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Welcome Thank you for downloading this pocket guide. 25 things you need to know to create a successful mobile game Games are consistently one of the most frequently used categories of mobile app. Revenues from mobile games is projected to hit $18.3 billion by 2016. There has never been a better time to create a game! This guide is for you if.. You’re just starting out on creating your first game Or You’ve only created one or two titles before.
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Author: Kevin Miller Kevin Miller is the CEO of RunRev. He oversees a global team and has worked with thousands of developers large and small creating successful apps. Follow him on Twitter @runrevkev!
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Table of Contents
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Get the Concept & Design Right
04
Approaches To Coding Your First Title
13
Sail Through the App Store Submission Process
19
Create Buzz About Your Game
25
How to Make Money
31
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Part 1: Get the Concept & Design Right
Click the YouTube link to see Ben develop a game in 3 hours and 16 minutes Getting the concept and design for your game right can be the difference between success and failure. Here are some tips to help you get it right.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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1. Design Something You Love
If you want to make it as a game developer, you need to believe passionately in what you’re making. To navigate the journey to success, make something you can get behind. Making an amazing game will compel you to overcome any challenges that may come up in your path. It’s fine to take a quick look at the market for a gap but don’t get too focused on that. Instead throw your focus into doing something which you think is amazing. Can you feel the passion when you design the game? If you can, it will flow through every aspect of what you create. If you’re working with others on the game, would they play it? If you wouldn’t play it yourself or your target customer, for example your children don’t absolutely love it, it will struggle to get noticed among all the other titles out there.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
Designing something you love has to flow through the whole game. If you’re a dab hand with graphics then by all means do them yourself. If your talents are more technical or coming up with plot elements, then work with a designer to get the graphics looking great or hire one to make your ideas really look the part. If you’re on a budget you can find someone to make your sketches look great on a site such as Elance. www.elance.com
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The mobile games market is projected to hit $18.3 Billion by 2016. Time to get started.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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2. Perfection is in the Eye of the Beholder
The details in your game matter. Hugely. The only way to know if you’re getting it right is to iterate, early and often. Don’t spend months designing something behind locked doors before trying it out on some people who are in your target audience. If you spend a long time creating something in a vacuum you’ll have so much invested in the outcome it will be hard for you to hear that you need to start over!
Iterate often and early.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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2. Perfection is in the Eye of the Beholder Don’t let it get to that stage – as soon as you have something to show, even if it is just a screen or two, get it in front of people. That will make it easy to change. The more feedback you can get the better. The difference between having a sound play for 2 seconds or 5, a button being small or large or a screen displaying for a short or long time, can be the difference between engagement, fun and playability or complete failure. Some types of customer are easier to satisfy than others. Children for example are among the toughest customers because they have a short attention span, so pay particular attention to how long they use your title and how engaged they get with each and every element.
Children have a short attention span.
Know how to appeal to your target market.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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Keep asking yourself these questions Do I clearly understand who I am aiming my game at? Do I know who will test my game ideas? Am I prototyping enough? Am I getting enough feedback from that group? Do they like my game? Do I know what they like about my game? Am I excited and can’t wait to continue developing? Is my game engaging?
Important tips for the early stages
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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3. Create Player Avatars Take the time to create an “avatar” of your target players. A player avatar is a description of who your target customer is. Take the time to put this together. You can do it on a notepad or on a whiteboard. If you have more than one target customer, create multiple avatars and give them names. Once you’ve created Avatars it’ll give you people to think about when designing elements within your game. If you’re aiming your game at multiple types of player, ensure there are some strong design elements within it that will appeal to each of the avatars. Having them up there and named means you can keep asking yourself (or discussing, if you’re working in a team) each aspect of the design in relation to what these players want.
Tips for Creating Avatars Are they male or female? Old or young? What other sorts of games do they like? What trends or fashions are they into?
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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4. Agree Terminology During Design Once your game gets more complex, there may be plot elements or aspects of the gameplay that are sophisticated. For example, in an interactive book there may be moments where your characters get involved in a particular form of battle.
Create terminology that will speed up your thinking
Create terminology to describe each of these different plot elements during the design phase. That will speed up your own thinking (or discussion, if you are working in a team) as you design these elements into the game. Instead of having to describe the scenario each time you can simply refer to one of the types of scenarios you have named. This may not be important for simple games, but as your plot becomes more complex it can save a great deal of time.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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5. Be willing to try again Overnight success with your game may be possible, but it is highly unlikely to happen on the first night. Angry Birds made over 50 attempts before they were finally successful. Hopefully you’ve done lots of iterating and talking to your market long before you launch and most of that trying again has already happened during design time. However it may be that your first title is not a success and it will either need to be upgraded or changed dramatically. The key is to learn from your customers each time you do a release. Listen to their feedback and comments as openly as possible and seek to understand them. It can be challenging to do if you’ve poured your heart and soul into the game but if you listen openly you’ll be able to develop the insights you need to create a success. Persistence pays: you need to be willing to keep trying until you make it.
Angry Birds made over 50 attempts before they became an overnight success
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Part 2: Choose the Right Approach when Coding your First Title
Take the time to make smart choices before you start to code your game. There are many options out there. All the choice can be daunting, particularly if you haven’t written a game before or if you’re just starting out as a programmer. Taking a little time to consider your options early on can smooth your journey and save you trouble down the road.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
6. Choose a Tool that is Simple Enough, but not Simpler If the tool you choose is too simple it may not have the feature set you need to create your game.
Choose the right tool for the job
Ensure it has sufficient feature set and that it can be easily extended later to meet any requirements, including those that may occur in the future as you upgrade your successful title. At the other end of the scale, choosing a tool that is more complex than necessary can be equally problematic. If you are working on the game by yourself or in a small team, you may simply not be able to finish it if you pick a language or tool that is too complex. There are many good tools out there each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so choose carefully. In the case of our own LiveCode platform, some 38% of projects completed with it would not have been realizable in any other tool.
And projects typically got completed in just under half the time when compared with all other alternatives including relatively high-level languages such as HTML 5.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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Be able to iterate quickly to save time
7. Ensure that you can Iterate Quickly Ensure your tool lets you iterate quickly. Once you get a screen or element of functionality into the hands of your customers to test, you will want to be able to make changes quickly. If it takes you hours or days to try out a new behaviour you’ll lose a lot of valuable time. To make your title successful you may need to iterate hundreds or thousands of times, making small changes each time, so getting this cycle as short as possible is vital.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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8. Think Cross Platform Revenue from the iOS platform currently dwarfs Android, however new Android devices are outselling iOS by a significant margin. If your focus is on making money, you may want to start by creating your title on iOS and then consider creating an Android version later. If you’re aiming to get a large user base then you can start on either platform. Depending on the type of game, you may also want to consider creating or porting your game to desktop platforms in the future. One of the most tricky aspects of cross platform design is handling the different screen resolutions and a little planning early on will really help down the line. Think about all of these things early on and choose a tool that can move with you as your needs grow.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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9. Choose a tool you can master quickly Choose a tool which is quick and easy to learn
You want to be able to spend as much time as possible on the design and functionality of your game. Choose a tool that helps you to do that. Any programming environment will take time to master, particularly if you’re not a programmer. However some tools are much easier to learn than others.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
10. Organize your code Spend time thinking about the design of your code. Wherever you create common functionality, write reusable code such as libraries so that you don’t end up copying and pasting. This means that every time you fix a bug you’ll fix every instance of a particular piece of functionality, which will both lead to a higher quality game and save you a lot of time. Spend time in forums and with online learning resources studying best practices. If your game is successful then you may be working with the same code base for many years to come. While it is normal to have to rewrite large portions of functionality in a version two, particularly if version one is your first ever game, the more you can do to organize your code the less work Your code base it will be and the less you’ll have to alter later. is important
so organize it well
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Part 3: Sail Through the App Store Submission Process
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Getting your app into one of the app stores is vital. The process can be involved, here are a few things to think about.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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11. Read the Guidelines for Each Store Early The app store guidelines exist to ensure that applications are reliable, perform as expected and are free from explicit and offensive material. While ensuring that your applications are reliable and perform as expected is something that may come later in the development process, ensuring your app design will meet the design criteria should be considered from the start. Make sure you understand what is and isn’t allowed before you create your app.
Know the publishing guidelines for the Store of your choice
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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12. Ensure your App is Packaged Properly.
Package your app properly
Take time to consider all the details that go with the app. Is your store description clear and enticing? Have you created a strong icon? What about the splash screen for the app? Taking the time to make sure all these little details are right will really help you to communicate the value of your app to a potential customer.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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13. Know what day the Store Does its app Refresh. While it may vary from store to store, teams of people are responsible for updating the store and doing an editor’s or staff pick’s section. Find out what day your chosen store and category typically gets refreshed. If you want to increase your chances of getting picked out, submit your app the day before the refresh. If it is an upgrade you can also take the time to regularly send an update and information about your download stats to the store team. Done right you can help to raise awareness of your app with the store teams which can’t hurt when it comes to getting additional coverage.
Submit your app the day before refresh day.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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14. Allow Enough Time App stores vary and it can take a while to get your app approved. This is particularly true if your app is initially rejected and has to go through multiple rounds of review before being accepted. This is typically more of a problem with a new app than it is with an upgrade but nonetheless if you are in a hurry ensure you allow sufficient days to go through the process a couple of times before you finally go live.
Allow time for app approval by the Store.
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15. It doesn’t stop at the Store The days when you could simply release an app to a store and see the sales flood in are long gone. With hundreds of thousands of games alone, you will have to put more effort in to stand out. All the more traditional forms of marketing and awareness building are still important. You’ll want to have a website, social presence and possibly other content such as a YouTube video. Which leads us to the next section…
Be Social
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Part 4: Create a Buzz About Your Game
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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16. Be Social Look for ways to include a social strategy both within your game and in your online presence. Customers expect to have access to you and if you’re not present on the social network basics such as Twitter and Facebook you’ll miss out on the opportunity to connect with them. Similarly look for ways you can incorporate one or more social networks into your game. For example, can you post a Facebook status update when your player reaches a certain milestone? If you get it right this can go far beyond being just a gimmick, it can help to significantly raise the profile of your game every time someone plays it.
Look for ways to promote your game
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17. Perfect One Killer Feature You’ll design your entire game to be amazing endto-end. When it comes to getting people talking about it, aim to have just one killer feature that everyone can talk about. For example, you may have a beautiful game for herding sheep into pens, lovingly detailed and with carefully tested gameplay. Take time to brainstorm something you could include that is memorable. What might really stand out and be a lot of fun? “Perhaps a sheep-dog element where the sheep do a special move when you whistle?” Your game may be great without it, but having that one feature that your audience will talk about and remember can be the difference between obscurity and success.
Make your game amazing
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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18. Create a YouTube video This can show the game play or your killer feature. For optimal viewing a video should not be longer than 60 seconds. Research shows the vast majority of your potential audience will stop watching if it is any longer. Using YouTube is a good bet because it has social features built in. The more people that view the video the easier it is to find. If you don’t get a good audience for the first video, try again. Get it right and the video could become a major component in driving traffic to your app.
Promote your game with a short YouTube video.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
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19. Be found by Search Engines Can Google and other search engines find your game? Is your product name a unique and searchable term? Or Does it have to compete with something else that shares it’s name? Creating a unique, catchy name can make a real difference. Your website needs to contain all the marketing for your game and link back to the app store(s) you are in. You should also ensure your website is optimized for mobile as many people will be accessing it on a device.
Be visible online
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20. Create Launch Triggers Once you’re past the point of creating your first title and have a reputation in the industry, can you work to set up triggers for your release that increase the chances of it making the top apps list? Making that list will give you a massive sales boost on most stores. Consider ways you might be able to achieve making that list in advance. For example, can you set up a series of triggers so that all of your publicity hits on a given day? Tell your user community to expect the new version on a specific date, seed key reviewers and bloggers with content that is embargoed for the date and so on. The idea is to set up as many triggers as possible that will all hit at the same time to give you the best possible chance of making the top apps list.
Communicate with your community of interest
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Part 5: Understand How to Make Money
You may have started out just to try to create something for fun, or you have set up a new company and be intending world domination. At the end of the day most game developers want to make money from their game. Here are a few ideas that should help.
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25 Things You Need To Know To Create A Successful Game
21. To Freemium or not to Freemium Freemium is one of the most popular core strategies for making money with games these days. The idea is simply that you offer your game for free but charge a premium for an advanced version or for virtual goods. The advanced version may be a separate app or you may purchase access to additional features or services directly within the app through in-app purchasing. Typically only a small percentage, say the top 5% of users, will pay for the app. For this model to work, you need to have the potential to have a substantial user base for your game. A really good game can generate $20 to $30 a month per user in virtual goods and continue to do so. That sort of ongoing revenue is very attractive as after the initial sales rush you will want to maintain income. Some 91% of mobile game revenue comes from microtransactions.
Freemium?
Consider small transactions
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Continued.... You need to be aware that those customers who do pay will expect you to continuously come up with new content. For example if you’re selling virtual goods such as new weapons you’ll need to provide a steady stream of them. Having this stream available is a great way to generate ongoing revenue. You can even email customers who haven’t played the game for a few days with the offer of a free virtual item in the hopes of enticing them back. However, be very careful choosing which valuable features to place behind the freemium wall. You cannot require a customer to “pay to win” or even pay to utilize the majority of the game, as if you do you will never build up the user base you need to upsell to. A good rule of thumb is to use virtual goods or services to allow the user to express themselves or show off their personality within the game.
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22. Mobile Advertising Casual games are a great place to put in-app advertising. You can get paid whenever a user clicks on an advert. You can experiment with good places to place that sort of advertising, for example between levels. Again, you’ll need a significant user base to make this work, however the value of this sort of advertising is growing significantly at the moment.
Consider In-app advertising
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23. iOS vs. Android The reality is that while Android devices are now outselling iOS by a significant margin, some 84% of revenue generated by mobile game developers is still coming from iOS. Android devices tend to get upgraded less quickly than iOS devices so often won’t have the latest version of the OS. This can be a problem if you are trying to push the capabilities of your game towards the cutting edge. Additionally there is an issue with “freemium friction” the difficulty of doing small in-app purchases on Android devices in a way that doesn’t break the user’s flow in your game. So if you’re just starting out and commercial success is important to you, you may want to start on iOS then launch your Android version after. However this situation is very fluid and you should keep an eye on the market. Where the aim of the game is for exposure rather than making an immediate profit, you’ll want to launch on both platforms Keep an together from the outset.
eye on the market, iOS and Android
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24. The Profitability Rule If you were to take a diagonal line on a graph that indicated profitability for a game – i.e. cost vs revenues, you would find very few games, big or small, are close to the line. They are typically either well above it or well below it. For example, a very small game produced by a single person may not have many costs but even then it will either be very profitable or it won’t. If you have a game on the market and you are planning to try to scale up, this graph is going to be key. A good rule of thumb is that you cannot “spend yourself” to profitability. If your small game is not profitable, more budget for launches, advertising or content will not make it profitable. Get your small title to be highly profitable before you try to scale up. Then you’ll have a much better chance of transitioning into the big time.
You cannot spend yourself to profitability
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25. Optimize Everything There are many factors that all need to be optimal for your game to be a success. For example, the quality of your website is key in getting a customer to look at it the game the first place, the splash screen needs to be attractive, the gameplay outstanding, there need to be no critical bugs, the virtual goods must be appealing, it needs to be reviewed or covered on multiple websites and so on. There may be 50, 100 or 1000 factors that make a successful journey to acquiring a paying customer who continues to spend money on your game. The key thing to realize is that these factors do not add together, they multiply. If your website only converts 20% of the people it could (compared to the best possible website) then you only have 20% of the potential audience. If 50% of those give up your game, dropping out in the first 5 minutes of play you only have 50% of that initial 20% left to get hooked and so on.
Identify and optimize your success factors
Thank you for reading our pocket guide and we wish you every success in creating your game. Lots of people, like you, have created successful games using LiveCode and the Game Academy. The LiveCode Game Academy is a self paced guide which takes you on each step of the journey from the start to publishing your game. It includes 7 videos modules and supporting learning materials. These are created and maintained by the RunRev team, who are available to answer any queries you may have at each step in your development.
LiveCode and the Game Academy Bundle starts at a highly affordable price and with the Pay as you Go package we offer a 30 day money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied. Want to know more? Why not take a look at the first lesson in our Game Academy Buy LiveCode Follow us: