Spry Fox Making Happiness

We wanted to pull back the curtain on the state of the game economy in Spirit Crossing, how we got here and some things we are looking at in the future. 

We really appreciate everyone who has put a lot of thought and consideration into playing Spirit Crossing and giving feedback on it in its incomplete state. It’s really a special feeling to have such a lovely, committed group of players who care deeply about what we’re making. 

What are our goals for this game’s economy and pacing?

Here’s what we are working (slowly, doggedly) towards:

1. A game that doesn’t take over your life
We want to be respectful of our players’ lives and real-world responsibilities. This has been a consistent goal of ours in all our games, like Cozy Grove for example. We do not want to create black holes that demand all your time & attention.

That’s why we try to create reasonably-scoped “daily play patterns.” We already see folks grinding out all the fish in the game; if we had even more resources that you can grind to an unlimited extent, some players would feel even more pressure to play beyond the amount they feel is desirable, and that’s not what we want.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is not a new concept for us. We wrote about this extensively when we were launching Cozy Grove. Not everyone likes this approach. Some people complained that we should simply do what many other games do, which is to let you grind all resources for 24 hours a day if you really want to; that it’s ultimately “your problem” to manage your own time. That just doesn’t feel right to us. We care about our players. We’re not going to shrug our shoulders and call something “your problem” if we think we can do something about it.

We believe it’s possible to make a game very fun without constantly tempting you to grind for longer than you would enjoy doing so. We think we proved that with Cozy Grove. So we’re going to keep sticking to our philosophical guns here. We think it makes our games more enjoyable for more people.

2. Enable players to be able to play how they want to, while still sharing grand community goals 
There isn’t a one-size-fits all daily session. We appreciate that different people have different playstyles and we want to accommodate as many people as we can.

Someone in Discord mentioned the tension between saving resources for personal projects in Spirit Cossing vs contributing resources to communal objectives. We agree that there is too much tension between those two goals right now. We intend to improve that! Some amount of tension will always exist, but nobody should feel like their only choices are “impoverish myself” or “allow my Waystation to suffer horribly.”

Balancing this tension is a tricky design problem, but ultimately our goal is to make people feel well-rewarded no matter what they choose to put their time and energy into. It might take a few more iterations, but we’ll get there.

3. Keep friends together
We don’t want to create content gates that splinter people apart. We want to make sure that no matter your level of progress in the game, you can still participate in activities with your friends. This is one of the reasons that, for example, you can’t individually level up your movement speed in the game, or purchase items that make you (and only you) move faster. It would certainly be a cool thing to be able to earn the ability to move faster! But then you would be constantly outrunning some of your friends. So we don’t enable this. 

Why is the game’s economy balanced the way it is right now?

For a long time, we were working on standing up the core game features of Spirit Crossing. The game’s economy took a backseat during this earlier phase of development. We intentionally tuned resources to be cheap and unlimited because we wanted pre-Alpha playtesters to be able to quickly try new features and content in order to provide feedback on them. 

Adding pacing
As we moved towards larger Alpha playtests, we started to focus on pacing and progression. There was a lot of work to be done. 

• Players were collecting in days what took years to build. We can’t (and were never going to be able to) build things fast enough to keep the pre-Alpha sugar rush going forever. We need the pace that people acquire content to match the pace with which we can create that content. Or the game falls apart.
• When that content spigot runs out, people leave. We saw this in our retention data. The handful of players who remained from our early playtesting days are the rare survivors of a population that largely gave up on the game once they ran out of things to do and things to acquire. 
• Earning stuff can be enjoyable: Many players like having interesting things to work towards! The effort shouldn’t feel egregious, but ultimately, the game must have meaningful long term goals, and earning the clothing / decoration / etc that you desire is one of those key goals.

Keeping things tight
Right now the game is balanced conservatively, because we know more activities and sources of resources are coming in the future. 

• Cheap prices now can cause more pain later: When desirable items are cheap at this stage of development, we’re inevitably forced to raise their prices in the not-distant future. Something has to be done to soak up the excess income from newly introduced income sources in the game. Due to loss aversion, a thing all people tend to experience quite strongly, many people tend to become very upset by price increases, even if their income has increased proportionally. So raising prices is painful. And if we need to raise prices multiple times, players can begin to lose trust in us. 
• Expensive prices now, with a smaller population: One game development strategy is to set prices higher early in the balancing effort, when your playtest population is small. The community feels the pain from this in the short term. It definitely isn’t ideal. But the alternative strategy just introduces more pain later on, when even more people will feel it. 
• Generosity is the end goal: Eventually, we’ll fine tune for a feeling of generosity once all the economic sources and sinks in the game are stable. 

We have to use this screenshot because we’re mesmerized, also it’s relevant to dyes. (Thank you, emiyay!)

Case Study: Dyes

Dyes have been brought up a lot by members of our community, so here’s a deep dive into the “why” of our changes to Dyes. We think that the Dye system serves as a pretty good example of the kinds of issues we described more generally above.

We tightened the costs for Dyes along with the rest of the items in the game’s economy, and not for monetization reasons. At the time we made those initial changes, monetization wasn’t even on our radar, since we were still owned by Netflix and operating under the “your Netflix subscription gets you everything” design model.

• We wanted there to be a variety of easily accessible dyes, as well as dyes that require more time & investment to earn.
• We wanted dyes to tie nicely into the house plant economy. A dye that initially seems expensive should eventually prove very affordable once a player has invested in their plants.

The state of dyes right now:

• Affordable dyes are not compelling enough to some players; they feel that they lack reasonable options if they can’t easily craft the most expensive dyes.
• Players have the most expensive dyes shoved in their face all the time, which exacerbates the feeling of them being frustratingly expensive and out of reach.
• The home gardening economy still needs design work, and dye costs will need to be rebalanced once we’ve finished making adjustments to home gardening. There’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem there.

The state (hopefully) of dyes in the near future:

• As we make changes to realize the vision described above, our goal is to make sure that there are always compelling & affordable dye options available to players, but also, that players feel good about making the effort to grow houseplants and enjoy the rewards that come from that.
• In general, we think it’s a good thing for there to be some rarer dyes that are “chase items,” i.e. that you feel like you need to earn over time. But the existence of these dyes should not make most players feel like they have “no good dye options” available to them.

We hope this glimpse into our thoughts about the game’s economy has been interesting and helpful. In our next post on this topic, we’re going to delve into how we’re thinking specifically about earning a living from Spirit Crossing, now that we’re no longer owned by Netflix and need to actually somehow generate revenue in order to pay our own salaries and cover the (frankly very large) server costs that this game has!

We’re looking forward to your feedback, both on everything we’ve shared here and on that next post.

See you in the Crosslands,
Spry Fox