Kongregate - Kongregate Newsroom (Page 30)

Game Development Aug 23, 2016
What Some Experienced Developers Learned from Making Their First Game

In a thread in the Game Programming forum on Kongregate, a developer working on his first game [http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/mrflibble] asked experienced developers in our community what they learned from making their first game and what they would do differently if they had the opportunity to start over again. The thread can be read here [https://www.kongregate.com/forums/4-game-programming/topics/642680-what-did-you-learn-from-your-first-game] , but we also wanted to highlight some comm

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Culture Aug 18, 2016
Engineering Personas

A few weeks ago, Kongregate CRO Josh Larson related the diversity of our company [https://blog.kongregate.com/the-sorting-hat-at-kongregate] as identified by an activity of having people take a Hogwart’s sorting hat quiz. We found out that, without any conscious effort, we had a relatively evenly distributed team. While this exercise was mostly done for fun, it does highlight a key concept to building a successful team: How do you balance the strengths and weaknesses of individuals to propel the

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Game Development Aug 11, 2016
More Terrible Games, Please

I’m an intern here at Kongregate, which means that my responsibilities are varied and almost completely uninteresting to read about (but I’m not about to let a little thing like that stop me). For the past week or two, I’ve been spending most of my time combing through hundreds of old games, weeding out anything that seems broken or miscategorized. It’s very time-consuming, and although it can be tedious to wade through a tidal wave of unplayable games, it can feel like I’m uncovering bizarre ar

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Kongregate News Aug 10, 2016
A New Home for Our Documentation

Our documentation now at docs.kongregate.com [https://docs.kongregate.com]. Some of you will notice today that we moved our documentation to a new platform (on readme.io). Besides a cleaner interface, it allows us to provide some pretty useful tools within the docs, such as: * An interactive API Explorer where you can make test calls to our APIs * A community driven support hub [http://docs.kongregate.com/discuss] where you can ask questions and request features *

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Monetization Aug 04, 2016
5 Tips to Improve Game-as-a-Service Monetization

Written by Moonlit Wang, Partner Development Manager at Google Play Games, & Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile at Kongregate Free-to-play games are essentially games-as-a-service. The lifetime value of these players is much more complex to calculate than it was when a game’s player LTV was simply the purchase price of a game. We understand that the LTV is directly related to how much time players spend in the game, since long-term players spend more money, but how do we design a game t

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Culture Jul 28, 2016
The Sorting Hat at Kongregate

It was to be the last question of an Exec AMA to close out Kongregate’s day-long offsite: “Which Hogwarts House would the person to your right belong to, and why?” The answers quickly revealed — and were later verified by Pottermore [https://www.pottermore.com/] — that the four members of the Kongregate exec team in fact represented each of the Hogwarts Houses from the Harry Potter universe. A Gryffindor CEO, a Slytherin COO, a Ravenclaw CTO and a Hufflepuff CRO. We have symmetry! We love to

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Game Development Jul 19, 2016
Test Market Considerations: Countries, Timeline, UA and More!

At Kongregate, all of our published mobile games go through a rigorous test market period (a.k.a. geo-locked launch) lasting at least a month. This is an important phase of the mobile game product cycle, as it allows the team to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the title through data-driven KPIs, and to make changes to address any issues we observe before we release the game globally, whether they are crashes/bugs, tutorial/retention drop-offs, monetization [https://blog.kongregate.com/new-

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Art & Design Jul 16, 2016
Creating an Art Style

What is “art” and why do I care? I don’t have what you might call an “artistic flare” for writing these, so bear with me. Much of what is said here will be geared towards video games, but it still applies to other forms of art. In my work as Studio Art Director at Ultrabit, I often have to tell artists to change their art to fit the goals of our project. This task creates a level of anxiety and uncertainty for most artists. You’re taking them out of their comfort zone and possibly creating a fee

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Community Jul 07, 2016
Help Your Players Help Themselves

Game players come in all forms, but they are united in their passion to play games. That’s why you make your games for them to enjoy. It’s very chicken-and-the-egg if you sit and think about it too long, but I like to go more with the “If you build it, they will come” viewpoint. Especially in terms of player help and support. Players, and people in general, typically would rather try to Google/search/dig a hole and hope the answer is at the bottom of it before they want to talk to an actual per

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