Experience of the SOCIAL WARS and modification advice

I have recently played the popular game Social Wars on Facebook, overall it is a good game, but I found some methods for enhance the game and I want to share some my experience about this game as a game designer.

Attracting points

What the game attract me first is the art attraction of the units. They are cute and cartoon style. You can own all kinds of battle units including arm man and jet and vehicle, even robots… though I found later there are not as many combat style as the appearance of the units.

And the learning model is good, they don’t force me go through a lot of novice teaching like many other games did. It only need me learn the basic play and control of the game, then I can learn others latter and gradually through quest. I think that is important. As an exciting player, I don’t will to wait for a long time to play. The elusive novice teaching often spoil my moods, I think many people like me too.

What the game grasp the eyes of player first is novice teaching, so I recommend designer take care of that. You customer should love your game would flee, if you haven’t attracted them at the first place.

The novice teaching and quest is suitable for banlance between learning and playing.

The other flashing point of the game is that you can build your units through fusion two units, and it is a surprise to have the units you haven’t seen before, and their appearance is really cool. You even can sold your fusion units through auction. YES, you can buy or sell, that make me exciting. The most important point is that it is by you to confuse your units, like building your house through your hands. Collection of units is a main gameplay I recommend.

collection feature

Pinch point

The game is good overall, but also have some pinch points that make me annoying. The control is not very smooth and disrupt my play often when I use my laptop to play.

Like any other game prevailing, the screen scroll is through your dragging. But the real time control of this game make it is hard to choose the units as you will. Don’t like Warcraft or StarCraft, you can’t drag mouse to paint the rectangle to choose more units, that is the most convenient and commonly accept method. And you can’t team the units with the shortcut, which is also important in this type of game. I often make mistake when play because the control. So I recommend below methods.

•Use keyboard WASD to scroll the screen, but also add arrows at the edge of the screen for clicking to scroll.

•Use ctrl + number to team units.

•In full screen mode, scroll screen when mouse are hovering on the edge of the screen.

•Add a map for spot enemy and your units.

add a map for spotting units

The scene narratives is too long and not very easy for seeing, I think it is better to cut the talks and let player focus on play. And the mission even don’t have the introduction interface for user to check. Just by previous talks, no way for user to refer to. So better add the mission interface including mission title, brief, and goal lists etc.

all quest should have clearly displaced goal

The barrage is exceed what it should be, but not very powerful attack in fact, so you only see the week dense barrage. I think it is better diversity the attack mode to form diverse barrage.

dense barrage

One of the UX design principle is don’t hide your main operate menu too deep. In this game, what we often used menu include PLAYERS WORLD and MISSIONS WORLD and STORAGE, but you can’t find them on main screen. That adds our control cost. Put them in more obvious place

do not hide common used menus too deeply.

As a building game in some sense, the buildings are too dense for me to click and find the right object is a hard work. I also found the same problem in many other 90 degree angle viewpoint game. To give player a more spacious looking space can enhance the user experience.

Don’t shelter important objects. Though I am not trypohobia.