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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

10 out of  50 US top grossing games are social casino giants, an indication of how dominant this genre is with an massively loyal target audience.   Superdata research predicts massive growth in this segement You may wonder, why people are sinking millions of dollars in to these games which can not be played for real money! give no cash returns, unlike the real life casinos! & online gambling counterparts! I remember in 2010 while working at slot machine giant WMS (acquired by scientific gaming for $1.5 billion). When they launched a variant of their popular flagship (online real money) brand ‘Jackpot Party’ as an F2P game on Facebook, everyone was genuinely surprised, it racked up 25K overnight!! Traditional casino gaming manufacturers could not fathom what would drive people to play these no real money counterparts? Have they discovered another virgin goldmine waiting to be explored? Flash forward 2016,...

Co-authored with Steven Gaston This post was originally featured on Gamasutra In part 2 of this post (in case you missed, Part 1 here), as promised we will cover how to set up external usability tests, preparation done at developers’ (client) and research agencies end, see how internal and external UX designers work in sync combining their final observation & analysis to produce unbiased results. In Part 1, we saw how most studios typically conduct usability test in ways that allow biases to creep in which could drastically alter the results. We are happy to know there are studios that have a more sophisticated UX pipeline & UX designers (some of your comments hinted at that) in place who conduct sessions in a clinical setting. Our process will outline the ideal practices that should be a part of the DNA of any usability session. [bctt tweet=”Part 2 of a handy #UX...

Co-authored with Steven Gaston User experience design has become the mainstay of creating intuitive and rewarding offline, online digital experiences, be it across web, apps physical products or more recently GAMES. Most top tier gaming companies big or small (be it PC, mobile or console) like Blizzard, Riot, Sony, EA, Zynga, King, Ubisoft, Gameloft understand this scenery change and are now more readily hiring UX talent & integrating UX design in their development pipeline seriously. I remember finding a big void on this subject a year back and have been writing on the subject of UX design in games under the heading of UX Insights since last year. Analysing F2P games and deconstructing prevailing and upcoming games industry macro, micro trends. UX Walkthrough?…….What’s it about. This series takes the subject of UX in games a step further by sharing with you some of the methods and techniques used in...

The question I ask is – can we go beyond? Every UX, Game, Product designer aspires enhancing prototypes to map the complete user flows, not just bits and bobs. This article is divided into Tactical and Strategy layers. I will cover the former first. As an UX Director, I have to continuously work on both Tactical and Strategy sides of UX with my team and stakeholder groups to enhance the quality, push the limits and strengthen the integrity of our UX pipeline and process. In my last article Here, I detailed the process and benefits of low to mid fidelity prototypes where we built a device ready interactive version for user testing. Example below of our low-fi proto. built during the last post. My last post focused entirely on just prototyping a low-fi stand-alone feature. This time we will build a hi-fi prototype with inter-connected features, hence testing the entire...

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...

[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...