Spry Fox Making Happiness

Mini World Events

Hidden Lanterns and Hidden Bells are two of our hidden-object mini world events in Spirit Crossing. Mini world events keep the Uplands different and interesting, and aim for something new nearly every day. We want a wide range of small events, some of which we announce and some only until you stumble upon them in the wild. 

These two events play on the non-harvest activities… aka activities that don’t give you anything. Lighting a lantern and ringing bells are fun to do just on their own, but with these events every once in a while you get something making the events delightful and more rewarding. Lanterns in particular are interesting because the normal ones light up for everyone. Just by playing by yourself you can indirectly end up helping others find the hidden objects by process of elimination.

Spirit Vaults: the Original Mini World Event 

When we started setting up our event system, the first experiment at a hidden-object event that we created was an event called Spirit Vaults. We had 5 different colored statues spawn in the wilderness, each in a different place on the map: a peak, a cave, a field. You had 3 days to find all 5 and you’d get a big reward at the end if you found them all.

Every week, we have a team-wide playtest to stress-test the game, find bugs and to get feedback. We tested this event several times and this event had a strong response. Either people loved it or… strongly disliked it, splitting the team in half. This seemed to break down along the different playstyles team members had.. The people who liked it loved the challenge of the hunt. They would tag things on the map for their friends and loved the challenge of finding very hard hidden statues. The people who disliked it were completionists or more casual players who didn’t like the challenge of finding every single one and were frustrated in not being able to complete things in a reasonable time frame.

(↑ screenshot taken from an older build!)

Lessons from Playtests

One of the hardest parts of a designer’s job is processing feedback. Not reacting in an immediate way, especially if the feedback is negative, is really hard since we want to make our events as great as possible. Sometimes designers need to sit with the feedback. We need to review what our goals are and what we hoped to accomplish. Sometimes we need to break down the feedback so we understand the root cause. Is this actually pointing to a different fundamental problem, or can this be taken directly as suggested? Once we take time to process it we can iterate on our initial designs and make them better. 

It can be challenging to make events that satisfy all players. We all have various activities we like more than others, and we want to offer a variety of content that will appeal to an array of play styles. But there were some clear takeaways from that first “Spirit Vault” event that we used to make Hidden Lanterns better when we created this second hidden-object mini event: 

• Add rewards to each one found instead of waiting until you’ve found them all. This reduces the frustration of having to find every last one. 
• Stick to easier places in the Wilderness. Some of our Wilderness maps can be harder to navigate than others, and finding a small item in any huge Wilderness can be plenty hard on its own. We don’t need to add extra frustration to satisfy the folks who want to find them all. 
  

To Quest or Not To Quest

We still have this tension between folks wanting to have a checklist to find all the things and others who just want to casually explore and not be pressured into finding everything. One way around this that we do in Hidden Lanterns is to have more items in the world than the quest actually requires you to find. This way, it becomes slightly easier to complete the quest. And since you get a reward from each find, having additional ones is a bonus. With Hidden Bells, we don’t even advertise how many there are, nor do we have a quest at all.

There is no pressure in finding the bells, but if you do, you get an extra bonus. We chose Hidden Bells for this pattern because there are fewer of them out in the world, and they don’t have the same persistent visual effect as the lanterns do. You can ring them for all to hear, but their state doesn’t change for as long. 

We hope you enjoy both types, and as always, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have a strong preference between the two styles of events, let us know in the Discord! And if you’re wondering about that original test event, Spirit Vault? After experimenting with the Hidden Lanterns and Hidden Bells events, we used what we learned from these and other events to redesign the Spirit Vault entirely. It ended up turning into the Lost Spirits event. Rather than five differently colored statues, you now find three differently colored spirits trapped in Shrineworks urns and bring them back to their companion spirit by the trolley station. 

Concept art illustrated by Justin Oaksford

Warm and well-lit wishes!

This blog was written by Julia Keren-Detar, a Game Designer at Spry Fox.