This article describes game loops and mechanics of Everdale (Google Play) which was soft launched by Supercell earlier this year. I wrote this article when the game’s version was 8.127.
As a game designer, I may use some terms or brush about mechanics casually that might not be too familiar for non-GDs, so please be not afraid in sharing any questions or feedback you might have. Trigger warning: Wall of text!
About the Game
Everdale is a farming simulation game for mobile phones, with the player’s goals being typical for its genre: develop a village by managing time, resources, and workers.
Initially, everything in the game seems quite casual and reminds of Hay Day with a touch of Sid Meier’s Civilization (due to the simplified research tree). You’ll learn quickly that every job takes time and occupies a villager, so you won’t be able to simply activate the production in each and every building like in Hay Day — you’ll have to choose wisely.
Soon after, you will unlock another game layer which expands its core loop — Valleys (usually called clans, guilds or brotherhoods in other games). These two layers cannot exist without each other.
Let’s map out the very basic village loop and its core mechanics.
Village Loop
We start on the edge of a forest where there’s a big cauldron (called village’s pantry), a field of pumpkins and the study building. During the tutorial, we’ll build our first house and choose our first villager. These four constructions introduce the mechanics that define the whole game.
Villagers (Workers)
Villagers drive the game. Each has their own house and a small selection of customization opportunities.
Almost any job needs a villager to be assigned. They behave quite autonomously: if a villager is set to construct anything, they will walk over to the storages and take the resources needed, or go to the pantry to eat soup, and if they find a prerequisite lacking, they’ll patiently wait for the supply and get back to work as soon as they find their needs met. If no one produces the needed resources or the worker finishes construction, idle time happens, and probably no good manager will like to see their workers idle. Hence why villager management is the key game activity which won’t give you a rest.
The game provides a lot of useful information to help you manage your village effectively:
The lower panel shows your workers’ occupancy state in order to quickly assess the situation and decide what to do. Tapping the panel will open a more detailed info on each villager, their job and progress, or, if applicable, the reasons why they stopped working. You may drag-n-drop the villager image from this panel onto any building in the village to assign them to another job.
Villagers consume food (soup) but only when they are assigned work in the village (not Valley) and this work doesn’t involve harvesting edible resources. The most effective way to supply your villagers with soup is to dedicate at least one to working at a pumpkin farm. If you happen to urgently need replenishment of your soup supply, then use your finger to make soup out of any edible resource you have:
All types of work are predicted in the game and it helps a lot with planning and management. You can see when any storage would be filled to maximum capacity, or when your villager will start lacking some resource, or with what effectiveness the construction is conducted (which means that your villager sometimes will stop working due to some shortage).
Any job has its own reminder, which you can toggle on in order to get push notifications when the game needs your management.
Everdale’s specific feature alteration is that you can’t skip any timers directly. However, you have access to a vast system of different boosters:
The main booster is called Nectar. It is produced over time in a special well, and may be purchased in the game shop. The Nectar charges a boost (maximum duration is 30 minutes) and, when activated, it boosts all work and movement speed by 300%. At any time you may pause the boost (you need it when some villager stops working, to not waste any nectar).
You also get more granular boosts that are called Potions. You can feed a potion to any villager to boost their movement and specific activity speed (for example, faster wood production, or faster farming). You cannot pause the potion effect though.
Potions are given as part of rewards, and later on you may craft them in the Valley.
Study and Construction
The village centre is the Study building. This feature resembles the casual Civilization research mechanics.
Here you’ll encounter a study tree and unlock it by completing different research. The player controls the order of research but in the end, you’ll still have to research everything.
How this works: Choose a research > assign a villager > wait. The progress may be boosted by Scrolls, which sometimes can be given as rewards, or purchased in the shop. 1 Scroll gives 1 point of the currently active research.
The Study building needs to be upgraded to unlock further areas of research. However, the upgrade is locked by the village level. To level up your village you need to build a certain amount of structures or their upgrades.
When the research is completed, the new progress possibility is unlocked. Usually that means a new building or an upgrade is now available.
The construction game flow looks like this:
Otto’s Orders
This daily event looks like a board with orders and helps the player to earn gold, scrolls for research, and later ingredients for the potions.
You will know this feature quite well if you played any farming simulator, though in Everdale the orders are updated only once per day. The order may be fulfilled at once if you have enough resources, or you may select it and fill the order cart little by little. Although keep in mind, if you already have one order running, you are not able to fulfil another one.
As soon as the player gets used to the main village loop, the next one opens up to them — the Valley, which uses the same loop but makes it deeper.
The Valleys
One Valley unites up to 10 villages on one map and unlocks multiple new buildings, new resources production and some new features.
Cooperation with Other Players
The moment you unlock Valleys, you become a member of one of them. The game just doesn’t give the opportunity to play outside the Valley as you can’t progress without its features.
The Valley has a chat, where you talk with other members and get notified about important Valley events. At any moment you may look at the member roster, and see their reputation rating (see it described further).
Top-3 players automatically become Elders and can lay claim to the leadership role (as in, launch the voting). They also can help the Leader with Valley management (start construction, research or events), but only a Leader may remove players or change Valley settings.
Valley Research
The research system is quite the same in the personal village. You’ve got the Great Library with a research tree from which the Elders or the Leader may choose one. Yet for progress of research, you’ll need to fulfil special Shipping tasks.
When this special order is completed, the player is rewarded with reputation points and books which go to the progress of the currently active research in the Library. For ensuring all members have enough time to fulfil some orders, individual players only have a certain amount of Shipping Tokens that are spent when accepting an order, and they are replenished over time. If a player can’t fulfil the order entirely at once, they may take it to the village and complete it gradually, as it is done with Otto’s orders. The entire feature resembles Hay Day’s Derby remarkably.
As with the village, you can upgrade the Great Library only with the next level of the Valley which is earned by constructing and upgrading Valley buildings.
Constructions and Upgrades
When the research is completed, the Leader or an Elder may start a new construction or upgrade project in the Valley. You can have only 3 active constructions at a time (and occasionally the Valley may decide to have only 1 or 2 constructions active in order to complete a project quicker).
Launching a construction is free, but the main part is notably resource-consuming. The overall feature is quite like trivial orders or shipments. You and other members take orders for gold and basic resources, get reputation for each, and when all orders are fulfilled — the construction is completed. Again, you will find the system being limited by Tokens that won’t let you complete too many orders at once.
Players may cancel an accepted order (for example, when they realize that they won’t be able to fulfil it quickly enough, or someone in the Valley chat says they may do it quicker). In that case the player forfeits all invested resources.
Valley Resources Gathering and Craft
You may gather different, unique resources in the Valley (for example, wheat, fish, cotton). The feature flow is always the same: Choose the “Farm” with the resource in need > Choose a villager to assign > The villager is occupied working the farm for a certain time > After time elapses, collect the resource and free up your villager.
Any number of villagers can work at one “farm” but there are limited slots for their villagers.
To craft Valley resources you’ll need your village resources as well as Valley ones. This craft won’t occupy any villager workforce, and the entire game mechanic resembles crafting in any other farming simulation game. The caveat is that there is only one shared queue for all Valley members, and you might have to wait for a long time depending on previous orders.
Guilds to Upgrade Your Villagers’ Skills
One of the key features that will help you to be effective in the game is the Guilds. They let your villager gain a permanent boost in the selected type of work and each type has its own Guild. For example, you can upgrade a woodcutter skill in the Woodcutting Guild, or a research skill in the Researchers’ Guild.
Guild training consumes gold and time of the selected villager. With this feature you’ll be able to see which villager suits better for the job: the interface will show you if one of the villagers has the needed skill to do the job faster. You may train a villager with any or even all skill types (if you have enough gold).
But one cannot simply train a villager. You’ll have to fulfil a list of requirements first:
- The villager must be trained in the selected skill (for example, collect X pieces of wood to unlock the Woodcutter’s skill upgrade);
- You must level up the Guild to unlock higher levels of skills (the Guild of level 1 cannot upgrade the skill to level 2);
- The player’s reputation level must let them upgrade the villagers skills to the selected level;
- The villager’s house defines the maximum level of the villager’s skills.
Reputation
Now that you know of the main Valley’s mechanics, you’ll be quick to understand what Reputation does.
Reputations points are awarded to the player when they complete various Valley’s orders:
- Shipments that help with research progress
- Orders for building construction and upgrades
It is an accumulative resource which is depicted as a scale with different rewards on its way. Those may be treasure chests with valuable resources (gold, gems, scrolls, etc) or different upgrades for the life in the Valley:
Thus the bigger the reputation is, the more things you can do in the Valley if you have enough resources.
Harbour and Ships
Valley ships help you to earn gold, reputation and books for Valley research.
There are three docks available to the players: two common (and free) and one elite (paid feature).
Free docks introduce ships from different trade partners. You may choose any of the ships to moor at the next time at the dock. Trading partners determine the type of the orders, their amount and the ship’s cooldown. For instance, you may choose a ship with only gold tasks if in need of the precious coin.
Each time you complete orders of ships, you progress on a relation track with this trade partner. Each new level grants greater bonuses: bigger order rewards.
The elite dock lets you summon an extra ship. Upon gem payment, you’ll get a ship with greater rewards, more time to fulfil the shipment, a bigger amount of orders and additionally increased relation points with this trade partner.
Temporary Events
Events are a frequent occurrence in the Valley:
- They appear once or twice a week
- Can be launched by the Leader or an Elder
- Typically has 2–3 stages
- Each stage has a time limit to complete (or else the event fails)
- Every participant has a limited amount of tokens for accepting event tasks (replenishing over time)
- When all stages are completed, the entire Valley is being rewarded
An event appears as some cute-looking construction in the Valley which is supposed to be upgraded at the event’s stages.
These stages are usually one of two types:
- Assign a villager to one of the tasks and wait till it is completed (that task may have a preferable skill which causes accelerated task completion when a matching skill-possessing villager is assigned)
- Completion of orders to gain gold, books or reputation
Rewards for the event completion vary: The most common prize is a pack of books for the Great Library research. But you may also get various boosts which are the same for all Valley members; for example, there might be a boost for faster wheat gathering, or a waiver on food consumption for the active boost duration.
The event appears as a randomized constructor which is assembled of different parts every time it kicks off: a visual part (currently, I’ve encountered 5 different visuals), a varying amount and one of the two types of stages, variants of tasks inside a stage, and a selection of rewards. As a result of this constructor you’d get familiar events yet still can’t predict which event will occur next time, with which stages, what rewards there will be or how to be prepared.
Monetization
The game gives the player tons of opportunities for spending a pleasantly small but also quite a considerable amount of money.
Let’s start with currency. You may spend real money when purchasing:
- Permanent bank offers with gems
- Special Offers
For the time being Everdale shows an offer of just one type. Initially, you’ll encounter a Starter Pack for $2. As you progress, you get similar offers every time you level up your village (hello, Clash of Clans). This bundle offers all main resources: gems, scrolls for research, gold and a pack of more common consumables such as Nectar and Potions.
All other spending opportunities just consume gems. You may spend gems for:
- The resources you lack to complete any order
- The elite ship in the Harbour
The rest is hidden in the Bank:
Every day the bank will greet you with 1–2 free resources lots and show updated offers in the other sections, for you to decide whether to buy cute decorations or a discounted pack of resources.
If you don’t mind spending many gems on customization and vanity, then you’ll be able to create a truly unique village:
Personal Notes
I’ve been playing Everdale from the moment they soft-launched this summer (thus been playing for about a month) and passed through some emotional stages and moments when I was about to drop the game.
But let’s start with the things that make the game great.
Good Stuff
- Low barrier of entry. Good tutorial, and a decently paced new mechanics progression helps the new player to quickly get the feel of the game.
- Powerful and sticky start. The timers are crisp, new mechanics are unlocked quickly, even the micro-management part makes you happy as it lets you stay in the game while waiting for other timers to complete.
- Fast intro of the social mechanics and reinvigorated motivation. Players quickly become part of something bigger and start feeling responsibility towards other players.
- The visuals and UX are of high quality; it just feels good to play the game, with the game world also being interesting to explore due to the attention to details (like tapping a boar to send it running).
- Tasteful bank and micro-expenses of gems, which entice towards a first payment conversion.
- Neat constructor for the regular Valley events that provide short-time goals and refreshing day-to-day content.
Things to Improve
Micro-management, no queues, frequent sessions
I love games that follow the rule of “Entering for 5 minutes — Stay for 1 hour”. That means it would be possible to achieve something meaningful in the game within a 5-minute gameplay, but you may as well find activities for an hour or more. As an example, in Match-3 games typically you may play just one level for a daily achievement and then are free to quit after 5 minutes, or you keep playing for as long as you have lives, or even have endless lives and stay as long as you like.
Everdale follows this rule…from time to time. You enter the game, check on your villagers, reassign them, spend resources to currently available orders and then you quit. Or I might stay and start collecting mushrooms and berries, or examine the orders to try and plan things ahead, or figure out how to assign your workers for the overnight period so that they don’t slack most of the time while being asleep. But usually, and unfortunately, you would enter for those 5 minutes, then quit only to return half an hour later. Rinse and repeat that for the whole day — a pretty exhaustive experience akin to a real job.
Moreover, let’s remember Hay Day and similar games where it’s pretty common to have 1–2 logins per day which will be enough to feel that you accomplish progression. It doesn’t really work like that with Everdale. You’ll be exposed to emotional pressure that if you don’t come back in an hour, your villagers will stop working and you won’t achieve anything effectively. And you can’t map out the working day for your village as there are no queues which by now is a common feature for farming simulations, where you would put together a 3-hour queue and are free to go.
You come to realize quite early that this game is going to be really time and session consuming, and for some people that’ll be one of the prime reasons to stop playing.
The Valleys, or two extremes
As written before, it’s impossible to play the game without being a member of the Valley. The only thing you can do after leaving one Valley community is searching for a new Valley.
As a result everything depends on your luck to enter a decent Valley or on your motivation to find a better one suiting your ambitions.
There are basically two extremes: a Valley might be rather passive and you’ll have to do the majority of tasks by yourself which will take significantly more time without other members’ help, or you end up joining a hyper-active Valley which has rules and plans for each member and will be quick to boot anyone who doesn’t play the game at high frequency.
Many players probably will leave the game at the first exposure of Valley life as searching for their optimal Valley resembles a Wheel of Luck, and you’ll need to invest a lot of effort and time into finding a playstyle-fitting and nice Valley.
In my case I managed to find a good Valley, but it has definitely changed throughout the month:
- At first, we all were enthusiastic newbies, so it wasn’t really too hard to keep the Valley active while everyone was progressing almost equally. However, we agreed on some initial rules at this stage with asking all members to contribute.
- Soon though we fell into the trap of overactivity, at which point one of the elders started to blame people who have been too slow in earning reputation even when they were still newbies. It was a bit lucky that this particular player didn’t win the leadership and the newly elected leader kicked him out.
- After that our Valley became more relaxed, as we went and unlocked Guilds but though we still were rather active it was hard to keep the same pace as in the humble beginnings, and there are no new mechanics on the horizon to keep curiosity up.
So the game, which is really time-consuming, becomes even more time-consuming with the appearance of the Valley. And the cheerful experience of being a part of an engaged community passes by really quickly when you start to feel that emotional pressure. The reason is pretty simple: When you are not active enough among 10 other players, it means that the entire Valley loses 10% of effectiveness, and that can be felt rather uncomfortably. I have to admit the last time I felt as much pressure in a game was indeed the Derby feature of Hay Day: I quit the game after just a couple of races, though there was no pressure projected at all in my Neighborhood. In Everdale this Derby-pace starts even earlier, it doesn’t cease to be pushy, and the pressure is on constantly.
To sum it up, I’d like to stress that despite my critical view above, Everdale still looks like an attractive game to me. I’ll follow its progress, hope the developers reflect on the current drawbacks and trust them to find elegant decisions (for example, the guys over at Deconstructor Of Fun suggested some great ways for further development).
