Over the past 10 years I have dabbled with design and development as a hobby. Some of this dabbling has led to experience gained, some led to business opportunities, some led to the acquiring of new skills or the levelling up of old skills, and some led the the design and development of some fun little mobile games.
Be it the creation of game design documents, level design, tweaking of difficulties, coding user interfaces, creating game assets or making meaningful changes based on analytical user data, I have been through the hills and valleys of designing and releasing indie games on the the Appstores.
Below I will showcase some of the games I have worked on over the past decade, but it is worth noting that these ‘titles’ were released prior to 2015. Post 2015 was where I focused on the intricacies of Product, UX and UI design and have not returned to the realm of game design.
Mayday
Designed and developed on the back of ‘Flappy Bird’s’ outrageous success, I decided to strike while the iron was hot and get a game out the door that might just be caught up in the whirlwind of its success.
Analysis
Starting simply by analysing how Flappy Bird became an overnight sensation. I analysed downloads, reviews and social media mentions to determine if it’s success was purely based on luck or was it manufactured.
Using a number of online tools at the time, I was able to track the ranking of the game and noticed a trend. Prior to the success of the game at the end of December 2013 and early 2014, there was a big bump in downloads followed by a slump. This is typical for one of two things, either the game was just launched mid 2013 or the game developer was using bots to boost the downloads of the game. I was more inclined to believe it was simply a launch boost, as indie games with no marketing budget typically follow this trend and the game was launched on May the 24th, 2013.
However it was the major boost in downloads, and more importantly, social media mentions in November that required understanding.
What I noticed was that majority of the social media mentions for Flappy Bird centred around the Appstore reviews of it. There was an unplanned competition for who could post the funniest review of the game making its way around Twitter, with individuals posting links or screenshots of the most hilarious reviews they have found (or wrote) on their profile.
Was this a mere coincidence? Possibly. I think that Dong Nguyen did manufacture the push to review his product through clever UX and UI design.
If you remember playing the game itself it is quaint with its pixel art and 90’s inspired audio but ludicrously difficult. Because of this there was something that the end user would be seeing a lot of – the ‘Game Over’ screen. Dong saw this as an opportunity to garner ‘ad’ impressions from banner ads that would reset upon death, and an opportunity to drive traffic to something that a mobile user wouldn’t typically seek out… the App Review page.
It would appear that the difficulty of the game, along with the unique 90’s style assets and some intelligent UX work, Dong primed his app to become a perfect storm and all he really needed was a catalyst, which turned out to come from the millions of end-users who thought it would be funny to post ridiculous reviews.
Though the catalyst would be based on pure luck, there is no doubt that Dong’s design decisions manufactured the mechanisms allowing his product to hit the levels of fame it gained.
Design
Following this analysis I moved onto the design of the game. Now it’s safe to say that it was a very easy design, as I was more or less copying what had already come before but a design document was created, with wireframes and early sketches.
There was design decisions that needed to be made and limitations in the platform we were using that required critical thinking and work-arounds. For example – is the level one continuous level of X pixels that repeats until the user loses, is the level infinitely repeating with every barrier being created live as the user moves through the level or do create the barriers in batches based on a position of the user.
The decision we came do was that we would create the level in blocks (or batches) based on the user position in the level. Thought would mean that the level lazy loads as the user plays, lowering loading times, but also meaning that every level will be completely different as we have some maths creating the barriers in random locations.
Another key design decision was around the ‘Game Over’ menu. As explained previously, my research showed that this menu was of key importance, as such we decided to have buttons that would allow the users to ‘Try Again’, ‘Rate’, ‘Return to Menu’, ‘Post Results of Facebook’ or ‘Post Results to Twitter’.
We launched Mayday with full analytics using Flurry to track which buttons end users would tap, the frequency of these taps vs. the times the ‘Game Over’ screen was seen. The end results were that some of these buttons were completely unused. As such a business decision was made and an update was pushed to the App to remove the unused buttons.
This resulted in more meaningful interactions and a higher clickthrough rate for the actions that we deemed important (sharing on social media).
Assets were a mix of purchased and created assets. At the time I was using Photoshop and Firefox to create PNG files for the game. Be gentle, it was one of my first dives into UI.
Development
The development of Mayday was done using the Lua coding language using an SDK called Corona (now Solar2D). An intuitive coding language with an even more intuitive SDK that would take the single batch of Lua documents, process them and offer back iOS and Android native mobile applications. No need to learn Objective-C, Java or Swift.
Development began while assets were being completed and Version 1.0 was pushed to both Appstores within a week.
Release
As we waited for downloads, user feedback and our analytics to come through we began work on Version 1.5 – this version would have multiple levels, with new assets and an unlock mechanism to access them.
Version 2.0 had updated assets and some tweaks to code for efficiency purposes.
This app was downloaded over 50,000 times across iOS and Android.
Dubstep
The design and marketing was simple – create a simple, one-touch game that was very difficult and use a name that could trick the Appstore algorithms.
Dubstep is a ‘don’t touch the white tile’ game that would allow users to ‘create Dubstep’ inspired music by playing a sound every-time they touched a black tile. This was a very cheap, and honestly dirty, way of getting an App named Dubstep passed the scrutiny of Apple, but it did work.
Analysis
I conducted a trend analysis utilising the Apple Appstore data available through AppAnnie and noticed a trend pattern – one-touch games that were difficult was all the rage following the success of Flappy Bird. Due to this, I wanted to create something that was simple but addictive.
Design & Development
The design process was actually very straight forward, I didn’t even create a design document for this one. Myself and a developer ran our own Game Dev Jam over 2 days and the end result was Dubstep.
All the assets were created in Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks (except Skrillex’s face, I grabbed that from his Myspace page).
This was again developed in Lua using Corona SDK.
Release & Results
It was launched onto both Apple Appstore and Google Playstore with surprising success, being a surprise hit in the Indian market and yielding over 1 million downloads.
Sneaky Santa Saves Christmas
I have always loved side-scrollers. Since getting my first ever game console in 1995 and going down to my local video store and borrowing copies of Streets of Rage 2, Golden Axe and Shinobi. There was one game that my Dad bought us when he gave us the console that I will never forget… Ranger X.
With its stunning artwork, unique controls and a hovering motorcycle thingy that was like your sidekick. It was just the coolest game. It was from my nostalgia for this genre of game that led me to make Sneaky Santa.
Wanting to release a game just prior to Christmas in order to catch incoming searches, and the attention of bored adolescents stuck at home over the Christmas break, we decided to create a simple, yet brutally difficult (near impossible to beat) side-scroller.
Design
Sneaky Santa was were I fell in love with design. Sketching out levels, designing choke points, making decisions functionality decisions. This was really where it went from being a necessary evil in order to give what was inside my head to a developer and became about the journey.
Unfortunately, for all of us, I did not save my original sketches and designs. In fact, I have almost nothing from these original games. I never thought to take photos of my designs, once it had been developed I didn’t see the need for them.
How wrong I was.
Each level was individually crafted, hand tweaked through code to be pixel perfect in its simplicity and equally in its difficulty, with thought going into every detail of the gameplay. For example, Santa doesn’t double jump. Why not? We coded it in, but removed it because double jump gives users another chance.
blocks = {
{
filename = "images/block_grey_plain.png",
type = "plain",
widthHeight = {50,50},
position ={0,276},
},We ran user testing on a proof of concept version of the game, tracked analytics and gathered feedback. One of the many results from this testing, was that the double jump had to go. It provided the users with a second chance, with a way out and that was unacceptable.
The game was designed to be brutal, to bring players to their knees in submission. Under the guise of Saint Nicholas, I wanted to unleash Saint Pain, and so it was.
Development & Release
Once again, Sneaky Santa was coded in Lua on Corona SDK over a 1 weeks period and launched onto the Apple and Google stores just before Christmas 2015.
We received an awesome response over the Christmas period in English speaking countries, but countries that didn’t celebrate Christmas just didn’t see the appeal.
The difficulty curve was met with mixed results, and I ran a marketing campaign on 4chan… which also yielded mixed results. My hook was that it was the most difficult mobile game ever created, but still not impossible.
This led to thousands of downloads as users attempted to beat the game and post their results in the 4chan board. The first 2 hours were going according to plan.
In the following 2 hours they downloaded the game and released it for free, hacked my Facebook account and doxxed me.
All while I watched it happen live, in real-time.
Keepers
An unreleased and unrealised 2D side-scroller that I was very passionate about. I still might build it myself, someday.
This project had no analysis, it was purely a passion project. I was not trying to ride coat tails or latch onto searches… this was love.
I created a detailed Game Design document which I will link below.
This was my last dip into the pool of mobile games (or games in general) and marked the end of Stage 1 of my career journey into UX / UI and Product.
I hope you have enjoyed this section of my portfolio, it definitely has some of my more embarrassing moments but just so you know… if you’ve made it this far… this was the foundation of my experience and skills in UX/UI and Product. These silly games. This is what shaped my understanding of the requirements of our artform, what drove me to analyse and dissect data, make informed design decisions, understand the limitations of development, how to interact and work collaboratively with developers and the amount of hard-work it goes into creating a product.
Though, from humble beginnings…
