Mobile Session Design: Flexible Sessions

Mobile Session Design defines a game’s ability to pace its content and create strong long term retention. It’s one of the biggest indicators for a game’s long term success. I’ve spoken about a number of considerations you need to have…

Comments Off on Mobile Session Design: Flexible Sessions

Social Gaming: Facebook, Guilds and Beyond

Facebook has had a big impact on games. Before Facebook, video games were seen as an antisocial activity for spotty boys hiding in their bedrooms. Together with the ubiquitous usage of smart phones and Nintendo’s family marketing of the Wii,…

Comments Off on Social Gaming: Facebook, Guilds and Beyond

Why you should care about Idle Games

Idle games are an exciting new genre that I expect to expand greatly in the coming years on mobile. Idle games, Clicker games, or “games that play themselves” is a baffling genre. Inexplicably these games are dominating many of the popular…

Comments Off on Why you should care about Idle Games

Harnessing the Psychology of Gifting

I feel like gifting has a bad name in games. Like the term “social” it has been ascribed to Facebook games that often implement interesting features in unexciting ways. Understand the psychology behind gifting in general – the phenomenon that…

Comments Off on Harnessing the Psychology of Gifting

Understanding Energy Systems

Energy seems to be hated by designers and players alike, so why does it endure as the hallmark of casual F2P games? The fact is that whilst it’s a crude mechanic, it’s also an efficient one, delivering several functions in…

Comments Off on Understanding Energy Systems

Eliminating Energy

In my previous post I explained the reasons that designers include energy systems in their games:

Comments Off on Eliminating Energy

3 Tips for Better Pacing

Free to play on mobile is changing quickly every day. . Their tastes are changing, and now I feel is just the calm before the storm. The on the top of the AppStore can only hold for so long, the…

Comments Off on 3 Tips for Better Pacing