Game Development - Kongregate Developers Blog (Page 4)

Developer Spotlight Nov 09, 2017
'AdVenture Communist' Dev Q&A: Digging into a Dynasty

KONG: Hyper Hippo is a Canadian-based independent game developer best known for the hit idle game AdVenture Capitalist. How did you all meet and start making games together? CODY: Hyper Hippo sprang out of the imagination of Lance Priebe, the creator of Club Penguin. He assembled what he felt was a "dream team" for game development, then opened the floodgates and said, "GO!" TRISTAN: We all met while working on the virtual world "Disney’s Club Penguin." We wanted to try our hand at some new

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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 wi

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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 [http://www.kongregate.com/pages/stormbound-kingdom-wars-mobile] 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

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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 [//www.slideshare.net/Kongregate/the-art-of-building-amazing-demos] from Kongregate [https://www.slideshare.net/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 [https://app.adjust.com/ek72lt?fallback=http://www.kongregate.com/pages/castaway-cove-mobile&campaign=2017_09_05-CastawayCove-Free-All-S&adgroup=Blog] , an idle game set on a far-off deserted island. Synapse is responsible for hit titles like Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards [https://app.adjust.com/83cgg4?fallback=http://www.kongregate.com/games/Throwdown/animation-throwdown&campa

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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 [http://www.gameanalytics.com/blog/how-to-grow-a-gaming-community.html]. 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 presenc

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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 commo

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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 [https://blog.kongregate.com/building-games-for-the-long-term/] absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing port

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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 [http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/80/Why-HTML5-is-the-future-of-online-gaming]. 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

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