pictured: Thumper Dark Souls is more likely associated with anguish than euphoria as a series, but it -- and other notoriously difficult games -- are where we can find some of gaming’s most pleasurable moments. If you work through your urges to throw your controller at a wall, you might be lucky enough to experience the joy that keeps us all coming back for more “YOU DIED” screens. We’re going to delve into what leads to these experiences, why they feel so good, and how they can be designed. That feeling? It’s called “flow.” Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s in response to interviewees describing the feeling as being carried along by water, flow is a deep, pleasurable immersion in the activity you are engaged in. Most commonly used in reference to creative pursuits like painting or performing music, this experience is absolutely found in games as well. To find yourself in a state of flow, first there are some parameters: You know your goal You know how to accomplish your goal You are receiving feedback

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

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

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

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