Hello developers!
Today I want to talk about the importance of mobile users (With that I include all touch devices like tablets), and how to make sure they have a great experience.
Why are they important?
So let’s face it, you probably don’t really consider mobile players when designing the game, at the end, they are not that important right?
Well turns out that mobile users make about three quarters of all users. So by not thinking about them, you’re missing on a massive player base that you great game won’t reach, or at least not reach as much as it could.
And while many games reach thousands of concurrent players while being pc only, are you sure you want limit your chances?
Okay, so now that you know the importance of mobile players, how do you make sure to create a great experience for them?
How to create a great experience.
Okay, this topic is very complex, but you mainly have to focus on 2 issues:
1. Playing on mobile is HARD
At some point while playing any game, you have probably stumbled upon a player that seems to be having a stroke, or just be plain stupid. These are the players that seem to not know how to move a their character or click on an object, or take 40 billion years to do so.
And no, they are not dysfunctional people, they are simply relatively bad mobile users.
See, mobile devices have many disadvantages, like a pretty slow movement, field of view and much more. These big limitations along with a lot of lag (Have in mind that most players aren’t using precisely a last generation phone) make basic stuff really hard to do in games. So if you want to make sure that mobile players don’t hate your game, make sure to reduce the difficulty of basic actions. You shouldn’t make your entire game super easy, but certain basic mechanics should be adapted to mobile.
I think a game like spider does this really well.
So, in the game, in order to solve puzzles, the player is going to be constantly having to click on keys, doors and other stuff, so, What did Roy Stanford do? Well he made it so if the player gets really close to any items, a hand would pop, and by click the grab button, the player would grab that key.
This means that players don’t have to click on keys that, on a small screen, are literally 10 pixels big, and that they can also run and pick items at the same time.
Rainbow friends on the other hand gets rid of the clicking completely, players just walk into the items and equip them instantly.
Small details like this end up making a balanced mobile experience.
2. UI is horrible
Mobile devices, especially phones, tend to have quite small screens, which means that something like a shop, that might look perfect on PC, feels really clustered on a 6 inch screen.
This means that icons might look too small or pixelated, and buttons or texts might be too small to read or click.
The only way to fix this is to test the game a lot on your phone, it’s better to go too big than too small.
Okay so now that you know the two main issues, you only need to implement one thing when developing:
DESIGN MOBILE FIRST! All of the tricks I told you rely on one thing: Putting mobile players before any other device.
If you’re going to design UI, make sure to toggle a phone in the test tab on studio, if you’re deciding how fast a monster should be, think about how hard running on phones is, if you’re implementing a certain mechanic into your game, make sure it’s easy to understand and intuitive in phones and tablets… Whatever it is that you’re making, make sure to have mobile players in mind.
Anyways, that’s it for today! Thanks for reading this post, and have a great day!
