Lawn Mowing Simulator – Retrospective #5 – Percentage Cut Targets!

It’s time for the next instalment in our series of retrospectives looking at the design of features in Lawn Mowing Simulator. This time we’re looking at something that most of us will only have noticed in passing… but was actually built on an important design decision – Percentage Cut targets!

On every mowing contract you took in-game you were given a percentage of the grass in the level that you needed to have cut in order to complete that contract. Usually this was either 99.9% or 99.5%.

But why not 100%? Well, there were reasons – but what were they? Game Director, Rick Payne is here to tell us!

Q: If I hired somebody in real life to cut my grass, I’d probably be a bit annoyed to find the odd tuft here and there that was uncut. But the contracts in-game were slightly more lenient – how come?

Rick: It’s actually a simple answer. Having to find every blade of grass to cut in what could be over 1 million blades of grass on the bigger levels – even with ProView – was very time-consuming and having to run around for a while trying to find that last blade was killing player satisfaction.

So we changed the target percentage down slightly – and we also made it vary a little bit depending on the contract.

Q: How did you arrive at those slightly lower numbers? Was it a lot of playtesting to understand where the balance was between ‘thorough’ and ‘tedious’?

Rick: Hours and hours of playtesting the maps mainly. We settled on two numbers 99.9% and 99.5%, which were to be used on different sized locations.

For smaller locations 99.5% was the go-to, with 99.9% for our largest contracts. We went for those numbers to balance the larger and smaller spaces of what we felt would be “acceptable” to be left over – but still feel finished.

Contracts in LMS1 could range from 1000sqm to 5000sqm, so the amount of uncut grass that 1 per cent could represent was pretty huge.

In post-release updates we also change the values again – to be more lenient – based on community feedback.

Q: With the brand new grass technology for LMS2 the visual representation will be different – but I guess the ‘problem’ of 100% completion could still exist. It’s too early in development to say for sure, but do you expect a similar approach to find the right balance in the new game?

Rick: It will always be a ‘problem’ to be considered, yes. Some players feel the need to get every last blade (and I’m one of those types!) Meanwhile other players aren’t playing the game with that as their priority.

We’re working on an idea for a system that allows players to set their own requirements for much they need to cut in order to achieve completion on a contract. If you target a higher percentage of grass that needs to be cut, you can earn a little more money – but it will give players a degree of choice.

We’ll be revealing more details about gameplay once we get nearer to release and designs are playtested and finalised – but If there’s something from the original game you’d like us to talk about, let us know!

This is a taste of the kind of content you’ll find in the Skyhook Games Discord… Be sure to join for all the LMS1 Retrospectives as well as all the latest on Lawn Mowing Simulator 2. Click here to join!