A Word From Our Lead Game Designer...

BIG TOP 10 is out and people seem to really love it! As you might imagine, that’s a wonderful feeling for a developer; especially for myself as a designer.

But then again, maybe they like it too much…
What started out as a healthy challenge (and proof 20,000pts was possible!) from our CTO (Sean Wylie-toal) posting his [then] high score of 24368pts on Touch Arcade, turned into a high score arms race. Within just a few days, user Baoshao posted back with a score of 25696pts taking the lead, if only slightly. Ill content with such a slim lead, she then posted a score of 50669pts and then an even higher 76998pts!

The ability to leap frog your score was one of the core additions that stood out when we first prototyped BIG TOP 10 and this forum competition was driving that home. It was clear we could justify an online leader board, and we needed it fast!

OpenFeint was a perfect solution, but while we worked to integrate it and release BIG TOP 10’s first update, we discovered Baoshao wasn’t satisfied with a mere 75,000pts. She had become so good at BIG TOP 10 that she could literally play indefinitely; posting a score of 300,151 points with 14:41 minutes still on the clock. She was aiming for a cool 999,999pts and other players like ArtNJ weren’t far behind reaching that infinite play point.

Congratulations to them, but it meant we had some more work to do.

Sure we want a game with infinite replayability, but not one that takes an infinite amount of time to complete! So we started working on bringing the challenge back to these players, but we didn’t want to affect the majority of players who were still striving to reach 20,000pts.

We tried a couple of solutions, such as progressively increasing the number of large numbers and reducing the number of negative numbers as the player’s score got higher. While that certainly made it harder, it didn’t make it very satisfying. We don’t want people just shuffling six or seven times until an equation presents itself. We want equations, especially long equations, to have a risk vs. reward dynamic but we don’t want them to be impossible after all.

So we went back to the drawing board and considered what made BIG TOP 10 fun initially. We felt it really was the challenge of racing the clock—seeing how well you could do in a limited amount of time. These top level players had effectively removed that challenge, and self admittedly ruined some of their own fun. So what we decided (and what we ended up doing) that the right solution was to leave equations [relatively] easy to make but decrease the amount of bonus time awarded as your score climbed. This meant if players wanted to keep going beyond say, 50000pts they could no longer rely on small equations, they had to think bigger!

We also capped the timer at 5 minutes, just in case players were banking too much time at low scores. We didn’t want to reduce time rewards in the sub 10000pts range, because feel most people are enjoying it as is. We didn’t want to make it more difficult for them.

With 1.02 we hope to have returned the challenge and fun back to players like Baoshao, ArtNJ and everyone else on the Touch Arcade forums that’ve shown such love and support for BIG TOP 10 and we’re not done with BIG TOP 10 yet.

At the very least, we’ve got 750 points worth of achievements left to use (within the OpenFeint network), and we fully intend to use them. We’re also continuing to look for ways to allow skilled players to jump into higher score ranges more quickly. Ultimately we’d like to bring the average length of each round down slightly in the high scoring games so that no one has to miss work or break up with their girlfriend, while still allowing players to achieve those high scores and more.

There has also been some request for new game modes, and while nothing is for sure, there are a few alternate BIG TOP 10 game modes open to exploration in the original Game Design Document. But that’s a topic for another day.

Matthew Edwards
Lead Game Designer
Bight Games
matthew.edwards@bightgames.com