Mobile game design: effectively distinguish and implement iterative design and planned design

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Mobile game design usually follows two main design principles:

Iterative design = get some core mechanics right and keep iterating until you create something fun; this is some initial, unexpanded design before development;

Planning and design = thinking about all functions, every level page, and all relationships and interactions between major functions before starting any development.

Typically iterative designers come from the PC world, which is used to selling pre-packaged non-free-to-play content for a specific fee with a high level of fun. They usually come from the casual design world, which is working on games with high retention and low monetization.

In my opinion, too many people go too far with iterative design. They subscribe to a religion around MVP (minimum viable product) and use the MVP approach as a crutch and a lame excuse for not thinking enough about the features. Adopters of this approach often make comments like:

“We can iterate on that later.”

"We don't have to worry about profitability right now, we just need to create fun."

Unfortunately, non-technical designers fail to understand that game code is not a flexible resource. It's not like creating and rebuilding Lego bricks. Unlike Play-Doh, you can't make significant changes without incurring any cost: code (especially game code that contains a lot of hard-coded code) is relatively inflexible.

I'm going to take a relatively extreme view here and emphasize that many iterative game designers in the mobile, free-to-play space are in a dangerous state and are in danger of destroying the entire game team through their own laziness.

The new mantra for the mobile game development process shouldn’t be to focus on the MVP, but on something more.

Kim Theory:

Develop the minimum feasible product based on the most feasible plan.

The mobile gaming field can be very tough for those who are not willing to invest the time and effort to think about their designs.

I often see situations like this:

Implementing and developing some semi-finished ideas that have not been effectively designed or improved;

Too many designers chase the best-selling game designs and try to bring new features to existing games that don't actually make sense;

Not really thinking about whether all the features in the game can be effectively combined and how they relate and interact with each other.

For all the designers out there who find themselves in these situations, here’s some advice:

Stop! You are in real danger. You are destroying the entire game development. You are wasting precious time and resources that you could have saved with better planning. Accelerating design = delaying overall development. Rushing to add some new half-baked features will only increase development costs.

So how can we plan better?

This boils down to the following key tasks:

1. UI: Make sure the UI supports the functionality you are designing. Create schematics for all key screens in advance.

2. User flow: Make sure each new feature has its own page before committing to development, and test the user flow in advance.

3. Edge Cases: Think about all the major edge cases. What are edge cases? Edge cases are game situations that are outside the normal game flow but still require design. Make sure you don't miss a beat in edge cases.

4. System Impact: Think about how these features will affect your game balance and economy. How will this affect other systems in your game. How will the UI affect other parts of the game. Make sure everything is consistent.

5. Design Impact: How will this new feature affect the overall core user loop, design goals, and monetization? If you add a new PVE feature to a PVP game, this will cause huge damage. How will this affect monetization and your expected game monetization? Please think about this question carefully!

Finally, there are situations where a planned approach makes sense for an interactive approach. Trying out a completely new approach to the game has significant risks. Again, this is not about over-planning. You should plan as I suggested above to make sure it makes sense for your feature, game type, goals, etc. The specific situation you face will determine the optimal feasible plan you take. There is no single answer that works for all situations.

Depending on the scenario, you’ll usually need to make more plans for the following types of games:

1. More complex: More complexity, dependencies, and more systems involved; you need to understand how your features will affect everything in the game.

2. More UI: Related to complexity but more related to the screen you have.

3. More systems: Generally speaking, if your game is more hardcore, it means that the game has more systems. In many cases of game launches, such as "DOTA Legends" (and many copies), we have seen the existence of multiple systems such as PVE and user retention.

Graphic overview: When to use iterative vs planned design?

Screenshot (from gamasutra)

Summarize:

I hope this article helps you increase your product’s chances of success through better planning.

You need to understand when to focus on planning and when to focus on iteration depending on the situation.

Use the above practices to reduce the number of iterations during the production phase of game development; most planning work should be done during the pre-production phase.