Is Lioden Getting TOO Complex?

NOTE: Lioden is a virtual pet game, you can learn more about it here.

Lioden is a virtual pet game featuring lions for people with sixteen years of age and up. Since this game is targeted for an older demographic compared to most virtual pet games, Lioden has the ability to add more mechanics to the game without

confusing a young audience. But over the years, Lioden has grown larger and larger in terms of content, this game has so many features that it takes

a great effort to understand it in its entirety. Virtual pet games typically never have a point where the game can be called finished, these games keep introducing new content endlessly. Lioden has had so much new content to it that the game has become massive. The following will explain Lioden’s content problem and theorize on it’s solutions.

How complex is Lioden?

Lioden currently features a complex lion genetic system which features over seventy-five eye colors, over two-hundred base colors, over ten thousand markings. The plethora of different markings which the lions are born with have made it difficult to introduce new types of lions since it takes Lioden’s artist forever to redraw them all on the new art. You can learn more about Lioden’s art challenges below:

To add on to this, there is currently over five thousand different apparel items for a lion to wear. Lioden also includes several mini games and a crafting mechanic which allows players to craft rare items from materials they collected in the game. If you thought it stops here, you were wrong, because Lioden also currently features twenty-two different currencies which each serve their own purposes.

Why is Complexity an issue?

Players have felt the consequences of this system because the large amount of content has

caused the website to have trouble loading pages and has even caused the website to crash

on multiple occasions. Not only does Lioden face performance issues because of it’s over abundance of content, but it also is forced to deal with a messy navigation page. The main navigation page has scared new players off due to it’s confusing and cluttered design. Even I, a player for two years, has trouble locating the correct pages I need. Design is easily an important aspect of games and websites, having too complex navigation seems inconvenient and requires much dedication to get used to. It intimidates new players and doesn’t bring new members to the site.

What can Lioden do?

Lioden, and other virtual pet sites have never acknowledged what they would do if the content they produced became too much to handle. Flight Rising has suffered a similar fate for the staff had introduced so much new apparel that it becomes difficult for artists to redraw it all. However, Flight Rising did handle their issue by hiring more artists, because of this I imagine Lioden would hire more artists or coders to fix performance issues. If money is an issue, then Lioden can hire volunteers, since they’ve done that in the past with forum moderators.

Lioden Marking Art Process

Conclusion

There isn’t one big solution to Lioden’s complexity problem, and it may be some time before they try to attempt to fix any until the problem snowballs into something bigger. But this problem will likely come back to haunt Lioden in the future. As someone who has played Lioden for a long while, I am interested to see how the Lioden staff handle this issue.