Hello Fizstarters,

This is Sean again, dropping a quick note to let you know what we've been up to.

Coasters and Shirts

Packing party!  I took a break from adding new content to the game to pack up coasters into sets of 4 to ship off tomorrow to our t shirt printers, Teelaunch.  They'll put the packs in with your t shirt shipments so you get both at the same time.  Those of you with just coaster packs will be getting a mailing from Bit By Bit instead.  The coasters look and feel great and we were able to afford some extra with the extra funding we raised -- we'll use them as promotional material once the game launches.  I'll post again once we've gotten shipping details from Teelaunch.

Some people still haven't answered our surveys requesting your address and shirt information.  I'll order extras for those people in hopes they get in touch with me later, but I'm just going to have to guess on size and color.  You still have time to send me your info before I send out the order to our printers tomorrow afternoon.

So, if you're supposed to get a shirt and haven't answered the survey, please do so before tomorrow afternoon Pacific time.

The Schedule

Our internal schedule matches our Kickstarter expected delivery date of June for the game.  Both art and feature work is 95% complete, so I think that date is still reachable, but at the same time I can imagine the game being delayed past June if it seems worth it.  I've read about 80% of (a sample of) Kickstarter projects shipping late and vowed not to be one of them, but when it comes down to spending an extra 10% of overall project time to make the project 25% better, it's hard to turn that down.  On the other hand, I think it's important for the business to be able to estimate projects and ship on time.  If this were a larger company, we would not be able to slip the date a month -- we'd cut features until we hit our ship date.  We're not a large company though, and my gut feeling tells me we should play to that strength and release the best game possible.

I haven't agonized over it since June is still very attainable, but I would like to get a reading from all of you.  How much would it upset you, the backers, if the game arrived in July instead of June?

I bring it up now because I don't want it to be a surprise in case it ends up happening in a month.  Right now things are on track, but I've been responding to beta tester input and have been trying to add more of the types of things players like.  Specifically, I'm adding a lot more "Challenges" (the game's term for a hybrid between "goals" and "achievements" / "trophies"), and a lot more "Events" (the quest-like narrative elements of the game that break up the Lemonade Stand gameplay).  These have been a big hit with testers thus far and I personally find them to add a lot of fun and charm to the game, so I'm happy to add more than were originally planned for.

Beta Testing

Speaking of testers, beta has been going very well. The game has been running well for nearly all players, and most people have spent several hours playing.  Feedback from the testers has been largely positive and extremely constructive.  Last week, we reached out via Facebook and Twitter to let people know we were looking for additional beta testers, and many of our backers took notice and signed up.  We're now at the point where we're able to accept 5 or so additional testers to play the beta, and this time we're soliciting from here on Kickstarter.

So, if you have 2 or 3 hours a week to play Fiz and offer your feedback, please post here in the comments or email me at sean@bitbybitstudios.com to sign up for beta testing.  You need an iOS 4.0 or higher iPod touch or iPhone.  I'll make a separate announcement once we're looking for testers for the Android version.

Back to Work

That's all I have for now!  I'm off to continue adding new content for this next beta release.  Thank you for reading and for all of the support.

Hello everyone,

Sean here, just dropping you a quick note to say hello and update on the progress of the game and the rewards.

Rewards, Surveys

The coasters are set to arrive at our office on Wednesday, we can't wait to see them!  In the mean time, Teelaunch is ready to print and our backer surveys went out today so we can start shipping soon after arrival.  Many of you responded already, thank you.  For the rest of you, please try and get them completed by next week.  I'll update next week with an estimated ship date for the physical rewards.

Beta

Closed beta testing officially began last week.  The definition of "Beta" ranges from game to game and company to company, but for us on Fiz, it means the game is somewhere around 90% feature complete, 75% art complete, and fully playable.  There are bugs and temp art still present, but their presence is reduced each day.

The closed beta build has 15 pieces of equipment, 8 employees, 10 recipes, and 6 marketplaces to play with, which overall is a small portion of the final planned content.  Feedback has been positive, with most players playing over 25 minutes in their first couple sessions alone.  After the game is more art and feature complete, I'm considering holding an open beta test with a playable browser version, but that depends on how much that winds up distracting me from finishing the actual version.

Current Work

Kelly is working on animations for characters and the icons in the game, they're looking great.  I'm aiming to finish implementation of all missing features by next Monday.  Aside from that, I'm responding to tester feedback by fixing bugs and balancing data in the game.

Behind the Scenes - Balancing

Balancing is the act of changing data in the game so that the game plays at an appropriate pace and is challenging and fun at the same time.  In Fiz, the bulk of balancing work is with the Marketplaces and the Recipes themselves.  I think it's an interesting task so I'd like to share a little bit of info on it.

This image shows a listing of all the data for a Marketplace:

This marketplace, named Korner Stop, is among the first you can unlock in the game.  The data for customers and competition are expressed in ranges between 2 numbers.  At Korner Stop, a customer's budget, which is the amount of coins he or she is carrying, is always between 10 and 30 coins.  When a customer is created by the game in order to shop for beer at Korner Stop, their actual budget is a number randomly selected between those 2 values.  In this way, wider ranges allow for more unpredictability, and smaller ranges allow for less.  

Other points defined by this data are:  It's open year round.  It has 60 customers per month, they typically buy between 1 and 4 units of beer at a time, and they are pretty sensitive to how expensively it is priced.  There are always 2 competitors selling beer at Korner Stop, and their Quality score can range from 150 to 600.  In order to get a customer to buy your beer instead of a competitor's, you want to beat their Quality, beat their price, or match the customer's preferred style and flavors of beer, or a mixture of all of these.

All marketplaces treat variables like these differently in order to offer different experiences. I try and design each one so that they have different quirks. Some have customers that have no price sensitivity, so you can really overcharge for your beer without feeling negative effects. Others have incredibly difficult competition. Some have lots of competition, but they aren't offering a particular style of beer, so if you make and sell that type of beer, you stand to succeed there. Part of the fun in the game is figuring out what the key to succeeding in each marketplace is. Players won't be able to use this tool to figure out which recipe sells best and at what price at each marketplace, though. Instead, players use market research and hints placed in the game to discover the keys behind each market.

Tools

How do I know if it will be easy to beat competitors here?  How do I know how much money the player can expect to make during each sale?  I really don't know exactly.  I can guess when I start entering numbers in, but it's impossible to accurately tell without actually selling the beer and seeing how it does.  

Since playing the game thousands of times and writing down my results would take years, I have a program that I use to visualize sales data.  With this tool, I can change parameters, sell 10,000 batches at once, and instantly see how they each did -- it is invaluable for my balancing tasks.  Here's what it looks like testing 2 different recipes at Korner Stop.

(View Fullsize)

The graph on the right shows the average profit earned by selling a 350 Quality point batch of each recipe, at various prices.  Profit usually goes down because customers can no longer afford the beer at such a high price, since most customers don't have that many coins.  Customers who are price sensitive also negatively rate beer as it gets more expensive, resulting in a greater-than-linear profits drop as price increases.  

The left side graph gives me hints as to why the curves on the right side might be shaped like they are.  At Korner Stop, customers generally prefer Pale Ale, so they choose it over the competition's often (purple line with green diamonds on the left graph).  Grubb's Lite, a Lager, is much less popular (grey line with yellow triangles).  Still, Grubb's Lite is cheaper to produce so the average profit gained from each (right side graph) is relatively similar.  I want the profit to be higher for players who have figured out that selling Pale Ale is advantageous here, so I'll change some of the parameters in the game.  I'll either make the Pale Ale recipe cheaper to produce, or make it so that customers who like Pale Ale are willing to pay more than they would pay for other beers.  Here's what that graph looks like after making Pale Ale the same price as Grubb's Lite to produce:

As you can see here, Plain Jane Pale Ale now not only outsells, but out-profits Grubb's Lite at this marketplace.  Consider this update a freebie in saving you from having to perform expensive market research in the game!

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this update and the behind the scenes look at some of the design work for Fiz.  I'll be back again sometime next week to talk about physical reward shipping.

-Sean