by Dave Rohrl | Feb 4, 2021 | GAME DESIGN, OTHER
This may surprise you, but game design is more than analysis and number crunching. It requires a large element of creativity, and often the best kind of creativity comes from groups rather than individual designers. This means that, often, teams need to engage in some...
by David Nixon | Jan 25, 2021 | GAME DESIGN, OTHER
It is difficult to overstate the importance of retention to succeeding with a free-to-play game. After all, if players don’t stick around, they don’t watch ads, they don’t buy currency, and they don’t consume all that lovely, expensive game...
by Rico Schmidt | Dec 23, 2020 | GAME DESIGN
Levels drive the core interaction in most free-to-play puzzle games. The quality of this content, and the pacing of level features, rewards, and difficulty has an enormous impact on both retention and monetization. While the overall visual presentation, simplicity in...
by Ed Kuehnel | Oct 28, 2020 | GAME DESIGN, NARRATIVE
Introduction While there are many different ways to go about developing stories for games, in this blog post on narrative design we will focus on a process that has been passed down to multiple generations of game developers over the industry’s relatively short...
by Dave Rohrl | Dec 15, 2019 | GAME DESIGN
As a game design consultant, I work with a wide variety of developers on a huge range of projects. I deal with large companies and small, casual games and hardcore, and designers ranging from utter newbies to industry vets. I’ve designed...
by Dave Rohrl | Nov 20, 2019 | GAME DESIGN, STRATEGY
A product manager at King recently published this brilliant article about some research they did to help them understand the audience for various game genres better. In essence, they laid out the top 100 grossing mobile games, coded them for genre, and...