Everdale: Challenges in creating a new game genre & lessons in game publishing

City building and management games are quite a popular genre, especially in mobile games. However when you take out all of the games that involve warfare, army and combat it ends up being quite a niche genre. The appeal is there for a lot of the players, evident by the success of games such as Cities: Skylines, SimCity or countless Tycoon games but for some reason developers tend to stick to the military strategy sub-genre and not explore alternatives. Up until Supercell came along with Everdale – a co-operative city building game that is player-vs-environemnt (PvE). The game was officially cancelled in October 2022, but recently Supercell announced they found a new home for the game with Metacore.

I loved Everdale, and in celebration of this wonderful news I wanted to do an analysis and review of the game, it’s development process, the reasons behind it’s cancellation, and my view on the future of Everdale.

Everdale Review: Pioneering a New Game Genre, and Doing it So Well

Game Design

Everdale is (not “was” anymore!) a Village building game at it’s core. You build and improve your village, using your villagers, and eventually join a valley to work together as a community on bigger projects and goals. When it first came out, the biggest unique factor of the game was that it was not a PvP game – that was such a breath of fresh air in the industry that was rapidly churning out cutting edge, competitive action games. Personally I enjoy city building games very much, so just the idea of having a complex city building game that is co-op was incredibly original and exciting.

The game design for city building games usually involve some aspect of “construction time”; building a new building, upgrading it etc. takes time. Generally measured in minutes in the beginning, going into hours and then days as you progress. This of course creates a big question for players: “what am I going to do while I wait for this?” That is the balance between active vs. passive play, and Everdale nailed this active-passive gameplay balance very well. You had some resources that you could not automate the gathering of, and they spawned randomly. So in your active playtime you actually had a fun loop of ordering your villagers around to gather berries or mushrooms, but also can progress towards longer term goals.

In terms of art and concept design, it was the usual cartoonish style of Supercell that most people know and love, but the tone of the game was also unique in that there was no reference to aggression in any shape or form. Not even a tongue-in-cheek “I am the best” kind of approach some characters in Brawlstars have, for example. Every villager, NPC, game message is positive and wholesome; even the in-game events were about helping a person prepare a feast for the Valley or helping a beached whale get back into the sea! I can see how this wholesome aspect is not something everybody is looking for, but it was so refreshing to me as a player.

The design of Everdale had the goal of community and co-operation, and every design choice aligned itself so well to this while not compromising on the core rules of the genre.

Game Mechanics

The game mechanics centered around having your villagers do various tasks to build and improve your village. There are the basic blocks of resource gathering, construction and research, and you assign your villagers to do these jobs.

The real difference to this is the Valley aspect in Everdale. Up to 10 players join a Valley, and work together to improve the it. This adds a second layer for the city-building aspect, and involves multiple players working together on them. Good leaders and guidance can bring together all the players to achieve the same goals, and it was something that had not been implemented this way in any game. Usually, city building games have Guilds or Clans but they end up being used for players to support other players in time of need, rather than a coherent goal for everybody.

What makes the Valley even better was that it requires effort from everybody to build something. Everdale is not a game where a single player can carry an entire Valley and finish all the buildings, trade tasks, events, etc. alone. That is a slippery slope which quickly devolves into a single person having multiple accounts (and tons of money investment), eliminating the community aspect altogether. The difficulty of the goals for a Valley was perfectly balanced for ten people to work together (emphasis on ten people).

Though the rewards of your investment as an individual player, was not so perfect. Which brings me to the next section.

Well if it was so great, why didn’t it work out?

In my view, it all was down to the gameplay balance & tweaking some numbers here and there for Everdale to be a huge success. However, I want to note something before getting into the details. My thoughts below are by no means “mistakes” that could have been avoided (as opposed to, for example, the Autochess genre). When you are a pioneer trying to create a new game genre, you will run into challenges that noone has ever encountered before and sometimes fail to overcome those challenges. It can even happen to Supercell as we saw! This is a retrospective view on trying to understand what those challenges were, to inform future games in this new frontier.

With this disclaimer out of the way, let me expand on the number-tweaking challenge that I mentioned. First of all, from my personal experience as a player, the numbers of the progression was not a smooth curve at all. It felt more like a very steep hill from the mid-game onwards, and it was in every progression path – research times, build times, and especially the Valley.

The Valley is a great concept, but it relies on one thing that is a very, very difficult thing to achieve: everybody in the valley to be equally dedicated to the game. This does not mean every player needs to spend 8+ hours per day actively; it means if someone is only spending 2 hours, other players will have difficulty if they want to play and progress more than that. The point I made about how noone can carry an entire Valley alone is true for the opposite, and you could only progress as fast as your least dedicated player. Kicking a player from the Valley does not feel in line with the wholesome vibes of the game either. This also meant the progression wall in the Valley felt even more unsurmountable.

The second point about the number balancing was the segue I used for this section: the rewards are pretty meaningless compared to the effort and time invested in achieving them. It actually felt punishing to send your villager to an event in the Valley for the few research points you might get, as opposed to just keeping him in your Library to do actual research. This specific example is tied to the first challenge as well; why would I spend my resources at a Valley event if I have no hope of finishing it and getting completion rewards?

You can rightfully say “that is the entire point of having a Beta test”; but thinking more strategically you need two things in the Beta test to be able to iterate and solve these issues.

• Engaged players to actually experience the progression curves.
• An indicator from players that should be as quick as possible.

In Everdale, players suffered silently for hours / days because of how the curves were designed in the first place. Say, if an upgrade took too long, you would have to wait however long it took, for many players to reach that level, until you can spot that issue in data. Until you reach that critical threshold of players, weeks likely have passed with no balancing at all, and in turn dwindling player numbers.

In my personal experience again, the biggest pain point that demonstrates all of these issues very well was a single Valley building: the Dye Workshop. The production times were too long, the resources it needs were too scarce, and for complex items it used it’s own products, which unnecessarily lengthened wait times. I personally did not quit the game because of the Dye Workshop, but I would not be surprised if that was the churn point for many players.

Could-have, should-have: Ideas to solve these issues with 20/20 Hindsight

If you have read my previous posts, you know that I dislike just pointing out problems and would like to offer solutions. In Everdale’s case these are not applicable anymore, but I wanted to propose a couple of ways as thought experiments to solve these issues. Maybe they would have helped, or maybe not – we will never know. But in any case, here are my ideas as a player and someone who likes breaking down game mechanics from the perspective of a data scientist.

• Valley crafters (like bakery, toy shop, and most importantly the Dye Workshop) should not have a queue system, at least in the Beta. The queue system requires a lot of coordination from players, and Betas usually do not have enough players that can form such highly coordinated teams. I am not saying it shouldn’t be there at all, but in Beta it would have lead to faster iterations and catching the progression bottlenecks quicker.
• The rewards should have been much higher for all the traders and Valley events. The path Supercell usually takes is treat Beta as almost a soft launch, and they did not want to break the economy of the game or having to resort to progression resets. However, as this is a PvE game, there isn’t a balance between players to be mindful of – so they could have went with much higher rewards to observe the progression challenges players face. Admittedly, this may have lead to people getting to the end of the progression quickly and quitting. However I would argue that instead, people were frustrated with the progression and quit without experiencing most of the mid-end game anyway.

The Future of Everdale: Supercell’s Genius Idea

Now I want to mention the main spark that lead to me writing this post. As I mentioned in the introduction, Supercell recently announced that they are finding a new home for Everdale, with Metacore. They are known as the developers of Merge Mansion, though you might not have heard of them and that is ok (I encourage you to check out their website for their reasoning behind this).

I think this is a brilliant move by Supercell. As mentioned above, the game “failed” but it was not due to being a badly designed game; it just couldn’t overcome the unforeseen challenges of a brand new genre. I don’t and likely will never know neither the discussions behind closed doors, nor if there is a merger&acquisition plan in the future for Supercell and Metacore. However, re-homing a well designed game is a low-risk, high-reward idea for Supercell, and at worst a mid-risk decision for Metacore considering how well received Everdale was.

I could write an entire post on the great approach Supercell has for development, but this post is about Everdale so maybe another time. I just want to finish this post by saying how excited I am for the chance to play Everdale again; a wonderful game that deserves a second chance in development.

Kudos Supercell, and good luck Metacore!