Category
Game Design
10 min read
#Game Deconstructions
7 Incredible Game Design Examples And Why They Work
Deciding how to visually represent your mobile game is arguably the most exciting stage in your app’s development. But it can also be one of the greatest challenges. Balancing breathtaking visuals or charming aesthetic features with practical and seamless navigation is something not all developers have been able to easily achieve. Essentially, a good design style needs to draw users in to an engaging world through great aesthetics and unique visuals, while also supporting the overall user experience. An amazing hand illustrated backdrop by a talented artist is all well and good. However, if it doesn’t match up with your game’s core functionality, it’s not worth the investment. Whether you’re developing hyper-casual or hard-core games, finding the right design involves an appreciation of your genre’s limitations, a practical understanding of user experiences and most of all, a flare for creativity....
8 min read
#Game Design
What’s The Best Game Engine For You?
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably at least thought about creating your own game. But if you’re not an experienced programmer and especially if you’re not involved in the game development world at the moment, it probably seems intimidating. And for good reason! That’s because it’s tough to create a game completely from scratch – so tough, in fact, that there are there are thousands of game engines out there. So which one is right for you? To help you choose, we’ve narrowed down what you need to consider in a games engine when creating your game. [bctt tweet=”Which game engine is right for you? To help you choose, @GameAnalytics narrowed down what you need to consider in an engine when creating your game.” via=”no”] The Basics Of Choosing A Game Engine The most important thing you’ll want to consider...
11 min read
#Game Design
Hyper-Casual Games 101: How To Get The Most Out Of Your Players
Editors Note: In June 2019, we held an event dedicated to making hit hyper-casual games. Alongside GameAnalytics, we were joined by publishing giants, Voodoo, and Kawaii specialists, Platonic Games, to share the latest stats, trends, and insights when making hit hyper-casual games. You can find all of the info, decks, and videos from the event here. As a relatively new genre, we’re rapidly witnessing changing trends with hyper-casual games, as well as seeing regular new titles fighting for top positions on the app store. With this in mind, relying on tired marketing strategies or an ill-informed idea that free-to-play titles don’t need a marketing budget won’t do you any favours. When monetizing your hyper-casual game, you’ll want to focus on getting as many people playing as quickly as possible, but also make sure they come back. Usually, if a hyper-casual...
14 min read
#Game Design
Game UX Style Guide: Why Do You Need One?
Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Om Tandon, Director of User Experience at Digit. With over 14 years experience, Om specializes in UX design, UI design and User Interaction, and has previously worked at Gameloft and June Software. Is it just me or are UX playbooks, UX pattern libraries, UX style guides not talked about enough? Or incorporated as often as UI style guides or brand style guides? Are these just buzzwords or do they really not matter? Or is there some kernel of truth and real benefit of creating them, be it in games or enterprise softwares and apps? Before we start talking about the HOW, it is inherently important to ask WHY. Why do you even need a UX playbook, pattern library or style guide in first place? The origins Style guides have been around for a long long...
10 min read
#Game Design
Designing Habit-Forming Games
We are all creatures of habit, whether we like it or not. Not every habit is bad – especially when you’re a developer who’s got players that make your game a regular habit or part of their everyday activities. After all, a player who gets used to playing your game will keep coming back to it, and that’s the key to forming a steady community of players in the long run. [bctt tweet=”A player who gets used to playing your game habitually will keep coming back, and that’s the key to forming a steady community. Read more:” username=”GameAnalytics”] Repeat Customers Are The Best Customers This is the case in nearly every business, but especially true in gaming. After all, most users aren’t going to finish any game in a single session (and if they can, is that really the right...
10 min read
#Game Deconstructions
The 10 Best Digital Board Games For Your Mobile
In recent years board games have had a revival – the hobby is growing faster than ever and the diversity of the games on the market is truly extraordinary. Even though part of the appeal of the hobby is its physical and social format, digital board games soon followed its analog brothers and sisters, proving that good game mechanics can adapt to many formats. Whether you are struggling to get a group of people together to play, or just want to quickly try out a few strategies, or even simply avoid the ponderous rule book and learn the game in an interactive way, digital board games are here to oblige. You might have already been playing a game on your phone or iPad without even knowing that it was originally designed for the tabletop! Here are some of the best...
11 min read
#Game Design
How to Make a Successful Indie Game
The games market is absolutely booming and will top $108 billion this year, growing at a CAGR of 19%. Mobile games remain its most lucrative segment and now account for 42% (or $46.1 billion) of the total revenue generated by app publishers. Want to grab a share of the pie? How to create an indie game: step-by-step guide to success Market research It all starts with an idea – and your idea has to be validated. Here’s what you should do: Study the App Store and Google Play download/top grossing game charts to see what game genres tend to perform better in terms of revenue and user engagement. As of October, 2017, the upper regions of the US top-performing iOS app charts are occupied by popular Match 3 games like Candy Crush, Puzzledom and Homescapes, the omnipresent Minecraft and occasional...
7 min read
#Game Design
Top 5 Game Engines For Beginners
It’s no secret that creating a stellar game from scratch is no easy feat – it’s comparable to climbing Mt. Everest, in fact. Remember the movie Grandma’s Boy where the main character, Alex, was basically producing his own game with triple-AAA level graphics and gameplay for the Xbox console? And when J.P. was shown a preview of the game, commenting “I like what you did with the bump-mapping”? It doesn’t work that way! Though the movie itself was hilarious, the idea of creating a jaw-dropping 3D game, for a console no less, entirely by yourself in your spare time, is a pipe dream. Sorry for bursting anyone’s bubble, that’s really not my intention – I just want any would-be game developer to fully comprehend the hurdles of game development, especially if you’re going it alone. So for this article, I’ve...
24 min read
#Game Design
The Math of Idle Games
[latexpage] This article was originally posted on Kongregate’s Developer Blog. Part I I’ve given a few talks in the past about the appeal and general mechanics of idle games, but what if you actually wanted to make one? Theory and patterns are nice, but there’s some complicated math running behind it. And how on earth do you balance a game that has insanely large numbers? This article is Part I of what will be a three-part series detailing topics covered in my most-recent talk. Part I discusses core ideas of growth, cost, prestige, and generator balancing. Part II will look into alternate growth methods (especially derivative-based). Part III will look at prestige cycles and balance. The models for all of the charts produced in these articles are available as spreadsheets. Please feel free to duplicate, peruse, experiment, extend, etc.! Let’s...
15 min read
#Data & Analytics
How To Perfect Your Game’s Core Loop
At the heart of your game’s design, there are core mechanics, and the core gameplay loop. In short, it’s the main activities that structure the entire design and the players engage into repeatedly, in a looping sequence. It’s part of the essence of the game, something you cannot remove without fundamentally altering the experience. In the original Mario, this would be walking, running and jumping. The various enemies, bosses, and environments stem from the core mechanics. They are here to surprise the player, challenge his skills and keep the experience fresh. In other words: to exploit the core loop to its fullest, and add extra depth to the experience. There are several loops that structure your projects, depending on the lenses you use. Just like there’s a core gameplay loop, there are core economic loops that will derive from your...
13 min read
#Game Design
Our 9 Sound Design Tips to Improve your Game’s Audio
We barely touched on sound, yet it’s an important part of the game’s experience: It gives cues to the player that will help him to react to the world. For example, you can hint the presence of some NPC behind a wall or inside a building. Or let the player know that an enemy is rushing on him while it’s not visible yet. Sound provides instant feedback to the player’s inputs. We talked about that in the article on juicing, which you can check out right here: Squeezing more juice out of your game design! Music is your most powerful tool to drive emotion. Sound effects greatly contribute to the player’s immersion. The absence of sound, or bad sound design will break your game’s feel. That’s why you want to pay great attention to it. For this article, we collected...
11 min read
#Game Design
Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview
We got in touch Melanie Christin, the co-founder of Atelier 801, an independent game studio that produced the massively multiplayer Free to Play title Transformice. Its community has been extremely active since 2011, the year of its initial release. We asked her for tips and feedback on the company’s experience. Melanie, can you tell me who you are and what you do at Atelier 801? Hi, I am Melanie Christin, the cofounder of Atelier 801. We built this game company with my partner, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand, thanks to the success of our first game, a multiplayer title called Transformice. And we created the game one year before the studio. Your flagship game is Transformice. How does it play? Transformice is a massively online multiplayer browser-based game. The player is a small mouse that jumps from platform to platform to catch a...
14 min read
#Game Design
The 9 Do’s and Don’ts of Game Trailers
Editor’s note: as we discussed in Marketing Your Indie Game on a Zero-Dollar Budget and How To Create Immersive Game Intros, your game’s trailer is one of your most powerful marketing assets. Whether it’s for your website’s visitors, who want to get a sense of how the game feels, or more importantly for the press, who will use it to decide whether they want to cover your game or not. This article will help you showcase your game in the best possible light. Game trailer fundamentals Your game trailer shows what the game is, and it has the power to drive emotion and interest before people get a chance to try out your game. It provides you with an arsenal of visual and audio tools to turn viewers into players. The structure of your trailer will likely always be the same. It will: Start...