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,

This article was written by Lars Doucet and originally posted on Gamasutra back in March. We found it so useful that we're hosting it here, with Lars' permission. For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet. Support Mac and Linux 5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively Participate in Humble Bundles (back when they were really good) Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc. significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam Localize all the things Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech Probably worth it? But not crystal clear. Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China. In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0," we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar. For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016: and I had noticed it

This three-part series is intended to break apart my MIGS 2016 slides into what are hopefully detailed but accessible angles on the math and mechanics behind idle and incremental games. The sections draw heavily from a collection of spreadsheet models I built and have opened up for you to play around with. In Part I we looked at some of the standard math behind rapid-growth idle games, primarily at the relationships between exponential and polynomial growth and some methods of checking and adjusting the balance of the various generators over time. In Part II we explored different options for growth outside of the Cookie Clicker exponential model, as well as other options for interactions of generators. Now, in the final part, we will look at prestige loops, including analyzing the design behind real-world examples and how to vary them to keep things interesting for the player. The ability to reset your game with a multiplier to progress, often called a “prestige,” is one of the crucial mechanics behind most modern idle games, originally popularized (and conceived?) by Orteil’s Cookie

A few weeks ago, in Part I of this three-part series, we looked at some of the standard math behind rapid-growth idle games, primarily at the relationships between exponential and polynomial growth and some methods of checking and adjusting the balance of the various generators over time. In Part II we’re going to explore a different option for growth outside of the Cookie Clicker model that the vast majority of idle games use these days. In the "standard" model, there is a primary $\color{ForestGreen}{currency}$ and a bunch of generators ($\color{Cerulean}{Gen 1}$, $\color{BurntOrange}{Gen 2}$, etc.) that produce that $\color{ForestGreen}{currency}$. In AdVenture Capitalist these are the investments generating cash. In Clicker Heroes these are the heroes generating damage, which is then converted into gold. But who says that generators have to produce primary $\color{ForestGreen}{currency}$? What happens if generators generate other generators, like this? You have a single generator producing the $\color{ForestGreen}{currency}$ and then a cascading chain of generators producing the previous tier. So $\color{Cerulean}{Gen 1}$ is the

I’ve given a few talks in the past about the appeal and general mechanics of idle games, but what if you actually wanted to make one? Theory and patterns are nice, but there’s some complicated math running behind it. And how on earth do you balance a game that has insanely large numbers? This article is Part I of what will be a three-part series detailing topics covered in my most-recent talk. Part I discusses core ideas of growth, cost, prestige, and generator balancing. Part II will look into alternate growth methods (especially derivative-based). Part III will look at prestige cycles and balance. The models for all of the charts produced in these articles are available as spreadsheets. Please feel free to duplicate, peruse, experiment, extend, etc.! Let’s start by specifying some terminology to make talking about this easier. Primary Currency: This is the main number that is being incremented, generally the goal of the game. Usually it’s some form of money. Generator: The items in the game that produce primary currency. The rate of production,

In a thread in the Game Programming forum on Kongregate, a developer working on his first game 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, but we also wanted to highlight some common themes that many new game developers might find helpful. Choose Your First Project Wisely and Finish It! People who want to get into game development often have a “dream game” they hope to make. That’s great! But set that aside for now. Your first projects are about learning, and part of what you are learning is how to manage complexity and finish projects. Light_bringer777, creator of the Learn to Fly games, advises, “Your first objective should always be to learn and improve yourself at the beginning. Do projects that teach you something rather than aiming for production value early on.” Remember that you aren’t only learning how to code and how to design; you are learning how

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 or ad engagement. In this blog post, we share our learnings from running test market campaigns, with a focus on the pros and cons of running tests in different parts of the world. Phase 1: The Philippines The Philippines is a popular country for testing. Players are cheap to acquire with Cost-Per-Installs (CPIs) typically ranging from as low as $0.30 to $1.00. This allows developers/publishers to hit a meaningful number of installs quickly and stay within budget. The caveat is that games with a niche theme and/or art might see higher CPIs; for example, our recently launched Pocket