3 Game Production Tips I Wish I Knew When I First Started Out
In our earlier post, we shared our 5 biggest mistakes made when creating our first few hyper-casual mobile games. 1 of the most important mistakes we touched on was having no proper production framework in place. The last thing you want is to develop a full game with no idea how the market reacts to it, so you will need to implement some sort of risk-management.
In this post, we will dive deeper into it and share with you 3 game production tips that could potentially save you time and money!
1. Clarity at each step of the production
Imagine a full game production broken down into smaller segments, and each segment working towards achieving a specified set of goals — let’s call the segments “phases”.
In each phase, there are 2 things you need to clearly define; timeline and scope. Having these defined can give your team a clear goal of what needs to be achieved in the given timeline.
Ideally in the first phase, you want to nail down the core gameplay loop (mechanics, win/lose condition, scoring etc). Extensive playtesting and tweaks are recommended in this first phase as it will solidify the gameplay for future phases.
The second phase can start to include mainly retention features and additional polishing. This phase is where you add in more content/features to supplement the core gameplay loop.
The third and final phase is the official launch. In this phase, most works are on balancing and final polishing. Also try to read customer reviews and see what they like/dislike and adjust from there.
2. KPI tracking by Soft launching your product
What we realized was that we needed to get the market’s response with each step of our production, so that we know we are on the right track and to minimize risk. In order to do this, it is recommended to soft launch your game after each phase to get some data to measure your game’s performance.
So what we did was to soft launch our game after phase 1. In this soft launch, we are focused on testing the Day 1 Retention Rate (D1 RR). Since we are only testing D1 RR, our phase 1 production can be kept lean. Should we pass the D1 RR benchmark (~40%), we will continue to put in more resources to develop the game further to phase 2. If it doesn’t pass our D1 RR benchmark, we will decide to improve or kill the game (usually the latter).
If the first phase soft launch test passes, we will move on to phase 2 production getting ready for second phase soft launch. In the second phase soft launch, we are focused on testing the Day 7 Retention Rate (D7 RR). So in the phase 2 production, there must be enough content to test D7 RR. Should the second phase soft launch test passes our D7 RR benchmark (~18%), we will commit even more resources for phase 3 production to see this game fully completed and for official launch.
So with a clearly defined soft launch test, you can make calculated decisions and minimize risks.
We drew our D1 and D7 RR benchmarks from here, which explains that for arcade hyper-casual mobile games, those are the benchmarks to hit for.
3. Lean and Agile project management
For my third and final tip, I wish to share all the tools that we are using to manage all our workflow. We have changed from one tool to another, and always on the search for better tools.
- Kanbanflow — For project and tasks management. This is where we create boards for each of our project and assign tasks to our team members.
- Slack — For daily active communication. This is where we discuss everything under the sun.
- Google Sheets — For literally anything else. They are so handy for storing games research data and crunching down the data into charts.
- Google Drive — For file storage.
- AppAnnie — For researching iOS/Android top charts.
- GameAnalytics — For tracking and measuring game’s KPI/performance.
- Adobe XD — For game workflow charts.
Did you find these 3 tips helpful? We would love to hear your thoughts! Comment below to let us know!
