Game Development - Kongregate Developers Blog

Game Development Oct 12, 2017
How to Streamline Your QA Process

Before your game can be released into the wild, first it needs to survive the rigors of the internal QA process. Ideally this process will go smoothly, but there are a few common problems that can delay testing, which this article will explain. These are things that we believe should be considered early in development. They may seem minor, but they can stall out a release in a big way, especially if you’re developing in a different time zone from your publisher. For some context, let’s start with a common release cadence: Alpha > Beta > Release Candidate > Release. Publishing QA receives builds at the Release Candidate stage. As much as we enjoy contributing earlier in the development process, this article is focused on the end of the release process. This assumes common blockers and crashes have already been found and fixed in the Alpha and Beta stages. First-Time User Experience The first thing your users will see, obviously. Here’s the thing, they’ll only see it once -- QA will go through this experience at

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Game Development Oct 10, 2017
The Perfect Stormbound Q&A with Paladin Studios

We sat down with the team who works on Stormbound to learn more about their studio and development process. When not developing the next smash hit, they enjoy “Thundering Thursday,” an after-hours event full of food and board/video games. KONG: Paladin Studios is an independent development studio located in The Netherlands; can you give our readers a better understanding of how Paladin came to be and what types of games you have released so far? DERK: Paladin was founded in 2005, when I joined forces with a buddy of mine to create a “cool development studio.” Back then, we worked on technical challenges for things like simulators and interactive visualizations. Basically using game technology for anything except games... and after several years of doing that, we got tired of that. My co-founder left, and I decided to pursue the dream of actually making entertainment games. Our first game was “Jimmy Pataya,” a project where the goal was to get a game from initial idea to App Store in two weeks. After that, we spent nearly two years on Momonga

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Game Development Sep 28, 2017
Devcom 2017: The Art of Building Amazing Demos

Kongregate's John Cooney gave a talk at Devcom this year about building amazing demos. Check out his slides below: The Art of Building Amazing Demos from Kongregate

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Developer Spotlight Sep 05, 2017
Castaway Cove Q&A: How Synapse's New Tidal Idle Came to Be

We sat down with the co-founder of Synapse Games, Alex Reeve, to explore their newest launch Castaway Cove, an idle game set on a far-off deserted island. Synapse is responsible for hit titles like Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards, Spellstone, and Tyrant Unleashed. When not developing games, he’s busy playing Dominions 4 and XCOM. KONG: Even though many people reading here on Kongregate may be aware of Synapse and the games you have developed over the years, do you mind reintroducing yourself? What is the short history of Synapse? ALEX: Sure! We started making Facebook games way back in 2008. The first of our games to gain a significant amount of traction was called War Metal, which was a multiplayer web RPG game set in a dark, futuristic world. It was a lot of fun to work on, so we ended up making a spin-off/sequel called War Metal: Tyrant. This was a CCG built in the same world. We ended up launching this on Kongregate, and we fell in love with Kongregate and the community right away.

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Guest Post Aug 24, 2017
Guest Post: Growing a Gaming Community (Before You Have Players)

This article was written by Nathan Lovato and originally posted on GameAnalytics.com. When you get started with social networks, it’s tough. Nobody follows you. Nobody reads you. Nobody knows you! How do other game developers get those thousands of followers? 2 years ago, no one knew me either. I was terrible at communication, and I didn’t like it. Back then, I had failed a company, largely due to a lack of online presence. And today? Not only do I enjoy the exchanges with the community every day: I learned to communicate the hard way and it paid off. With a niche concept in game design education, I’ve got 30 000 Youtube subscribers, 50 more every day, and companies who come to me with job offers. Thanks to them all, I’m fully independent. When it comes to getting visibility, there’s no short answer. No definitive formula to drive the people’s interest. It’s hard, it takes time, and it’s a unique skill you must develop and hone. That’s why we got in

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Analytics Aug 17, 2017
Don’t Rush Your A/B Test!

If you have been working in game development for a while I have no doubt that you’ve used A/B testing at least once. It’s a powerful tool, allowing you to check various hypotheses with data before introducing any changes to the entire game’s user base. There is no space for gut-feeling here; we should rely only on pure numbers. Sounds pretty straightforward -- could anything go wrong? Apparently, it could. In the world of A/B testing there are a lot of pitfalls. Here is a list of the most common ones: Running the A/B test without a clear hypothesis and metric to measure Jumping to conclusions before getting statistical significance Uneven distribution in the variants between geos, platforms and whatnot Incorrect implementation of the A/B test conditions Issues with the correct assignment of an A/B test group Too short of an A/B test (i.e. one day only), resulting in biased data In this article we will be focusing on the issues caused by rushed decisions. Here at Kongregate, we care

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Game Development Aug 10, 2017
Exploring Motivation: Why People Play Games for Years

Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight the core motivations created by each game and discuss how that system ties into that motivation. An excellent resource on the subject is Quantic Foundry's 2017 GDC talk on the anatomy of player motivations. AdVenture Capitalist offers a simple promise that any fan of idle games can appreciate: click more, get more powerful. Quantic Foundry's talk highlighted idle games in particular as incredible motivators for people who are motivated by the accumulation of power and the desire to complete every quest and collect every achievement. There are hundreds of idle

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Game Development Jul 19, 2017
HTML5 Is Here

HTML5 has been hailed as the future of gaming in web browsers for years. Back in 2011, however, HTML5 was running into headwinds due to issues with performance and compatibility. There was general optimism about the technology, but few were willing to adopt it for their own games. Things became more urgent recently, though, with the deprecation of NPAPI plugins (i.e. Unity, Java, Silverlight, etc.) and an ominous cloud hanging over the long-term viability of Flash. So where are we now? For context on the following data, Kongregate.com has had 500-1500 games uploaded every month for nearly a decade, with over 100,000 games to date. We’ve often been known as a “Flash” platform because Flash dominated other technologies, but we’ve actually been an open, technology-agnostic web platform since 2007, also supporting Java and Shockwave early on. We were the first platform to officially support Unity, long before it was ubiquitous, starting in 2011, and we also built native support for HTML5 in 2013. All of this puts us in a unique position to have a

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Game Development Jul 06, 2017
Working with Intellectual Property: It's Freakin' Sweet, I Tell Ya H'what

Over the last 7 years I’ve worked on a variety of Facebook and mobile games; a handful of them were with different celebrities and intellectual properties (IPs). I've been working on Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards at Kongregate for the past two years. I joined during pre-production, saw it through launch, and continue to support it through live servicing. Animation Throwdown is a card-battling game that incorporates the worlds of 5 animated properties from Fox: Family Guy, American Dad, Futurama, Bob's Burgers, and King of the Hill. Before Kongregate, I was a producer on Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff at TinyCo. Before that, I worked as a designer and producer on a variety of projects with celebrities and brands at Grab Games: Baby and Me (working with Brooke Burke and ModernMom.com), Brad Paisley World for Facebook, and a few other games that were never released. Partnership First of all, these projects are partnerships. You get to work on amazing properties that have a fan base who cares deeply about that property and, if you’re lucky,

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