Zombie Cells – Character Design (1/2)

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In the process of creating a new game/world you come to a moment when you have to settle it with inhabitants. At that moment the possibilities are overwhelming, but you must go down to earth and start placing some boundaries here and there. Once you know which kind of public the game is focusing on, and which kind of metafore would fit the game mechanics, it’s the time to call your pencil to action.
In this case, we had a liquid or low gravity environment, plus a massive spawning of beings. Once we dismiss the spacey theme, we went for the more stimulating body fluids’ setting ;). At some point the word “zombie” came out, and like victims of our time (the zombie golden-age) we just couldn’t help imagining hordes of zombie cells infecting a helpless host. In fact, we imagined the host was Justin Bieber… Down below are the first attempts.

The idea here is to try different approaches. To see which ones fit best and trace a line of action. Pencil is still the quickest tool. Although your inner child may just wish to start using colours, it’s better to try as many different styles in the less time possible, so let’s keep computer away.
OK, this time my inner child won over the battle, so I jumped quickly to Flash. That’s why the first two attempts, (down here) are just crap. Then I tried a simple cartoony style, most in the mood of Angry Birds. You can notice that specially in the last two of them.

And then… the magical moment, when everyone goes crazy. At some point you may come to a mad idea, an absurd concept that may be very funny. And then again, cold miss Logic comes back and hits your face with her glove. “Did you really think that zombie cells also needed to go soviet?”. – “Uhmmm… I guess it was not necessary, but it was cool as hell”.

It’s important to go through this phase in the early stages of design, or else, this mayhem will make you waste an undefined amount of precious time. In this case we dismissed the idea due to some deep and raw concerns about disappointed expectation.
In the second post about character design we’ll reveal the final stages of zombie cells infection. Take care!

Game analytics

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All our games use Playtomic stats. Playtomic is the equivalent of Google Analytics for games and is a great tool for game developers. With it we can go further than just knowing if someone has reached level 225 on Halloween Pairs.
Basically, Playtomic allows us to know on which sites our viral games are published, the geographical distribution of the players, the average time spent playing and how many hits the sponsor of the games gets. Besides this, we can custom it to track almost any kind of event relevant to the game play.
Practical example: How we improved Angry Bee with Playtomic
 
Some days after releasing Angry Bee on a couple of sites, we discovered that we were losing half of the players on level 3.

That wasn’t good. The game was more or less finished and at that point we wanted to avoid redesigning the levels. Nothing was wrong with them. The key issue was to improve the tutorial and reorder the levels. Firstly, we tried something simple.

Which effect would have swapping levels 3 and 4?

Bingo! Now the game retained 75% of the players and the play time increased.

Dealing with stats is not all about tracking the amount of plays of our games. If you use them wisely, they can help you to turn your game into a great hit by analyzing the players behavior.

Our current project

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Those Medidor are some screen captures of cheap nfl jerseys the game currently under Angry developement at our workshop. Halloween We are looking forward to publishing it to test our theory about how sense of cheap nba jerseys humour can improve the performance of a game. Can funny elements make a game Público more appealing and played?
The type Perchè of game v?h?n we were asked to replicate was somehow a dull starting point. We wanted to enrich its gameplay without changing the original concept by adding funny elements and weird cheap mlb jerseys characters like a frog riding Construction on a toxic cloud.
We’ll keep you informed!