The main thing for the last week (March 20 – 26, 2017)
About the central materials and news for the past week in our digest, which has returned to service.
There were three central materials last week.
Developer Library: Three lessons for a game designer
This time Mark Brown used the example of Nova 111 to reveal three things that are important to remember for a game designer.
- Even genres that are very far from each other can be combined (even a turn-based game with RTS).
- Be open to the surprises that the development presents (the original mechanics may grow out of bugs).
- If the game is based on an interesting idea, make it so that it can be traced throughout.
How to create a vacancy correctly?
Tanya Evdokimenko told in great detail how to write a vacancy correctly. Its material can be used as a step-by-step guide. She also says a very important thing, that it is very important to prescribe in the vacancy as specifically as possible what you expect from the employee. One job name with a vague list of requirements is not enough: “The job title does not imply an answer to the question of what tasks the specialist will have to solve. Two game designers will have different responsibilities on the same project. For example, one will deal with the balance of events, and the second with the elaboration and introduction of new mechanics. Both are game designers, but the requirements for them are different.”
Five reasons for the success of Summoners War
At the end of the week, the news came that Summoners War had earned an astronomical figure of $780 million over the past three years. With the help of Alexander Pashin, we managed to quickly collect material about what is in the game, thanks to which it earns so well. There are five key points:
- External simplicity (at the first stages, the game does not seem difficult to master);
- The presence of an evolv and the absence of the player’s right to make a mistake when pumping;
- Additional full–fledged – very complex – pumping with the help of runes;
- Wide opportunities for communication within the game;
- Careful work with stocks.
Main news
As for the news, we recommend paying attention to the materials from the “Chinese fields”. Companies in the Middle Kingdom are increasingly amazed by the size of the amounts they operate with. Tencent earned $10 billion last year. Shanghai–based 37 Interactive, unknown in Russia, earned $761.9 million over the same period (annual growth of almost 1000%).
In Russia, at the beginning of this year, the turnover of the MMO market is falling.
