by Rico Schmidt | Mar 19, 2021 | Featured, Uncategorized
In the first part of this three-part series, we talked about “level creation cycles” and outlined a six-phase approach for building them. We discussed concepting, internal testing and feedback loops. We talked about usability testing and balancing, and explored the...
by Sudha Agarwal | Feb 25, 2021 | Featured, Uncategorized
Photo by Leio McLaren (leiomclaren.com) on Unsplash The best product managers rely on data to inform decisions, learn from the past and plan ahead. Many opt to use some sort of dashboard as their first port of call. But, while dashboards are useful tools to keep a...
by Dave Rohrl | Feb 4, 2021 | Load More, Uncategorized
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 | Load More, Uncategorized
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 | Load More, Uncategorized
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 | Dec 17, 2020 | Load More, Uncategorized
Part 3 – Writing the Walkthrough & Dialog Overview This is the third entry in a three-part blog post on narrative design in which we illustrate a process for integrating story and gameplay that has been used by game developers since the days of early graphic...
