Designing UniVersus: The Demo Experience
Bill Stark, Director of Game Design
Over the past few weeks we’ve talked about tools we use to make UniVersus a more accessible game to players. Today we’re going to talk about a new tool we started rolling out earlier this year: updated Demo Decks.
The Goal of a Demo
One of the keys to a successful TCG is building the critical mass of people who learn the game and convert to long-term players. The top three ways to learn a TCG historically are:
Learning from a friend/family member who already plays
Learning from a digital onboarding demo
Learning from a demo in a game store, convention, or other gaming space
We regularly demo our game at conventions around the world, and track data based on those demos to better understand where we can strengthen our demo experience. At Gen Con last year we made some important discoveries:
At 45 minutes our demo was one of the longest in the game hall
Few players converted from our demo to in-store play, and fewer still were playing months later
Many players who took our demo, even those with a strong background in TCGs, felt it was “too hard” to learn and chose to pursue other games instead
The goal of a strong demo program is to “get players to the fun” in a sustainable fashion that lets them feel early mastery over the core concepts of a game, and build excitement about diving deeper after the demo ends. Our demo program, despite the best efforts of some extraordinary demo team members, wasn’t getting the job done. It needed to change.
Reevaluating
With our data from Gen Con back we set about building a new demo experience that better served our goals. We wanted it to accomplish the following:
Be accessible to new players by reducing mental load significantly
Introduce the core concepts of commit, enhance, attack, block, and the check system
Play out in approximately 15 minutes
Luohan Wei and Chris Bromley, a member of our community, took on the task of building the experience. We decided to use our own characters early on, settling on Sun Wukong and Hercules from popular mythologies around the world, to make the demo more approachable to players who weren’t necessarily a fan of one particular world or another. The experience is a scripted play through with each card numbered in sequence so it’s easy to reset and learn over and over again. There are some key differences between the demo decks and our regular cards found in boosters and Challenger Series:
They’re not tournament legal to help reduce balancing needs and allow us to iterate on demo designs more quickly
Characters are incredibly simplified, with only one ability and much lower health to ensure games are quick to play
Most cards in the demo decks are “vanilla” or French vanilla (we previously talked about those here)
The conclusion in testing early on was that the new demo experience vastly improved the experience that came before it. The demos took much less time, were far less confusing for players, and succeeded in teaching core concepts. We had a winning strategy!
Demo Experience: Part 2
A demo experience for conventions is great, but we also wanted to improve the onboarding experience for players who can’t make it to a con. We also knew a digital onboarding experience is an incredibly powerful tool to help in this space, but because of the unique nature of our licensing obligations we aren’t able to build a digital TCG experience that lets players play all of our cards together. Instead we settled on a digital experience to walk players through the scripted tabletop demo or a general game of UniVersus.
To deliver a high quality experience we partnered with an organization called Dized, who build these types of tutorials for many games. Working with our partners at Dized, Drew Nolosco, the head of our product team, put together a demo experience potential players can use after an in-person demo or with the first UniVersus product they’ve purchased.
You can check out our new digital demo directly from Dized.com here.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in guiding someone to a demo, you can send them to our Dized tutorial online now. We’re also at many gaming conventions around the world, including Gen Con later this summer, where new players can get a demo in person. Soon we’ll begin rolling out additional demo decks that relate to the worlds we’re visiting in upcoming sets, themed specifically to those IPs to create a more immersive experience for fans of those titles. Finally, if you are a retailer interested in demoing UniVersus or know a local game store that might be, they can reach out to become a part of our demo program here.
