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Posts tagged with "games"

Dark Game Design→

Tadhg Kelly, writing for Edge:

In the short term, your game’s player numbers may go up and your revenue might explode, but you inevitably sacrifice integrity. You might have onboarded a few players to pay for stuff, but you’re teaching many more to ignore any messages that the game spits out. It becomes harder to communicate with players and you lose their loyalty or the possibility of a game building a unique, defensible culture.

“Integrity” – most tech pundits will tell you that it doesn’t matter when you can monetize free-to-play with behavioral strategies that increase engagement and other meaningless buzzwords.

Luckily, there are exceptions, even on the App Store.

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ustwo Announces Monument Valley Release Date, Posts “Behind the Scenes” Video

Monument Valley, the highly-anticipated game by London-based development studio ustwo, is launching on April 3 at $3.99 for iPad and iPhone, the company confirmed today.

Monument Valley, originally teased in November 2013, is a mobile-only puzzle game influenced by the drawings of Dutch artist M.C. Escher: with a mix of impossible perspectives and its own set of physics, in Monument Valley players will have to guide main character Ida through a series of stages that challenge the rules of geometry and spatiality and that are beautifully realized and animated.

Monument Valley, which was originally meant to be an iPad-only game, has been designed to let any kind of player finish the game; according to ustwo, each level is intended to be a work of art that can be hung on a wall (the game will feature a special screenshot button to capture completed levels as images). Monument Valley, which has been in development for over 10 months, is ustwo’s next major game to land on the App Store – the company’s previous hit, Whale Trail, generated over 5 million downloads to date.

In an interview with TechCrunch, ustwo’s Ken Wong shared some of the details behind the design and development of Monument Valley, citing Valve’s Portal and Brian Eno’s music as sources of inspiration for the game. Created specifically for mobile devices, Monument Valley will only run in portrait mode due to the verticality of its structures. In February, ustwo’s Ken Wong wrote that his hope for Monument Valley “is that it might contribute to the argument that the medium of entertainment we call video games is in fact art”.

Ahead of the game’s public launch next week, ustwo has published a Behind the Scenes video, embedded above. You can check out more Monument Valley teasers at the game’s official website.

The Making Of Tengami→

Pocket Gamer’s Lee Bradley posted an interview with Nyamyam, the studio behind the recently released Tengami for iOS, a puzzle/exploration game built as a Japanese pop-up book.

Our goal was never to be the next big indie hit. People look at like Fez and Braid, games that made millions. But that was never our goal. We just wanted to make a game that we love. Something that was very unique and original, something that nobody else has done before.

I didn’t like some of the choices in Tengami 1.0 (puzzles seemed arbitrary; character movement was slow), but I loved the atmosphere and visual representation of different types of folding paper. Tengami was just updated to version 1.1, which introduces an alternative character control, and I’m going to give it another try.

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Behind The Sales Numbers Of Badland→

Brandon Sheffield, writing for Gamasutra:

Frogmind was founded in 2012, by two developers from Trials developer RedLynx. In 2013, they released their first game, Badland, and immediately got 100,000 downloads at $3.99, which was great, but sales took a nose dive after the first weekend, going down to 1,000 downloads per day, and eventually less.

Badland is a fantastic iOS game that’s truly built with touch controls in mind. In Frogmind’s GDC session, CEO Johannes Vourinen shared some interesting numbers that iOS game developers thinking about other platforms (Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore) should take a look at.

Also interesting is his report on temporary sales and Apple’s “Free App of the Week” initiative (which Badland participated in, although during the special App Store anniversary week) – because the game is typically a paid download with no In-App Purchases, the result after the promotion wasn’t what most people think it is.

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Apple Highlights Indie Games In “Indie Game Showcase” Section

Following a weekly refresh of the App Store’s featured content, Apple has started highlighting indie games in a section called “Indie Game Showcase” today, presented on the App Store’s homepage.

The new section, available on iTunes here, will presumably highlight indie developers on a regular basis, featuring a selected game from the development studio and offering a glimpse into the favorite games of an indie development’s team. This week, Apple started by featuring Simogo, the independent, award-winning studio behind Year Walk, Beat Sneak Bandit, and the widely acclaimed Device 6.

From Apple’s Indie Game Showcase page:

Often made up of just a few dedicated members, independent studios prove that what really matters is the size of your dream. In each Indie Game Showcase, we celebrate a popular game and its creative team, highlighting the developer’s titles along with their favorite games from other studios.

In featuring Simogo’s Device 6, Apple notes that the experience was “tailor-fit for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch”, resulting in a game that was included in the list of runner-ups for the App Store’s Game of the Year collection in 2013 from a company that has made “outstanding games exclusively for the App Store”.

Apple’s Indie Game Showcase comes at the end of the Game Developers Conference, which saw an increased interest in indie productions by larger companies. Among various announcements, Sony unveiled improved development tools for indie developers on PS4, Microsoft showcased games part of the initial rollout of the ID@XBOX program, Nintendo showed the capabilities of its Web Framework, while both Epic and Crytek announced subscription services for their game engines, a move likely aimed at smaller, independent developers.

Alongside the Indie Game Showcase, Apple also featured its “10 Essential Indie Games” section on the App Store’s Games category page again, including recent releases such as Nyamyam’s Tengami and Sirvo’s Threes.

A Look At Temple Run Prototypes→

Eli Hodapp, writing at TouchArcade:

We met up with developer Keith Shepherd at GDC, and at a dinner the night before he was talking about how when they hire people now they go through the various stages of Temple Run’s development to give an idea of what’s possible in the mobile space after a day of work, a week of work, and a month of work.

Always interesting to learn about the process of making a game, especially a popular one such as the original Temple Run. The video at TouchArcade has a full interview with Keith Shepherd, who explains how the “free with In-App Purchases” strategy was born as a consequence of an experiment on the App Store, something that Imangi learned to optimize for Temple Run 2.

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Gameloft To Support Twitch Streaming On iOS with Asphalt 8 Update

Twitch

Twitch

With a press release (via Joystiq), Gameloft today announced that an update to Asphalt 8: Airborne will be one of the first iOS games to support livestreaming through Twitch on iPhones and iPads.

Earlier this month, Twitch announced a mobile SDK to allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add native broadcasting functionalities to their apps. By partnering with Twitch, Gameloft will showcase features enabled by the Twitch SDK in Asphalt 8, which include live streaming, stream archiving, as well as the possibility to capture player audio and video through the front-facing camera in real-time. In pre-release screenshots shared by Gameloft today, Twitch integration is shown as a separate screen with settings for stream quality (low, medium, high), video and audio capture, and chat logs; during gameplay, chat messages will be displayed at the bottom of the screen in an animated ticker, with picture-in-picture support for live broadcaster commentary. It’s possible that the more powerful CPU and GPU found in the latest iPhone and iPad models will be required to render this kind of video enhancements for iOS games in real-time.

Live broadcasting represents one of the most important shifts in the way people play games,“ said Matthew DiPietro, VP of Marketing, Twitch. ”Twitch has quickly found a home on consoles, so by partnering with Gameloft to launch the first streaming-enabled mobile game brings us one step closer to being everywhere that gamers are. Also, being integrated into Asphalt 8: Airborne, one of the highest rated mobile games, should ensure it resonates with our community.

Twitch integration in Asphalt 8 will also come with discovery features to let players browse other streams from the same game directly within the app, an interesting move that could increase usage of Twitch as a social platform for gamers and not just a video broadcasting service.

The third update to Asphalt 8 will be released “soon” according to Gameloft, and it’ll be optimized for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini with Retina display. For the Game Developers Conference this week, Gameloft will host a 24-hour livestream on Twitch to showcase Twitch support in Asphalt 8.

Rovio Shows Angry Birds Epic Gameplay In New Trailer

Following last week’s news that the Angry Birds franchise will get an RPG spin-off with turn-based gameplay for birds fighting pigs, Rovio has posted an official gameplay trailer of Angry Birds Epic. The video shows various characters engaged in fights with a classic RPG battle perspective; there’s a glimpse of the crafting system, which will allow players to create items and weapons. The game seems to borrow heavily from the tradition of turn-based RPGs: there’s a job system with classes such as Knight and Mage, a world map to explore, and stats to upgrade to make characters more powerful.

Angry Birds Epic has also received a new website, which confirms that the game will be a free RPG; Rovio hasn’t indicated how a possible In-App Purchase system will fit in the gameplay yet. While the Finnish game maker’s first hit and subsequent games used a paid model with unlockable extras, Rovio adopted a free-to-play strategy with last year’s Angry Birds Go, a racing-themed spin-off. The annoyance of several In-App Purchases through the game was mentioned in reviews, with The Verge noting that its design was “hampered by its free-to-play structure”.

Angry Birds Epic launches today in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand for iOS, with more countries to follow soon.

Twitch 3.0 Brings Search Improvements, New Player Layout for iPad

Videogame broadcasting service Twitch has today launched version 3.0 of its iOS app, which includes a new, cleaner UI for iOS 7, improvements to search and broadcaster profiles, and a new player layout on the iPad.

In terms of discovering content on Twitch, the changes to the search interface now enable the Twitch app to filter results by channels, people, and games. When tapping on a username in search, the app will reveal the updated design for broadcaster profiles, which display more information about a channel even if it’s currently offline.

Thanks to the iPad’s larger screen, Twitch can now show a live stream and chat panel side-by-side for an experience that’s consistent with Twitch’s offerings on PC and Xbox One. Live video is automatically resized when the chat is visualized in landscape mode, and new moderation and emoticon tools have been added to the chat to make it more consistent with the Twitch website.

Last week, Twitch announced a mobile SDK that will allow developers of mobile games to add live streaming features to their smartphone and tablet games, although no further details on platform availability and first compatible games were disclosed by the company. Twitch 3.0 is available on the App Store.