I make games for cell phones, AMA. Development pipelines, current events, apple v android

I make games for cell phones, AMA. Development pipelines, current events, apple v android...

is that true the mobile market too saturated?

I haven't tried making anything on a cell phone. Is there anything you have to consider when you're making a UI that has touch controls in mind?

What kind of games do you make?

Almost entirely yes. At this point, success is rare outside of being able to partner with a publisher, or dump a couple million dollars into advertising.

Absolutely, though for the most part the industry has ironed out a lot of the issues and UX pitfalls of touch screens. The biggest problem is touch feedback, or the lack thereof. If you make a game that relies on knowing where your fingers are without looking at them, you're going to have a bad time. I'm excited for the "braille" screen tech they're working on, as that could provide physical arbitrary buttons on the screen, coupled with "3d" touch to have meaning behind user input again.

I've made a little of everything. Mostly word and puzzle games, but also a rhythm game, a few action and platformer projects, and a number of "helper apps" for scrabble, league of legends, etc. All indie kind of stuff, only a minuscule amount of AAA experience.

How did you get into the industry?

>At this point, success is rare outside of being able to partner with a publisher, or dump a couple million dollars into advertising.
Is it even worth making a game besides f2p games with microtransactions like gacha shit? Seems like f2p games are the only thing that are really successful on mobile.

Why are mobile games exclusively garbage? Is there just no market for actual good video games (the kind that people develop for consoles and PC)?

I've loved games all my life. Dropped out of one college for Computer Science, graduated another for digital art. I was hired by a dude on the other side of the state just before graduation as he and I were working on apps in the very early days of Android, and one of the projects hit big enough to pay our salaries. We've been making stuff and growing ever since.

There are a lot of ways to do F2P right. Unfortunately, there are many MORE ways to do F2P in a way that nickels and dimes gamers. More unfortunately, the latter is what players actually go for. As the playerbase matures and demands more respect from their developers, I think you'll see a shift away from the Battlefronts of the world to a preference for "buyout" options or subscriptions.

Similar to my previous answer, the truth is garbage is being produced because players like eating garbage. At least for now. Having never sunk to the level of making garbage myself, it's pretty sad to see my (I hope) superior designs being overtaken by the garbage. But if garbage sells, you earn money to advertise more garbage, further pushing the good games into obscurity.

>apple v android
Yea, lets do that
Swift vs Java

Well, when you develop for both, you end up kinda hating both for different reasons. Haha... Differences in languages don't really bother us. Java does have a propensity to crash any time something is accidentally null, making things pretty hard to debug at times, where Apple phones will just keep on chugging for better or worse. That said, you run into a lot of the walled garden's walls when developing in native iOS Objective C or Swift. So on iOS, we're often cursing about being told we're not allowed to do something that was trivial on Android.

How do you even into swift? This shit is the fisher price of programming languages, I fucking hate it and I fucking hate the fact that I'm going to fail this class because I just can't into it.

>mobile developer pretending to be a gamedev

>Making video games on cell phones

Fucking
disgusting

Why is Swift so fucking shit? It's a lot easier to just make the game in Unity and port it to ios

>turd layer

You'll be fine. Work with it for a while, pass your class, and know you'll be using more sane languages in the industry. We mostly use Cocos2d-x for our game projects, which is entirely C++. If you go AAA, you'll be using Unity or Unreal with their respective supported options. Or maybe you'll be some badass who makes game engines yourself, and then you get to decide what everyone else suffers to understand. Life goals.

Fine then, steer the conversation more toward games. I'm game.

See what I did there?

It's a pun.

*BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK*

Then don't use swift. Go Obj C. 's What we do. And yeah, most of the time you'll want to stick to an established game engine. There are still reasons why you might make a game natively, not the least of which is battery life.

One of my biggest gripes is that swift is only available on apple computers, and unless I convert my craptop into a hackingtosh or pay for some ridiculous cloud service which I swear my professor is the owner of I can't work with it outside of uni, and the apple computer room is always filled to the brim with designers, so that means I can't play with it until I learn it like I did with many other, far more complex languages, it taunts me.

Yeah, like I said, just find any means of passing the class. Most schools will let you rent a macbook or something. As a student, you might even be able to score a free Mac Mini from the powers that be. Rest assured, no company is like that classroom, where the school has likely received a hefty sum of cash from Apple to push their tech on the next generation. Well, with the exception Apple literally forces you to own a mac to publish on the App Store, but once you're out of school that will not be so much of a hurdle. I'm typing this from my Windows partition on my macbook right now, in fact, and we avoid Swift like the plague.

>Fine then, steer the conversation more toward games
ok stop posting and let a real gamedev take over nobody cares that you make virtual slot machines for phones

How do you/does your publisher even make money?

Is there a viable market outside literally free games (with ads) and "free" games?
Do you (attempt to) spy on your users?

Do you feel bad about making kids wasting their parent's money?

I think it's well-established that people are willing to pay for a premium (read: $5 or $10) game, it's the size of the development team that usually limits this option. To convince people to buy your premium title, you need the resources to market it so that people 1) know about it, 2) know it's worth the money and 3) know other people are enjoying it. That's an investment most developers can't afford.

This is why you see a lot of free-with-advertising models. It's very inexpensive to set this up as a developer, and most players are willing to try a free game in exchange for their eyeballs. This is how we make our money. 10-50k users being shown a banner ad can be enough pay a couple employees a modest wage.

That said, there are better and worse implementations of the ad model. Words With Friends, for instance, makes a buttload of money showing an unskippable video every time you play a word. I'm much more in favor of showing a banner at the bottom of the screen, or if absolutely necessary, a static interstitial every three levels or so. And even then, we ALWAYS put a $2-$5 buyout option to remove those ads. Many players will appreciate that, and that $2 is more than you'll ever make from a single users in that user's lifetime.

If you are doing your job right, you will rarely have even an opportunity to spy on your users. If you are collecting personal information as a game designer, you really should reconsider your designs. For the rest of things, you'll almost always be dealing with anonymized data anyway. Analytics, for instance, give you a lot of insight to your UX and game design without ever exposing personal data to you or your team.

What is the best way to monetize a free app?

Explain to me how some of these games which are basically glorified flash games, require 2gb of ram to run smoothly.

what makes you NOT want to develop a certain app?

>That's an investment most developers can't afford.
Going by the amount of shilling I'm exposed to, I refuse to believe that.

>If you are doing your job right, you will rarely have even an opportunity to spy on your users.
Would your boss subscribe to that statement?
I'm not in gaming, but I already see a future for myself where my boss forces me to extract as much data from our users as possible. Rather disgusting. Fucking business people.

Parental controls have become quite robust in recent years. There were a handful of bad actors that preyed on children to get at their parents' credit cards, but a court case or two later and Google, Apple, Amazon and all the others now properly protect players and parents from that kind of fraud. This was pretty much solved back in 2014.

Truthfully, advertising. So long as you respect the user's time and patience, the vast majority of players are happy to play your game in exchange for the occasional, modest ad. We always go a step further a provide a buyout option for a couple of bucks, and this works well.

It's not that a game necessarily takes 2GB of RAM, but that the phone is carving out 2GB of RAM for the game in case it needs it. That said, most memory consumed by games is by art and sound assets. The average phone now requires 2K-resolution assets to match the screen resolution. If a game hogs RAM, it's usually because the developer is lazily using the entirety of a game engine their flash-alike simply doesn't need.

Being on a small team, we pretty much have to be personally interested in whatever we're making at the time. Game ideas get shot down frequently if only because the entire team isn't on board with the idea. So for me, I either want to make stuff I already find interesting, or that my team has convinced me will be a fun thing to make. Kind of a nebulous answer, sorry.

Amount of shilling: speaks to one of my earlier answers about market saturation.
My boss DOES subscribe to that statement. He argues even if it isn't an ethical problem for you, it's at the very least a problem of making more work and risk for yourself. You really don't want to risk exposing personal data to the world, or having to deal with the legal ramifications. Or, hell, do you really want to maintain that database if you don't have to? I talked to a guy who made one of the early dating websites who had all sorts of stories about his employees going behind his back to spy on dates they acquired for themselves on their own service. A real mess for everyone involved.

make an IAMA on reddit its the free maketing. just upboot with a couple alts.

nah

how many titles do you have and how much money do you make?

7 games, too many apps, and I've been a part of a few more projects. Accounting for over half of my salary going to pay back student loans, I take home about $20k.

cool, I started working on an android game but got distracted, I might release it eventually. I didn't go to college, I spent the last year working as a programmer for a bank using Java and just got a job as a gamedev C++/UE4.

The market is super saturated atm, I'm not sure if I should even bother finishing it or if I should start working on VR projects..

how much do you wish you were dead