Postmortem: The Games Kitchen's Wireless Pets

So what most users will be faced with are lists of text links, and indeed only a very small window onto the list (four options visible at a time at most). There's not even anything like drop-down menus which are typical in the Windows interface. Therefore, a significant issue is designing a simple user interface in which the user won't get lost, but which still offers a good number of choices to the user.

Wireless Pets achieved this fairly successfully; the reason we know this is that not one of the over 350,000 players has complained about the interface. If it doesn’t get in the way, it must be OK. Also, there are over 60 ways to interact with the pet, giving the user plenty of flexibility.

The simple interface hides a relatively deep game. Like games such as Creatures, Wireless Pets is surprisingly complex, although most of this complexity is hidden and the game seems simple to the user. The pets have many hidden statistics and variables, as do the food, drink and play objects, and each object has a different effect on each of the 6 pets. Having this end of the game running on the server meant that it could be as complex as we wanted it to be without worrying about device limitations, so the choices the user makes can have interesting and complex effects. For example, pets may get any one of a number of illnesses if their health variable gets low; and incidentally, there's no way for the user to directly affect the heath variable.

SMS is an even more limited technology. Text messages are sent to and from the user and server; just ASCII text, nothing else, and with a limit of 160 characters. Try designing a game for that! Thankfully, we weren't trying to replicate the WAP gaming experience for SMS - the WAP version has more than 60 different ways to interact with the pet, and it is impossible to let the user know what 60 options they have in only 160 characters of instructions.

Therefore, the interface for SMS game is very limited, as it has to be It is much more like the Tamagotchi games than the WAP version is, having only 3 real options (feed, play and clean). Again, though, this did not mean that the pets were as simple as that, although they were less complex than those found in the WAP version.

2. Personality. It may seem odd to talk about personality in media which can have 70x40 black and white graphics (WAP) or 160 characters of ASCII text (SMS), but this is what we recognised we had to do. The user must feel some sort of emotional attachment to the pet, otherwise it's entirely meaningless.

Before we did any game art, all of the characters were designed on paper then as full colour vector graphics. This was extremely useful for marketing support materials. All of the pets were designed so that they would reduce down well to 40 pixels in height.

Since the game graphics are so small, we knew we had to do more to convey personality, and we did this by having the pet write a diary each night. It's worth pointing out at this point that the game is 'always on'; the user links up (WAP) or sends a message (SMS) to interact, but if they don't see their pet for a few days it will get hungry, bored and very lonely. At midnight on the server, the game does a daily update, which includes changing some of the pet's variables and also writing a new, three sentence diary. The sentences are selected from a database based on the pet's variables and the priority of individual pets (for example, the dog is more worried about the amount of exercise it's getting than the ghost is). Diary entries are not as simple as 'I feel hungry'; they convey personality. Sample diary entries for feeling hungry are:

The SMS game was a good bit trickier to try and get an emotional attachment due to the limitations. We again used diary entries, though these had to be short due to the 160 character limit, so only one entry was 'written' by the pet. Although we couldn't use graphics, we did use smileys to give a visual representation of how the pet was feeling. A typical update message would look like this:

Which at 143 characters (including spaces and hard-carriage returns) is at the maximum we could use, since although the technical limitation is 160 characters, most languages are 10-20 percent lengthier than English.

3. Innovation. As I said at the beginning, we didn't know quite what UNITY or indeed WAP itself could manage. We made quite a number of technical innovations which would be taken for granted on other platforms, even relatively simple ones such as Game Boy.

Many of these features are standard now in UNITY and on other WAP platforms, but at the time were ground-breaking. All of these innovations, although all except animation are transparent to the user, combined to make an envelope pushing game.

4. Mass Appeal. One of the features of WAP and particularly SMS is the broad market for the devices. Every mobile phone in Europe sold in the last five years or so has had SMS capability, and inter-operator SMS isn't a problem in Europe as has been in the US. Over 24 billion SMS messages are sent each month, despite its lack of popularity in the US. Almost every phone now sold in Western Europe has WAP capabilities, although usage isn't nearly as high as it is for SMS.

Basically, these are mass market media, and in a way that the games industry never gets close to. Around 60 percent of the population (in the UK, and this probably hold true for most of Western Europe) has devices that can play these games, and the games are marketed by network operators, who really do market the games to everyone.

This means that games for WAP and SMS will be marketed at many non-gamers. They are unlikely to be enthused by many typical gaming genres, such as sci-fi and fantasy. The games will also be played by many non-gamers, who are unused to gaming conventions, even really simple ones ("Why didn't the game start from where I left off? I have to press 'save'? Why? Who decided that?"). Another factor worth considering is that most gamers will have dedicated games machines, be they console or PC, and so will likely be uninterested in a gaming platform featuring a 70x40 black and white screen.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons Wireless Pets has become so popular is its appeal to non-gamers. The subject matter is based firmly in the real world, the objectives are obvious and not goal oriented, everyone knows what a dog is and that it was to be fed and played with, and the pets look cute as buttons. People are very familiar with the concept of animals with human features and personalities, and of course Tamagotchi and Pokemon took the world by storm, appealing to a market that games hadn't reached before.

The simplicity of the user interface also helped significantly in this respect. There are no hard controls to learn. Despite the number of variables and complexity of interactions, most of this was hidden from the user, or presented to them in a way anyone could understand (for example, through the diary entries). The game also features a level of resource management; users have a weekly allowance to spend on food, toys and medicine, but again this is a concept not foreign to anyone.

5. Platform. Despite its flaws and limitations, particularly at the start of the project, UNITY is a good platform for WAP and SMS. It took away a number of tasks which would otherwise have been very difficult and time consuming to write, such as user identification, login, localisation and data management. Without UNITY to handle this, the game would easily have taken twice as long to write.

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