Last year saw the official release of Pokémon UNITE — a lane-pushing game seemingly without lanes!

It takes the much beloved Pokémon IP and packages a 'MOBA' experience into something quick and digestible enough for a wide audience to enjoy on a casual basis.

Timi Studios aren't the first to try for very short match times, but I do think they're the first to succeed. Here's how they make it work.

A Window of Opportunity

A first thing to understand is that working with IP comes with both opportunities and challenges. There's already an audience for this setting and characters, and any new game has to fit their expectations.

In the case of Pokémon, the audience is...

• Likely to include younger players
• Relying on content that's family-friendly
• Using a portable device (the norm for Pokémon games)
• Likely to be unfamiliar with lane-pushing genre conventions

This introduces a number of constraints on the design... with the reward of a big, untapped audience if it succeeds!

The Countdown Begins

The first challenge will be around match duration.

Lane-pushing games are played in real-time with a team, and it's not healthy if players leave early or put down their device — leaving the rest of their team at a disadvantage.

As the audience is not necessarily familiar with the genre, we have to clearly communicate that matches will last a while.

It also helps if the matches are short, and better still if they're consistently short.

For comparison: most mobile lane-pushing games (including Mobile Legends, Honor of Kings, Wild Rift) have settled on an average 15 minute match duration, and this has high variance: a match could last anywhere from 13-19 minutes.

With variance, there's an added risk that players gamble on getting a short match, and have to quit early — frustrating them and everyone else.

So, what can we do to bring the match duration towards a range where Pokémon fans find it accessible?

Leave it to the numbers

One solution which I've seen attempted in many lane-pushing games is adding a match timer. Set the timer to 20 minutes, and you're guaranteed a consistent, predictable match duration! Sounds great, right?

Well... it's not so easy. I remember a time when I was working on my old game Rise of Winterchill, and matches were dragging out — often to more than 50 minutes.

My solution at the time was adding a "kill count" victory condition, where one team having 30 kills would result in victory. The problem is that when a game has lanes, players will see the narrative for victory to be pushing those lanes all the way into the enemy base.

It took one match where I was outside my opponents' base with a big wave built up ready to push... and then somebody got the 30th kill and the game faded to black. That showed me that a "kill count" victory was not the way to go.

The lesson was that when the narrative victory and actual victory conditions are different, it creates moments of anti-climax.

Arena of Fate is a lane-pushing game which suffered terribly from this problem. It had a 20 minute match timer which guaranteed its match duration: that's great! But the timing would routinely end games in unsatisfying ways.

The victor was decided by points, and with 4+ different ways to earn points: the team with the advantage would rarely lose it. Simply continuing to "play well" was enough to secure a win while letting the clock run down.

Despite Arena of Fate having lanes and towers, there was little meaning to pushing them beyond the points awarded.

Borrowing Baskets

This is where Pokémon UNITE does something clever. A match timer set to 10 minutes would definitely meet the needs of its audience, ensuring that the match duration is short, consistent, and well-communicated.

So that's what they do. And then, the game designers picked pseudolanes to support that narrative.

What I mean by that is: the game swaps out the usual 'lanes' for 'something with similar properties' — I call this a pseudolane.

(I'll reference these more later. Here's an Introduction to Pseudolanes if you're curious.)

UNITE replaces lanes with goal zones, and here's a quick description of how they work:

• Players run around the battlefield collecting Aeos Energy by fighting neutral Pokémon.
• They can visit the enemy goal zones to dunk their Aeos Energy and earn points for their team, and exp for themselves.
• The dunk can be interrupted by combat with enemy players.
• Aeos Energy is dropped on death, so it is good to dunk often.
• Once a goal zone has received enough points, it is eliminated.
• The deeper a goal zone is in enemy territory, the more points it awards.
• Friendly goal zones offer rapid healing, which makes them desirable to defend.

With goal zones, UNITE communicates effectively by shaping its storytelling in the image of basketball. When the whistle blows and victory is assigned based on points, players aren't surprised. They already know how this works.

I believe the story of how you win is really important in lane-pushing games. Borrowing imagery from traditional ball-in-net sports helps to reinforce this idea. We can even see that the arena is presented as a stadium!

Avoiding Anti-climaxes

Several things contribute to matches not ending disappointingly... at least most of the time.

Firstly, in casual play the exact points of each team are not displayed. Instead, the announcer will give an estimate to avoid players fixating on how badly they might be losing.

Secondly, as a team scores points, the available goal zones will move deeper into enemy territory — a "negative feedback" or "anti-snowballing" mechanism. Some of the neutral camps will even change their spawn positioning based on goal progress to favour a losing team.

Finally, the Zapdos "boss" on the battlefield makes dunking instant, which allows a team to make risky plays to even the score. It can even be stolen with a last-hit, giving the underdog a fighting chance.

I appreciate that the only way to secure points is dunking. This is so good for narrative continuity: if you are doing the thing the game asks and defending/attacking around goal zones, you can't be caught out.

Family-friendly fun

With goal zones, there are no troops marching down lanes. This reduces the amount of ambient violence in the arena.

I think this is appropriate for an audience where players are accustomed to liking their Pokémon, and battle is portrayed as sporting and a test of a trainer's bond and trust with their Pokémon.

The aesthetic of mindlessly fighting amongst themselves (which is how troops work in most lane-pushing games) doesn't seem like it would work here. I note that there are still neutral camps, but at least those are a test of skill directed at the player.

Compression of Progression

Another design constraint for this audience is the game's complexity and learning curve. It needs to be simple to pick up and play, while having enough depth to keep players coming back.

In most lane-pushing games, part of that depth would come from an in-game equipment shop. UNITE chooses not to have a shop, as in the space of 10 minutes it's too much hassle to navigate — especially on a portable device.

Instead, players can customise their moveset and items from the main menu before entering a match. Once in-game, moves will become available and upgrade automatically at fixed levels.

Additionally, some Pokémon evolve at certain levels, changing appearance and enjoying a boost to their stats. A player might start the match with Squirtle, and over a few minutes grow to become Blastoise.

Existing Pokémon games use evolutions as a narrative and aesthetic device to communicate progression. Producing extra models and animations to do the same in UNITE is expensive, but it is so beneficial!

There are familiar Pokémon from several generations of the games included, so everyone quickly picks up that:

1. Progression is a thing that's happening.
2. Progression is tied to levels.

That's enough to eliminate a new player's confusion, and from there they can engage with the nuances of progression at their own pace.

Is UNITE a lane-pushing game?

My definition of a lane-pushing game is a technical one: it depends on the meaningful and continuous availability of pseudolanes. (Again, you can check this article for more about them.) That's the test I'll use here.

But first, in practice I see UNITE as a game with three primary activities:

• Gathering Aeos Energy (including via objectives and bosses)
• Dunking to score points
• Guarding against dunks

So do goal zones count as pseudolanes? We can quickly check the conditions:

1. Do they provide information?
   Yes, though only on an inferred basis. If the enemy is not dunking, they must be doing one of the two other things.
2. Is there combative tension?
   Yes, enemies are motivated to threaten a dunk while allies can take engagements favourably with the goal zone healing.
3. Is there an always-desirable incentive?
   Dunking rewards experience, and guarding and dunking are so directly relevant to victory that it seems players are willing to engage with them for the full 10 minutes.
4. Does the region transform to represent narrative victory?
   Yes, the goal zones retreat as a team makes progress.

My conclusion is that yes, UNITE is a lane-pushing game — albeit a simplified one. It's great to see a design like this being well-executed; I believe it's the first example of a commercial game using an alternative to lanes!

I would additionally note that goal zones are an asymmetric pseudolane: one which behaves differently for the attacking and defending teams. This possibility was alluded to in my 2015 article on Alternate Victory Conditions!

And again: the consistency of the narrative is what holds all this together. I look forward to seeing more games experiment in this direction soon!