Codemash 2016 - Designing a Game for Mobile
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
2 likes•898 views
A talk I gave at CodeMash 2016 in Sandusky, Ohio, about considerations when designing a game for mobile. Includes game design, graphic design, and monetization advice.
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Codemash 2016 - Designing a Game for Mobile
- 1. Designing a Game for Mobile Amanda Lange Developer Evangelist Microsoft, Philadelphia
- 4. Game Design
- 10. Design for Touch
- 16. Graphic Design
- 32. I’m sorry
Editor's Notes
- The About Me slide, with a focus on my mobile experience
- Bullet points
- Game design for mobile should be done in an iterative, agile way.
- You’re probably familiar with the bits and pieces of agile development, so I won’t go over them here.
- Any time you see a company that did really well with one game title, they made a lot of game titles. Even the Flappy Bird developer made a lot of games before and after Flappy Bird.
- Recognize any of these? These are all titles made by Rovio before they got famous making Angry Birds.
- If you take into account the idea that app store success is kind of like a roll of the dice and requires luck, the best bet is to make as many rolls as possible. So make a lot of games.
- Match 3 and sliding block type puzzles do well because they’re touchable (more on 2048 later)
- It’s not to say you can’t make an action game. But go for indirect control over the avatar, or an avatar-less game.
- The joystick on screen thing is bad.
- Action games where your finger covers the avatar is bad.
- Monetization and design are tied so closely together that I’m going to return to some more game design stuff in a later part of the talk, when I talk about Freemium. For right now, let’s move on to…
- Games that do well always have some commonalites. The MOST popular games are bright, open, friendly…
- I like to show clash of Clans because even though it’s a more “core” game you can see that it’s still really friendly and bright and geometrical.
- There’s a whole genre of these “war” games. This one is Game of War. You know it because their ads don’t actually show Game of War – they show Kate Upton in a tight dress. So you can break these design rules if you have the advantage of Kate Upton in a tight dress, but… you probably don’t.
- …otherwise, you know, think big, colorful, geometrical, readable, friendly. Don’t lean a lot on grays and browns. Consider things like warm/cool contrast. Hire a graphic designer if you have to!
- Color blindness is a factor Make sure icons are readable Test this, test this
- All “bright colors” aren’t created equal. If all the colors in your app are equally bright, nothing stands out, which can lead to confusion. The most important items need to be the most visually interesting – a good way to do this is with saturation in addition to brightness.
- In this picture I took a shot from Bejeweled that illustrates my point and broken it down by specific color choices. (Candy Crush does this too, they’re almost the same game with different boards and layouts). Here you see first of all that Popcap always does a great job by having shapes as well as colors show off the jewels to click, good for any colorblind players. You can see that background colors are much less saturated than foreground colors. UI colors are more saturated too. It’s very clear what is and isn’t an interactive element here.
- If all the colors are set to the same saturation, it looks ugly ….and blotchy due to my quick process for doing this, but mostly just ugly. It hurts your eyes. The jewels look basically the same though!
- I like that even the interior of the Death Star is not at 0 percent saturation. Some UI elements are though. There is a concept of “warm and cool gray” where warm gray has some pink/red to it and cool gray has some blue to it. This can help a lot with differentiating the color gray in spaces where you are very tempted to use a pure gray. I would avoid pure gray in ALL game dev cases but especially in mobile.
- If you have a terrificly high production value like The Room maybe you don’t have to take my advice about the color choices. Please note though these devs have decryed the ‘virtual D-pad’ as well
- More than 90% of Google Play’s revenue in the last half of 2014 came from gaming. Games are bigger money makers for Apple and Google than you might think. Among the takeaways in a joint IDC/App Annie report Wednesday: The number of smartphones and tablets used worldwide for gaming topped 1 billion for the first time in 2014. Google Play’s revenue from games grew more than 75% last year. On Apple’s App Store gaming revenue grew more than 30%. Game spending on iOS and Android each exceeds that of Nintendo and Sony’s handheld consoles. Games accounted for more than 80% iOS and Google Play consumer app spending last quarter. In the second half of 2014, this share topped 90% on Google Play. (The link is to my source for these stats and this info)
- The picture of how money is made isn’t always pretty and sometimes borrows from the gambling industry. In the head follow what you think is right for you. I am going to tell you some more facts about free to play.
- Obligatory South Park Reference.
- The pay-once model is often considered the most ethical. The customer pays for a game and get what they get. But there are some downsides – if the game isn’t what the customer expected, they’re SoL. For the developer, you won’t get as many players. The pay up front model means your game needs a lot of buzz to generate sales. Your game needs to be terrific or memorable and compete with big titles and names. The other downside is, you’re actually limiting how much money you can make with this model. If you set the price yourself you won’t get users willing to pay MORE. But many GREAT games use this model.
- Monument Valley: “…people downloading it have already shown themselves willing to spend money on digital content. It's also a very good game and quite a short one - those two factors together encouraging players to shell out to keep it going a bit longer. And yet, with everything in its favour, its IAP uptake was around 5-6 percent: 575,608 out of more than 10,000,000.” Not my words or phrasing, read full article = http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iosapps/how-make-money-on-app-store-3594331/
- Ad supported is one way to go. One common practice is to have one ad-supported game that’s free or “lite” and one full game that you charge customers for which has no ads.
- Freemium is the category of games based on in-game purchases. These games make more money than any other type of game. This is the most interesting category of game so I will talk about it a lot more than the other categories. (I have more experience in this category as well.) Here’s the most important takeaway: if you want to use this model of game, you have to bake the “freemium” into every part of your design. It isn’t something you can just tack on to the game and make it work. You have to know from the start if you are making this type of game.
- Some freemium customers are free-riders. That’s the majority of your players. They pay nothing. Freemium customers that “convert,” ie, pay for your game, are referred to by types of sea creature. A small customer that only pays a little is called a “minnow.” Medium customers are “dolphins.” But we really only care about one type of customer, the “whale.” This concept, unsurprisingly, comes from gambling… In some industries you’ll see a breakdown where about half the profit comes from minnows/dolphins and half comes from whales. IE, you have something like ten percent of the customers paying for fifty percent of the profits. In the big games, though, this is a lot more stark. There’s even more free-riders, and ten percent of your customers, the whales, are paying for a huge majority of your game. If your game is small enough, you may even get to know your whales by name.
- Expect a conversion rate less than 5% with 95% of your players free riding. Mobile analytics firm Swrve said that during January of 2014, 98.5 percent of mobile game players had not spent a single penny.
- Whales are 10% of your customers making 50% of your revenue
- A common free to play tactic is an energy or extra lives mechanic that makes the player either pay or wait.
- Another common thing to sell is powerups for the game. A lot of people like the idea of costumes or simple skins for characters or something that’s just cosmetic to sell to users. That can work (eg with League of Legends) but it is not very likely to make as much money as powerups or something that has an impact on the game play.
- Notice that the bigger bundles of in-game currency are marked as better deals. They have more appealing graphics.
- Candy Crush actually made a change in this semi-recently. Here’s an older graphic, without the big pretty banners to show what I mean.
- "Climbing the chart, from what I've seen, depends on the number of downloads in the fraction of time. If you get 100 downloads in one hour, you'll probably be top of the App Store in the next refresh. So, what's relevant isn't just the number of downloads itself but the period of time in which the downloads are made. "When you're top on the App Store, people will see your app and probably download it again, and you'll stay on top, even if your download rate is reducing. I don’t know why, but I noticed that it was like a boom effect climbing and then, even if the downloads where reducing, we stayed on top.“ This is also from http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iosapps/how-make-money-on-app-store-3594331/ and is just an anecdote about discoverability. Discoverability is a really hard problem to crack. The hardest.
- Do you ever wonder why there’s dozens of kinds of orange juice or dozens of kinds of oreos? It’s because the more variety you have, the more SKU, which means the more shelf space that you got.
- Similarly you can stack things in your favor in the app store by trying to hit several different genres of game with a similar game design. When Storm 8 iterates on their game they reskin it as well.
- Kim Kardashian is an interesting one because the game that was designed around her already existed in another form. It just wasn’t a hit until her brand was added. The developers essentially reskinned their own game, and had a success.
- Threes is not 2048 – it’s actually a better game and has terrific sound design. But it wasn’t as big a hit as 2048 was at first. This is an important thing to note, if you have a game that people can borrow the design of and clone, they might, and it’s hard to avoid. But making quality graphics (and sound!) are still important. Threes was also a premium game, so it hit a different market from free games.