Outsourcing is the transfer of non-core functions of the game design company to third parties. For example, it is not always profitable and convenient for companies to employ cleaners or their own security service. Then they turn to private security companies or cleaning companies, saving money on staff recruitment, training, and formalization, but closing the necessary task.
Outsourcing in gambling design allows you to reduce the cost of game design and helps to work out this very design as the customer would like to see it.
Further in the article, we’ll talk about the main features and tasks that are put before the outsourcing company during the game development of the design for a video game.
Documentation
When working with documentation, most often, game designers deal with mechanic design documents and concept writing. And the only way to write quality documentation is to learn from your mistakes.
If you’re just learning: try to write your documentation and put it aside, and after a while (2-3 weeks) proofread it. This way, you will immediately see all your mistakes: as the practice has shown, this is the easiest and most effective way.
Game Balance
Balance is one of the most difficult tasks of building a game. I believe it is the most important and responsible part of a game designer’s work. Typically, developers give a game a set of mechanics. And what feelings and emotions it will evoke in the player, and how these mechanics will interact with each other is up to the game designer. Here are a few hints on how to make your life easier when working through this stage.
We all work in spreadsheets, either Google Sheets or Excel. Unfortunately, not everyone understands when it’s better to use a Google product, and when it’s better to write the balance in Excel.
Google Sheets are convenient for teamwork: you can see the entire history of changes, and you can roll back to the right stage at any time. And most importantly, we are not afraid to get an outdated version or lose the file, we do not need to puzzle over how to send the file to the right person.
But if the amount of data is quite large, for example, 50 thousand lines with formulas, it must either be split into several books and bind them together or use Excel as it is much more stable for large amounts of data.
Analytics
Analytics gives us valuable information about product performance and user behavior. It is:
- is needed to understand what’s going on in the game and what players are doing there;
- quickly find the reason why players leave the game;
- allows you to quickly detect and just as quickly fix any problems you have;
- provides data to improve user conversion to payer and increase repeat purchases (and this is the most important plus).
Typically, either off-the-shelf solutions (Amplitude, AppsFlyer, Firebase) or self-written ones are used to handle analytics. All of these systems support the connection of third-party platforms, such as tracking, and push mailings.
Game engines
Understanding how game engines work helps a game designer create a quality product. A game designer who knows engines is able to make changes to the game both on an editorial and code level, be it changes in logic, UI, effects, or object parameters.
He also understands how easy or difficult it is to implement the task and offers an alternative solution if the deadline is limited. And if a couple of days before release, it suddenly turns out that it is necessary to cut some of the mechanics and do it as quickly as possible. Understanding the architecture of the project and taking part in its planning, the game designer will do 80% of the work of cutting mechanics himself.
It happens that only three people can implement a full-fledged game at the prototype level. This will allow us to immediately assess the game as a whole, at an early stage, to find possible problems of mechanics and balance, think through the architecture in advance with the experience of testing, and simplify the selection of the most appropriate technologies.
I should note that creating your own games is especially useful for game designers. It allows you to get acquainted with new technologies, projects, and individual mechanics, to see how they interact with each other on a basic level.
