other story content was a matter of days. We built as much as content as we could in advance, but we were working right up until the final hours of the MILE to keep up with the audience.
Did anything about the MILE go in a direction you didn’t expect? So many things! We didn’t know what to expect from the audience, but like I mentioned before, seeing the community rally to keep all the survivors alive was awesome. Of course, survival is never easy in The Walking Dead, so we still lost plenty of survivors along the way. At one point it looked like the entire cast of main characters would be wiped out and all would be lost. But in the final days, a few key decisions saved the last few survivors. That was thrilling.
monitored user activity for anomalies and whenever it seemed like someone was exploiting a feature, fixes and updates were made.
Was there a limit to what someone could feasibly earn then, or could people with more time to invest be more influential than others? There were some limits placed on how much IP could be earned through different activities, but the design was meant to reward users who wanted to see, play, and experience everything Last Mile had to offer. We had some power users who had outsize influence in some bids, but it was impossible for any single user to tilt the whole MILE in their favor.
How did you make sure user tasks and mini-games were fun, and didn’t end up just feeling like daily busy work between the streams with Yvette Nicole Brown and Felicia Day?
We ran the first month of the season, the Prologue, as a “Beta Access” period in order to iron out bugs and identify which activities were the most fun and engaging for the audience to play. Gathering that feedback helped us make adjustments to maximize the fun. We revised everything from the bidding interface to mini-games and ta e travel activities, tweaking the experience all the way up through the finale. Since this is one of the first MILEs, we took took every opportunity to learn from the audience.
rou
How did you prevent cheating to gain extra “Influence Points”? Our p
ow d “Inf
Our partners at Genvid would know more about this, but them the minigames and Influence Point system were designed to reward engagement in a way that would make cheating extremely difficult, if not impossible. The team regularly
to w m 42 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2023
How do you retain your users when doing an online event like this? What motivators are in place to come back? Are they game design based? Narrative based? — Both? Both. The story had to be compelling, the characters had to be relatable, the game design had to be fun, the bids and user interface had to be accessible. Any confusion or disruption to the experience that bothered one user would inevitably bother thousands more. That made constant tweaking and tuning a necessity, so that as the months continued on, the experience got better and better, rather than just repeating any early mistakes.
Are there plans for a second season? We’ll see! This may have been the Last Mile for Prosper Landing, but it’s definitely not the last MILE. Genvid is pioneering this new form of storytelling and we’d love to tell more stories with them, in the world of The Walking Dead and beyond.
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