Hand Tour [Wardragon] Developer: 4 tips for a heavy hand tour

Transferred from: http://www.gamelook.com.cn/2015/08/225874

Gamelook reported/At the beginning of May this year, Gamelook has reported a "Wardragon (War Dragons)" Strategy hand tour, the leisure Hand Tour developer Pocket Gems production of SLG with real-time synchronization play and 3D screen won a lot of praise, The highest ever reached the 16th place in the US iphone income list. The lack of ' core ' game research and development experience led to a number of problems with the Wardragon, which eventually plunged the game to hundreds.

Recently, Harlan Crystal, co-founder and CTO of Pocket Gems, shared the company's first 4 experience in making heavy games, hoping that an independent team that tried or was doing SLG games could refer to the following Gamelook compiled content:

Over the past few years I have been thinking about dragons, especially want to make a dragon related to the top game, more specifically, I want to do a 3 A-level tour of the Dragon. After a lot of late-night discussions and countless efforts with my colleagues, all of my thoughts became a reality. A few months ago, Pocket Gems released the real-time strategy hand Tour "Wardragon", added the host-level 3D quality, we added to the dragon in the previous game pet and camp settings, hoping to bring a strong performance of the company's work.

From the size of our team, such a plan is beyond our ability, so we need to start a new technology for the project, that is, Mantis Engine, we spent a long time on the idea, practice and testing within the company, We want to make this game work with 3A levels. Creating a fun multiplayer 3D game is a very challenging process, we have experienced a lot of setbacks, errors and bitterness of the QA equipment testing, the following is our research and development process learned from the four experience, we hope this can be helpful to everyone:

For core players, the community is extremely important.

People's definition of 3A games is different, exactly what 3 A is decided by? Picture? How long is the game? Platform? Is the product itself the way of presentation, or the way people play the game? What I want to say is that the most important principle of creating a 3A game is to create a strong community.

For most hand tours, the community is the hardest to do, especially from a long-term point of view. In the early stages of the development of hand-tours, the community meant that they could exchange visits with good friends in real time and give them farm items, and we all know that this approach has gradually become weary.

It turns out that creating a strong community is like Blizzard or rockstar, allowing players to spend up to 20 years on their favorite games. The reason I say this is that I want to communicate meaningfully with the players and give them the tools they need, and they will try them out or use them with multiple tools. In "Wardragon" this game, we recognize the really important things and the importance of the guild. Since the launch, 16,000 active guilds have been formed in the game, which has also contributed to the game's engagement, with active players averaging 80 battles per day. In the game, your guild members are brothers and sisters, you fight together, collect resources to build better defenses, you can learn strategies and game knowledge through group chat, and guilds become a bond between players and the game.

The Guild in the Wardragon game reflects the importance of real-time community and real human communication, and when you can give players a clash in the game, they will like the game, and when you give each player a conflict, they will be more involved.

Casual games require a large number of users, the core game to value the initial players

In the early stages of hand-tour, as long as the hand-tour market to launch the game is enough to have the advantage. You have to work very hard to make a good game and launch it globally. In the next few days and weeks, you'll get more players, and then tweak the game to meet their expectations and needs to create a loyal fan base.

But now it's completely different, the hardware is getting better and the mobile network is speeding up, and the players generally want to get more out of the game. If you can't give them a lasting entertainment experience, players have plenty of options to change. We found that this also affected the way players look for the game, since the release of "Wardragon", we saw a lot of players at the beginning, but loyal users only a small percentage, the proportion of casual players is still very large.

In the "Wardragon" project, we've actually created a very strong community through high-engagement users, creating a better gaming experience through their behavior and feedback. It is important to make adjustments to the game through initial player feedback and data. They spend a lot of time playing games and rankings, and we find that high-level users spend a tremendous amount of time, with the top 10% active users occupying almost 70% of the total player's time.

This, of course, is also related to the marketing differences between casual games and core games.

Core players do not fully trust the hand tour

This time maybe we can stop to talk about the core game that has been talking about, and in fact many game companies use the core to describe something else. For example, many companies define core fans as the most consumed users, but I think the real core user should be defined as the player who invests the most in your game, including the time factor in addition to the money.

No matter what you define, many of the core players still don't swim as the first platform for the 3 a game, which is probably because many game companies use aggressive free tactics and cottage games to undermine the player's trust. However, if you look at today's hand market, you will find that the situation is improving.

Hand-tour is getting better, such as "Vainglory", "Dominations" and "Rival Kingdoms" and so on are very good, if the core players are willing to try, they will like. Most hand-tour developers now see this potential and will continue to do so in the future.

Second, many of the highly acclaimed 3A brands have launched hand-tour versions, such as Halo, Warcraft and radiation, and so on, the boundaries between hand-play and core players are blurring.

It is difficult to get the core players on the hand tour platform

If you listen carefully, you'll find a lot of hands-on marketers who are trying to find the core players in their hand-travel platforms.

One of the big obstacles we encountered in the Wardragon project was how to find the ideal player in the best way. Cross-promotion doesn't work, because our previous games are all casual categories, so it's not for "Wardragon". It is also difficult to identify and find the ideal target player through traditional mobile marketing channels. When you create a unique gaming experience, traditional marketing can be a headache if you don't have a clear user definition.

We found that when you try to get the core players, you need a long-term creative marketing resources support, you need to immediately let your players know that in this game they will not encounter any form of candy elimination. From the game icon to the login page and invest a lot of marketing ideas, you will get 10 times times the return.

Hand Tour [Wardragon] Developer: 4 tips for a heavy hand tour