Warning! Heavy Game Design Here
Warning ☢️ Heavy Game Design post ahead 😁.
Session control mechanics are one of the most important systems in mobile F2P. They control the pace through which the player not only consumes game’s content, but also gets rewards. As games scales their content in mid to endgame, players get more and more energy, but they don’t have more time during the day dedicated to the game.
So what do you do?
You still want them to progress by optimal pace, meaning that they would ideally consume all the energy ⚡ from the whole day. As this would take later too much time for the amount of energy consumed, you introduce energy multiplier systems. This enables the player to use the same amount of their time as usual for the core loop, but they are consuming multiples of their energy and also gaining multiples of rewards (or loses 😅 hello Lucky Defense 🤬). This also enables the game to naturally offer long sessions, when you have time and want to go step by step or shorter session, when you just drain all of the energy on usually automated reward systems.
A good example of this would be Social Casino games, such as Scopely‘s Monopoly GO 🎰, where big amounts of energy can be swiftly spent by multiplying your energy output by 100x together with your rewards also being 100x. Another example is Habby‘s Capybara GO 🐊, where there is the Adventure mechanic, which is not automating the main core loop as in Monopoly GO, but it enables the user to quickly extend their idle rewards gain by using all of their energy if they don’t have time for a normal session.
The last example (right image) is Travel Town 🐚, which recently introduced the option to spend 2 energy on click. This is very interesting as most of the energy multipliers work on automated gameplay. Here the generators literally skip the initial stage 1 items and start spawning stage 2 items by default. This is a very smart design 💡 to enable players to spend same amount of time but get double the items and spend double the amount of energy. Keep in mind that this way the time to merge those stage 1 items to stage 2 is also cut down, making the time saving much stronger 😎.
