Disclaimer

This post was written from my personal perspective as a crypto founder. Nothing should be construed as financial advice. This post and our products are not intended for U.S. audiences. この投稿の日本語版については、ここをクリックしてください。

TL;DR

Upon wrapping up the remaining TGE-related work, our team will be 100% focused on improving Farm Frens for its Season 2 relaunch on LINE in Q2 2025. In the meantime, Farm Frens’ Telegram version will fully convert into a Web2 game, and we will not be supporting it with updates until further notice.

Because many of our Frens are not familiar with the game development process, we wanted to publish this blog post to shed some light on several topics:

• Why game development is hard

• Why we need downtime to significantly improve the game

• What were players’ major pain points with Telegram’s Season 1

• How we will solve these for LINE’s Season 2

Rough Waters: Why Games Take Time

Unlike other forms of media, games are notorious for taking a lot more time and resources to launch:

The best explanation why that I’ve seen was shared in this long Tweet thread by Daniel Cook, famous indie game designer whose studio Spry Fox was acquired by Netflix:

The joke goes: An expert game designer is 20x more effective than a newbie. They are correct 20% of the time instead of 1%. Why are game designers wrong 80% of the time? Sometimes they are wrong by a little. Sometimes by a lot. Is it poor planning? Are they morons? An expert painter does not produce a completely broken picture 80% of the time. Why is this so hard?

I lay a lot of blame on the much larger gap between authoring a thing, experiencing the thing and revising. Many types of media (like drawing or painting) allow for real-time 'self-playtesting' with the author as the playtester. Game design does not.

When I draw, I am constantly engaged in a tight real-time iteration loop of authoring marks, viewing the marks, reacting to the experience as a viewer and adjusting the next steps. There are 1000s (often tens of 1000s) of feedback iterations. Same goes for writing. There are larger editing passes that occur at lower frequencies, but even within those passes, I'm in a real-time create-experience-revise loop. The first draft is really the 5000th draft of the 'self-playtesting' process.

Now, when writing and drawing, I can't predict exactly how someone-who-is-not-me will react. Death of the Author and all that. But an experienced artist and writer can often get within the ballpark for a familiar target audience. Sad scenes are sad. Happy pictures are happy.

Contrast that with games. Some issues where the create-experience-revise loop breaks down:

1. Much longer iteration times. If I'm lucky it takes minutes to make localized changes and test them out. More typically it takes longer.

2. Due to interdependencies some changes can't be fully experienced by the player until months later when all systems are fully in place. I just worked on a game where it took 1.5 years before we were able to test the basic flow and balance. This is common. Imagine having to paint a picture blind and wait a year before you can look at it and see if you painted it correctly.

3. Game developers often are corrupted playtesters. Many games involve mastery and knowledge. The designer, due to knowing what they know, becomes blind to issues new players will face. Empathy only goes so far, even when designers roleplay the 'new player'.

4. Other systems (social systems, emergent complexity, proc gen, randomness, exponentials) are just hard to mentally visualize. We can plan them out, but the experience of playing them is often (deliberately) a surprise.

5. There is no accurate 'self-playtesting' for these systems. A game [designer] has limited ability [to] 'play the game in their head' and so real (slow) playtesting is required.

[…] So unlike writing or painting, the meta of game design is painstakingly building a process where you can iterate as quickly as possible, while making as few changes as possible, while still enabling big change to be feasible late in the process.

Keep in mind that Daniel, the author of the above excerpt, is primarily known for designing boxed product, not live service games. In other words, after shipping his games, Daniel’s studio Spry Fox is not expected to constantly continue updating the game at a rapid cadence into perpetuity.

For live service games like Farm Frens (or other titles that our Amihan team has worked on previously such as League of Legends and MapleStory), the baseline requirement to continuously satisfy hungry players’ voracious appetite for content is several orders of magnitude more difficult to upkeep.

Because of this, launching and supporting a live service game can be likened to building and sailing a cruise ship. The more time and money that is invested into upgrading the ship while its docked, the more onboard activities it can provide while at sea. Though it’s still possible for the crew to improvise new events when the ship is sailing, ultimately whatever entertainment provided onboard is constrained by the preparations that were made in advance while the boat was harbored at port. For example, it is possible to offer swimming pools, hot tubs, and water slides as cruise activities only after the plumbing for all this infrastructure is built first. This analogy is important to internalize as I will be referring to it throughout the length of this post.

Pulling into Port

In May 2024, our team began designing Farm Frens after hearing about the early successes of Catizen on Telegram. In record time, we hustled to launch the MVP (minimum viable product) version of our game after only four months in development. (To give you a comparable benchmark, Scopely spent seven years to ship Monopoly GO!, which then became the fastest mobile game ever to gross $3 billion.) To depict this visually, we only gave ourselves enough time to launch the smallest ship that could still be seaworthy:

When we launched Farm Frens, we knew it was an incomplete game experience in many various ways. However, per Daniel’s quoted excerpt in the previous section, as game developers we desperately sought player feedback and market validation for our early prototype. We wanted to know whether this project was worth our team continuing to invest time and resources in expanding, or if we were too blindsided by our own bias as creators: would our baby float or sink?

Upon receiving the incredible outpouring of excitement and support from our early community of Frens, we knew that we had something special on our hands. However, with our game now live and no longer anchored at port, our crew had to put all hands on deck to keep our customers happy.

In the beginning, we did not even have the luxury to entertain new feature development because we had so many bugs and technical issues to resolve. There’s a huge difference between what we as a small team of twenty can QA and catch internally versus what happens when thousands of players rush onboard and touch everything. Even keeping the game afloat amidst all this load took a lot of effort in the first month as our backend team worked around the clock to scale our servers as fast as players were pouring in.

Eventually we were able to stabilize the build, and started rolling out new features as fast as we could design and develop them. Let’s take a quick look back at what we shipped and when to keep our Frens happy:

• 9/16: Farm Frens Telegram launch

• 10/14: Yield Field

• 10/24: Hamato visitor

• 11/6: “Chili Weather” event

• 11/13: Gronk visitor

• 12/5: “Winging It!” event

• 12/21-1/5: Annual studio winter break

• 1/29: Multiplayer Pranks

• 2/3: Season 2 development starts

However, because our game was already out at sea as a live service with daily active players, our team was really handicapped with what we could do to improve the game. Making major overhauls to the product’s core engine or economy would likely crash or sink the service, so we instead had to limit ourselves to less intrusive updates like the visitor and event systems. Of course, we also had to continue addressing customer support requests throughout our live service, and each one we received would dampen our team’s shipping speed.

Gradually over time as we collected more quantitative data and qualitative feedback from players, we realized that the common pain points players kept expressing could not be solved by our team with just a minor update or two. Because of this, we decided to reformulate a new strategic plan for Farm Frens: to stop treading water in Telegram’s stormy seas, and instead return to harbor and redouble our efforts for LINE’s new blue ocean.

Getting Shipshape for Season 2

One of the core values of our company Amihan is “player devoted.” Inherited from our prior experience at other player-first studios like Riot Games, our team is dedicated to hyper-serving the next generation of players. Because of this, our future feature roadmap for Farm Frens is rooted in solving the most important problems current and potential new players may have with our game.

From all the conversations we have had with our Frens, here is a summary list of the key issues we need to improve for Season 2:

• More interactivity

• More player choice

• More progression

• More social

More interactivity

When watching newbies play Farm Frens for the first time, we commonly observe many players trying to tap different areas of the farm (e.g., characters, land, buildings), but then getting frustrated when they are unable to interact with most things on screen.

Our original design choice here was intentional because, at the time that we launched Farm Frens on Telegram, the most successful projects to date included Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen—all of whom had extremely basic interactivity. We did not know if the Telegram audience, which appeared to be a non-gaming or casual gaming base, would easily understand a game with a lot of interactive touchpoints, so we decided to keep our game’s MVP more on the minimally idle side.

However, after launching, many of our players told us that they loved our game’s art and character design so much that they wanted to be able to affect more things to happen on the farm directly themselves. Because of this, for Season 2 we’ll be adding a lot more fun ways for players to interact with our game: both within the farming simulation and in the surrounding UI interface.

More choice

By adding more interactive touchpoints for the player to the game, we also can enable players to have more agency and choice in making decisions for how they want to improve their farm. During Season 1, we saw a lot of players backwards engineering our game’s data configurations to try and theorycraft how best to optimize output:

What if we could evolve this even further for Season 2 by giving players additional control over customizing specific characters and crops on their farm? We have a lot of fun short-term and long-term ideas for this design space, but here’s an early teaser at one new system we will be introducing for next season:

More progression

We know many of our most avid players, especially those that monetized to accelerate progress, reached the end game of Farm Frens quickly and found themselves left with not much else to do. This was definitely one of the highest priority issues that our team wanted to fix, but unfortunately the state of the game map’s code base was not robust enough to support easy incremental updates without severely impacting stability and balance.

For Season 2 and beyond, we definitely are already planning to add deeper progression systems so players can continually find new content to upgrade and collect, no matter how much they play or spend. We are also developing a new system that should make the end game repeatably fun, even for our most hardcore farmers!

More social

Last but definitely not least, we want Farm Frens to spread like wildfire when we release Season 2 on LINE. For most of Season 1, Farm Frens was a mostly single player experience (until we released Pranks about a month ago). Despite this, our game still spread rapidly to become a top ranked mini-app on Telegram for several months in a row.

We think and know we can do better, and we want to double down on finding more ways our Frens can play, laugh, and have fun together with their loved ones. My personal favorite highlight from the various offline events we held in East Asia is shown below, when a handful of Farm Frens players, who arriving as strangers, later huddled together to exchange friend requests and become in-game and Telegram Frens. This one moment inspired me so deeply that I knew as a team we had to build more features to make magic like this happen more often.

Setting Sail for LINE’s Blue Ocean

If you take nothing else from this post, at least remember this: Farm Frens’ Season 2 on LINE will launch in Q2 2025 with…

• MORE things to do

• MORE things to decide

• MORE things to upgrade & collect

• MORE things to share

And that’s just the beginning.

When we launched the first season of Farm Frens on Telegram, our crew did our best to keep our early prototype boat afloat and our Frens onboard happy. However, there is only so much we could do while out at sea in rough waters away from harbor.

Now that we have docked at port, we’re anchoring our service temporarily with no updates in order to make major improvements to our game’s core engine, economy, and feature set. All of these preparations and upgrades are needed in order to evolve our floatation device into an adventure-ready vessel when it's time to set sail once again for LINE's bluer oceans.

In the meantime, dear Frens, we will continue to keep you updated on our progress, and thank you for your continued support and patience!