Introduction
Hello, I’m Bogo, and I had a topic called “A Short Checklist To Think About When Creating a Game”. I am making this new one to go more in depth and I am adding on to what was in the first topic. If you want to read a little less you can go to the first one. So now to the checklist;
1. Planning
When creating a game, planning is key. There are various ways of doing this but what I find is best is to write down a core loop. The Core Loop of your game is the main things your player will be doing in a game. Here’s an example;
This photo is from the Level up event. But as you can see, these are the extremely simplified version of what a RPG game would entail. So you would wright down your core loop on something like a whiteboard then build your game off that concept.
When planning, it is very helpful to have something you can go to to see what you need to get done. You could do this with a checklist, but what I find most helpful is to plan your game using a website that is made for planning games. A website like this would be Codecks. In codecks you create decks and cards to plan out your game, they even support you with discord bots so that you can have custom commands like “/bug”.
2. Good Advertisements
Now, with recent updates you can no longer advertise to players whose account is under the age of 13, so as a result advertisements have become a little harder to get players off of. Now before I go any further, you should always have a plan for advertising off platform. You never want to rely entirely on advertising in a specific place. So reaching out to YouTubers, Twitch Streamers, Ticktoks, and posting on Facebook and/or Twitter can really help you out.
Making good advertisements means spending the right amount to get enough attention for your game, an add that catches the attention of a user. This would mean spending a decent amount of time making the ad look new and different from the rest. You want your ad to stand out. Why would someone click on your ad if it looks like all the rest? In my opinion, players aren’t looking for the same old games, so an ad that looks and sounds different than all the rest (while not looking like it was made by a 3 year old) can really help out a lot.
3. Good Presentation
Once a user clicks on your game/ad you’ll want to capture their attention right away. You want them to want to click the play button, not think it’s a lame game and immediately click off. So an enticing description with thumbnails that make the game look fun to play can really make the player want to click the play button instead of clicking away. Remember, you want your name title and description to compliment each other, not fight each other for the players attention. For sponsors, a good game picture will really help draw people in. This also applies for your games name. Something like “Super Mario Ultra Fun Obby” doesn’t in the slightest make your game sound interesting. Take Minecraft, their name is simple but lays out the two main concepts of the game, mining and crafting. They didn’t name it “Block Sandbox” or anything generic like that. Instead they combined two different words into one name. Try to make your game sound new and interesting, you don’t want to make your name too similar to all your competition, but you also want those keywords in your title/ description to help your game get found on the search page without messing with the quality.
4. Tell The Truth
Once a user clicks on your game, they then become a player. You don’t want to deceive your audience with thumbnails/descriptions that make the user think that their going into something completely different then the game they clicked on. This will only lead to dislikes and less people playing the game. The worse the Like/Dislike ratio the less people you’ll have clicking on your game no matter how enticing your games thumbnails, descriptions, or your games name. If you have a bad like/dislike ratio, then users wont want to play the game. A little bit of clickbait is always good, not too much to where your lying, but enough to make the game look fun. Just go on YouTube and look at lets say a Mr. Beast video, does it show exactly what is in the video? Or is the title a little exaggerated?
5. Engaging Gameplay
Once a player has loaded into your game, you’ll want to have some engaging gameplay right off the bat. Usually, if you don’t have engaging gameplay, the players won’t play for more then around 3 minutes. So you want the first three minutes to be very fun and engaging. Another thing you don’t want when releasing a game is bugs. You need to play test your games and even get multiple people on at a time grinding the game to test everything. The more bugs are in a game the less fun of a time a player is going to have in that game. Now, you should always have a tutorial, period. This is important because if your game doesn’t have a tutorial to show the players how the systems in your game work then you’ll end up losing players because they don’t know what to do. Based on the type of game, engaging gameplay can mean different things, in a simulator, think Pet Simulator X, every UI has an animation, even hovering over the buttons have an animation and a sound!
6. Single Player Friendly
This is extremely important for games that aren’t going to be popular as soon as they launch or don’t get enough players at a time, because if you have a game like lets say a FPS game, when there’s no one else online, how is that player going to have fun? Adding in something like a single player mode would make that lonely player still able to play the game and have a fun time. Or even just spawning in NPCs when there are less then a certain amount of players in a server.
7. Returnability
You want your game to make people want to come back. Adding in something like daily loot drops or exclusive items or skins for people who played the game a certain amount of days, or weeks, in a row. The more players are coming back to your game the more visits you’ll have and the more online players you’ll have. With bigger games, you’ll have to update constantly always bringing new things to the game or else you’ll see a major drop in your DAU every week you don’t update. In lets say a shop, you want the player to be able to buy the first thing relatively quickly, then gradually increase in time needed between items in your shop. You’ll also need enough items for the player to have to come back multiple time to be able to buy them all.
8. Remember Your audience
When developing a game you need to keep in mind what age group your game is for. I don’t mean like the age recommendations feature, I mean like the age group you want to play your game. So like for a younger audience you should probably go for a low to mid poly, cartoony build style with lighter UIs and more cartoony animations. Also remember when creating a game that the UI will set the mood for your game. Brighter UIs bring on more happy and playful moods while darker UIs bring on more serious moods.
9. Avoid "Pay To Win"
While pay to win games can earn a lot of money, take the “AFK Until I Get 50K Robux” games that rose earlier this year. Have pay to win features can really mess with the players you actually want playing your game. If your a new player who is actually good at FPS games, and some kid with their christmas money buys the best weapon in the game, lets say you can only get it for 1K robux, and wrecks you instantly, your not going to want to play that game anymore. The studio that goes by the name of “ROLVe” shows very well that you don’t have to be pay to win to make a substantial amount of Robux from your games. The game Arsenal has almost nothing to buy and is one of the most popular FPS games on the platform.
The Roblox Level up channel, they recently just went over this same topic;
Conclusion
I hope this helps you when you go to create your game! If you think I missed something, or disagree with something I would love to hear your opinion. Of course game development tips are never “One Size Fits all”, so these things that I have listed will always take different forms based on the genre that your game is. I also hope you read the hole topic as I feel this is very important and many games don’t even think twice about these aspects when creating a game. So I really hope this sinks in and you remember.