What My Nephew Teach Me

When I saw my 6 years nephew played Temple Run on my phone, I was surprised he easily reached 3000 miles while I never passed 1000 miles. He jumped, dodged left and right nimbly as if he can predict all obstacles by instinct. I asked him to play FarmStory – a game I’m working on and he immediately turned to the new game (I thought he was attracted by the cute icon at the beginning). But a few minutes later, he dropped it and turned back to Temple Run. It’s unbelievable as the reason was “too hard” since the game was designed as a kid game.

This leads me to think about our game. How does an adult-viewed easy game (too easy to be played by me) become hard from the eyes of a kid? I compared FarmStory with Temple Run and I thought I may find some tips (though they are different genres). In FarmStory, players need to aim at a specific target then slide while they can touch any place of the screen in Temple Run. For a child, the latter is obviously easy. I understand they stand for different gameplay but what I want to say is that we really need to see game from the eye of children. This is easy to say but hard to do. 

Actually, there are some tips to win but our players don’t know these tips. We do have a game tutorial but few players would take time to check it. That’s why more and more games put tutorial in the game and always use picture instead of dead words. And also the graphics, they are beautiful, but too colorful and lose its theme. Even you play it for a few hours, you may be unable to say what color it is.

I’m not saying that our game is bullshit but I want to figure out why it is not famous as Temple Run. I do love many part of these games, such as cute vegetable, lovely music. Actually, the Match Three game in it is my favorite one. As a startup group, we need such compare to make our game better and to go further. As a new game, we still have a long way to go.