Golden Rules of Mobile Game Development
So I’m very excited about Runic Rumble, I decided to write a blog post. Epiphany Games has done a bunch of mobile work for clients in Australia and Abroad but this is the first time we are creating a mobile game specifically for our own players. What’s more Runic Rumble players will receive some nice benefits and treats in Frozen Hearth, I won’t go into specifics but we have to create some serious technology to support our players of all platforms. This got me to thinking – what are the Golden Rules of Mobile Game Development:
- Keep the Gameplay simple as possible, have one good game play idea and focus on that.
- Do what you can with the platform to make it easy for the player, people don’t want to have complicated sign-in processes – single click sign-in is preferable for multi user games.
- Make your narrative simple, yet engaging, draw the players in on one sentence.
- Test often on many devices. Even iPhone has several devices and many versions of the OS.
- Keep it small, the smaller the download quicker the player is playing your game.
So, onto the new technology. At Epiphany we have created some great pieces of tech used in over 100 games. This ranges from iOS to PC and Console. Today we have started an exciting project that many game developers will want, as what it does is allow developers to unite their players across games and platforms and share their achievements online. More importantly it utilises the services we like to use already: Steam, Apple Game Centre etc. It’s not a replacement – it’s an enhancement, one that will be in the hands of the Studios who make these games. Secondly it has some nice features out of the box to get started, like high score tables, league tables and achievements you can use these and give your players a login quickly and efficiently using a JSON or XML API. Looking forward to sharing future updates about this new tool kit.
Cheers
Morgan