The world of gaming has become one of the most successful entertainment industries in the past few decades. Many people enjoy the escapism of gaming, as well as its ability to help you pass the time with an enjoyable experience. The sub-category of mobile gaming continues to grow in popularity and profitability, too, and many solo developers and small teams join the industry on a daily basis bringing interesting new concepts to the stage. This industry can be very profitable, especially for smaller teams. Of course, there are a number of things to consider when developing a mobile game today to help you achieve success in this industry, and we’ve listed a few here to help you.
Planning And Conceptualizing
Your first step when developing your mobile game is to come up with a great concept and an even better plan for seeing your game from start to finish. Your game concept needs to be more than just the gameplay, however. You need to think about everything, including graphical style, what you or your team can deliver, user interface, settings, and even things outside of the game, such as marketing and how people will find and purchase the game. You’ll also have to remember that you’re starting a business, and for that reason, you’ll want to make sure you create a great business plan for your game studio. A business plan will help to keep you on track and allow you to spend time figuring out the more intricate aspects of running a business like this. You should include things such as goals, budgets, and marketing strategies in this plan to maximize your potential success.
Prototyping Your Game
While building your game, you’ll want to take regular breaks to run testing sessions to ensure things are proceeding as planned. You can test individual systems as you develop the game, isolating particular parts of your software and fully fleshed-out iterations of the game. In the later stages of development, you’ll also want to make some of these prototypes accessible to trusted testers or even open them up to a public beta test to really put the game through its paces. These wider testing sessions of your prototypes can flag up many more bugs than you might be able to find via internal testing.
App Testing And Security
Alongside testing how your game plays and searching for bugs within your coding, it’s important to also focus on the security of your game app. There is a risk today of certain apps being exploited due to their weaker security systems, glitches, or bugs, which can lead to some seriously malicious activity. Data theft is a common occurrence on apps that have not been secured properly, and this can be the data of your company or the data of your customers. This will cause you to lose the trust of your customers and could seriously impact your business going forward. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to run application testing software like that offered by ForAllSecure. This software will work to push your app to its limits, attempting to crash it and search for weaknesses using a few different methods. Once these weaknesses are found, you can then work to patch those weak points up and reduce your risk of a security breach after releasing your game.
Monetizing Your Game
Alongside selling a game, there is also the opportunity to make money on it in other ways. You could, for example, release your game for free and then provide players with the option of paying for additional content once they’ve got a taste for the game itself. This essentially works as a demo of the game and gives players a better idea of what the game has to offer. It allows players the chance to see whether they enjoy the game or not before spending any money on it and can actually lead to increased profits in the end. A free game will likely get far more downloads than even one that costs a dollar to purchase, and if your game is enjoyable, you might see many more people paying for additional content compared to those that would have paid for the game outright.
Providing Future Support
There is often a belief that once an app or game has been developed and launched, developers can simply move on to their next project and enjoy the profits from their successful app launch. Of course, in theory, this is possible, as there is nothing stopping you from forgetting about your game and setting your sights on something else. However, suppose you launch a game that still has bugs being found, hindering your customer’s ability to properly enjoy the game. In that case, this can cause you to lose their trust for future projects and may significantly reduce your sales. This is why it’s important to offer continued support for your game after release, at least for a few months. You could also consider adding additional content for players to purchase, allowing your game to provide you with profits for a lot longer.
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