Game Development - Kongregate Developers Blog (Page 2)

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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Game Development Jun 05, 2017
China Is Kind of a Big Deal for Indie Games

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

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Engineering Apr 27, 2017
Unity WebGL Memory Optimization: Part Deux

Now that the Unity WebPlayer is mostly a thing of the past, making sure your Unity WebGL content runs smoothly is more important than ever. The main pain point that we hear from developers relates to the dreaded “out of memory” errors that end users encounter when trying to play WebGL games. This is a particularly frustrating issue for players using 32-bit versions of browsers, since they are much less likely to have a large contiguous block of free memory for the Unity heap. This article will cover some more tips and tricks for diagnosing and resolving memory-related issues with your Unity WebGL game. Monitoring Memory Usage When profiling and optimizing your Unity WebGL game, it is important to keep track of multiple kinds of memory usage. The first is the Unity heap, which defaults to 256MB and can be changed in the Publishing Settings interface under “WebGL Memory Size.” We touched on some optimization techniques for this chunk of memory (and why you want to keep it as small as possible) in a previous blog post. To reiterate, the

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Game Development Apr 25, 2017
Juicy Beast: All the Tools We Use to Make Games

This week, we're hosting a guest blog post from Juicy Beast! We receive a lot of emails about the tools we use to make our games, so we thought it’d be easier to just list them all here for you curious folks out there. Photoshop We mostly use Photoshop for UI work and everything “branding” and “marketing”. It’s obviously a standard, so no news here. One trick we use a lot is “Generate > Image Assets”, which automatically exports all your layers to PNGs if they’re named correctly. You can also customize the size, quality and file type of the exported image. It’s magic. Illustrator We use Illustrator every time we need to come up with a new logo, either for one of our games or to refresh the Juicy Beast one (for the 100th time). We occasionally stray from Illustrator for a more hand-drawn look, like with the Knightmare Tower logo and Toto Temple Deluxe logo, but even then, we start in Illustrator to sketch things up quickly, as it tends to handle type more

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