Yesterday at Devcom Developer Conference, the GDC-style precursor to Gamescom, there was a dedicated mobile track that included talks on world-building, technical issues, problematic monetisation and IP licensing.
Here are the digested highlights:
Building your story world in 3 easy steps
MyGames global narrative director Armando Troisi
Before his role at MyGames, Troisi worked in storytelling at Microsoft, BioWare, and NetEase.
He began by saying that the main point of world building is to enable player fantasy, and later said that “the best story worlds are the ones made by players”, citing the narratives created by the EVE Online community over the years.
He said it is also useful to have a central object or concept in your game’s lore to act as a ‘pivot’ – he used examples like Iron Man’s arc reactor, LOTR’s rings of power or Dune’s spice. These are items or ideas that drive the world and the characters in it to action.
He also talked though how useful it is to cut together what is effectively a video mood board, to get a visual sense of what you are aiming for. He said he did this when he consulted on Rovio’s endless runner Sky Punks and for My Games’ War Robots Frontiers, and found it very useful in terms of visualising the world in order to add more colour and spark further ideas.
Narrative designers must also leave enough ambiguity and mystery in a story to allow players to build an emergent story, Troisi added.
Bringing a large-scale world to life on mobile
SuperGaming engine developer Rakshit Thakur
Indus developer Rakshit Thakur talked through how his team got this large battle royale arena up and running on mobile devices. The game has been in development for three years, and has just gone into soft launch.
SuperGaming created its own engine for Indus which operates in a layer on top of Unity, mainly to create the game world and to handle asset streaming. To ease the strain on the device running the game, the team split out static and dynamic assets, and also used ‘lazy loading’, as Thakur described it, to further divide assets into what the player could see and what it could interact with.
SuperGaming also spaced out complex areas of the map to help performance, and placed large objects in the game world to block lines of sight to ease the amount the engine has to handle. 
How aggressive monetisation is ruining mobile gaming, and how we can fix it
Midjiwan CEO Christian Lövstedt
Lövstedt began by referencing Clash of Clans, saying that he’d reached a point in the game where he could either wait for 13 days for his building to be upgraded or pay to get it done now.
“Clash of Clans is a super good game…I just can’t afford to play it,” he said. The same applied with Golf Clash, which he says has become too expensive to play.
It is “sad” that many mobile games’ target audience is whales, he continued. Many mobile games resemble casino or slots games, and he said this is damaging to the reputation of the mobile games business. He contrasted this with the total of purchasable items in Midjiwan’s game The Battle of Polytopia, which is capped at $32.
Lövstedt said he considers The Battle of Polytopia to be “real” free to play, because you can only buy cosmetics and non-consumables. He said his studio also only focuses on monetising “minnows” – getting smaller amounts from a larger number of players – the opposite of most mobile games. IAPs are transparent, there’s no in-game currency, and he says Polytopia’s DLC and expansions are intended to be “good value for money”.
Nine years after launch, The Battle of Polytopia has generated 20m organic downloads, and has 600-700k MAU, he continued. This is the result of a long-term view on monetising the audience, and the studio’s focus on building a community of players.
In the Q&A afterwards Lövstedt acknowledged that this approach only really works for studios with a large active playerbase and relatively low costs – he estimated that Midjiwan has around 15 staff, many of whom are contractors. The studio is also generating revenue on Steam, console, Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass, so is well-spread out.
When asked about the impact of Apple and Google featuring, Lövstedt said that it is less impactful than it was, though if your game is events-driven that can help. It is difficult to speak to anyone at the platforms, he added, said that Steam was a better platform in terms of backend developer features.
Cost-effective ways to run IP integrations (focus on retro anime)
Tilting Point insights and strategy manager Simone Luxi
“Anime is a goldmine for game developers”, says Luxi, who noted that anime lovers are often superfans who love collectibles – traits that suit mobile game monetisation well.
Citing the uplift from an Astrokings’ crossover event with Ghost in the Shell, Luxi says retro anime has now become an important part of Tilting Point’s live ops plans.
While many larger anime franchises are expensive and are already in use, crossover events with older, smaller and less well-known IP can still work well, said Luxi, as they can have small but very dedicated fanbases.
Tilting Point’s crossovers are not only successful in asian markets, he continued, and have caused upticks in the west, whose interest in anime is growing all the time.
It is, however, important to consider the anime brand’s reach, engagement, quality and fit for your game when looking at collaborations, said Luxi. Spotting up-and-coming anime series can also be cost-effective and impactful – he cited a new series, Kagurabachi, which has a huge readership but has not yet seen any videogame integrations.
Paid online surveys and Facebook ads can also help gauge interest and whether the IP is a good fit for your players, he added.
Defence against the dark arts: using F2P gaming tactics for good
Naavik senior consultant Eva Grillova
Former Disney, Wooga, Socialpoint game designer Grillova now works at consultancy Naavik, and has done extensive research into how non-gaming apps are using gamification to boost long-term retention (though she prefers to use the term ‘applied gaming’)
Good ‘applied gaming’ achieves long term engagement through learning and repetition to form new habits, and over time has compound effects, she said. Post-covid, Grillova notes a rise in the use of language learning, fitness and mental health apps, and then noted how some of the bigger apps use ‘applied gaming’ techniques.
The apps with limited ‘applied gaming’ functions like Calm and Peloton show slightly above average retention, but Duolingo and Finch, much more ‘gamified’ apps, have far greater D30 and D60 retention, she said.
Some of the most popular game-like techniques used in leading apps like Duolingo include heavy use of visual progress indicators (Playrix-style house renovation, for example), Animal Crossing-style collections and social features like the leagues in Duolingo, which split players into cohorts and types so that you are ‘competing’ with other users on your level.
