What experience does to your career is amazing. But it doesn’t come without its challenges. You fail more times than you succeed. Yet, every failure is your stepping stone to success.
Nevertheless, it will save you a good amount of time and money, if you stick by these golden advice for beginning with mobile game development as a career. Otherwise, you might learn it the hard way.
1. Don’t be Biased
We are easily motivated by success stories. It will make you optimistic. The more you hear about them, the more you want to get out there and achieve it yourself. Well, this temptation is at the same time good and bad for you.
We already saw what’s good in it. The bad thing is that you are blinded from perceiving the reality. You wouldn’t stop to analyze the failure stories or associated risks. Ultimately, things might turn out very bad for you.
For a beginner in mobile game development, the first few years are very important. It is the time to take advice, learn from own and other’s experiences, and reflect on oneself and one’s work. But most importantly, it is the time to practice patience.
2. Avoid Too Much Expectation in the Beginning
The beginners in mobile game development often only have the few basic skills that is needed for game development, combined with lack of any significant experience. They start their career with high hopes and great expectations.
Conversely, what actually happens is that soon after they start, they get defeated too easily and too frequently. This is because the awareness they have regarding the effort that is to be put behind the actual process is too little. Often, these successive failures will lead to disappointment and drain confidence.
It’s always better to start on smaller projects or concentrate on a certain division of a large project in the beginning. This way, it is easy for a beginner to tackle the problems that they come to face and progress forward.
3. Don’t Make a Simple Idea into a Complex One
The subheading speaks for itself. Never try to add inappropriate and useless content to your game. For example, do not complicate a kid’s game by adding too many buttons or violence and horror elements suitable only for the adults. The logic behind including the different components of your game should be to improve the user experience in the end.
4. Don’t Keep Prototyping Outside of Your Big List
Prototyping helps to save your valuable development time. Before starting anything, you have a complete working model on your hand.
It is a phase is where you can try out all your wild and creative ideas from your imagination and see if they fit into your game like a jigsaw puzzle. You can invite others to play your game and have their say. This feedback will be a useful resource while making improvements to your game.
5. Document Everything
Getting agreed upon an idea finally is a fairly complex task- you spend hours discussing, researching, experimenting and just in plain thought. It is not easy to remember everything that you’ve come across.
Recommended read: Mobile Game Development – It’s Past, Present & Future
Sometimes, even losing a single solution may disrupt your entire work. Also there is the risk of losing important information while the idea gets transferred from one person to another. This is where the importance of a proper documentation lie.
6. Don’t Skip Planning
Good planning is unavoidable to maintain the pace of your project’s progression. Planning allows you to allot specific time for all the things that needs to be done. You can focus on writing codes or fixing bugs at the right time.
Absence of a plan can get things messy and eventually you’ll end up taking too much time and spending too much budget on your project.
7. Market Early
Marketing should not be set aside for the last month of the release. It is never too early to start getting some good fans for your game. In fact, you can begin with basic marketing steps even before you actually develop any codes. Take the word out as early as possible, and you’ll save some bucks here.
8. Generate an Early Feedback
Most developers are of the habit of seriously thinking about play testing their game only by the end of their project. This is a very bad idea.
Show your game to people outside of your team and friends circle from the beginning itself. As soon as you build the prototype, it’s time for your game to get some attention and feedback from a large audience. You may even attend events and festivals and show your game to folks there. People can find out mistakes in your game that you can’t find for yourself. And the end result – scope for improvement and success.
9. Follow People with Similar Interests
As always, networking is an important part of the game. After all, you need your connections to get to know what’s happening in the industry. They help to know what’s trending and new, different views, ideas, and options and thereby benefits mutual growth.