Building tight games with game metrics (Part 3)

This is the third and last part of adding analytical insights to Daniel Cook’s blog post on "Building tight game systems of cause and effect". If you missed the two first parts, you can access them through this link Part 1 and this other one Part 2 respectively.

11. Processing Complexity

“Tighter: System requires simulating few steps to predict an outcome.  In a vertically scrolling shooter, you see the bullet coming towards you.  It doesn't take a lot of thought to figure out that if you stay in that location you are going to be hit.”

“Looser: System requires simulating multiple steps to predict an outcome.  On the other hand, in Triple Town, good players need to think dozens of moves ahead.  Thinking through all the various machinations necessary to get the result you want adds a serious cognitive load to the player.  A single mistake in the player's calculations yields unexpected results.”

Click to read more ...

Don’t make me think – Applied to game design (Guest Post)

No matter how big and smart our brains are, we humans are still lazy when it comes to thinking. Joakim Achrén, CEO at My Next Games company, is here to illustrate how embracing the inherent laziness of players can actually improve your games. And we will be adding some metric sauce here and there...

Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think came out in 2000, yet it is still regarded as one of the best website usability books around. It’s been the best resource for me in usability since I read it for the first time in 2006. The book is subtitled “A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.”

If you haven’t read the book yet, you should. At least right after you’ve read my thoughts on how to apply the approaches to game design. I will tackle some of the most important chapters in the book and point out how to apply them. Here goes!

Click to read more ...

Beating Candy Crush Saga (Guest Post)

Michail Katkoff is back with more game analytics goodies. In this post specifically, he will dissect one of the most succesful games of all time, Candy Crush Saga, and give you tips on dethroning the king of social gaming, none other than King (pun intended). So read on. 

Candy Crush Saga from King rules the top grossing charts because of several key elements:

• it is extremely accessibile, as you can play the game both on and offline
• it has a low-entry barrier 
• it takes full use of virality
• the graphics and the sounds of the game are both distinctive and weirdly appealing
• it has map based progress, which ensures relevancy for players who start the game even years apart

 So how can you, as a developer, beat this game?

Click to read more ...

Building tight games with game metrics (Part 2)

Two weeks ago we started “metricifying” Daniel Cook’s, Chief Creative Officer at SpryFox, blog post on "Building tight game systems of cause and effect". This week we begin part two of this game-analytical journey. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. 

6. Pacing

“Tighter: Short time lapses between cause and effect.  When creating mouse over boxes like you find in Diablo, a common mistake is to add a delay between when the mouse is over the inventory item and when the hover dialog appears. If the delay is too short, the hover dialog pops up when the player doesn't expect it.  If the delay is too long, the dialog feels laggy and non-responsive. (In my experience, 200ms seems ideal.  That's right inside the perception gap where you've decided to do something, but your conscious mind hasn't quite caught up)“

Click to read more ...

Building tight games with game metrics (Part 1)

In July 2012 Daniel Cook, Chief Creative Officer at SpryFox, published a blog post about making games easy to understand and play, which he called "Building tight game systems of cause and effect". Here are a number of game metrics ideas and suggestions inspired by the techniques described in that post.

How to build "tightly"

In his blogpost, Daniel Cook explains that: "a tight system has clearly defined cause and effect. A loose system make is more difficult to distinguish cause and effect relationships. There is no correct ‘tightness’ of a loop." He then enumerates several methods to tweak the tightness of a game under development. In this post, we tried to translate those aspects into actual game and player metrics. The list below is, of course, far from a complete guide for using game metrics to track game design "tightness". As Daniel himself writes:

 Not all systems are readily amenable to the intuitive formation of models of cause and effect.

  Not all of the methods apply to all games. Depending on what the game designer is trying to accomplish, some methods will be important and others will not make any sense at all.

Click to read more ...

The economics of mobile game publishing (Guest Post)

Our latest guest post brings a new face to the GameAnalytics blog. Eric Seufert is a quantitative marketer with a specific interest in freemium analytics and product design. He is currently writing a book called Freemium Economics, which will be published by Morgan Kaufmann in late 2013. He also blogs frequently at Ufert.se, so feel free to pay him a visit. 

Supercell’s recent $100mm secondary financing round raises some interesting questions about how mobile game developers capitalize on a hit game. A title in the Top 10 grossing chart for the US can, as evidenced by a number of recent high-profile examples, generate upwards of $500,000 per day, but this capacity for revenue generation does not directly scale with enterprise value for the firm because these revenue streams are not themselves business units. Rather, in many cases, hit games are evaluated as short-term windfalls that 1) cannot be expected to persist permanently into the future and 2) are assumed to be non-repeatable (ie. a huge hit game is seen as an aberration, not the result of a product strategy that can be re-implemented in another game to the same degree of success).

Click to read more ...

Introducing the GameAnalytics Unity Cheatsheet

Spring is already upon us, so we thought of bringing a breeze of fresh air into the GameAnalytics SDK for Unity. We have listened closely to the feedback of our Unity users on the GameAnalytics package. Read below what this update brings.

Click to read more ...

The Chaos Factor: The Biggest Challenge for Game Analytics?

How do you generate order from chaos? This is fundamentally the challenge game analysts face when given the task of making sense of some of the most complex information systems in the world: Massively Multi-Player Online Games. In this post we broach the topic of game balance in MMOGs and why making it perfect is so hard.   

Click to read more ...

Usability in mobile games: the triumph of bad design?

Many successful game seem to have lately forgotten to include usability, which used to be the alpha and omega for game development, in their development process.

Usability is defined as both ease of use and ease of learning to use a man-made object. It is a concept that has been at the core of good software design ever since the beginning of computers. It was, of course, a long and hard road for usability to dominate software development, leaving users in a usability Dark Age for many years.

Back in the days of the text-based interfaces standard, the average user would simply be unable to operate a computer without a large manual or specific training. Today, with the operating system standard dominating the market, anyone can sit down in front of a computer and use it intuitively, without any training at all. The progress of usability in operating systems has been enormous in the last 20 years, and comparing Windows 95 to Windows 7 clearly demonstrates that.

Click to read more ...

Five Tips for Killer First-Time Flow

In this post Michail Katkoff gives us some tips on achieving flow in video games. While the concept of flow has its roots in psychology, it has been in the last few years associated with the world of video games as well. Flow is defined as that state in which a person is fully immersed into a video game, which guarantees maximum enjoyment.

While getting ready for launch, player testing your title is truly a tough and eye-opening experience. Every. Single. Time. You've constructed all these really simple, educating and fun levels, just to realize that players don't play the game 'as they should'. To ensure that your game is played like it is supposed to be played, you need to have a killer first-time flow.

First-time flow hooks the players and teaches them the core loop of the game. Most importantly, you have to win the player over with the first playthrough. If first-time flow sucks, all the later levels content will be left untouched.

Click to read more ...