Kongregate Newsroom (Page 32)

Analytics Jun 02, 2016

Better than Average: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Arithmetic Mean

The average, or arithmetic mean, enjoys a prominent position in most analysis toolkits, and for good reason. It’s a simple and elegant way to compress a large data set into a single, descriptive number. It’s ever-present in the alphabet soup of “key performance indicators” that highlight most gaming dashboards: ARPU (average revenue per user), ARPPU (average revenue per paying user), and average session length, to name a few. But the average is not without its limitations. If your data set is no

Engineering May 26, 2016

Unity, HTML5, CORS, and You

Due to the fact that Unity is removing support [http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/10/08/unity-web-player-roadmap/] for the Web Player in their 5.4 release, many developers are ramping up on publishing their content using the HTML5 target to ensure forward compatibility. If you do not have any experience with creating Unity HTML5 content, you can view our blog [https://blog.kongregate.com/unity-webgl/] post about the subject to get a brief overview and some tips on uploading your game to Kongregate.

Art & Design May 19, 2016

Design Tips for In-Game Character Proportions

Are you building a next hit and need some help getting your characters feeling right? Many developers often face issues designing proportions of individual characters, and the relationship between these characters and the surrounding environment. Below is an approach you can take. Obviously, if your game doesn't have characters, this post may not be for you (but feel free to stick around, since this may help your next project). The same framework is not limited to humanoid characters and can be

Game Development May 12, 2016

7 Tips to 7-Day Game Jams

Making games in a week isn’t easy. As someone who has built around 30 different games in less than a week, I've encountered a lot of counter-intuitive hurdles to working in this timebox. The good news is that a week is perhaps the best amount of time to gauge a design. It offers enough time to execute the primary details of the game, while giving some space to pivot and polish as necessary. While every team is different (or solo developer for that matter), a couple of days just isn’t enough at

Ads May 03, 2016

Ads Count, So Count Your Ads

Ads in mobile games are more popular than ever. Ads can come in the form of interstitial banners, non-rewarded video, rewarded video, offerwalls, and other native forms. Some games, often casual, can be solely supported by ad revenue. Even for games with options for in-app purchases (IAP), Kongregate typically finds that in-game ads can account for 10-50% of all revenue. This “ad”ded revenue is nice but often lives independently of IAP revenue, typically in the dashboard of various ad networks

Kongregate News Apr 28, 2016

Kongregate Game Jam!

We’re super excited to announce our first game jam! The game jam will take place from May 27th to June 3rd, giving you a solid week to get your jam finished and uploaded to Kongregate.com! We’ll be announcing the theme and special modifiers at the start of the jam. You can find more information about the game jam on the Kongregate forums [http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/623011-kongregate-game-jam-may-27-to-june-3] . If you can’t make this game jam, no worries! Kongregate h

Art & Design Apr 21, 2016

A Simple 10-Minute UI Litmus Test

About a year ago, I gave a talk to a small group of mostly indie and small-studio game developers about how to incorporate the UI process into their games, and one of the pieces of advice I haphazardly slapped on an ending slide was, “Think like a player [when looking at the UI for your game].” Essentially, I was asking developers to remove themselves from the game that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. To the surprise of probably no one, the first question I got was, “How do

Engineering Apr 14, 2016

Load Testing with Locust.io

Overview With more and more developers utilizing cloud services for hosting, it is critical to understand the performance metrics and limits of your application. First and foremost, this knowledge helps you keep your infrastructure up and running. Just as important, however, is the fact that this will ensure you are not allocating too many resources and wasting money in the process. This post will describe how Kongregate utilizes Locust.io [http://locust.io/] for internal load testing of our i

Game Development Apr 05, 2016

A Brief Look at the Idle Games Genre

Idle Games form an intriguing genre that defies typical game design wisdom in many ways while still being incredibly successful. Now, as a genre that is three years old, idle games are starting to demonstrate more and more sophistication and depth of mechanics, bigger budgets and licensed IP, all the while being led by innovative indie developers. My talk at this year's GDC, "Idle Chatter [https://blog.kongregate.com/idle-chatter-gdc-2016/]," gives an overview of old mechanics, new mechanics, an