Game Developers Conference China - Day 3

Finally to the Final day of the conference and the most interesting day of the lot.

The first session I participated was titled '7 Steps to Mastering Native Advertising on Mobile',

According to the speaker of that session there are very few paying users compared to non paying users (The speaker displayed the statistics with the aid of a pie chart where only a thin slice was shaded to show the percentage of paid users) who play mobile games.

While he displayed several advertising formats for mobiles, he added that a player relationship management is important to display the appropriate advertisement for the user.

Further he compared the games 'Sweet Mania' and 'Happy Mall' as games where advertising had been used effectively, finally he mentioned that it is the developer who has to build and control advertising and suggested 'Pubnative' and 'AppLift' as good publishing platforms (which fortunately works with the Unity Engine).

The next session I participated was titled 'What could gaming learn from UI/UX Engineering'.

 I was interested in attending this session as I believed that what users experience plays an important role in increasing its popularity. The following tips were gathered during this session.

1. Attention to detail is very important in UI/UX design 
2. Every line you draw should be beautiful and functional 
3. UX design is an industrial design as well as a visual design
4. UX designers should know where the user wants to go quickly 
5. Placing UI objects/buttons in a way that obstructs the game in not good since the users should get a full view of the object 
6. Create a User flow in such a way that each box has one page
7. Include decision trees
8. Don't rely on back buttons and don't be obsessed about the number of clicks
9. Amazon.com gives the recommendations of the products in the same page itself so that the user's don't have to go back to see its UI.
10. UI/UX is like animation but with a slower frame rate.

In addition to that the speaker discussed about Wireframing, Information Design and several other features like consistency, navigation, sticking to the button sizes, App Icon Design and paying attention to color (In China red colour denotes good luck and happiness while in the west red colour denotes danger).

Finally the session ended up with the note that Good UI may not work for a bad game but bad UI will hamper the chance of success of a good game.

The next session that I attended was titled 'Simple skills to rapidly improve the business value of mobile games product'. This session was in Chinese but with the aid of translators it proved to be another enlightening session, the tips gained from this session are as follows.

1. The name of the game has an impact on its commercial value (A game in China that was named 'Kung Fu' gained popularity after it was named 'Sword' )
2. The simpler the name, easier it is to understand
3. Names should not be changed very quickly as people will not remember too many names
4. The name can also give a preconceived idea about the game
5. Try to avoid giving too common names.
6. Icon pays an equal importance for a business perspective of  a game
7. We are in a world of pictures, so take time to design an icon.
8. Don't follow the trend, try to do the opposite (unless it is risky)
9. Decide on the colour theme (Using a single colour or using several colours).
10. Audio plays a crucial role in games.
11. Pay attention to the size of game, as people with slower bandwidth connections may find it difficult to download the game

The next session I participated was titled '80 DAYS Post-mortem: Letting the game tell the  story'.

This was indeed a valuable session as this was a postmortem of the mobile game '80 Days' by its Creative Director. Below are some of the facts that he shared with us.

1. Designing Games in tablets helps to simplify things
2. Deliver the game that people expect
3. Relationships of characters are in the heart of everything
4. Resources that are expected in a gameplay are 1)Time 2)Money(useful) 3)Health while the game '80 days' did not use health.
5. Conversation between characters were used in the game 80 days
6. No death was used in the game
7. Text slows down game play
8. Story is the 'Heart' and not the 'Spine' of the game
9. Players learn the rules of the game and then uses them
10. The inspiration for the game was used from 1920 travel posters
11. The writing was done in a scripting language rather than a visual tool.
12. Price Algorithm - A Good algorithm that could be used for strategic games.

The last session of the last day was indeed the most memorable for me, it was a Round Table session titled 'Monument valley: Joy, Beauty and Ideas'.

Source: GDC China

This was delivered by none other than Ken Wong, the Lead Designer of UsTwo, the company that made the game Monument Valley, this session was so memorable to the extent that I will write a separate post on it.