How I stopped worrying and fell in love with mobile games

The Gamasutra resource has published the author’s text of Gameloft studio game designer Lucas Gonzales (Lucas González) about what mobile game design is and why there is no need to be afraid of it. We have translated this text and are sharing it with you.

I’ll tell you honestly: when I made the decision to make a living as a mobile game designer, I seriously thought that in terms of career it was a step back.

I know this idea may seem strange, especially if you are a businessman or have recently entered the industry. But I’m sure any game designer with similar experience will understand my mood at that time.

Let me apologize in advance for the numerous autobiographical remarks, but they seem to me necessary to illustrate the course of my thoughts.

I also ask you to remember: I will generalize. Every time I mention the PC/console market or the mobile market, consider that I mean in the first case only AAA projects, and in the second – niche indie games or casual games.

A marvelous race of game designers for PC and consoles

I grew up playing PC and console games. I played those titles that later became classics, and believe me, they were not only adventure games from LucasArts, but also all the Quake, Civilization, Baldur’s Gate, Final Fantasy, Sonic the hedgehog, Castlevania, Zelda … in short, you get it. I dreamed about how I would work in the game industry. In my dreams, I created masterpieces akin to the ones I played. COOL PROJECTS.

One day I got my first job in the industry. This happened shortly before the seventh generation of consoles (Xbox 360-PS3-Wii) was released. My first game was supposed to be an AAA first-person shooter for the next generation of consoles. The dream came true!

The project collapsed almost immediately. So I learned my first lesson: in the AAA universe, not everything is gold that glitters. I had to switch to less ambitious projects. However, my goal was still the PC and console games market. WiiWare, XBLA, PSN and Steam were great for realizing my ambitions. Finally, I had a chance to create something similar to what I’ve been playing all my adult life.

As the years passed, I continued to work on hardcore games and learned a lot. I had to deal with the problems of guidance systems, learn about the reaction time of the brain, deal with animation “trees”, with interactive UI, combat AI, with hand-to-hand combat animation… I enjoyed coping with these tasks.

Meanwhile, the all-powerful Empire of Facebook grew and strengthened, the iPhone and Android appeared. The f2p market gradually became more attractive and profitable, game developers were drawn there. I didn’t understand them. Who in their right mind could want to make a game about harvesting, when it was possible to realize their dreams and create platformers, RPG, RTS, FPS, MMO and other genres that were designated by unpronounceable abbreviations?

In addition, I had before my eyes an example of game designers who tried to survive by making educational games or clones of famous titles. While they were doing all this, I was creating games for XBLA and PSN, games played by the audience of “three A”. I confess I felt like a superior being. I was proud of the opportunity to make games for PCs and consoles. Why, I personally knew people who would rather move to another country to work for big studios than stay at home and work for small teams that made money from the Facebook audience.

I think many game designers who read this will share my feelings. I looked at the mobile games market from the top down. I perceived mobile games more as a subgenre of “real” games for PCs and consoles. My market was a market with a capital letter, and all the others were like a by-product of the industry. Not that I underestimated the mobile segment. I knew about his growth rate and potential. I just thought he wasn’t for me.

And suddenly, under the influence of circumstances, everything changed. I was forced to look for a job in the mobile games market. Of course, when changes are inevitable, you have to look for your bright side in everything. And I honestly tried. I just didn’t really know what I was looking for.

Game designers of mobile games – “plebeians” from game dev

And I found experienced professionals in their field who have never made games for PCs and consoles in their lives. And they regretted it.

As soon as I started working side by side with them, I quickly realized that they could just as well work at the AAA games studio. Their skills were no less valuable than mine: they understood the needs of the player, knew how important feedback and the rhythm of the game were.

I will say more, they had skills that I didn’t have. I’m not talking about those skills that depend on the genre: it’s hard to be a specialist in creating a racing AI if you’ve never done a race. I’m talking about those skills that are acquired due to the specifics of the mobile market and can be useful to any game designer, regardless of which platform he creates games for.

What mobile games teach

Availability

Accessibility is one of the key characteristics of any game. Who knows more about it than the game designers of mobile games, whose projects will compete with thousands of their own kind? Yes, they have to fight more competitors in a day than console developers have to fight in a year. How specific should the concept of your game be? How easy is it to understand? Even in a console or PC game, it’s not easy to attract the player’s attention a second time, imagine how much more difficult the task is in the world of mobile games.

We all know that users don’t read texts and hate long tutorials. Now imagine that the player sees your title for the first time on the way to work. Or looking through the latest releases while sitting in the bathroom. What will you have time to explain to him? How do you give the context of the game without words, video inserts and long dialogues?

Variety of player types

Where else can you find such a variety of user types, if not in the mobile market? How to attract casual and hardcore players at the same time? How to entertain at the same time those who do not want to pay and those who invest hundreds of dollars in the game? It must be admitted that the audience of mobile games is incomparably more diverse than the audience of console or even PC games.

How to balance the game? What mechanisms should be used to make a game suitable for all these players at the same time?

One of the most important skills of a game designer is the ability to put yourself in the player’s place. The more the target audience differs from the one who makes the game, the more difficult it is, and no one has such an opportunity to feel in the shoes of a variety of players, like the game designers of mobile games.

Game balance

Games are no longer a piece of static software, they are a mobile structure that adapts to the audience.

You know everything about how exactly your user plays your game. And you can make changes to it so that the player will not notice. Can you change the difficulty of the mission depending on the player’s previous achievements?

Consoles, of course, try to keep up with the times as much as they can (and they can be quite slow), but it is mobile devices that enjoy a wealth of features and a wide audience on which to experiment. Players are constantly online, playing frequently and in short sessions. You have time to track all the necessary data and have time to make modifications before the next session. And you always have a lot of guinea pigs at hand, on which you can test game models.

Just imagine what can be achieved if you combine the data obtained with the right monetization schemes. The possibilities are endless.

Flexible design

Your game turned out to be more successful than you expected. It’s being featured everywhere, reviews of it everywhere, people are talking about it, the number of downloads is growing exponentially… And suddenly everything disappears. A week later, your fifteen minutes of fame are in the past: the players just lost interest. There won’t be a second chance.

Imagine that you need to update the game every two weeks to keep the audience, and adapt your game to one of the most volatile markets.

How to create a game that can be expanded quickly and easily? What features, levels and new missions will you offer the players? What do the players like? What will you do when you realize that they like what they should ignore, and vice versa? How often do I need to update the game? How many months ahead do you plan updates? How will you adapt your plan depending on the success of the game and the success of competing projects?

You don’t need a fully finished game. Give your audience what you think is key to your project, and as quickly as possible. If it works, continue in the same spirit. If not, then you’re wasting your time, move on.

Compulsive behavior

I admit, I have never read so much specialized literature on psychology as when I started creating mobile games. I still have no idea why some games make so much money (if I knew, I definitely wouldn’t describe it here). Did you know that some of the highest-grossing games are, in fact, not games, but simply prettily designed lotteries, where a player can not even play, but just watch?

From my point of view, some of these applications are examples of how a good game should NOT look like. But they earn. And they make good money!

To explain their success, you need to delve into the wilds of the human brain and neurochemistry. There are three key concepts here: short-term goals, immediate feedback and remuneration. Everything is simple. Give your player time to think, and he may leave and not come back.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for inventing a Skinner box for players. What I’m saying is that you need to learn how to win the attention of your users both during short gaming sessions and over time. And then improve your game using this knowledge.

Social dynamics

Create a good singleplayer, and if you’re lucky, it will be successful. Add social mechanics and you’ll get a hit. Where would Candy Crush be without a card and the opportunity to ask for an extra life from a classmate? And imagine what an epic squalor the “Merry Farm” would become if it was impossible to steal turnips from a neighbor in it.

All the most successful games include social elements. Cooperate or compete, share, give, ask for help, create groups and clans.

Mobile game designers have long been able to use the universal craving for socialization to increase user engagement. They explored a genre that PC and console game designers rarely take into account – asynchronous mutiplayer.

That’s why there is such a variety of social mechanisms in the mobile market. Designers have to deal with the limitations imposed by asynchrony. They made it their key skill. Nowadays, you can’t rely only on invitations, gifts and the opportunity to visit a friend. This era is over.

Monetization

Finally we got to this terrible word. From my point of view, it was monetization that gave the mobile market and its developers a bad name.

When we think about monetization, we imagine gold pieces replenishing energy, sets of crystals for 99 rubles and additional moves. I am sure that such schemes are the very first, primitive monetization options.

There are many free titles where you don’t have to pay money to enjoy the game. For each of these games there are a thousand of those in which there is monetization, and it infuriates. You don’t need to pay attention to them (or not, pay attention. You don’t have to do that). Find out what your players want to give you money for. Monetize your game. And do it quickly, because both the market and the audience are quickly fed up, and every day they are more selective and capricious.

F2P is everywhere, it no longer belongs only to Facebook or mobile games. I am convinced that this practice will be adopted by other markets sooner or later, and no one has such experience in this as mobile game designers.

Adapt or die

I believe that mobile games make you keep your finger on the pulse of events, and even more so than when you work for PCs or consoles.

Until an updated version of your favorite engine appears, or until a new console enters the market, mobile game designers will have time to survive several generations of mobile devices, and witness the birth, rise and decline of a dozen new games and studios.

Your audience’s preferences will change every week, or will remain the same for months. This will strengthen your ability to assimilate information to the extreme.

***

So, two years have passed since I made my fateful decision. I have to admit: I was wrong. I was biased against mobile games simply because I didn’t know them. The only examples I had were primitive examples of what is now.

We see how Blizzard, Ubisoft, Square Enix – in short, all the major players of the console and PC market rushed into the mobile market to fight local champions in this arena. Indie PC games are published on iOS and vice versa. The boundary between two different worlds – PC/consoles and mobile games – is becoming more and more blurred.

It doesn’t matter if you are doing solid console projects for hardcore gamers or funny little social networks for housewives. A full-fledged designer should know as much about games as possible. Point. And just as working on AAA games develops certain skills, working on mobile games develops others. Both are important and useful.

I know how stupid it sounds, but I’ll say it anyway: you only need to wait a couple of years, and the game designers of mobile games will get all the respect they deserve.

The fact is that those who make mobile games communicate with an audience of millions. They make games that everyone will play. Games that your dad will play, or that friend of yours who says he “doesn’t waste time on these toys of yours,” or that pretty girl who sits opposite you in the subway, or even your own girlfriend.

So don’t let a bunch of titles with an unsuccessful monetization scheme obscure all the beauty, and greatness, and all those new horizons that mobile games open up to game designers.

A source: http://www.gamasutra.com