How to make people play our game again and again?

Previously, some different games was discussed because we are still discussing what to do about our own game, including an complete rewrite of the game’s design document and other related information, and since this week most of our own game’s design is ironed out we’ll starting to discuss our own game.

Originally, our game is featured in a fantasy setting where 2 players need to be teamed up in order to defeat a huge boss. However, in our discussion regarding the implementation of the idea, we found out a problem: No matter how we make the boss fight, there ought to be repetitions, such like climbing on the boss’s back while the boss tries to shake your character down, how the boss attacks and how the player will dodge the attack. Even though we can spice up the boss fight by giving the bosses different sets of attacks or completely different bosses, the results would be the same – The player would quickly exhaust all the alternative patterns and bosses and will get bored pretty soon.

To cater to this problem, we have once discussed the possibility to make the game extremely hard (not unlike one of the platformer above), however even we make the gameplay fair through the feedbacks and controls, it’s still not enough to not make the player feel frustrated. So we scrapped the entire idea.

We think the lack of the replay value is cause by the lack of alternative strategies and randomness, so we ultimately remade the game into something entirely different – Instead of two players fighting a boss, now we have 2 players fighting each other in an arena with the same amount of resources – each player get 3 bullets and have only 1 HP. The arena is quite big so there are lot of space for alternative strategies, also because the opponent is a human now instead of an AI or preset pattern, there are more fun in outwitting a fellow player.

Now, the problem comes to how to actually make it so the process itself would be fun, we’re thinking of a very fast-paced gameplay that will make the player replay again and again in a relatively short time. The match itself will be about 3 to 5 minutes long, and give the player incentive to play the game again and again, using different ways but under the same goal.

Now this is one problem solved. The other problem, would be how to make this gameplay itself more interesting so the player will want to play the game again and again.