A Mobile Game Primer for Brands

The mobile games industry has grown tremendously in recent years. COVID-19 has accelerated that growth, amplifying already-incredible levels of consumer engagement, spending, and demographic reach. 

Playcrafting helps brands leverage mobile games to increase awareness and engagement. In our work for the past few years, a number of questions have emerged for every non-endemic brand we’ve worked with. We want to answer those here. 

In this article, we’ll take a high-level look at mobile game development, then outline our workflow and best practices. You’ll get an understanding of the full scope of a mobile game, how to optimize the collaborative game development process, and how to maximize the created game’s quality as a tool for communicating your brand.

What’s in a mobile game?

On a tangible level, a mobile game comprises a variety of assets: code, audio files, images, 3D models, and more. These elements come together in a cross-platform game engine - a software program used to build games - such as Unity or Unreal.

These tangible assets are composed and connected in accordance with a design specification detailing game mechanics and user flows along with various other features and functionality. Once the game’s core design is laid out, the engine is used to build separate, playable apps for desired mobile platforms.

What kind of game should my brand make?

For non-endemic brands, making a widely-accessible game is paramount. 

Mobile devices already offer a variety of experiences for a diverse group of players. But a concise onboarding flow, intuitive controls, and easy-to-understand gameplay are hallmarks of an accessible mobile game. This appeals to casual players who now comprise the majority of people who play games and typically align with non-endemic brands. 

Playcrafting can help you identify appropriate game mechanics and aesthetics for your brand. This will ensure that the game is accessible and audience-appropriate and appeal to players who might be outside of your typical audience.

What is the process of making a mobile game for brands?

The process of making a game has several steps, ranging from initial design and implementation to iteration and delivery. We’ll cover each of the steps, as well as how we can work through each step together to create a game that speaks your brand.

STEP 1: Initial Design

We start by identifying your brand focus: what you want your consumers to learn about your brand and how you want them to interact with your brand through the game. This incorporates your guidelines for how the brand can or cannot be represented.

We then identify the project scope and timeline, aesthetic options, and game mechanics, then work together to select the target aesthetic and core game mechanic. After this, we produce and finalize a game design document: a structured document that details the game’s functionality and flows. This document outlines and aligns every key point before development begins. It provides clarity as to what is being built and how it will function ahead of time.

Best Practices: Initial Design

Draw focus to your brand focus early on. We help you determine how to best incorporate and draw players to your brand focus within the game. Planning around this enables us to cater the overall design to your brand.

Maintain the game’s integrity. Players can tell from a mile away when a game is just a “cheap cash-in.” We work with you to ensure the gameplay and narrative are immersive while integrating your brand authentically. The resulting game should come to life because of your brand’s message, not its logo.

Scope appropriately. Scope and timeline awareness is critical, as it informs the rest of the development process. Taking the overall timeline and feedback processes into account up front guarantees an on-time delivery of the most fully-featured and polished version of the game. 

Use mood boarding and mockups. We identify potential aesthetics via mood boards and references in a directed approval process. Once a target aesthetic is selected, we produce mockups of relevant assets to ensure everyone shares the same aesthetic vision.

STEP 2: Aesthetic & Game Prototyping

Work on the game itself begins once the game design document is finalized. 

Variants of usable audiovisual assets are produced for review and approval to ensure that asset design is on the right track before being integrated into the game. Simultaneously, engineers build core functionality outlined in the game design document using placeholder audiovisual assets.

This results in both the delivery of audiovisual assets and a separate playable demo that exemplifies core gameplay and user flows. The game doesn’t start to look like its final aesthetic until we bring in approved assets.

Best Practices: Aesthetic & Game Prototyping

Finalize your aesthetic. We deliver audiovisual asset variants that best represent the overall aesthetic during this phase. This helps us solidify the aesthetic direction and begin producing assets that are usable within the game.

Finalizing aesthetic direction early on is extremely important. The longer a game is in development prior to a change in aesthetic, the more audiovisual assets need to be modified or recreated entirely. This proportionately inflates workload and scope.

Integrate your brand effectively. As we finalize the game’s aesthetic, we’ll work with you to identify how to best represent your brand within the selected aesthetic while adhering to your brand’s style guidelines.

Utilize tempered feedback. It’s important to focus audiovisual or gameplay feedback on the appropriate deliverables during early prototyping. It’s very easy to critique the aesthetic of playable prototypes due to placeholder audiovisual assets, but audiovisual feedback should be kept strictly to audiovisual deliverables. While unintuitive, reviewing early gameplay prototypes without focusing on their aesthetic can reduce overall time spent iterating on audiovisual assets and pave the way for more polished assets at the end of development.

Step 3: Ongoing Development & Iteration

As the game developers, we’ll provide deliverables and work with you to iterate on your feedback in accordance with the project schedule. We’ll make sure that each aspect of the game is provided for review at the optimal point in the development cycle to minimize overhead introduced by iteration.

This iterative feedback is scoped for at the project’s outset to ensure that there is an appropriate degree of flexibility to the game’s design and keep scope creep in check.

Best Practices: Ongoing Development & Iteration

Approach feedback holistically. It’s important to provide feedback and propose revisions that take into account all aspects of the game that are impacted as a result. For example, a lack of consideration for how a particular flow is affected by a proposed change can result in implementation guesswork and additional revisions. We’ll work with you to make sure that everything is accounted for.

Organize your feedback. Recording feedback in an organized manner is critical to reducing revision time and frequency. We’ll make sure a sound process is in place for unifying and reconciling your feedback during each iteration. This guarantees all feedback is communicated clearly and is acted upon quickly and accurately.

Minimize scope impact. Revisions have to be actionable within the project time allocated for them in order to stay on schedule. We’ll identify revisions that are or aren’t in-scope and work with you to reconcile them against the project schedule, then implement them with as little impact as possible.

STEP 4: DELIVERY

Once the game is complete, it must be built to each target platform and delivered to the relevant app stores (i.e. Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Store) for distribution. Upon delivery, we must submit each build for review in the associated app store. If approved, it can be publicly released. If a build is rejected, any outstanding issues must be addressed and a new build must be submitted for review.

Deployment to a mobile app store requires an app store account. If your company does not have the needed accounts, we can set them up with and for you.

Best Practices: Delivery

Stick to the build pipeline. Mobile platforms have various processes for building and distributing mobile games for internal testing, limited access releases, and public releases. As such, it’s important to be able to produce each kind of build consistently and quickly. We’ll set up a build pipeline that accounts for these build variants so that we can readily produce each variant throughout the development process.

Prioritize app store preparedness. It’s important to set up app store accounts and configure associated app listings as early as possible to ensure the release is on time. Additionally, mobile apps must undergo a review process prior to each release. We'll help you get everything in place and assist in the app store review and release processes.

Don’t forget the privacy policy. All app stores require publishers to provide a link to a publicly-available privacy policy that covers the game in question. Prepare a privacy policy as early as possible to avoid any delays.

What else should I know?

The development process varies from game to game. There are several other topics that may be relevant when it’s time to create yours. A couple of other common subjects are analytics and server-driven functionality.

Analytics

Your game can collect analytics data to help you learn how players interact with your brand through your game. We can work with you to identify use cases catered to your game’s brand focus, then create specifications and implement the data collection to provide you with relevant insights.

Server-Driven Functionality

Some game features, such as leaderboards, require external servers to process and store data. Each mobile device running the game then sends data to and retrieves data from those servers.

Server-driven functionality, especially socially-focused functionality, can drive player engagement and organically expand your game’s playerbase. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of the implementation and maintenance costs:

• Server-driven functionality significantly increases the technological complexity of the game and increases engineering time requirements accordingly.
• Server-driven functionality is only available to a given player if that player’s device is online. When deciding whether or not a particular online feature makes sense, it’s important to consider how likely it is for a given player to have internet access while they’re playing and how the gameplay will be impacted if they don’t.
• Server-driven functionality incurs ongoing costs. The servers that process and store data must be hosted somewhere, and that means they need to be paid for. It’s always wise to estimate costs for online features against the current or expected size of your playerbase.

Let’s get started!

While there’s some overlap with traditional advertising efforts in how games are designed and built to communicate your brand’s message, they bring in a number of considerations of their own. We’ve been doing the work for years so you don’t have to. 

Mobile games can bring your brand to life in unexpected and interactive ways. Making them should seamlessly tie in with your workflow without breaking the bank.

With these insights, we have all we need to bring brand reach and awareness to a whole new level. Get in touch today and realize your brand through mobile games.

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Want to see what Playcrafting can do for you? Let’s chat!