2. My History in Games
1994: Web content for game companies
2001: Full-time mobile game developer
2003: Making games for Xbox, PlayStation, Wii
2007: Teaching game development part-time
2011: Back to making mobile games
2013: Focusing on making development easier
4. How Far Mobile Has Come
2001:
2011:
Screen Size:
60x96 px
640x960 px
Framerate:
1 frame a sec.
30+ fps
Devices:
Low millions
1 billion
Technology:
WAP, J2ME
Your pick...
Distribution:
Good Luck!
App Stores!
5. LAUNCHED APPS
Helped create big mobile games for big companies.
Avengers Initiative
Wizard of Oz
Whole Kids
Awesome Eats
6. What can I tell you about
mobile game development?
10. TOOLS
Everything you need is at your fingertips.
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More game engines than ever before:
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Unity, Unreal, GameSalad, GameMaker
Great cross-platform development tools:
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HTML5, JavaScript, Flash, C++, C#
If you know code at all, you can make a game.
11. COMMUNITY
There are a million people making games & apps.
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People love to help each other make games
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Developer forums
Stack Overflow
Not just online, but in-person too!
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Meet Ups, IGDA, Juegos Rancheros
12. ACCESS
Anyone can publish an app.
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You don’t have to know the right people anymore
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To put out a DVD-based game, you need a
publisher, a distributor and a retailer
On mobile you only need Apple or Google...
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And be willing to give them 30% of each sale
13. COST
Your devkit costs $300. You already have one.
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$200 for an iPhone. $100 for a developer account.
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Most tools have a free version
Open source software can get you far
Everyone you know can be a beta tester
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Use TestFlight to send them your app
15. CHOICE
There are 2 million other apps out there.
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1,400 games come out on iOS each week
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Apple only features ~20 of them
If you’re not in the top 1%, hard to get noticed
The competition is spending $100k+ on ads
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How do you cut through the noise?
16. DEVICES
20 different iOS devices. 4,000+ Androids.
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5 different screen resolutions to support for iOS
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Devices that look nearly identical AREN’T
Apple makes it difficult to target specific devices
Don’t even get me started about Android
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_devices
17. BIZ MODEL
The traditional publisher model is dead
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Used to get funding for a game with just a design doc
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Be prepared to pay for development yourself...
Or raise money from investors.
Work-for-hire in console was long, lucrative contracts
18. FADS
Every month there is a new winner to copy.
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Angry Birds...
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Infinity Blade...
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Candy Crush...
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CSR Racing...
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Clash of Clans...
20. Hard lessons learned from
years of mobile game dev...
... that I wish I knew three years ago.
21. SMALL TEAMS
Two people can make an awesome game.
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Team-size is not a measure of quality
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Get the right people for each role
You don’t have to sit together
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Use the magic of Skype and GitHub
22. RAPID DEV
Don’t get stuck. Don’t stop. Don’t waste time.
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Every month that you don’t ship, the world is changing.
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Apple will release a new device or rev of iOS
Kill your sacred cows and SHIP THE GAME.
You can’t learn until you $%&# up bad.
23. THE CROWD
Get the audience involved early.
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Make something that people want.
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Get feedback on the game as soon as possible
Kickstarter lets you fundraise AND get an audience
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Get your audience invested in the idea
24. OUTSOURCE
Don’t do anything you’re not great at.
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Easy to outsource...
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Large amounts of your content
ALL of your IT hosting & operations
Hard to outsource...
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Vision. Game Design. Lead Engineer.
25. What we focused on at
Fun Machine...
... is what we’re good at and enjoy
26. PROCESS
We’re the process geeks in a room of geeks.
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There’s almost always an orderly way to do
something
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Once you’ve made most of the big mistakes,
you learn how to avoid them
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We use software to track our processes and
progress: Google Docs, Jira, etc.
27. AUTOMATION
Please don’t make me think about that again.
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No amount of process will avoid all human error
The app store is rife with opportunities to screw up
We wrote software for as many steps in the development
process as possible. And then automated that software.
28. ITERATION
The more you try, the more likely you are to get it right.
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If it takes 20 minutes to “try something out”
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If it takes 5 minutes to try it out...
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You get 3 tries an hour
You get 12 tries an hour
We focused on empowering our team with tools
29. HELPING
We enjoy helping our friends make their games
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It feels good to be trusted enough to help
Teaching, solving problems & shipping is rewarding
Hard to turn down work, especially from friends
30. What we’re focused on
moving forward...
... still what we’re good at and enjoy
31. HELPING
We want to clone ourselves... as robots
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Offering our tools to the community to help
them automate the workflow
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Creating a knowledge-base of the common
“gotchas” in mobile game development
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Building a community of app developers that
also like robots (and zombies, of course)
32. TOOLS
When our friends asked for our tools, we listened
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Awesome to hear: “Hey that thing you made,
can I use it when you’re not around?”
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Spent the last several months making our tools
useful without us in the room
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Juuuust about to release them to the world...
33. THE BIG IDEA
How we’re trying to help
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Free your engineers from repetitive grunt-work
Empower non-programmers to test their work
Let you focus on making your game
34. COMMUNITY
Let’s stay in touch and help each other
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We still don’t know everything about apps
The rules change every day (iPad Air?!?)
Small teams survive with the help of friends
