TL;DR
- Halfsies ran its Halloween weekend from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November, inside the normal daily puzzle.
- Pumpkins, poison, vampires and a ghost devil replaced the usual objects, some of them cut by lantern light.
- Two badges: Jack-O'-Lantern for 250 or more, Ghost Rider for doing it all three nights.
- Version 1.3.5 went live on the App Store and Google Play on 29 October, the day before the event.
- The cut and the scale did not change. Only what you see did.
Halfsies is my daily cutting game. Every day everyone gets the same three objects, you slice each one, and a scale shows how close you got to half by weight. For Halloween it changed for one weekend without turning into a different game. Here is what shipped in version 1.3.5.
Three nights, not a month
The event ran Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November. A daily game already has a rhythm, so the event sits inside it: three daily puzzles in a row, each with Halloween objects in place of the usual ones. Pumpkins, poison, vampires and a ghost devil went on the block.
A short window does two jobs. It gives a reason to open the game on a specific day, and it ends before it gets stale.
Change how it looks, keep how it plays
The cut and the scale stay exactly the same. What changes is what you see: some of the Halloween objects are cut by lantern light, where the screen is dark and you move a lantern to find the object before you cut it. The lantern is one of the levels on the public store pages.
Two badges with plain rules
- Jack-O'-Lantern Badge: score 250 or more on a Halloween night.
- Ghost Rider Badge: do it on all three nights.
One badge rewards a good night. The other rewards coming back. Both rules fit in one line, so a player knows what to aim for before the first cut.
Ship it to both stores before Friday
Halfsies only reached Google Play this autumn, so this was the first event on two stores. Version 1.3.5 went live on the App Store and Google Play on 29 October, the day before the event started. It also carried the iPhone sound fix I wrote about in why my iPhone game went silent after every ad: the silent switch silences the game and your own music keeps playing.
If you are planning an event for a daily game
- Keep it to a few days that already mean something, like a holiday weekend.
- Swap the content, not the rules. Players should not have to relearn the game for a weekend.
- Give badges one-line rules: one for doing well, one for coming back.
- Get the update approved on every store before the first day, not on it.
The ads were off the whole time. The $200 Meta test closed on 21 October, and diary #8 has the full numbers and what changed while the ads were paused. The day-by-day account is also on the Jeje Studios blog.