iCombat

I posted to Twitter about this but think it deserves mention here as well since it is such a great resource for game developers.  Ngmoco’s blog is short but incredibly dense in high quality advice from successful and experienced iPhone gamemakers.  The most recent posts aren’t so heavy on design advice but if you go to earlier entries you will find some awesome entries about game design and development.  The best post was from Kristine Coco titled With doing comes learning that gives some great insight into what works and what doesn’t for geographically distributed teams as well as for certain aspects of game development.  As an aside, Kristine will actually be giving a talk this year at the Game Developers Conference on working with external teams (clearly a topic important to me as I work with a team in the Ukraine!) titled I Say Green, You Hear Purple: Avoiding a Game of Telephone When Working with External Teams.  While I cannot attend unfortunately, it sounds like the ngmoco website will be posting the talk and slides after the presentation on their blog (update: see slides here).

Another fascinating post was by Matt Roberts’ titled Usability and Game Design where he does a great job of reminding developers just how important the subtleties of game design and intuitiveness can be for making a game successful.  From determining if your controls are natural to making sure that the user always understands what is happening, these are hugely important albeit basic things.  As I reach the end of my game development process I think my distance from the coding has helped me focus more on these basics (relating more as a constant beta user), but still I can understand the feeling of sometimes losing a grasp on the importance of simplicity and intuitive design.

While the ngmoco gamemakers portion of the blog hasn’t been posting for more than several months and really only has a handfull of posts, everything I have seen is definitely worth reading so if you are in game development you should add it to your list.

Update: The ngmoco blog has been updated with several posts with insights from the GDC this year.  There is a really thought provoking post about the future of the App store and the evolving opportunity with the coming SDK 3.0 update.  Here they talk about how the value proposition will shift from a one time sale to a longer term outlook.  In their words, “with social gaming and microtransactions in the form of level packs and virtual items, games will become more than the first impression and need to upsell their services.  That in itself represents a new market opportunity for content differentiation.”  Exciting indeed to think that we will all have to start thinking about creating long term value as opposed to one time gimmicks or successes; this should benefit the entire App gaming market by refocusing us to the task of creating games with strong foundations upon which to build a following and deeper games.

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