Coming up you’re gonna discover critical mistakes that beginning game developers make and how to increase retention for casual games.
Kevin Wolstenholme is the founder of RisingHigh Studio and RisingHigh Academy. He runs a two-person indie game studio with 13 games with 13 Apple homepage features.
They also produce training for game developers and have achieved 6 Apple features this year. Plus, several publisher deals signed.
Common Mistakes Among Beginners
Among the most common things that beginners do wrong is building an old style game that is not on point — they concentrate on the wrong thing. Kevin of RisingHigh Studio and RisingHigh Academy aims to help those developers put their energy in the right places.
Kevin and his team give developers direction by pointing them into the right courses. They also give feedback about the game to because most developers do not realize that they are on the wrong path until after someone gets their attention and informs them about it.
How to Increase Retention for Casual Mobile Game
Retention is difficult and this depends on the core loop, which is the action that your player does repeatedly. For instance, in the game “Stack”, you repeatedly press the button as you stack the little cube up like a Jenga. The gameplay doesn’t have power-ups or other whizzy bangy staff and it only has that one action. Flappy Bird has the same approach, its core loop is similar, you just have to repeatedly tap through the pipe. This is very simple, but it works.
With retention, you can go into secondary loops and add more features, like a power-up. You can also add variability. For example, in “Flight” you are doing the same action but the shape changes and it makes you feel different after a long time. The idea is you are doing the same exact thing but it needs to feel a little bit different.
However, if your game has a broken core loop or is simply not fun, adding power-ups, extra characters or new levels will not fix it. So the best thing you can do for retention is to make your game fun, first and foremost.