Think differently
Facebook gaming partnership Facebook IQ and Game Raffinery to present an interesting report about understanding audiences and designing better mobile games.
If you are in mobile game development, there’s a lot of useful insight that you can find in that report. Here’s the link to the Game Raffinery form that you can fill up to get access ot the full report!
Read my new article that also been published on gamasutra.com about the flow applied to game design.
In the 1970s a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi experimentally evaluated the flow. He found’s that a person’s skill and the difficulty of a task interact with a result of cognitive and emotional states.
In this article, I will explained what is the flow, how it’s working and what are the means that you can apply in video games to create that effect.
Follow that link to read the article
Imagine that your users can create unique content for your game and get paid for doing that. Some of them, the most talented one can even work full-time for your game and gain enough money to make it their most important year income. It may seem to be irrelevant for some game developers but in fact, we are not far to make it happen and this may have become a general gaming industry trends in the upcoming decade.
I’ve been interested in blockchain technology for a few years already, I spend times to read in order to understand it. As a game designer, I have an idea of how this technology can influence and will influence the way we are designing a game in the future. This future is already here and before going into the subject, here is what blockchain technology is about
Follow this link to learn more about it
This is the list of things that I’ve to retain from Supercell fans Q&A from Reddit, they take the time to answer any fans questions and he is what I’ve retained;
It’s funny because the first time we install the game, we do realise that this functionality was in A/B testing because some of my friends at work was starting with different functionality. For me, the dev team was too divided to make the decision by themselves and A/B test those things the soft launch phase a the perfect way to identify what player wants. It’s also possible to change the controller’s settings in the option, be sure that Supercell is tracking does metrics.
Most of mobile CEO still believe that it took 6 months to make a mobile game. My answer to them is, look at the top grossing and learn from them 😉 As a personal experience, I’ve already worked with a CEO that gives me 5 weeks of conception time! The funniest aspect in that his that I have already planned a 2 weeks vacation during that period… so 5-2= 3 weeks of conception! That was the kind of CEO that still believes today that having 9 women making a baby will took 1 month instead of 9!
Their answer and it make perfect sense, they already have that backend infrastructure and since the competitive player is probably the one generated their revenue on their other games, be sure it will happen. Is their really mobile game company that target this player audience planning to not having a competitive mode for world launch today?
Of course the will, who won’t 😉 I already answer above!
They answer; “We have a prototype mode that works a bit like a soccer match! Not sure if it will ever reach the live game though.”
Yes, they prototype gameplay and ideas, and they iterate and they prototype again, and they iterate again and so on. They possibly kill lots of ideas and for those who believe that prototyping is a waste of time, take a deep breath and look at the top grossing market. I mention that because I have the chance to work in different video game company and I must say that even if people do believe that prototyping is important, most of the time, they don’t!
They certainly kill lots of ideas and they also possibly discover some great ideas from their prototype. For those who believe that prototyping is a waste of time, take a deep breath and look at the top grossing market. I mention that because I have the chance to work in different video game company and I must say that even if people do believe that prototyping is important, most of the time, they don’t!
Most of the time, it’s not part of the company culture because the managers find that this is time-consuming period and that the team can get lost during the process. They also take into consideration that programmer’s hour is the most expensive one so why just don’t do the feature as design???
Well because a great design on paper means nothing until to put your hands-on and prototyping will often reduce the time you will spend on retake and those retakes happen mostly during a critical phase of the project.
Well, apply!
They brainstorm and they want new brawler to add something to the gameplay. Once they got an interesting idea, the prototype and test it out! From their, they decided if it goes live or not. That the most efficient way of doing a video game.
They answer; Brawl Stars is a totally different game than Clash of Clans, so we felt it needed its own visual identity. Everybody was excited to create something new and different. Our inspiration was in part from classic games and Saturday morning cartoons. We’re all gamers, and we took inspiration from games that we grew up with and loved.
They answer; We always try to optimise the file size to get more things added. Maps and game modes will not affect the file sizes too much, but new Brawlers and skins affect it quite a lot.
That is a really important point to consider if you are game developers especially if you design mobile game. It is proved by metrics that if your game is the one that takes the most space on the player device, you got a better chance to de uninstalled sooner than later. Has free to play developers, you want your games to be live for years and keep adding stuff to it. That really important that your file size is small at the release of the project.
This is mostly what I retain from the Q&A but I invite you to take a look at the entire discussion by following this link
Design better games