One of the issues that arose while I was working on Pot Farm: Grass Roots (PFGR) was that our retention numbers weren’t as high as we would like. There were many factors that led to this, one being the lack of guidance and clear goals for the player after the First Time User Experience. The system of quests at that time was completely linear. You had to do one quest at a time and there was no way to look ahead at what you'd need to do in the future, or look back and see what you had done. This meant that there was a steady drop-off of players with every quest in the line. If a player was stuck on a quest, bored with it, or simply forgot about it, that was effectively the end of their interactions with quests. I audited every one of these linear quests to remove or adjust quests that were apparent blockers, but it quickly became clear that PFGR would need a new system to deliver quests to the player effectively.

I also wanted to develop a new type of live event. PFGR at that point had “Karma Contests” which were weekly contests where players could complete a set of repeatable actions for points that would place them on a leader-board. The higher they placed, the better their prizes were. However players were beginning to complain of fatigue with these contests, and often felt like they were being hopelessly outclassed by the top-tier players.

Both of these issues led to my development of the Quest 2.0 system. I designed the system and pitched it to the team. From there I lead a group of engineers and artists through the development and launch of the feature. There were a few core goals for this system:

First; to remove the linear nature of the current quest system and allow the player to have more than one active quest at once, as displayed by the center picture in the image above. This meant that players would unlock tutorial quests at the appropriate level to guide them through new features, and player progression wouldn’t be blocked by any single quest.

Second; to increase visibility on the quest actions and rewards. In the center image you can see that the player has clear indication, even in this “list” view, of their progress in the quest and the reward that they are working toward. If the player taps on any of the quests in the list they are taken to an info-window as displayed in the third image. There players are able to view more specific details of the quest step they are on, get hints on how to complete the quest from “Uncle Floyd”, and tab forward to the other steps in the quest to see what they need to do (and what they will gain) as they progress in the quest.

Third; to provide another live event system that was focused more on PvE than PvP. At the top of the center image is an example of a Limited Time Quest (LTQ). The tile is similar in base functionality to the regular quests, but with the addition of a timer and an overall progress tracker at the top. The player would have to race against the clock in order to complete each of the quests. The player would be given a slightly larger reward every few quests, with a Grand Prize waiting for them at the end. The LTQs allowed for players to “compete” in a challenge without having a top-tier prize denied to them by another player, like in the Karma contests.

The Quest 2.0 system was well-received by players. It has also increased monetization for PFGR while LTQs are active. It took a team of five people 3 months to finish development. It was a great experience both for the opportunity to design a feature from start to finish, and to gain experience leading a team.