Today Supercell hosted a select group of game-makers (and mobilegamer.biz) in Helsinki for a day of talks.
Speakers included Ustwo Games’ Jennifer Estaris, Metacore’s Dish Eldishnawy, Bitmagic’s Markus Kiukkonen and Markus Hjort, industry legend Trip Hawkins and Supercell’s Fernanda Oliveira.
Ustwo game director Jennifer Estaris began the day by talking through the creative process behind the Monument Valley series, with the third game coming to Netflix on December 10.
Estaris said the Monument Valley series now has over 150m downloads worldwide, and revealed that Monument Valley 3 started life when Ustwo participated in Playing for the Planet’s Green Game Jam. The content made in the game jam later evolved into Monument Valley II expansion The Lost Forest.
Then, as we revealed in early 2022, Estaris and her team chose nature and the environment as a central theme for what would become Monument Valley 3.
During pre-production Ustwo referenced 1984 adventure game Below The Root as inspiration, plus a multitude of photographic material. There was also considerable iteration on MV3’s open world-like sailing sections, said Estaris, and the team is currently playtesting a near-final build with over 100 friends and family.
Metacore’s Dish Eldishnawy took the stage next to talk about player engagement and retention, expanding on his Develop 2023 talk on the same topic. He explained flow state and the importance of scaling your game’s challenge with the player’s increasing skill, and suggested a new way to segment players to identify your top spenders.
The first step is to collect data on monetisation and engagement. Look at MAU and revenue, but don’t focus only on the small group of top spenders, said Eldishnawy. It is important to identify “valuable but overlooked” players too, and calculate their average transaction value.
Consider identifying player types by behaviour, and give them snappy names so your dev team can remember them clearly and make features specifically for them.
“Instead of only looking at how much time your players spend in a sessions, also look at how often they play,” added Eldishnawy.
Next, Markus Kiukkonen and Markus Hjort explained the origins of Bitmagic’s AI-powered game development platform. In 2022 it was known as Roleverse and was making a multiplayer RPG where a ‘game master’ controls the world in realtime.
The player-curated nature of the game then led to the firm’s current iteration as an AI-generated UGC platform. A demo showed a Roblox-like game being generated based on a simple prompt, and then being edited further in realtime with further prompts.
After lunch, panel sessions on emerging markets focused on the ‘next billion players’. Roby John, CEO of Indus maker Supergaming, said that it’s useful to think of India as a region in itself like Europe, as it has so many different cultures in one area.
The panel pitched LatAm and India as hypergrowth markets due to large, young populations with rising incomes. Gamescom LatAm was also cited as a big addition to the region’s appeal.
Developers from Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana also talked through how mobile games, mostly on Android, are a fast-growing category in Africa – particularly casual, hybrid and hypercasual games. Africa also has a young, growing and mobile-native population, and the continent now also has Africa Games Week, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa in early December.
Next, EA founder Trip Hawkins talked about creativity plus current and future game market trends.
Hawkins said Apple and Google’s “walled gardens” are among the many problems developers are facing today. Apple’s IDFA changes also made it “really hard” for mobile game-makers, he said.
He also questioned the current mass market viability of web3 gaming and what he called ‘prototype metaverses’, which are “not quite there yet”. But said that web3 gaming could still have a “big future” despite “a few stumbles” in recent years.
Of the ‘metaverse’ platforms, Hawkins said that part of both Roblox and Fortnite’s success is their humour and social inclusion, as there’s generally less pressure around winning in those titles.
Hawkins also predicted that governments will increasingly break down the mobile walled gardens run by Apple and Google, and that AI tools could help boost interest and growth in UGC platforms.
He also sees great potential in WebGL and HTML5 browser games, describing them as “the next big wave” – while also questioning why no major game companies have really grasped the initiative in this space.
Supercell art director Fernanda Oliveira was next, diving deep into the process of creating new characters for Brawl Stars.
Humour is a big part of the design process, said Oliveira, who said that each character is created like a joke, with a set-up and a punchline – a surprise the player might not be expecting.
Nostalgia is also a big theme, but references must always have a novelty or weird twist to make them feel fresh, said Oliveira. Diversity is another pillar, as having a broad range of characters from authentic cultural backgrounds means the team can be really playful with the character.
One brawler, Draco, was spun up from concept stage and added into the game in less than two months, said Oliveira. The character launch also included a song created in collaboration with the band Dragonforce and a music video that mixed live action and Saturday morning cartoon-like animation.
Then it was onto the game demos, where creators had two minutes to pitch their game to the audience. Among the most interesting mobile titles were Snack Club’s Takedown Legends, a Brawl Stars-inspired battle royale game, Boom Corp’s Bunny & Bot Star Company, a 2D driver like Hill Climb – but with guns.
Kuuasema’s Cthulhu Keeper looks like a very polished real time tactics game, and Snowclaw Games’ puzzler Wando also looked solid. Having launched as a premium game, Wando is now seeking a publisher to go free to play.
