Casual Games Association (CGA) has had a busy month. Their Indie Prize scholarship program received 470 game submissions before its deadline on December 5, 2016, and they recently released their online schedule for their upcoming Casual Connect Europe conference this February in Berlin, Germany.
Game design is an art, along with being hugely technical – it’s demanding on both its creators and players. The Design & Development track at Casual Connect Tel Aviv will deal with the blood, sweat and tears that goes into creating games. The track will be launch with Jonathan Boltax, VP Business Development at TransGaming in the morning, followed up by Tapcore COO Dmitry Shkolnikov in the afternoon.
Free-to-play is the distribution system of choice for many modern developers, with ad monetization becoming an important part of the way they generate revenue. Eric Seufert, partner at Heracles Media will talk about video advertising and how mobile ads can use them well in the session Ad Monetization Design Patterns in Free-to-Play Games.
The methods of monetizing that developers have been using in free-to-play no longer work with today’s sophisticated audiences according to Greg Costikyan. Greg is the Senior Game Designer for Boss Fight Entertainment, with a career in the game industry that has spanned three decades and included more than 30 commercially published games. During this time Greg has received honors that include the IGDA Maverick Award for “tireless promotion of independent games”, five Origins Awards and is an inductee into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame.
But after all this experience, Greg emphasizes that effective monetization is essential for a game to succeed. In the past, monetization methods have included hard gates, painful pinches and spammy calls to monetization: crude methods that players no longer tolerate. Games are about delighting players, but now the call to monetization must also delight. Not only that, players can only be retained if they feel their money has been well spent. To learn more about Greg’s ideas on how to accomplish this, watch this video of the full session from Casual Connect USA.
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For more about Greg Costikyan, see this exclusive article.
The casual games market isn’t going anywhere else than towards growth, says 24/7 Games’ CEO John Battagline, who created their studio from scratch, on their own, with no money, years ago. They released themed versions of games like sudoku, poker and blackjack: this made sense because of a well-established audience, but not intellectual properties in the traditional sense, that those games have. Now, they’re reapplying the lessons learned, with the new label, Burger Circus. “If you re-skin, re-purpose and recycle, you will rapidly create a lot of products, and every single one of them will allow you to gradually accumulate an audience. Hopefully you are going to hit a slam dunk and get a ton of users. The idea is that this will have an upward spiral effect”, John explained in their Casual Connect USA session, sharing the experience of crafting their game, RogueMON, on a don’t-quit-your-day-job budget.
Bob Heubel, a haptic technology evangelist for Immersion Corporation, specializes in helping developers implement force-feedback, tactile-feedback or rumble-feedback effects. With more than 16 years of assisting developers in designing and programming tactile sensations into their games and interactive experiences, Bob holds a number of patents in the field of Haptics.
Bob was one of the judges for the Indie Prizes at Casual Connect USA, and after the award ceremony, participated in the Meet the Jury Panel. With the other members of the Jury, Bob shared experiences in playtesting, what they look for, and what particular elements were crucial in the winners’ success. To learn more, watch this video of their discussion.
For more information about Bob Heubel, click here.
Like games are often inspired and driven by the players, engines can be driven by developers and their needs - this is exactly how things are with Amazon’s Lumberyard. Their Head of Product J.C. Connors presented this roadmap and their vision of industry challenged at Casual Connect USA in a panel with MaxPlay, Unity, King and Epic Games.
When it comes to working with sound designers/composers, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of having an effective audio pipeline; it depends on which practices suit your company’s working style or culture the most to bring out the best in your game. In their Casual Connect Asia 2016 lecture, IMBA Interactive’s co-founders Gwen Guo and Sharon Kho shared various project postmortems from small, bite-sized casual games to AAA titles, and discussed how you can find the best audio pipeline for your team. They mentioned: “(Sound designers) ask a lot of questions. Besides technical requirements, we ask to understand the soul of the games.”
Are you an independent developer? Then, hear ye year ye! This talk from Casual Connect Asia 2016 gave real life examples of various pitches that Kongregate has heard over the years and how to learn and improve from them. John Cooney and Melinda Montano described how you can pick the right publisher for you and your game and also stand out to a publisher. Remember: “A publisher is not an ATM Machine.” - John Cooney. To hear more from Melinda and John, see the session video below.
