Just a quick browsing in the App Store reveals an inexhaustible variety of mobile game apps across both App Store and Play Store. The choice is so overwhelming that you just cannot have a closer look at all of them. This challenge of getting discovered plagues every new mobile game app.
But even after your game is downloaded and being played, they risk being left and uninstalled anytime the players no longer feel them enticing. How can you prevent this? Some game design principles in this respect proved effective. Here we explained a few of them.
Identify Your Game Players
Every game has an audience that likes playing that game. Even within a particular type of game, there are subtypes and their respective audience. More accurately you can know about the players who are going to play the game a better gaming experience you can ensure for them.
When identifying game players, it is important to know players by age group, gender, social strata and all other demographic attributes. Moreover, you need to know the devices your game is supposed to be played by most users. You need to know the kind of features and design your target audience loves in most mobile apps and games.
Knowing your players to this depth will not be a tough task if you take help of modern analytics. Social media analysis of audience engagement for competitive games is the other way to do that. Apart from these, you should always concentrate on few closely competitive games and what type of audience prefers playing them.
Creating a player persona for your game can be a critical step to evaluate your target audience and accordingly making decisions on game design and development.
Key Game Mechanic
Now you need to decide on the key game mechanic based on your game idea. If you have a racing game idea, how you are going to make players race within the game and enjoy racing? That is where game mechanics come into play. Irrespective of big or small titles, almost all games come invariably with a game mechanic.
The whole of your development and design effort unleashing a game mechanic can fail if the players do not find the gaming experience enjoyable and enticing. Besides allowing them gaming pleasure at the start, the game should remain enjoyable with every subsequent instances of playing. That's how a game becomes addictive.
There can be an array of different game mechanics according to the type of game. For example, a game like Subway Surfers has a game mechanic with the player being chased to race ahead for more virtual coins and prizes. On the other hand, a popular game like 8 Ball Pool is all about playing pool games across the levels to earn more points and qualify for the harder round of the game.
How can you bring variety and freshness to this game playing experience? Obviously, it's possible only by incorporating new elements. It can offer player new game resources, several levels and hardships to allow the core mechanic is facilitating variety.
Prototyping Game Idea
Thanks to prototyping your still to come game app, you can save a lot of time and trouble in the development project. As soon as the game idea is ready making it appear on a professionally designed prototype will make things clear how the game is going to be felt.
There are many ways to create app prototypes. For mobile games also straightforward and quick prototyping with pen and paper may work. But obviously, if you can utilise a modern tool, it would be further effortless. A digital prototype with simple lines and shapes is more useful at times.
Consistent Design
Finally, let us talk about one of the biggest design flaws for a vast majority of mobile games, and it is nothing but the lack of consistency in design. Certain conventions are obvious, and in your mobile game, they should be same irrespective of the bunch of unconventional design ideas you have.
By just reusing certain game design conventions from your development can be easier and quicker. For example, across various types of games green used as the standard colour for referring to the player’s life bar while red is used for referring to the enemy. Convention helps players getting well with a game as the player can intuitively recognise most actions.
Game sprites are another area to deliver consistency in design. For example, colour contrast, on screen proportion, vibrance, etc. should be consistent. The user should have a consistent gaming experience from the entire game app.
Several ensign and development aspects remained uncovered in this post. But the primary focus of the mobile game development company should be on simplicity to help players getting with the game quickly every time the player comes to play.
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