Reflection on Making a Free Version of a Game

One of the creators of Catch the Monkey wrote a neat reflection on their making of a promotional free game to promote sales of the full version on the App Store.

The creators always had a problem with demo and free versions of games and it turned them off of the idea. They decided to go ahead with it and apparently the following talk by Matt Rix (Trainyard) greatly impacted their approach to making the free version.

Part 1 of Rix’s talk:

Part 2:

We determined the following principles:

  • Don’t do anything that would make the people who bought the paid version regret their purchase. The free version should complement the pay one, and theoretically co-exist side by side on the player’s device.
  • Don’t do anything that would make a person regret buying the paid version AFTER playing the free version.
  • I recently had a negative experience with an iPad game where I played 12 levels of the demo, bought it, and then had to play through those same identical 12 levels. I regretted buying it, and I did not want to spend hours redoing my previous progress. I didn’t bother to play the pay version. (InApp purchase obviously solves this.)

Read the full reflection at GameDev.net



May 3rd, 2012 by admin

Teaching Game Design to Kids

BOingbOing has a neat interview with game designer Charley Miller who teaches game design to kids:

Avi: What is Game Design?

Charley: Game design is the craft and process of inventing games. It’s an inherently rewarding practice that’s equal parts fun and frustrating. All game designers are also players and the best perspective to design a game from is that of the player. To design a game, you must consider things like how a player will learn to play; how a player will get better; how a player will understand their game state and assess themselves; how the game systems will create emergent systems and how players will explore these areas, etc. So in essence, game design is about designing a complex space to be navigated by players. It requires a lot of testing, a lot of balancing, and a lot perseverance. But this is what games do best: rewarding a decision with another decision to make. Not badges or points or leaderboards.

Avi: Why is designing games important?

Charley: It’s naive to think that game design is going to solve all of the worlds problems. But games are important because games say a lot about who we are. They are a reflection of us as individuals when we play and reflections of cultures around the world based on their design. And even when you consider folks games (games that sort of emerge on their own, like hide and seek) at some point, somewhere, someone suggested a rule that stuck. So we’re all game designers in some sense if we’re all players. And it’s through this sort of play that we develop a common language and experiment with ideas.

I teach a lot of game design classes at General Assembly in NYC and my students are a fairly diverse set of minds, ranging from twelve year olds looking to make the next Grand Theft Auto to fifty year old product managers looking to know more about gamification. A question I get is how can one game design class serve all of these interests and the answer is that the basics of the game design process of iteration through physical prototyping and playtesting has something to teach everyone.

Read the full interview.



April 3rd, 2012 by admin

Adventure into the Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is that place where human-like robots and images turn from acceptable to all-out creepy. What’s that mean? Start with this introduction.

Surprisingly after four years this Extra Credits video is still the best one on covering the uncanny valley:

Interestingly, the reason the uncanny valley exists is not clear but there are theories as to why humans react to the uncanny valley. These range from religious rational to mate selection. The theories that make the most sense to me revolve around avoiding illness (like viruses or diseases) and that the sorties paradox messes our senses up.

For now, we’ll have to keep guessing about the biology behind the uncanny valley while dealing with it when designing games. Luckily there are things we can do now to avoid falling into the valley:

- Be consistent with the look of your design. If it’s a robot keep it a robot and if it’s meant to be human keep it looking human – don’t mix and match.
- Similarly only match photorealism with human facial proportions otherwise our brains will pick up on the strangeness. Just look at this image in Polar Express:

From this great post on The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck (conclusion)

For further reading take a look at:
It’s Uncanny, This Valley: The Ups And Downs Of Cinematic CGI (In)Humanity

Uncanny: L.A. Noire, Blade Runner, and gaming’s quest to capture humanity



April 2nd, 2012 by admin

A Huge List of Dos and Don’ts in Game Design

Rock Paper Shotgun is great in announcing their opinions on game design and I love them when they espouse such opinions. I also enjoy their half-joking take on games themselves, particularly how to improve them.

Here’s their complete list of rules for game makers. Some seem very serious while others seem to just bring back the author’s ideas of good games from years ago.

DO have your in-game volume sliders work. It’s beyond all my understanding – and I have over sixty-three understanding – why I can drag the slider down to a fraction of a millimetre from the bottom and still not be able to hear the TV show I’m watching on the other screen. I shouldn’t have to use Windows’ in-built volume controls to SHUT YOU UP. Especially YOU, Popcap. It’s like your volume sliders go, 10, 9, 8, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 0. Your games do not demand my full attention, as brightly coloured as they may be. I might want to enjoy an evening of Peggle and light-hearted crime procedural dramas, and I need to hear the quips.

DON’T make it difficult for me to quit. In fact, since I’m telling you how to do your jobs, you should add this new requirement. A quit button. I know, it sounds cuckoo-crazy, but bear with me. From anywhere in the game, I want to call up the menu (by pressing “Escape” – not by looking at a device strapped to my wrist, tabbing through three pages, and finding the four pixel button for the options) and then choose “Quit to desktop”. I do not want to quit to the main menu. I do not want to quit to the level selection screen. I do not want to quit to that insane screen that asks me to press a button to start. I want to quit the game. Completely. In one go. I don’t, because I’m some sort of insanely fussy old pickypants, want to go through each of those previous pages one by one, until I’ve eventually climbed back up enough ladders to see the crack of daylight that is escape. Yes, you can ask me if I’m sure, in case I select the wrong thing because you probably haven’t bothered to add mouse controls to your 360 port. And then, PING!, I’m back at my desktop ready to continue with my day. Leaving a game shouldn’t be more of a challenge than a boss fight.

The big list of dos and don’ts



March 26th, 2012 by admin

An Introduction for Designing for the Web

This is a presentation I gave as an intro to designing for the web. Like all presentations I do, this one is written to be fleshed out verbally so if you’re just reading the slides you’ll be missing a lot.

This is online for some students who missed the presentation.

The presentation goes over how to write for an online audience and design the layout of your site to reflect online patterns. The presentation ends with a look at user flow, in class we mapped out an example user flow that is not covered here. One more thing that isn’t covered is our look at A/B testing.

Designing for the web
View more presentations from Wero Creative



February 17th, 2012 by admin
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