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Postmortem:
Ngame's Chop Suey Kung Fu What
went wrong 1. Under-ambitious design. Chop Suey Kung Fu really is a simple game, and in some respects, it’s too simple. There’s no character progression, no levels, and no real incentive for the player to keep coming back. Very shortly after launch, we started getting requests for extra features. Maybe characters could earn different belts as they got better. Maybe there could be killer moves that players could work up to. Maybe characters should get extra hit points. There is much, much more that we could have added in, but didn’t. As a result, players moaned that there wasn’t enough to do, and would stop playing if we didn’t give them something extra. We simply didn’t expect Chop Suey Kung Fu to be as successful as it was. We thought people might play a few dozen times, and get bored. We didn’t anticipate people playing for hours at a time, and fighting literally thousands of bouts. Still, it’s better to have been too successful and made a low-cost game that people enjoy than to have succumbed to feature creep! Sequels and patches are in the works, but why fix something that isn’t actually broken? It’s still getting the hits…
2. Didn’t cover enough platforms. Chop Suey Kung Fu was originally designed for WAP. At the time, WAP was all the rage. It hadn’t been released yet, and we really were working in the dark. However, armed with a copy of the WML spec and a Nokia WAP emulator, we designed something that could easily be done with our toolkit on the WAP platform. Unfortunately, WAP failed to take off, particularly in the US. Instead, most wireless users are still on HDML, which is basically the same, but without graphics. HDML also uses a different browser than Nokia. As a result, our first encounter with US carriers was a bit of a shock – all our graphics were gone, and we had to reformat for the HDML browser. In retrospect, we should have considered HDML much more seriously, and designed the game to have ASCII graphics.
The move to Web and TV was also less well organised than it might have been. We’d talked about doing versions for these platforms, and we knew that the underlying engine would cope with multiple platforms, but we didn’t develop them in parallel. Instead, we did the wireless versions, and then started on the rest. Our first error was immediately obvious: we’d commissioned WAP graphics, but we hadn’t commissioned colour graphics at the same time. We had to track down the freelancer who’d done the first set, and persuade him to produce more. It’s a beginner’s mistake, and one we’re not likely to repeat!
3. Localization. One thing we didn’t anticipate was the degree of localization that would be required. When Chop Suey was written, WAP was in its infancy (and arguably still is). We were planning on a cheap throw-away game that would get us in with American and British phone carriers. This year, Chop Suey is being translated into every major European language, and we’re having to look further afield as well. In retrospect, we should have coded to allow for multiple languages, but somehow, it just didn’t seem worth it at the time.
We also found ourselves faced with a mountain of customization. Every carrier has their own style, and wants the content heavily modified. Again, if we’d known this at the time, we’d have written it differently. Instead, we’re stuck with more of a maintenance and configuration problem than we’d like, but hardly an insurmountable one.
4. Collision with commercial reality. Chop Suey Kung Fu has been a great hit with the players. Despite all its limitations, they love it. But it doesn’t yet tell the commercial story we’d hoped for. It still has to see a truly convergent implementation. Telcos each want their own server, as do the TV companies. Instead of the global combat we were after, with any player on any device being able to play anyone else, it has fragmented into dozens of small games, where AT&T customers play AT&T customers, Sprint customers play Sprint customers, and so on. Convergence goes down well at shows and exhibitions, and everyone is keen to buy a convergent game, but nobody’s putting them out in the marketplace.
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