form. Sequel designs start with a list of common sense updates. For Diner Dash this means new restaurants, levels, customer types, upgrades, and story.

But these predictable updates only get you so far. You can’t wrap an entire game around the snappy timing of level 2.6 or the marginally faster avatar you purchase in the third venue. Besides, all these elements had been thoroughly “explored” by the time we arrived at the fifth in the series. Our customers were telling us they wanted something big. Something new and exciting.

And so, the rally call of “Time Management Game of the Year” was born. It spoke to overall expectations, but lacked substance, except, of course, the paralyzing subtext that anything short of the “biggest and best” equaled failure.

This well-meaning mantra quickly took on a sinister tone that would haunt the team for months. It was top-down direction in a really dangerous form. Not top-down in the sense of execs telling the dev team what to do (thankfully, that’s not PlayFirst at all), but rather an end run to the victory circle that inspires overreaching and running before walking.

In the meantime, with little else to go on, it would stand-in for the game’s guiding vision.

Lesson Learned: Inevitably, a long-running series hits a point where it must reach new heights or wither and die. This can make the creative team feel a bit like a professional comedian at a party who meets a well-meaning stranger, staring them in the eye with an expectant expression and demanding, “Say something funny!” Dramatic new heights for a sequel grow from the bottom up, like any other game. Go back to your “inspiration place,” wherever that may be, and give your sequel its proper due.

Predictably, our game floated through pre-production, pursuing tangents, adding an assortment of new features on top of everything we’d done in the past. The game was getting big, but had yet to find a definitive direction. Soon, the game arrived at the gates of greenlight and, still riding the wave of Time Management Game of the Year, passed into production lacking the razor focus we’d demand from a less established series.

Lesson Learned: Leave the baggage behind. Equally as important as what to add to your sequel is what to cut.

The Upside of New Blood

It was just after the first major user test that the company officially recognized the game had a focus problem. The decision was made to augment the team in design, engineering, and production to give the game some much needed form. But the company was still expecting its hit sequel, and the team embraced the challenge of honing without slowing production. Looking back, this proved to be a huge missed opportunity to hit the pause button and definitively find our game before moving forward again.

I didn’t bother reminding anyone at the time that I’d never led the design of a TM game, or that I’d spent very little time playing Diner Dash. I credit any clarity I brought to the table in my first few days on the project almost entirely to my lack of attachment to past Diner Dash games. After all, I hadn’t slaved over anything in the game, and I had no emotional attachments to speak of. I only knew we had to find a great game, and quickly. This proved an invaluable, time-saving perspective, far more so than years of Diner Dash experience.

What surprised me most in those first few days was that there were plenty of good, even great, ideas in the mix, but none of them seemed to be pointing in the same direction, except for maybe “BIG.”

It was clearly time to chuck Time Management Game of the Year and get the team driving towards something real. This launched a vigorous interdepartmental discussion around customer expectations and product positioning for this game. It wasn’t easy, but ultimately it would be a line in the intro animation script that would unify our vision.

One thing to come out of pre-production that everyone loved was the game’s fiction. Basically, Flo’s Diner, the symbolic heart of DinerTown, blows up, and Flo spends the rest of the game working her way back up from the streets.

At the end of the intro cutscene, Flo stands in the rubble of her diner and announces, “If the people can’t come to the food, then we’ll just have to bring the food to the people!” Finally, we had something meaningful to rally around, and it had been right there in our intro animation the whole time.

From that moment forward, everything had to pass through the filter of our new creative vision point. If it it didn’t fit, it couldn’t stay. It was liberating. That’s certainly not to say we didn’t all use some creative interpretation to hang on to our favorites for a while, but it seemed, for the first time, the game had potential beyond Diner Dash with a bunch of new features stacked on top. It was its own game, with its own mission to pursue.

All the Whiz-Bang New Features

Another of our early assumptions was that to deliver on customer expectations for something new and exciting, we’d have to overwhelm them with a ton of whiz-bang new features. We were thinking wide, not deep, and our reward was an almost unplayable mish-mash for a long time. Early user testers were not impressed. At best, they were confused. At worst, kind of angry.

Exploring multiple feature ideas, even the really dumb ones, during pre-production is healthy, enlightening, inspiring, shocking (in a good way), and in the right light, even funny, but we’d passed that point, and still felt like we had to try new things to make the big impact our fans were demanding. This spoke to both our mistaken impression that bigger was the answer and the mistake of trying to figure out the game on the fly, during full production.

Lesson Learned: Be honest about where your game is creatively. If you’re in pre-production creatively, acknowledge it and embrace it. If you’re in production, act like it.

It would be months into a bumpy production, and a few intense culling sessions later, before we finally had the game down to a realistic set of new features that felt worthy of the franchise. Ultimately, the magic number of major new gameplay features turned out to be three (plus all the predictable updates). Plenty enough to satisfy our audience, it would turn out.

Messing With the Core

With our newly crystallized vision and a more focused feature-set emerging, it became clear that, even with all the new stuff in the game, the core gameplay loop was still sitting largely untouched. Were we going to be able to deliver on customer demand for “new and exciting” without revisiting the core gameplay? I admit I was nervous even thinking about it. Good time management is a delicate thing. Many games never get it right, but we had. I definitely didn’t want to be the idiot who broke Diner Dash.

I must have asked, ‘how does this work in Diner Dash?’ about 150 times before making my first suggestion about the core loop. While my outsider perspective had served us well to a point, I found myself leaning more and more on the team’s Diner Dash experts as we got closer to the core. After all, I wasn’t the first designer to have a crack at this game. My first 150 ideas were likely to have already been explored in some form or fashion.

In the core loop of Diner Dash, customers come into the restaurant and queue up. The player seats them, serves them, and cleans up after them. If they do it well, customers leave a big tip. Play level one of any Diner Dash game and that’s pretty much what you’ll experience.

There was no reason to replace or remove any part of that loop, and inserting another step felt like adding just for the sake of adding. I was beginning to recognize another dilemma of designing a sequel. Change starts to feel like an obligation.

I literally found myself combing the game thinking, “What can we change here?” It felt so wrong, even when it eventually led to something good.

Lesson Learned: Making something worse just to make it different is not a healthy trade-off. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. If it’s got room for improvement, improve it. A tighter, familiar feature has a much longer shelf life than the fleeting delight of “Hey, that’s different!”

We all knew how delicate the flow in the middle of the core loop (seat, serve, collect, clean-up) was, but, in our vigorous scouring for change, we’d identified what looked like opportunity at the beginning that promised to give the core loop more pop. This lead to a new feature called the Townies.

This new addition allowed players to grab DinerTown residents from around the edges of the gameplay area and add them to the queue before seating. This simple addition opened up a new part of the gameplay and fed into the familiar strategic aspects of the game. In short, the stars aligned behind it and it suddenly felt a lot less like change for the sake of change, and more like legitimate evolution.

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

One new feature that ultimately went the opposite direction was something called Zoom. It was the biggest of the big new gameplay ideas from pre-production, designed to dazzle and impress even the most jaded fans. The feature was so central that the game was referred to as Diner Dash Zoom throughout the early months.

The idea: Just as everything was reaching maximum chaos, the camera would dramatically ZOOM back, revealing more environment, more tables, more customers, etc. It was big and flashy and… its wow-factor obscured a fundamental issue for quite some time.

Back to TM being a very delicate thing: the best TM players in the world fall into a zone, where they begin clicking in anticipation, staying an impressive number of moves ahead of customer requests. With thoughtful difficulty and feature ramping, designers can escort players down a path that leads from the ability to cover a few simple requests to directing a dizzying symphony of requests over the course of the game.

But with Zoom, when we pulled back to reveal more, more, more, we made the hot-spots smaller, inadvertently increasing the click-accuracy challenge. Casual players do not possess the same level hand-eye coordination as a 13-year old playing Halo, and they do not want to be challenged in the same ways. The result of Zoom was frequent mis-clicks that broke the game’s satisfying chaining mechanic and left players frustrated and feeling like they’d taken a big step backwards in their ability to manage all the new customer requests.

Unfortunately, instead of cutting our losses and moving on, we clung to the flashy appeal of the new feature and struggled with it for months. We were stuck on the idea that Zoom was our big new thing, just the kind of thing we were certain our customers were demanding. We didn’t want to let it go for fear of underwhelming without it.

Ironically, it ultimately took a resounding “meh” to the wow factor of Zoom from our beta testers to finally tip the scales against it. It was shocking how little it was missed after cutting it, and how quickly a better game emerged in its wake.

Level Designing a Sequel

Meanwhile, in our entire struggle to impress with big new features, we nearly overlooked a huge opportunity to evolve the series through traditional level design. Level design was simply a matter of course for development. We knew it was there all along, but didn’t fully appreciate its very specific potential value in making our sequel, and all the hard work we’d put into its fresh new features, reach the new heights we’d been shooting for all along.

Fortunately, along with a new blood to lead the design, we brought in a fresh level designer. Again, someone with no previous Diner Dash experience, working under the tutelage of former designers for the series. We even contracted Nick Fortugno, the original Diner Dash game designer, to consult on the first couple of levels just to be sure we were capturing the Diner Dash magic.

Something about this combination of fresh eyes and experienced guidance, along with a new focus on puzzle solving in sync with the game’s new features, helped us deliver some of the freshest-feeling level designs the series has had for years.

Lesson Learned: In the mad frenzy of adding whiz-bang new features, don’t let boring old level design become an “also ran” element of the design effort.

It felt like we’d gone full circle. From the beginning, we knew that new level designs were never going to be enough to offer the thrills we needed, but now that the game was finally taking form, we found ourselves leaning heavily on the level design to maximize all our great new features.

Staying With the Times

Inevitably, market opportunities and expectations change over the lifetime of a long-running series, and for the fifth game in our series, we found ourselves examining opportunities that didn’t exist during the development of previous Diner Dash games. In this case, it was the recent explosion of social gaming that had everyone looking at our otherwise traditional download game through new eyes.

And so it was that we set out to integrate an innovative new Facebook Connect feature, called Flo’s Super Sneakers, which promised to enhance the in-game experience via Facebook gifting.

As with any new feature, the Facebook element (which had bubbled up from our central engineering team of all places) required the game team to embrace the possibilities of where the series could go while maintaining the focus we’d fought so hard to reclaim. The result would be a feature that would introduce cutting edge social technology to a desktop application in a whole new way and widen the concept of social gaming as a whole.

Lesson Learned: It’s as cliché as it is true — think outside the box for every game (sequel or not).

User Testing a Sequel

Although the team deserves a ton of credit for ultimately “figuring out” the game, the unsung heroes in the equation — and perhaps the most important Diner Dash experts of all — were our fans.

I went into early user tests with the same base-level expectations I’d have for any game user test, but quickly discovered there’s a big difference when testing a sequel. Never before had I heard such distinct and emotional reactions from our testers. We were regularly getting reactions, such as, “Hey! Why’d you take out my favorite part?!” or “This part doesn’t feel like it used to. I don’t like it. Change it back!”

It was the emotional edge that caught me off guard. Players form a bond with a good game series, and it’s surprisingly easy to inadvertently drive a wedge where you intended to build a bridge. It was a sobering reminder, but also an excellent litmus test that we would revisit often throughout production.

When we finally got to our large-scale beta test, we were relieved to find things were mostly on track. But, for all our efforts, the results were still below the high expectations for our flagship series. We determined we had just enough time for polish and fine tuning, and we took it, instead, by cutting one of the biggest features in the game (sorry, engineers) and rapidly stitching the game back together in time for release. It would turn out to be one of the healthiest decisions we ever made for the game, but we never would have had the confidence to make such a risky last-minute move without user testing results backing us up.

Lesson Learned: Double your user-testing effort for sequels. Test early and often. Test with newbies, fans, and fanatics to paint a well-balanced picture for your game.

Two weeks later, we were getting our first real look at the product we were planning to ship. We’d started with so many big new things, a game that tried to be everything, but here we were staring at a game with a handful of tightly integrated, innovative new features, polish, and its own unique identity. It felt good.
Postmortem Thinking

A few weeks later the game hit the market and made an immediate impact. Sales and reviews have been very good, but more importantly, the fans got what they really wanted all along: a game that lived up to the good name of its franchise while delivering a few new and exciting enhancements.

With time to reflect, a few things still jump out as missed opportunities due to all the time we spent chasing Time Management Game of the Year. Maybe there was no choice. Maybe this was simply the path we had to take to find the game inside our sequel to a sequel to a sequel. （source:gamasutra）