Game Development - Kongregate Newsroom (Page 6)

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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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

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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 [http://www.fortressofdoors.com/] and originally posted on Gamasutra [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20170307/293025/China_is_kind_of_a_big_deal_for_Indie_Games.php] 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 [http://www.defendersquest.com/1/], I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach.

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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

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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 [http://juicybeast.com/blog/]! 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 [http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html] 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 [https://helpx.a

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Mobile Publishing Mar 30, 2017
PC and Mobile: Going Cross-Platform Post-Launch

These are slides from Mel Montano’s talks about PC and mobile cross-platform game launches at Casual Connect Berlin and White Night Prague 2017. She uses her experience in publishing and cross-platform games via Humble Bundle to provide real-world actionable items to help in pursuing a secondary (or tertiary or more) launch on a very different platform. Going cross-platform increases your potential audience, pleases your current userbase, and can grow your lifetime revenue. The leap from mobile

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