planet romero

Ravenwood Fair Post-Mortem

What would it feel like to actually make Disneyland in a magical, fairytale forest? That’s what I wanted to find out with Ravenwood Fair.

I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the team working on what I decided to call Ravenwood Fair. At the beginning, I did art direction toward a painterly style until the lead artist, Christine MacTernan, totally got the look and took over from there. I created and coded all the sound effects, and worked with a great composer named Aaron Walz from Game Audio Alliance on the game’s looping soundtrack. He did an excellent job, as the song can be played infinitely without annoyance – the true test of a great composition.

The team was very small: four programmers, two concept artists, two animators, a UI artist, a producer, Brenda and me. That’s only 12 people. In addition, the game launched on October 19, which means it took 2.5 months to go from concept to ship. This causes many a social game publisher to gasp, but there’s a good reason for it: the team worked very hard, and they had already been working on several game concepts for 7 months before I showed up, so they were already “at speed” and no ramp-up time was needed.

When I arrived at Lolapps, the owners told me I could create whatever, as long as the game would make money and launch by September 30. That was less than 2 months by the time I started working on it. I knew I had to hurry up and come up with a concept, so I quickly identified the best game on Facebook at the time, FrontierVille, and played it for three days so I could understand its design patterns and monetization model (I had been following the social game space since 2009). Then, I got the scoop on the engine we were using and found out it was really fast and could draw a ton of graphics on the screen quickly. I learned from the lead coder how much code had been written for the previous game prototypes, so I needed to use as much as possible to keep moving forward and not go backward much.

The idea for the game appeared very quickly. The setting was going to be a fairytale/storybook/magical place that floated in the air and was occupied by a slightly scary forest. Since the biggest games on Facebook were business sims, I needed to have the player build their own little business, and I wanted it to be like nothing else on Facebook. I thought a Fair would be a really nice obvious positive goal for the player to build, and there wasn’t a carnival/circus/fair sim on Facebook……yet. My thought was this: when you’re building a place for visitors to come and occupy, why wouldn’t you want them to be doing something really fun while they’re there? What’s more fun than Disneyland? I imagined what it must be like at a high-level point-of-view to actually RUN DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida – to have to carve out a bunch of wilderness packed with alligators and other denizens, and then have to build a fun place in the middle of that – and KEEP it happy and fun, all the while the alligators and beasts want their place back. I figured that would be a fun game to play – as I cut back a scary forest, I build a Fair, visitors come and use all the things I’m building, and I get to interact with them in a light fashion. That was the basis of my design, so we had our first meeting, and the producer and leads wrote down the long list of things that we needed to start working on immediately.

After August, we were still working on the foundations of the game systems and entire art overhaul, when Brenda joined the team from Critter Island (it had been shut down by Facebook). Brenda immediately started working on the quests, the map layout, and the tutorial parts of the game. She had to basically try to get all the final parts of the game together while I was still working on the foundational stuff, and we had to make sure that they would meet in the middle and the game would be complete by September 30.

Near the end of September, to make the launch date, the game had been re-scoped and re-prioritized so much that it wasn’t going to be anything I’d want to play if we shipped it in that state. Facebook games are well-known to ship incomplete and get fixed post-launch. I’m not from that world – I’m from the world of “You only launch once” and the first impression is extremely important. There were game systems missing that absolutely needed to be included in the game for the design to harmonize, and it got very tense at the end of September with the execs pressing for launch and me holding the game back to make it great. Every day in October was a “Can it ship?” day. It took 19 more 12pm-to-4am days to get the game in a state that I’d launch. In fact, I held back on doing interviews about the game until I knew it was going to be something I’d put my name on. Finally, around October 15, the game was quality enough for me to do the Dean Takahashi interview in VentureBeat.

The game launched, but the team kept working. We had lots of holes to fill, and obscure bugs to fix. The launch on Facebook went as good as a launch could possibly go: millions of people played the game and hundreds of thousands still join every week. Brenda and I ended our consulting with Lolapps on February 25, 2011 so we could concentrate full-time on our new startup, Loot Drop, Inc.

Just recently at the beginning of March, Ravenwood Fair made the #15 slot on the AppData Top 15 Applications list – this list is of ALL applications on Facebook, not just games (over 125,000 apps are on Facebook). Ravenwood Fair is the #1 non-Zynga game, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Currently, over 25 million people play Ravenwood Fair every month on all social platforms (over 11 million on Facebook alone), and over 1 million play every day on Facebook only. I never thought I’d see the day that I would make a game that doubled World of Warcraft, player count-wise. I’d like to thank Brenda and Lolapps for giving me the opportunity, and the Ravenwood Fair launch team that worked so hard on the game.

Ravenwood Fair Trivia Time!