Creating Exceptional Mobile Games

I have worked with people all my life. 12 years as an educationalist and since 1996 creating games and educational interactive content. While I was working with children and their families I took a three-year course in family therapy at the Kempler Institute of Scandinavia. This training learned me to look at the processes in a family; a perspective that can also be of great value in creating games.

If the purpose of a game is to impact the people playing it, knowing about processes is a great advantage. There are many technical areas that crave your attention in a game development process. It’s tempting to compare games feature by feature and expecting the same market feedback if you have made a copy of the #1 game. But great games are about people more than technology. This is why game creation does not equal cooking. The same ingredients will not necessarily produce the same overall result. There are subtle mechanisms at work that will alter the outcome.

I will tell about some of my principles, strategies and values when I evaluate games or concepts during development.

But first I’d like to mention some of the core elements in games and my overall view on these:

Graphics

I still remember playing the first “Tomb Raider” game on PlayStation 1. If you look at it today you can clearly see it wouldn’t be impressive today. But by the standards at that time it was.

The most important lessons to take is that graphics in games always will be a child of it’s time and also that the graphics by themselves is not the goal. They are there to serve important purposes:

-       To support the user’s imagination

-       To support the story you are telling (and you are always telling a story)

-       To help the user see what she is exactly supposed to do

-       To sometimes, but not necessarily, provide an aesthetic experience

You are always telling a story and you are always selling a feeling.

Make sure the graphics are supporting this story and feeling.

Gameplay

The gameplay is centered around your point of view as a player, what you are suppose to do and the overall purpose of the game. The most important thing about gameplay is that is has to allow the user to become more skilled and provide a learning curve that is neither too steep or too flat. I recommend the book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Another important part of the gameplay is the role you are put in. Are you “Defender of the Crown” or a plumber rescuing a princess? The role for the player in the gameplay must be attractive and provide a clear goal.

Motoric skills needed

The requirements to play a game successfully vary a lot from game to game. Where some games are turn based and only tax your intellect, other games require you to master combinations and muscle memory to come out as a winner. “Clash of Clans” is an example of the first and “Subway Surfers” an example of a game that requires timing and somewhat precision. Mobile games are still a lot easier in motoric demands than for example classic console fighting games like “Tekken” or pc World of Warcraft PvP (Player vs. Player).

What should be noted for mobile games is that you shouldn’t introduce motoric challenges unless it plays a natural role in the gameplay. For a sword bashing game it might be relevant but for a chess like game it would be working against the game’s premise.

Amount of text to read to play

I am often surprised by the amount of text I meet in fairly simple games. Often the quality of text is also quite bad. From spelling errors to ambiguous meanings. I can recommend from Stephen King’s referral a book called “The Elements of Style” by Strunk. If you are at any time writing a text for a game this is a must read.

Text in the right place and amount provides clarity and drives the game process forward. When you are observing children play games intended for grown ups it becomes clear that many games can be played without understanding 90% of the text in most games. I recommend you put game texts under scrutiny:

·      What is the purpose of this text?

·      How is it contributing to the game process?

·      Does it enlighten or confuse the player?

·      Can the game be played and understood without it?

·      Can you make the text shorter and more clear?

Game feedback to user effectiveness

A game should provide feedback to the user. A lot of current game developers have obviously read about how flashy graphics create endorphins in our brains that make us want to stay in the game. All kinds of fireworks, exploding stars, rainbows and whatnot are firing in all directions whenever a player is even minimally successful.

And that’s fine. However, the real deal is how a game provides feedback that helps the player learn and improve their skill in the game. What does the game tell you when you are NOT successful? And how? This is where the awesome games show their awesomeness. One thing we can never afford to lose is the player’s belief that she can improve. Or when they have failed 10 times in a row we can perhaps offer guidance or secretly adjust the difficulty – Or even quite openly offer the player to have a go in a “easier” mode.

The first couple of minutes a game is played is quite literally a minefield where the player’s interest can blow up. I am specifically thinking about the places in the game where the player can learn how to win and build confidence in she can be successful. In many cases I see games where these important situations are cluttered with 12 buttons and animations all demanding the player’s attention. Of course this will lead to many players losing focus and leaving the game because it is too hard or simply “nothing for me”. In many cases what they mean is that they are not able to decode the situation and figure out how to improve (win).

FTUE (First Time User Experience)

When you start a new game a lot of things will happen during the first minutes. You will most likely go through phases like this in your first time user experience:

• Discovery
• What (is this game about, what am I suppose to do)
• Why (am I saving the universe, what’s the story?)
• How (will I be able to win?)
•  Decoding the objective
• Asking the relevant questions unconsciously
• Trying to manipulate the situation to progress
• Testing own assumptions by gaining insights and learning (feedback from game)
• The crucial moment: Deciding to stop or continue - Has interest grown or worn out?
• Building loyalty to come back next day

The above are just headlines that I think deserve their own article. But try a new game and write down your reactions and reasons for deciding if you like the game or not.

When we first meet someone on a date we have a certain level of interest in that person. Everything the other person does or says will either increase the interest or decrease it. In such tense situations you can also flatly kill the other person’s interest with one misplaced remark.

When opening an app for the first time we also start out with a certain reserve of interest and we are looking for signs that confirm that this is what we are looking for.

You can put this question to anything you show the user when they first play a game: “Will this increase the user’s interest in this game?”

When you get all of the above right…

Let’s examine the feelings and reactions that are triggered. What are you looking for in your users’ minds?

Put yourself in the user seat and in the best case it will be one or more of these reactions:

·      You feel empowered (better than when you started)

·      You feel inspired

·      You feel you have achieved (something)

·      You were treated fair

·      You knew exactly what to do to win

·      You want to tell others about your experience

·      You are thinking about or planning what you want to achieve next time

One of the main reasons to ever play a game is that we interact based on very clear rules that set everybody equal across their position in society, mood or any other situation.

It doesn’t matter if you are president or farmer, if you have the highest hand in poker, you win! In my view this premise is one of the most important ones in games and one we should never break. You can see users pulling away from games where you can buy your way to success.

Two really good indicators of exceptional games happen after the game stops: Does the player want to tell others about the experience and is the player somehow planning what to do next time the game is picked up again?

Questions

One of my favourite mind games is to describe entertainment I like (be it games, movies or books) by lining up the questions they provoke in my mind.

If you are reading a crime novel you are often presented with a crime and you just have to finish the book to answer one obvious question: Who did it?

The last years’ surge of streaming TV series is a good example of what I’m talking about. We keep hanging in there week by week because there is always a cliff hanging question we are hooked to get answered: How will the main character overcome this or that threat? Netflix made a genius move by allowing us to go all out and binge watch a whole season and over dosing in answering the chain of burning questions.

My claim is that every exceptional entertainment concept is setting up questions in our minds that we feel hooked to get the answer to.

For a game it could be how to achieve something in the game to obtain a great satisfaction for the user when that (level or skill) is achieved. The subconscious question in that case is like “What actions do I need to do to experience that great sense of success?” or “How can I overcome the challenge and get my emotional reward?”

The right questions are always relevant and are usually supported by a number of smaller “subquestions” you can answer more quickly than the big questions.

 

And that’s not even enough!

I started out by stating how to make exceptional games. If you do all of the above right you are amongst the very few who have ventured so far. But to make the real magic happen and enter the exceptional league there are three more ingredients you should look at:

-       Being Original

-       Timing

-       Perfect Execution

There must always be something new and original to your game. The days when the first 3D first person shooter came about was awestriking. A new genre was born. Temple Run on the mobile platform also pioneered new times.

The timing in both above cases was right in the way it was timing what the technology could do in a new way. “Doom” squeezed the max out of graphic cards and Temple Run took advantage of both the 3D capabilities and the tactile element of the iPhone.

Perfect execution is all about not having any bugs or technical issues ruining the player experience.

An early MMORPG game like “Horizon” in many ways preceded Blizzard’s World of Warcraft but they couldn’t deliver the perfect execution. Too many server issues and bugs killed the concept that was in many ways showing the way for WoW years later. I still think one of the core reasons for WoW’s success was grounded in the way they managed to handle technical networking issues so extraordinary well.

That’s all for now and I hope my views have been inspiring!

Ole Ivanoff, March 2018