Beamable is excited to sponsor Game Jam 2020 AD!

Summary

All participants in the game jam developing in Unity will have the option to use Beamable to accelerate social, commerce, and content management tools and receive free Beamable swag!

The event is organized by Amalthea, the annual technical summit of IIT Gandhinagar, in collaboration with DigiS, the game development club of IIT Gandhinagar. The event takes place on itch.io and will be open for submissions of Mobile, PC, and WebGL games.

Schedule

• The event starts Dec 5, 2020, and runs through Dec 25, 2020.
• The submission period is Dec 5, 12:00 AM IST – Dec 19, 11:59 PM IST.
• The voting period is Dec 20, 12:00 AM IST – Dec 25, 11:59 PM IST.
• The judging period is Dec 26, 12:00 AM IST – Dec 30, 11:59 PM IST.

Beamable will provide a workshop to all game jam participants during the first week!

Links

To learn more about the game jam, visit the website at:

https://itch.io/jam/gamejam-2020-ad

Participants in the game jam can sign up for Beamable free at:

https://beamable.com/gamejamad

In fact, anyone can sign up to develop with Beamable for free at:

https://beamable.com/free

A new Beamable Package release went live this week with a few bug fixes and enhancements to Beamable’s Inventory system:

• New Inventory Update builder: Allows for atomically updating the entire inventory with various operations including Item Creation, Deletion, and Updating of properties.
• New Inventory Update Item API: Allows for the updating of item properties after creation. – New Polymorphic item type support: Subscribing to items will yield notifications for all subtypes (e.g. items.weapons.sword)– the same goes for currency.
• Bug fixes to InventoryView consistency: Inventory view could end up with a subset of inventory depending on the scopes that were requested.
• Bug fixes to notifying upon item deletion: Deleting items will now properly update the inventory view and raise the correct notifications.

Be sure to update your Beamable Package via the Package Manager!

Get started with Beamable today and develop your game for free!

We have a new Unity sample project that uses a “clicker” game to illustrate various Beamable features like Leaderboards and Player Stats!

In the ABC (A Beamable Clicker) sample project, there is a button that you click to grow a tree. Click the button as fast as you can within the time limit, and your result is submitted to the Leaderboard service on the Beamable platform.

To get started with this sample project, you have to do two things:

1. Sign up for a free Beamable development account at https://beamable.com/free
2. Grab a copy of the ABC (A Beamable Clicker) project and follow the instructions here.

When you open the sample project, there will be instructions on what to do next!

We are excited to hear what you think of this project. Please let us know!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BEAMABLE ANNOUNCES MULTI-GAME DEAL WITH EAST SIDE GAMES

On the heels of success with Archer: Danger Phone, ESG has committed to building the next wave of games on the Beamable All-in-one Live Games platform

November 20, 2020 (Boston,  MA) — Game studios face an increasingly demanding market in which players expect more frequent updates and real-time interaction with their friends. Beamable was launched earlier this year to help game-makers cost-effectively rise to this challenge while delivering superior revenue to their businesses. Based on the results they’ve experienced, East Side Games is the first publisher to enter into a long-term, multi-game partnership with Beamable.

“Beamable enables live operations for our games with far more capital efficiency than building and maintaining our own Live Games platform,” said Omar Abdelwahed. East Side Games will create the next several games on the Beamable platform, where they expect to use features including content management, live events, and a top-down serverless architecture that’s deeply integrated with Unity 3D.

According to research firm GlobalData, the global video game industry will reach $300 billion by 2025, and most games are transforming into a service business model—or what Beamable calls “Live Games.” Live Games are continuously updated, continuously connected, and continuously monetized.

Although the backend-as-a-service (BaaS) modules to support Live Games are important, Beamable is the first solution that directly addresses the problem of a fractured workflow that plagues most game operations. “We’ve invented a platform that eliminates extraneous programming languages, development environments, technical hand-offs, and process bottlenecks,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable. “The benefit is that game studios can focus on what they love most: creativity.”

Beamable is available immediately, and game studios can try the platform for free by visiting beamable.com.

About Beamable

Beamable fights for the game makers of the world by helping them turn their game ideas into thriving businesses with a low-code Live Game platform. Beamable enables anyone who builds, updates, and maintains a live game to save time and earn more money. Beamable is based in the Boston area, and led by a team of game-industry and enterprise-technology veterans, and backed by investors including GrandBanks Capital. For more information visit, beamable.com.

About East Side Games

East Side Games is a proudly independent and profitable game studio with a collaborative, creative, and fun culture, located in Vancouver, Canada. The studio has been operating since 2011 and is best known for Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money, Always Sunny: Gang Goes Mobile, The Goldbergs: Back to the 80s and Archer: Danger Phone. Learn more at http://www.eastsidegames.com/press/.

Media Contact

Jon Radoff

(978) 503-2861

jon@beamable.com

Making a living as an indie dev seems like an elusive dream. Many try to hold down a job at the same time, while others burn a hole in their savings to create a game and follow their passion.

To help prevent the creative fire from fizzling out, we have handpicked some easy yet powerful ways of making money as an indie game developer.

Using the Unity Asset Store

The days of coding absolutely every piece of tech in your games are gone. There are many available tools that are meant to help developers move fast, make progress, and be successful. If you are making a game right now, chances are you’ve selected a game engine to work with.

Many game engines have their own asset store where developers can buy and sell a plethora of tools and assets to move faster, or create those things to help other game devs. There are two ways to make money in the asset stores and provide some extra cash flow:

Sell Game Tools

A game engine like Unity comes with a lot of built-in features that are crucial for game development. However, it doesn’t mean everything is ready out of the box. If you’ve created some games, chances are you’ve developed some of your own unique methods and tools to improve your efficiency.

Why not take some of these custom tools and turn them into Unity plugins? That way your efficiency can become the efficiency of others, and create a steady flow of income while you work on your games.

Sell Game Assets

Maybe your skills aren’t so much in the areas of software engineering. Perhaps your real strength is in the creation of character models, level design, animations, sprites, etc. If you are an experienced game designer or have one on your team, providing game assets to the community might be the right way to earn some extra cash.

One fascinating thing about assets is, there is an almost unlimited need for new art, meaning you can always be creating.

Freelancing

Freelancing is just putting your game skills out for hire for a short time. You get paid per hour or project, depending on the way your contract is formulated. Freelancing is flexible, so it could be the right choice for you depending on your availability and skills. There are two obvious benefits to using freelancing to drive some additional income while hard at work on your game.

First, you get to practice and sharpen your skill as a game developer and get paid.

Second, it helps you build a bigger network which you can leverage to later promote your game post-development.

The only downside with freelancing is that it could be time-consuming and take time away from your primary game development goals. However, with some solid time and resource management, you should be able to enjoy the freelancing side quests without sacrificing progress on the main story! 🙂

Teaching

It turns out that there is a huge demand for instruction on game design and development. Sharing your knowledge is a great way to generate some extra income. Like freelancing, teaching will also help you brush up on your knowledge, and broaden your network.

There are two ways to teach game development:

One is the conventional form where you set up or join a class that uses live sessions (either in person or online). You will need to define or adopt a syllabus (schedule of topics to teach) and rely on lots of in-class discussion between you and your students and a series of assignments or projects. You might get paid per class, or you could get paid for a set of multi-week sessions.

You could also look at developing an online course or even an eBook. There are many platforms that can facilitate either of these efforts. The best part is, once you create the class or eBook, anyone can pay to take it or download it and you can sit back and collect the fees.

Conclusion

We work with many developers who’ve made some substantial side income while they were hustling on their game. We hope some of these ideas will inspire you to explore some opportunities that leverage your knowledge as a game developer to acquire the resources you need to be successful.

Another way to be successful is to reach out to us at Beamable. We’ve built a game platform that makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to bring your game to life with a vibrant set of LiveOps tools in Unity to boost your average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) at launch. We’re here to help you at all the stages of your game dev journey! Contact us!

A new version of the Beamable Unity SDK went live this week. It is a bug fix release. Please update your Unity SDK package!

What’s New?

• Inventory Client APIs now include Add and Remove operations for client-authoritative inventory content (i.e. currency, items that have the Write_self property set to true).
• Portal now supports being logged in to multiple customer accounts at the same time.

Bug Fixes

• Greeting Message text in Toolbox now wraps (visible on the first install in Unity 2018)
• Cloud Saving functionality has been restored on the device (iOS and Android)
• Leaderboard prefab is now properly seeded with sample leaderboard content
• Tournament prefab now emits a human-readable message if the content is not specified in the game object.
• Content Manager was erroneously reporting that content objects had changed under certain circumstances.
• Login Flow prefab was erroring out on clicking the “Cancel” button when switching between player accounts.
• Login Flow prefab “Remove” button for secondary player accounts was rendering as transparent rather than as solid on certain platforms.
• Tournaments sample content created via the Content Manager now has a properly formatted ISO date string.
• Content Manager no longer removes the first content object from the UI when a content object of the same type is deleted.
• Toolbox no longer shows the “Logout” button when the developer is not logged in.
• Cloud Saving DirectoryNotFoundException race condition when switching player accounts is fixed.
• Tournaments content sample data now includes rankRewards.
• Tournaments Prefab close button is now fixed.

What to get started with Beamable? Download the Unity SDK now for free!

There was a time when AAA titles funded by massive companies, backed by what seemed like infinite budgets and marketing dominated the gaming scene. Despite the massive gaming franchises of Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox, and the corporate giants like EA, Activision, and Rockstar (among others), indie studios have always managed to break through driven by creativity, innovation, and sheer dedication.

The most significant indie success story has to be Minecraft. It’s a simple game that involves mining, crafting and worldbuilding, and enables the player to play it the way they want.  . Minecraft is now part of pop culture and has undergone massive expansions since its inception, adding new mechanics, biomes, creatures, and massive worlds of treasures. You know a game is successful when game developers and players alike build Hogwarts, the Nether, and a virtual library that’s home to real-world uncensored texts.

Making games is tough and most titles will never find an audience. And even if you do find an audience, most games will never make back the money that was invested in them when you account for time and opportunity cost. While this can prove discouraging to some, the challenge to break through into success is a dopamine boost for others.

To help, here are a few pointers to follow that we think might help you maximize your game’s chance at success.

1. Start small

The goals for your gaming project must be clearly defined and achievable. The pre-production phase of game development exists for a reason. You have to sketch out what you want the game to be, all the components it will need to be successful, who the game is for, how big the player market is, and all the technical needs of the project. If any of these areas is undefined, it can lead you down a rabbit hole of indecision, analysis paralysis, and project abandonment.

As an indie developer, it’s important to keep it simple so that the project doesn’t add too much strain on your limited resources. Our suggestion is, when you begin game development, create a roadmap to launch the minimum viable product (MVP) to players as soon as possible, get feedback, and iterate. As you deliver simple yet fulfilling experiences, you will build momentum for yourself or your team, and your players.

2. Know your limits and plan accordingly

As an indie studio that might be made up of a single person or a small group, it’s imperative to know the full limits of your capabilities. Go on a scavenger hunt for resources and information on indie-dev communities, game maker forums, and scouting out the relevant social media hashtags and Reddit channels.

When you go through the pre-production phase of your game (see step 1!), define a project that can play to your strengths. Understand the requirements – the tools, what you need to work on, who should be working on what, adopt an agile management approach to hit those smaller checkpoints, and get to the goal.

It’s also equally important to know when to scrap an idea and try something new. Listen to your instincts. Know your strengths as a team and an individual, and plan a game project that will maximize those.

3. Use the right tools

To make a financially successful indie game, it’s important to be aware of what worked best for the indie game devs that made successful games. They were focused on minimizing costs and maximizing game quality, sales, and marketing.

The main way to minimize costs is to pick the right tools! Use reliable game engines and platforms to build your game, as these have a crucial impact on the final product as well as your operational costs.

Unity is currently the best platform for building your game. Successful titles like Hearthstone are powered by Unity and a large part of the game development community vouch for its reliability. It has a versatile array of tools for all kinds of applications. It also has a vast universe of support tools to allow you to add your favorite features to your game.

Beamable-Unity: A perfect match for game devs

At Beamable, we’ve developed a platform that’s fully compatible with Unity. You’ll be able to add a plethora of features to your game, including in-game shops, social connectivity options, content management, and LiveOps.

Beamable features simple drag-and-drop prefabs with fully managed backends, easily skinnable UIs, and a streamlined building platform. On top of that, there’s a central web portal from where you can manage events, player stats, in-game inventory, analytics, and a lot more with ease.

If you follow some of our advice above and use Unity with Beamable to create a successful game, perhaps we will be talking about your success in future blog posts! Feel free to contact us if there is a project you think Beamable can help with.

If you are creating live games, chances are you’ve been thinking about all the different products that are out there and how they might work to empower your game with online social, commerce, and liveops content features. It turns out, there is an entire community of game creators making games faster by leveraging the power of a back end game platform. This community exists on Discord and is called the Online Gamedev [BaaS] Community.

The community was started by Dylan Hunt, and brings together information and support from a wide range of game tech providers. Recently Beamable was excited to be added to the comparison sheet and the online community!

The comparison sheet is a deep resource that compares the many options that game makers have for a game backend platform, and lines them up on over 70 different dimensions.

Some of the questions you can ask are:

• How are all these BaaS platforms pricing their services?
• Do they have free trial versions for development?
• Are there API limits involved for us?
• What language and infrastructure dependencies do they have?
• What’s the level of quality on their documentation and examples?
• What kinds of game analytics are available?
• Is there GDPR support?
• …and much much more!

You can join the BaaS community by following this invite link to their Discord channel:

https://discord.me/baas

You can view the extremely helpful technology comparison Google Sheet here:

https://bit.ly/2mwZwqu

Beamable was recently added to this sheet which also includes companies like:

• Accelbyte
• AcceleratXR
• Amazon Gamesparks
• Braincloud
• Microsoft Playfab
• Nakama
• Photon
• SmartFoxServer
• XtraLife
• Chilli Connect
• Signalr
• Spatial OS

…and a few others.

While there are many game tech options for your live game, Beamable remains committed to an EngineCentric™ approach that is editor-workflow optimized, meaning game creators will no longer have to consider a game server written in another language running on special infrastructure as part of their game building process. With Beamable, we want you to do everything in the editor: Create content, leverage Unity pre-fabs and addressables, and write C# server authoritative code as a microservice that’s ready to scale and fully managed.

Sign up to try Beamable for free or contact us for a demo! We look forward to working with you!

The multiverse of mobile gaming now offers something for everyone, from arcade games and simple puzzles to high-end first-person shooters and multiplayer RPGs. Player retention is an integral part of the success of any game, and, as more and more games appear on the market, it is vital to ensure that your players are inspired to come back and play every day.

If you are working on a mobile game, one thing you should consider are daily login rewards. Each time a player starts a session that day, they are rewarded with something. It could be in-game currency, XP Points, cosmetics, and others. This rewards the player for doing what they want to do anyway, play your game! It also creates a sense of progression and a way for players to earn with their loyalty vs any specific game achievement.

To inspire the design of a daily login system for your game, here are a few games that use the reward system effectively to inspire long term player retention.

Hearthstone

Based on the popular game World Of Warcraft, Hearthstone is a digital collectible card game published by Blizzard Entertainment. The game is free to play with over 10 million downloads on the Play Store and is rated four stars with over a million reviews. Since it’s release, Hearthstone has done incredibly well in retaining a loyal fanbase with its robust multiplayer experience.

Hearthstone offers Daily Quests to players awarding them Gold for the successful completion of specific missions. This is a huge incentive, especially for newer players looking to build their decks. Gold is an essential in-game resource that is spent to replenish your resources, as well as level up characters. By featuring daily rewards that feature Gold, it helps recent players achieve their deck building goals faster, rewarding them for consistent and early retention that helps turn Hearthstone from a game into a habit and a hobby.

Hearthstone is worth a play through to see all these retention systems in action.

Angry Birds

 

Angry Birds is not only a popular game, but it has build an enormous worldwide pop culture following across gaming, movies, TV, and toys. The quirky art design and the freshly accessible physics based game mechanics propelled this game of Birds and Pigs into superstardom.

Core to the game are a series of integrated rewards that increase with daily login streaks to boost gameplay and add cosmetics. In addition to the dailies, every level cleared opens up new bonuses, and these deep progression systems encourage repeat sessions and high player retention. If you are considering a progression meta with daily rewards, study Rovio and their Angry Birds titles for inspiration and instruction.

If you haven’t played Angry Birds, give the latest game a try and take some notes!

Temple Run

Temple Run is now considered a classic of mobile gaming, practically inventing the genre of endless free running. With straightforward controls, accessible mechanics, and short play sessions, it remains a popular franchise amongst players.

This game also uses a streak-based daily reward system that stacks your rewards with higher and higher levels of return sessions. Players can complete challenges daily to unlock even more rewards.

If you haven’t played Temple Run recently, perhaps it’s time to revisit it for “research purposes!” 

Super Mario Run

 

Super Mario Run is an endless runner game based on the Nintendo Mario franchise. Since its launch, it has acquired a bit of a Nintendo cult following with over 100 million downloads on Google Play Store. In the game, you play as the iconic characters of the Mario franchise sprinting and dodging your way through the levels.  It rewards players for progression, as well as through many limited time events and missions, where players can attain items for building their team. Check it out!

Star Trek Timelines

 

Star Trek Timelines (STT) was created by many of the people who work at Beamable, so we know that game inside and out! It also uses many features of Beamable that make daily reward systems possible!

In STT, you play a starship captain in the Star Trek universe trying to discover why the timelines are fractured. It is a collectible character role playing game (CCRPG) that features thousands of different characters from the show.

There are multiple daily reward systems built in. There is your daily reward which grants better and better prizes based on your login streak. There are daily missions that grant merits which can be used to acquire more items for your character levels. There is also a battle pass system that rewards you additional daily rewards throughout the entire month. There is a subscription you can purchase to also unlock a premium tier of battle pass rewards (called Campaign rewards). All of these systems drive huge retention in the STT audience and give them the resources they need to build their character collection into the hundreds.

Give STT a play through to see how these daily reward systems work together.

Building Daily Rewards in Unity

If you are building your game in Unity and looking for a way to implement a daily reward system, you really should check out what we are doing at Beamable.

Beamable includes a Reward Calendar system which is configurable via our content workflow. Players can claim rewards from a variety of reward calendars, which can be free, unlocked in game, or purchased via the store. Developers can customize which rewards players can claim on which days, and how many claimable days are available. This feature incentivizes both engagement and monetization, and powers game mechanics like Daily Rewards, Battle Pass and Monthly Cards. If you are interested, grab a free copy of Beamable and check it out!

2020 has been a rough year! A global pandemic, crazy wild fires, hurricanes, and political polarization around the world. But through it all, game creators are still creating, putting their art into the world for players to enjoy. Here we are in October, the season of spooky stories in an already spooky year! We took a moment to pick out a few spooky scary indie games that we think you’ll enjoy!

Amnesia: Rebirth

Amnesia: Rebirth is a survival horror can and direct sequel to the fan-favorite game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This game has everything needed to scare the wits out of you.

According to Thomas Grip, the creative director at Frictional Games, “Rebirth has a new protagonist, a new storyline, and a completely new setting. There are no gimmicks and no invention of something brand new. This is Amnesia.” With this new release, the focus is on expanding the player audience by adding more story depth and not relying so heavily on jump scares.

You can find this game on the following platforms:

1. Official Website
2. Steam
3. Playstation
4. Epic Game Store

World of Horror

On the surface, World of Horror might seem like an odd pick due to its text-based narrative approach to a horror based role playing game, but there is a lot to like in this title. You will immediately pick up on the H.P Lovecraft influences woven in the work of horror manga artist Junji Ito during your game play.

You begin your rogue lite adventure in a weird town beset by twisted people and supernatural horrors.

The story unfolds like you are turning pages of a graphic novel, wherein your objective could lead you towards a school filled with murderous disfigured teachers (like having scissors for hands), or you might investigate an apartment of someone who is way too interested in eels (super creepy).

On your journey you will encounter numerous scenarios, meet allies, arm yourself, and fight strange creatures in a unique text-based system of combat. In the end, you will search for the cause terror in this town and put an end to it.

You can find this game on:

1. Official Website
2. Steam
3. Itch.io
4. Microsoft Store

Carrion

Did you ever wonder what It would feel like to be a monster in a horror game? With Carrion, you get to live out your wildest dreams! (or maybe nightmares?) Carrion from Phobia Game Studio and is a refreshing take on a platformer title with inspiration from the 1984 John Carpenter movie The Thing.

You are given control of an amorphous monster with a one-track mind: devour everyone in sight, become a massive entity of horror, and take over the world. You begin the game by crawling around with fleshy tendrils pulling every human you can find into your hungry maw filled with razor-sharp teeth.

The character controls seem like they might be complicated (piloting a gelatinous mass in all directions) but the game is surprisingly responsive. Crawling through pipes to reach various game locations feels satisfying and the combat mechanics against the humans as they desperately fight back feels fun and intuitive.

Overall this game checks every box and would surely provide for some quality spooky time each Halloween.

You can find this game on:

1. Official Website
2. Steam
3. Microsoft Store

Honorable mentions

There are so many horrifying games out there, so please check these other games out and support indie developers in their quest for the scary!

1. The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (Steam | Official Website)
2. Someday You’ll Return (Steam | Official Website)
3. Follia (Steam | Official Website)
4. DreadOut 2 (Steam | Official Website)
5. This is the Zodiac Speaking (Steam | Official Website)

Check back next month!

Continuing from last month, this was the second article in our monthly series where we pick our favorite Indie games. Check back next month for the best Indie games in November 2020!

Meanwhile, if you need any help with game development, keep Beamable in mind. We’d love to learn about your spooky game project and help bring it to life!

Unfortunately there is no magic formula for a successful game. It is precisely the uncertainty and the promise of success that makes game creation such a draw for so many creative world builders. Part of the success is effort, but a large part comes down to resources. Can you get the funding to bring your dream to life? Sometimes this means self-funding the game with your savings or credit cards… other times this might mean going out there and raising money for your vision.

To help you out, we’ve handpicked five sources that hopefully can point you in the right direction.

1. Ask Game Dev

Ask Game Dev is an insightful YouTube channel managed together by three indie game devs. Their videos cover all aspects of game development, but one video in particular contains a huge amount of information about game funding.

Released in 2019, their video titled “7 Ways to Fund Your Indie Game” is one of the best videos that we’ve come across. It is filled with information made memorable and accessible by their teaching style and animation explanations. They cover everything from crowdfunding sources like Kickstarter, to dev grants from large companies.

2. Game dev underground

Game dev underground is a solo-run channel with excellent content based on years of experience building dozens of games in the last couple of years. The channel regularly features the games of community members as well, raising their visibility and helping make indie games a success.

There is a particularly good funding video to check out here: How To Get Your Indie Game Funded (Without Using Kickstarter). It’s great content, explained in a refreshing way with specific focus on the various terms and conditions of funding in different ways as well as sources for driving more attention for your game projects.

3. Thomas Brush

Thomas Brush: Thomas is a creative and passionate indie game developer turned teacher. After successfully crowdfunding two games to over $200k, he produced a special video to explain the process. It’s called How To Raise $100,000 On Kickstarter and dives into the strategy for how he was successful.

The explanation is practical and straightforward and includes a step by step guide to help any game dev get started.

4. Dual core studios

Dual core studios: Dual core studio has some excellent tutorials for game development on their channel, but they also have a great funding video called: How to get funds for an indie game

The content goes deep. It starts by explaining everything you need for successful game fundraising (like a working demo, etc.) and then breaks down the funding process from publishers into discrete steps.

The video also touches on the very important topic of intellectual property rights and some of the things you need to think about as your race towards a funding decision.

5. Antler studios

Antler studios is a joint venture of university students who graduated and continued to chase their passion of game development. They are refreshingly open about their mistakes and what they learn from them as they go.

They have a funding specific video called 101: funding your indie game. It starts with a really interesting set of tips about how to structure your funding research. They cover the strategy of applying for academic grants if your game project has some possible academic significance.

They also go into some depth on trade shows for marketing, playtesting, and funding opportunities as well as trade shows being an opportunity to really practice and refine your pitch which is critical to the funding effort.

Don’t let funding hold you back!

We hope the resources we’ve laid out here are helpful. Sometimes the path to success is more expensive than you ever consider. It is always good to go into a game project with some idea about how you will resource it both with people and money.

Remember, if you need help on your game dev journey, know that Beamable is here to simplify game development by making it easier to build, run, and scale your game with low code drag-and-drop features, and a serverless workflow.

Good luck with your game building and fundraising!

Unfortunately there is no magic formula for a successful game. It is precisely the uncertainty and the promise of success that makes game creation such a draw for so many creative world builders. Part of the success is effort, but a large part comes down to resources. Can you get the funding to bring your dream to life? Sometimes this means self-funding the game with your savings or credit cards… other times this might mean going out there and raising money for your vision.

To help you out, we’ve handpicked five sources that hopefully can point you in the right direction.

1. Ask Game Dev

Ask Game Dev is an insightful YouTube channel managed together by three indie game devs. Their videos cover all aspects of game development, but one video in particular contains a huge amount of information about game funding.

Released in 2019, their video titled “7 Ways to Fund Your Indie Game” is one of the best videos that we’ve come across. It is filled with information made memorable and accessible by their teaching style and animation explanations. They cover everything from crowdfunding sources like Kickstarter, to dev grants from large companies.

2. Game dev underground

Game dev underground is a solo-run channel with excellent content based on years of experience building dozens of games in the last couple of years. The channel regularly features the games of community members as well, raising their visibility and helping make indie games a success.

There is a particularly good funding video to check out here: How To Get Your Indie Game Funded (Without Using Kickstarter). It’s great content, explained in a refreshing way with specific focus on the various terms and conditions of funding in different ways as well as sources for driving more attention for your game projects.

3. Thomas Brush

Thomas Brush: Thomas is a creative and passionate indie game developer turned teacher. After successfully crowdfunding two games to over $200k, he produced a special video to explain the process. It’s called How To Raise $100,000 On Kickstarter and dives into the strategy for how he was successful.

The explanation is practical and straightforward and includes a step by step guide to help any game dev get started.

4. Dual core studios

Dual core studios: Dual core studio has some excellent tutorials for game development on their channel, but they also have a great funding video called: How to get funds for an indie game

The content goes deep. It starts by explaining everything you need for successful game fundraising (like a working demo, etc.) and then breaks down the funding process from publishers into discrete steps.

The video also touches on the very important topic of intellectual property rights and some of the things you need to think about as your race towards a funding decision.

5. Antler studios

Antler studios is a joint venture of university students who graduated and continued to chase their passion of game development. They are refreshingly open about their mistakes and what they learn from them as they go.

They have a funding specific video called 101: funding your indie game. It starts with a really interesting set of tips about how to structure your funding research. They cover the strategy of applying for academic grants if your game project has some possible academic significance.

They also go into some depth on trade shows for marketing, playtesting, and funding opportunities as well as trade shows being an opportunity to really practice and refine your pitch which is critical to the funding effort.

Don’t let funding hold you back!

We hope the resources we’ve laid out here are helpful. Sometimes the path to success is more expensive than you ever consider. It is always good to go into a game project with some idea about how you will resource it both with people and money.

Remember, if you need help on your game dev journey, know that Beamable is here to simplify game development by making it easier to build, run, and scale your game with low code drag-and-drop features, and a serverless workflow.

Good luck with your game building and fundraising!

Our Senior Devops Engineer Brandon Bateman gave a talk to the Amazon Game Tech community about Beamable’s Microservice architecture that helps us scale the large games of our customers using Amazon Webservices Automation.

You can watch the presentation here!

 

Why use microservices for your live game architecture?

• Ability to scale individual services based on load
• Allow game developers to more easily work on specific services without having to merge
• Test specific components without the need for full deployments
• Add/remove features with less overhead
• Upgrade services individually without impacting others
• Smaller and more agile development cycles

Here’s what Beamable looks like!

 

Check out the video to learn more or contact us if you have any questions.

 

Your Unity game can take advantage of this architecture for it’s live game features (leaderboards, tournaments, multiplayer, commerce, social, etc.) by getting started with Beamable for free!

Game development is a tricky endeavor, especially if you don’t know where to seek information and help. With so many engines, libraries, frameworks, programming languages to choose from, the entire process can feel overwhelming.

The best way to counter that feeling is to reach out to people with experience. You aren’t alone. Chances are, someone has been where you are right now, thinking the same things.

Online communities and forums for game developers exist to solve the problem of feeling alone. They help you to get in touch with fellow developers who can not only give experience-based tips and advice, but also playtest your game and suggest improvements.

Senior programmers, artists, sound designers, enthusiasts, indies- you’ll find everyone in these forums.

These communities are also a good source of daily updates and knowledge around the latest innovations and trends in the industry. As a game dev, the learning never stops. Through communities of like-minded professionals who knows, you may even find your indie game dev team in one of the forums!

To help you out here are five indie game development communities that you should check out!

1. Reddit (r/gamedev)

r/gamedev is one of the most popular places for game devs. It boasts a thriving community of over 311K members. You are bound to find professionals from all areas of game development, be it artists, designers, programmers, etc. Another feature that makes Reddit an ideal choice for the Unity indie game dev community is its sheer popularity. You can showcase the work you’ve made, post questions to find help, connect with like-minded makers, find free arts and assets, and much more.

For an indie game developer looking for a community to join, Reddit is definitely one of the best places to start. If you don’t like r/gamedev subreddit for some reason, there is no need to fret. You can join r/indiegames, r/playmygame, or r/gamedevscreens.

2. Slack (IndieDev)

IndieDev is a very powerful and popular Slack community for game devs. You have to apply to join, so keep that in mind. Fill out the Google form, and you will get a reply within 48 hours.

Once you are in, the community is very well run. Moderators are almost always online to ensure that the group is organized. There are a lot of channels which you can choose to join.

Don’t worry if you are not familiar with Slack’s interface. The auto-redirect feature in the channel will almost always ensure that the user reaches the correct group for the topic they care about.

3. Discord (Game Dev League)

Game Dev League is a very popular Discord community. Discord moderators are online at all times, ensuring the server runs smoothly and that the pages are organized in a clear way.

There are many channels with some dedicated to showcasing, and some answering questions on creation. It’s a community that is truly built by game developers, for game developers.

4. Facebook (IndieGameDevs)

IndieGameDevs is a solid indie game dev community. It’s a generally smaller group, having about 115k members. In the words of this group’s moderators, IndieGameDevs is a place to “ask your doubts, seek guidance, learn, and share your progress.”

You will find a thriving community, and by sharing your success, you can also garner the support you need to make your game a huge success.

5. Reddit (r/IndieGaming)

Wait what??! Reddit again? Sure why not! There are no rules here!

r/IndieGaming is another highly active indie game development community where you’ll find many like-minded creators. With 219k members, this group offers you everything under the umbrella of game development. It’s one of the more active subreddits where you can tons of makers and tons of resources (both for upskilling as well as for playing your games).

Go join a game development community!

With expectations so high for games these days, it’s tough to be a “lone wolf” out there. To get a game over the finish line requires the help and support of a strong community. Inspiration is important. The feedback is important. The celebrations are important. Find a community today. You’ll need it more than you could ever imagine.

Join today and be a regular. Form connections. Post your questions. Provide your answers. And remember, Beamable is here for you as well! If we can do anything to help with your game development, let us know.

We’ve witnessed lots of ups and downs in 2020, and despite indie developers facing a tough time, they’re still managing to launch one game after another, every month, keeping us entertained and engaged.

Beamable would like to give a huge shoutout to all the indie developers out there showing up every day and getting it done!

To celebrate the continued contributions of indie devs, here are some picks for the top 3 indie games released in September 2020.

We had our game editors scour the internet digging up games that dazzle us with their all-around brilliance. The list is in no particular order except that these are three interesting games we feel you need to know about on Android, iOS, and Steam.

Here are the games we noticed this month. If you think we are wrong or missed something, put it in the comments!

Genshin Impact

Check out the gorgeous action RPG Genshin Impact, developed by miHoYo, using Unity. It’s available on PS4, Windows, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. and was released on 28th September, 2020.

One particular reason why this game caught our attention was it’s promise to be on par with games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Genshin Impact is set in an open-world known as Tevyat. A god chooses each player, and they are granted with a vision. Visions are magical gemstones that allow players to control seven different elements in the game – Wind, Frost, Nature, Lightening, Earth, Water, and Fire. You begin your journey by traveling to the far reaches of Tevyat in the search of lost siblings and, during the course of this journey,  find companions, each of whom have their own unique abilities.

One feature that truly distinguishes Genshin Impact from most action RPGs, is the game allows you to control four characters at once.

You will experience a rich world that seems to leap directly from the pages of a Manga story. This game is entirely free to play and expect the creators to feature in-app purchases and microtransactions.

Genshin Impact is looking to expand to all major game platforms and is definitely one of the best indie games to watch for. It also offers cross-platform play, meaning you can compete with players independent of their platform of choice.

Find the game here:

• Google Play
• Apple App Store
• Official website

Ary and the Secret of Seasons

Ary and the Secret of Seasons is an action-adventure game developed by Exiin and was released on 1st September 2020.

This glorious action based adventure game is set to dazzle players with rich visuals in the fictional world of Valdi. We catch up with the main character who is the Guardian of Winter – armed with the power to control the seasons which are in disarray.

The in-game mechanics of an RPG coupled with an element of puzzle solving makes the gameplay very delightful. Arry and the Secret of Seasons also boasts a “fluid” combat system with some really unique and satisfying fighting experience. To augment the fighting mechanics, there are a wide range of enemies that you will have to fight on your way to unlock the secret of the seasons.

Find the game here:

• Steam
• Nintendo
• Official website

Paradise Killer

Paradise Killer is an investigation-based adventure game developed by Kaizen Game Works and released on 4th September for PC and Switch. The game is set on an island that regenerates every few millennia, and brings together a beautiful combination of murder-mystery and gorgeous aesthetic.

In Paradise Killer you will investigate the mass murder of the island’s ruling council by piecing together clues and forming your own argument that is presented at the end game trial. By choosing the interrogation sequence, and how to go about it, the player discovers not a singular truth but a truth they shape and craft.

Find your truth and breathe life back into Paradise. It’s a truly unique and mind-bending journey!

Find the game here:

• Google Play
• Steam
• Official website

Honorable Indie Mentions

There are many amazing games out there. If you have some time, be sure to check out these amazon indie titles as well!

• A Time Paradox (Puzzle)– Steam | Google Play | Official Website
• Red Star Raider (Platform shooter)– Steam | Official Website
• The Blueness of a Wound (Adventure) — Steam | Official Website
• Batu Ta Batu (Puzzle) — Steam | Nintendo | Microsoft | PS | Official Website
• Outer Frontier (Turn-based strategy)– Steam
• Louie (2D Platformer) — Steam <- Built by Beamable employee Chris Hanna!

Check back next month!

This is the first in the top indie games series. We’ll be making a habit of doing monthly round-ups where we’ll bring a list of the best 3 indie games from the month gone by, along with some honorable indie mentions.

If you’re an indie developer building games, we’d love to hear about it and possibly feature you. Contact us and let us know! Who knows, perhaps Beamable can also help you build your game faster with live game features, content management for liveops, and even a server-less game option! Check us out today!

Oh and, if you think we missed a game or two, the comment box is open!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BEAMABLE LIVE GAME PLATFORM NOW AVAILABLE IN AWS MARKETPLACE

Game studios can now build, launch and operate live games with a self-service platform built on Amazon Web Services

September 22, 2020 (Boston, Mass.) — Beamable has launched in AWS Marketplace, providing a no-code and low-code solution for building and operating live games with dynamic content. Game studios benefit by increasing their time-to-market, decreasing their total cost of ownership (TCO) and improving player engagement with more frequent updates to content, features and events. Leveraging the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS), game studios large and small are assured that Beamable can meet the scaling, availability and performance requirements of the most demanding games.

In the most recent quarter, over a dozen new games have adopted the Beamable platform, including Archer: Danger Phone, based on the hit FX series. Previously, Beamable was built to power games with demanding authoring requirements, such as those built on popular television series with weekly updates including Star Trek and Game of Thrones.

“Making Beamable available in AWS Marketplace makes life easier for our customers,” explained Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable. “Beamable is now available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) option for studios who want to get up-and-running as quickly as possible.”

Beamable was launched earlier this year to make it easier to build and operate live games based on Unity. With the launch in AWS Marketplace, Beamable is broadening its addressable market to include Unity developers at the point they need game server hosting, as well as studios building on other 3D engines who need an efficient content authoring and live operations platform. By purchasing Beamable through AWS Marketplace, game studios can consolidate all of their infrastructure costs in one place.

To learn more about Beamable on AWS, visit https://beamable.com/aws

To get started with Beamable as a Live Game Platform for your Unity game, visit the Beamable AWS Marketplace Listing at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B08G3LTQW3?qid=1600440098979

Press release available here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/beamable_live_game_platform_now_available_in_aws_marketplace/prweb17418805.htm About Beamable

Beamable fights for the game makers of the world by helping them turn their game ideas into thriving businesses with a low-code content management solution. Beamable enables anyone who builds, updates and maintains a live game to save time and earn more money. Beamable is based in the Boston area, and led by a team of game-industry and enterprise-technology veterans, and backed by investors including Grand Banks Capital. For more information visit, beamable.com.

Media Contact

Jon Radoff

(978) 503-2861

jon@beamable.com

A Golden Era of Gaming

We are all living and playing games in a time when independently created video games are receiving the recognition they deserve. As the overall gaming market grows, the rising tide is lifting all boats.

The democratization of tools for creating and distributing games and content are accelerating, opening the doors for anyone with an idea and a drive to design, build, and ship a game. More games means more players, and more players means more game creation. It is a feedback loop that is powering the industry to new heights. From single developers building out of their bedrooms to independent game studios bankrolled by VCs and publishers, game development is booming.

Despite all this creative energy, it is still far too common to find studios popping up and shutting down. Why does this happen?

We spent some time looking around on Reddit asking this question. Reddit carries a huge community of indie game developers sharing their successes, but also their frustrations. We assembled some of the perspective here for you in the hopes that it is helpful.

The Dawn and Rise of Indie Gaming

In prior decades, commercially successful video games remained the province of large, multi-million dollar corporations. Building and distributing a game was complicated and required huge investments in time, money, and logistics. Every game had to be created and tested to absolute perfection, then turned into a hardware cartridge or media with designed packaging and distribution contracts at retail stores across the country.

As player expectations continued to increase with the advancements in PC and console tech, the entire industry was soon dominated by a few AAA companies.

Once the internet became popular, things started to shift. Connectivity opened up new opportunities to collaborate, pool resources and ideas, and distribute software without the need for expensive retail channels. Shareware came about. Online payment gateways. Game production costs started to drop along with the cost of reaching players. Soon indie game makers could build a game, and distribute it for free all around the world. Massive successes like Minecraft burst onto the scene, fueling the dreams of indie devs everywhere! Build a game in your basement and make billions!

Since the early 2000s, the non-industry developers (indies) have grown into a huge community. Indie developers trade ideas, share insights, discuss code, and provide important critique through various forums, chat, and streams. The indie community continues to organize events in a golden era of small teams building and distributing incredible player experiences directly to gamers around the world.

Why do Indie Games fail?

With all of this opportunity and success, it still is far too easy to spend years building a game that no one plays. Spend any time searching Reddit and some of the first results around Indie Gaming projects are pretty gloomy!

Reddit remains an important way for indie game developers to connect to connect and communicate with each other, sharing successes and asking for help navigating failures. Some of the most recurring keywords relevant to indie gaming that show up on Reddit continue to be about “Indie game dev failure”.

So, how does failure happen? There are many reasons, but here are some common ones, according to Reddit:

1. A failure to understand the power of marketing

It can’t be stressed enough that a huge component of game success is dedicated and continuous sales and marketing. You have to start early before development, continue during development, and pile it on after launch. The majority of games simply never reach a large enough audience to make them sustainable.

MeaningfulChoices, an active Redditor on r/gamedev had this to say:

 

“A game failing despite being good is about commercial success or failure.” She further adds that failing as a business can happen for a lot of reasons, the first of which is failing to reach your audience. Your game can be a critical success (players love it), but if you can’t reach an audience, the game won’t sell.

Early on, when access to players was opening up in the app stores and there were fewer games in the market, it might have been easier to reach an audience. But it is a crowded market today with hundreds of games being released each week.

You don’t just need a great game, you need a great game with a great story. Sometimes that story is about the team, or the creative director. Sometimes that story is the process and struggle to bring the game to market. Sometimes the story is the innovation of the game, or the quality of the art or narrative. Spend the time to put together a marketing and outreach strategy that begins the day you write your first line of code.

Try and think at least every day that you work on your game about how you will have 1000 people buy it on day one. A good game with 1000 dedicated fans has the opportunity to be a huge success.

2. Not recognizing the power of game influencers

There is a developing opinion on Reddit that online streaming and video content in gaming is becoming a core way to solve for #1 and reach an audience. YouTube and Twitch (and now TikTok) are powerful channels for indie game marketing.

To take full advantage of these channels, games must support the capture and easy sharing of video content to support the streaming context.

The heading of a post on r/gamedev by an insightful participant read, “To all PC indie devs – If Youtuber’s won’t play your game, you have already failed.” The post said that the influencers in the gaming industry represent the gaming population and must be looked at as your core demographic.

The post further mentioned that the common feature of indie game successes of the past decade was that the YouTube gaming influencers loved playing these games.

Many influencers make it a core part of their programming to try and promote new indie games. Everyone wants to be the person who finds the next major gem. The more your game is optimized to be found, played, and shared in the streaming channels, the higher your chance of success might be.

3. Inadequate QA and Testing

Nothing sets a player off more than bugs in a game. A robust QA/testing routine can make sure that your independent game is problem free.

Quality is always a struggle for Independent game developers, but it can’t be avoided. As pointed out in this Reddit post, test early, test often, and develop a scalable and repeatable process to ensure adequate test coverage. The gains will be substantial.

Summary

The path to a successful Indie Game is paved with failures. A crowded market has created an imperative for strong marketing strategies that embrace streamers and game influencers, and provide a bug-free and engaging play experience.

By providing some of the ways games fail, we hope you can navigate a path to success through the challenging but fulfilling world of Indie Game Development.

At Beamable, we fight for the game makers every day helping them build, deploy, operate, and scale their games into sustainable businesses. If there is anything we can do to help you, please reach out today!

Good luck!

Game jams are great places to find inspiration, and motivation to take an amazing game idea, and rapidly get it into the hands of players. Over the years, game jams have given rise to many interesting game ideas that have become huge successes — games like Surgeon Simulator, Super Hot, and Goat Simulator.

For many, game jams are a competitive environment that pushes game makers to refine their craft, learn quickly by doing, and take their skills to the next level. If that sounds fun to you, then here are some tips!

1. Find a game jam near you

Itch.io and Indie Game Jams are solid places to find upcoming jams.

Another fantastic online resource is the Ludum Dare! It’s massive and pretty competitive. Check out their website: https://ldjam.com/.

Global Game Jam is the biggest in-person jam each year. If you happen to live in a bustling city, chances are, there will be a GGJ hosted somewhere near you. You can search your area by visiting GGJ’s website: https://globalgamejam.org/.

2. Building a game jam team

After you find a jam and decide to participate, you’ll want to think about a team. If you’re alone, you can start by going to the jam’s Discord/Forum and search for a “Looking for a team” tab, or places like that where you can let others know you are looking to join up.

As you connect with various game makers, be prepared to share examples of your work, and to look up the portfolios of your team members as well to ensure that the types of games and style of games are a fit with your aspirations.

We published a whole article about building a game dev team. For a game jam, you will want 1 – 2 game programmers, 1 – 2 artists, and 1 audio person. At least one of those people will be the game director and lead designer who holds the vision of the game in their head and directs all the work to a single result. There aren’t any hard and fast rules, but it seems like the maximum number of members should be 8, and the minimum should be 3. Anything bigger, the harder it is for everyone to stay connected to each other’s work. Any smaller, and you can’t get the work done.

3. How to start a game jam

The first hour of the jam is crucial. Connect with your teammates and discuss the game’s overall plan. If you don’t have one, conduct rapid brainstorming and zero in quickly. You need to jump into production ASAP. Ideally, the idea has been decided upon in advance of the jam. Well-done initial planning will guarantee that important gameplay mechanics won’t need to change halfway through.

Here are several key things you can discuss during the first few hours of the jam:

• What does the team want out of this jam?
• What is the theme of your game and what gameplay mechanic can you derive from it?
• What is everyone’s availability like? How much time can they spend? What deadlines are there? Make this clear from the start – it’s important!
• Constantly ask if the game idea Is doable in the required timeframe.
• Decide on the deadlines for when the game will be code-complete. Leave as much room as possible for playtesting.

4. Communicating during the game jam

The more you communicate as a team, the better. Since game jams are virtual these days, it’s difficult to just walk over to someone’s desk or look over your shoulder and discuss updates and changes. Use tons of real-time chat and video calling so everyone is present and engaged.

Whatever your role is on the team, everyone should be aware of what everyone else is doing and pitch in wherever possible. It’s a team effort. Provide feedback regularly and honestly. Encourage rapid discussion of perspectives. Look to the game director for fast decisions to keep everything moving.

5. Halfway through the game jam

If yours is a two-day jam, you’d want to have a playable prototype ready by the end of day one. Save the last day for adding assets, polishing features, adding in sound effects, and tons of testing and tweaking.

If you are running short on time and don’t have working gameplay, ask your team to scale down the game’s size. Pulling an all-nighter during game jams is often the norm, but never an advisable idea as, by the end, everyone burns out, and mistakes get made.

6. Finishing a game jam strong!

You should have a playable build ready at least 6-8 hours before the submission deadline leaving ample time for final playtesting and bug fixes.

Try submitting your game one hour before the deadline. The website where you’re submitting will likely lag once many people start submitting, so be early!

7. Remember to celebrate!

After submitting your game, regardless of what happens in the judging, you deserve a huge celebration with your team. Not many people have what it takes to make a game. Even fewer have what it takes to build a game in days and ship something that players can play!

The end of the jam is not the time to second guess decisions or point blame. After all, the game jam is supposed to be fun and serve as a way to motivate everyone on the team to continue making and shipping games. Don’t use it as a time to overly critique or blame. Celebrate the end, and in the next jam, you can apply what you learned.

Are you ready to game jam?

Participating in a game jam can be super stressful, but hugely rewarding, and it provides the opportunity to launch your game making career. We hope these tips will help you survive your first jam, or maybe help you with your next one!

It’s also important to know that Beamable can help you make games faster. If you are building a game at a game jam with free to play mechanics, or you want a rapid way to add social features like teams, or commerce to your game project, contact us to learn how we can help accelerate your game jam team!

In the ever-competitive world of indie game development, the marketing phase is as important, if not more so, than the development stage. At Beamable, we have years of experiencing building and publishing AAA IP games. Here are some ideas about how you can get a head start on marketing your title, and building a community of players that will support your game for years to come!

Some of this will be obvious, but it still needs to be said. The goal is to develop your “golden cohort”. These are the folks that will start playing the moment your game is released, and keep playing almost forever! Get your golden cohort, and you will have a thriving game business for years to come.

#1 – Promote your game in indie dev forums

Indie game dev forums can be one of the best places to promote your project, test the waters, get feedback, and find players for your game. Most indie game dev forums have special boards or threads set up specifically for promotion.  You can post screenshots, character stories, game trailers, download links, and so much more.

Give these forums a try!

• IndieDB
• Gamedev.net
• Kongregate
• Dream In Code
• TIGForums
• Buildbox
• Game Dev Stack Exchange
• Unity

Make sure that, when you post, you are open to feedback. Also take the time to view, play, and comment on the posts of others. You can’t just go into a community and take. You have to give back too. Indie dev forums are great for both pre and post-launch, so don’t burn any bridges!

#2 – Posting to Facebook groups

Facebook game dev groups are also a good location. Try some of these:

• Game Developers’ Promotions for Gamers
• Indie Game Marketing
• GameMarketeers
• Indie Games Advertising
• Indie Game Promo
• Promote your Games Android & IOS / & Exchange Review

Be sure to check the rules of whichever group you join. Participate in a curious and authentic way. Do not spam the group with advertisements for your game.

Also, if you have some budget, you can use post Boosting or some small amounts of Facebook advertising. It will require some learning time to understand how advertising works. There are many free resources available, including the Facebook Ads Guide, which offers good insights on getting started with ads on both Facebook and Instagram advertising.

Quick-tip: Try to cross-promote across all of your different channels for a wider reach.

#3 – Instagram is great for visuals

Many indie devs and game studios are moving to Instagram to showcase screenshots, short videos, and other content about their games. The real power of Instagram is increasing your reach by using relevant hashtags for your posts. Look for other creators in the same niche as your game, watch their hashtag usage, and maybe even reach out to collaborate and co-promote each other’s games.

Some hashtags to try out are:

• #indiegamedev
• #instagamedev
• #screenshotsaturday
• #makegames
• #gamedev

The real trick with Instagram is to post regularly. Don’t overcomplicate the content. Post something small every day.

#4 – Get hunted @Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a discovery site where you can share and find new applications, products, and games. Users, fondly known as ‘hunters’, up-vote their favorite apps. If your game receives votes, it might get featured on the homepage as the ‘Product of the Day’. There are no charges for posting on this platform.

There is a whole TOPIC for Games. Make sure you get in there!

However, if you are serious about building buzz around their game, they have a service called SHIP. It is a suite of tools to help spread the word about your game.

#5 – Reddit  / Play My Game

Rightly coined as the “front page of the internet,” Reddit is a huge social forum where people post interesting news, videos, photos, memes, and so much more. The website is divided into millions of subreddits, which are basically topic-based communities. Users can post, comment, vote, and interact on subreddits.

Below is a list of some of the popular subs where you can share your game:

• Play My Game
• Let’s Play
• iOS Gaming
• Indie Gaming
• Android Gaming

Quick Tip: Karma is important in Reddit, so try to build your karma points first by being active in the community. Make sure you don’t appear spammy; the Reddit community can be unforgiving.

#6 – Game review sites

Game review sites are a massive way to increase your game’s visibility to players. Given the number of games coming out each day, and the amount of people pitching game review sites, it’s not easy to get picked up, but if you do, it can be massive.

Before you start pitching to game journalists and review sites, you need to make sure you have a solid press kit ready to go. The press kit should include a video trailer, screen shots, and a textual explanation of your game, the genre, the core game play with instructions.

Some review sites to consider:

• 148Apps
• AppAdvice
• TouchArcade
• Droid Gamers
• Gamezebo
• Pocket Gamer
• AppSpy
• PreApps
• Feed My App
• Android Central

Go out there and become a marketer!

Being a game developer is hard. You have to wear a ton of hats to build, launch, and promote your game. We hope this list of options helps you find some places to let the world know about your exciting game project.

It is never to early to start marketing your game. Join some forums. Get on Facebook. Set up your Instagram account. Jump in the Reddit deep end. Get started, and stay consistent!

At Beamable, we love seeing games launch, and we love seeing them successful. If there is anything we can do to help, please contact us today!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BEAMABLE AND EAST SIDE GAMES JOIN FORCES

East Side Games and Beamable are proud to announce a technology partnership and the launch of ARCHER: DANGER PHONE.August 17, 2020 (Boston, MA) — Beamable announced today that it is working with the hit studio East Side Games to launch and support a new mobile idle title called Archer: Danger Phone. This is the largest game launch yet for Beamable which got its start as a content management solution for games just this year.

“Beamable supports our ambition to provide regular content updates and live events for our players–and at a scale and frequency appropriate for a game based on a hit television show such as Archer,” said Jason Bailey, Co-Founder of East Side Games.

Archer: Danger Phone uses many content management features that Beamable offers including player data management, virtual goods and currency management, live events, offers and merchandising, and an advanced content authoring workflow. Many of these technologies were previously honed within Game of Thrones Ascent and Star Trek Timelines, where Beamable developed authoring systems to keep pace with the aggressive content demands of weekly television shows being watched by huge, demanding audiences.

In addition to Archer, East Side Games and Beamable announced plans to integrate Beamable into other games that are in development on the East Side Games IdleKit platform, a technology for creating world-class idle games.

“We created Beamable to arm game-makers with the tools to develop and maintain world-class games with the reliability and frequency that players expect,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable. “The idle game genre is one that requires consistent updates, live events and a monetization strategy that aligns with new content. We’re excited to work with East Side Games to deliver an evolving, story-driven experience that players will love.”

Archer: Danger Phone is available in the Google Play and iTunes app stores now.

To learn more about how the Beamable team contributes to Archer’s success, check out the blog post, Archer Danger Phone: Powered by Beamable, and the Archer: Danger Phone Beamable team play through on YouTube.

To learn more about Beamable, visit https://beamable.com. To learn more about East Side Games and their other titles, visit https://www.eastsidegames.com/.

About Beamable

Beamable fights for the game makers of the world by helping them turn their game ideas into thriving businesses with a low-code content management solution. Beamable enables anyone who builds, updates and maintains a live game to save time and earn more money. Beamable is based in the Boston area, and led by a team of game-industry and enterprise-technology veterans, and backed by investors including GrandBanks Capital. For more information visit, beamable.com.

About East Side Games

East Side Games is a proudly independent and profitable game studio with a collaborative, creative, and fun culture. Our games fund all our new projects, and everyone who works here has a direct impact on the day-to-day business. East Side Games has released several hit mobile games including Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money, Pot Farm: Grass Roots, Munchie Farm, Idle Paws and a new puzzle game, Dragon Up: Match 2 Hatch. For more information visit, www.eastsidegames.com.

Media Contact

Jon Radoff

(978) 503-2861

jon@beamable.com

We are proud to work with East Side Games on the support and release of Archer: Danger Phone! The game leverages many key capabilities of Beamable.

About Archer: Danger Phone

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE takes place inside the world of the hit animated series from FX: Archer. Across 11 television seasons, the show follows the misadventures of a dysfunctional intelligence agency and the crazy employees that work there. The game picks up during the collapse of the world economy, and the only way to survive will be to lead this crazy team in a cryptocurrency operation that’s just crazy enough to save the world.

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a narrative-driven idle game where you’ll build generator rooms, collect your favorite characters, level them up, and send them on lucrative missions to fund your operations, and take advantage of their get-rich-quick schemes to stay afloat.

Archer on Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a collaboration between Beamable and East Side Games who have worked for the last year to bring the game to life. ESG has focused on the game design, idle systems, and content that they’ve pioneered with their other hits TRAILER PARK BOYS: GREASY MONEY, IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY: THE GANG GOES MOBILE, and THE GOLDBERGS: BACK TO THE 80S.

Beamable provides critical live game features and support in the areas of:

1. Identity
2. Commerce
3. Events
4. Content
5. Managed hosting

Identity with Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE leverages Beamable’s login, authentication, and player analytics. Beamable is set up to offer a standard email and password option, along with Facebook ID or Apple ID.

For the player analytics, all instrumentation runs into an Athena data store where a Tableau connection allows for the creation of dashboards and reporting.

ESG uses Beamable identity and authentication APIs to construct a player web portal so that players can log in with their game account on the website and receive player support.

Commerce with Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE’s key revenue comes from in-app purchases (IAPs) and ad views.

ESG leverages Beamable’s Limited Time Offer (LTO) system to provide a collection of segmented merchandising.

The game uses Loot Rolls in a unique way, leveraging a special Beamable feature where ESG’s game servers can talk to the Beamable Commerce API and insert proprietary game logic on what players receive.

The game also leverages Beamable’s system for purchase limits and pricing schedules so player purchases can scale based on timers and frequency.

Finally, ARCHER: DANGER PHONE makes heavy use of the Beamable Real Money Transaction (RMT) and virtual currency purchase systems to integrate efficiently with the iOS and Android app stores leveraging SKU Mapping to accommodate flexible offer pricing.

Events with Beamable

A big part of East Side Games’ Idle system design is using multiple Limited Time Events (LTEs) each week to drive player engagement. These events use the Beamable Events system so that they can be scheduled, replayed, include multiple phase changes, and accommodate different reward schemes.

Rewards can be provided at different event phases, at defined thresholds or milestones of progression, and by rank at the end of an event or phase.

Finally, the game’s LTEs also leverage sharded/partitioned leaderboards so players participate in smaller groups of 200 which allows for more fierce competition and a shot for more players to achieve the highly coveted rank rewards.

Content with Beamable

One of the most powerful features of Beamable is content management, ensuring that the game teams can create and publish large amounts of changes to the game content without requiring a client update (and laborious app store approval process).

Almost everything in the game is defined as content: Announcements, emails to players, stores, store listings, SKUs, events, rewards, characters, etc.

The Beamable Content flow allows ESG to author the content, and have it be tested and validated in lower environments, and then seamlessly promoted to the production environment.

Fully managed hosting with Beamable

Everything we do runs on Amazon Web Services in a fully containerized environment. All the services mentioned above scale independently and automatically on EC2. When ARCHER: DANGER PHONE runs an event, we can see a 6X increase in player traffic. Beamable has to be able to handle that ramp up in scale, provisioning the correct resources, and scaling them back when the event load and concurrent players drop.

Example of an ARCHER: DANGER PHONE event start in soft launch

Hear from the Beamable Devs!

Go behind the scenes with some of the engineers that helped bring Archer to life on top of Beamable. Join the discuss over on our YouTube channel.

Conclusion

This is a very exciting project for Beamable. ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a huge FX IP with fans all over the world. It is exciting to see such a large game trusting Beamable to deliver advanced live game features at this scale. A special congratulations to the East Side Games team and everything that we’ve accomplished together!

If you think Beamable can help your game project, please contact us to discuss opportunities!

If you’re an indie game developer, chances are you’ve had to walk away from a number of great game ideas due to a lack of access to the talent required to craft your perfect game.

Bringing a game idea to life requires understanding many different creative fields. That is partially why game development is so exciting. While many indie game devs like the challenge of building a game from scratch alone, what if you put a small team together? Who should be on it? What should the roles be?

To that end, we’ve compiled a list of important roles required to build your own indie game dev studio. Depending on your game, you might need some of these roles and not others… but it is a good starting point for anyone thinking about tackling the challenge of putting together an A-team!

First up…

Game developers

 

Your idea won’t come to life without a game developer writing the required lines of code. Game developers will spend most of their time developing the required codebase, tools, features, and elements of the game. They’ll work within a game engine (Like our favorite: Unity!) to build the core game loop and optimize gameplay.

The game developer on your team will also be responsible for beta testing and debugging to ensure that the game is polished and ready to ship.

You might need more than one game developer, depending on the size and scale of your game.

Server Engineers

The Server Engineers will construct the back-end of the game. They will support the live game features that power cross-client communication, server-authoritative features, social interaction between players, and much more. Whether your game is single player or multiplayer will determine the importance and urgency of this role on your team.

This is actually an area where Beamable can help! Our tools takes over much of the heavy lifting and allows you to implement server features with a no-code/low-code option. Check us out!

Quality Assurance / Testers

 

Ideally, everyone on the team is a tester. The entire team will play the game hundreds or thousands of times as development continues. Everyone will be finding and reporting bugs.

That said, the quality of your game will be a serious point of appraisal from your players. Nothing leads to bad reviews faster than serious and preventable bugs in a game. It is important to assign ownership of the game quality to someone who will make it their mission to have the game experience be as bug-free as possible.

Designers

This role is often filled by whoever is running the indie game dev team, but not always. This person will supervise and have the final say in all game design-related decisions that will impact the players, the core-loop, and any meta-game. They are also responsible for maintaining the primary Game Design Document (GDD) for the team to ensure that game design rules, reasons, and decisions are documented so that they can be referred to as the game evolves.

Writers

The narrative of your game and all of the text content communicating to players needs an owner. Although it’s true that anyone can tell a story, it is an art that requires practice and command. It is best to find someone who is a professional writer/copy-writer and can level up your game’s content.

Writers are responsible for coming up with or honing the premise and the storyline of the game. This includes creating characters, their backstory, the settings, plot, and much more. If your game is dialogue-driven, you’d want the writer to make sure the copy is captivating and enhances the overall experience.

We’d go so far as to say that having a skilled writer onboard is probably as important as having a programmer. There’s nothing worse than a game with decent gameplay but typos and unstructured narrative.

Sound Designers

Sound and music are extremely important to enhancing the player experience. Sound designers and Music Composers will create all the sounds effects required for the game.

Sound effects and music are vital as they define the atmosphere of a game. While searching for Sound Designers for your team, make sure to select the ones who have worked on similar projects in the past.

Producers

The role of a producer, like that of the designer, is often taken by someone already filling another role. Whomever they may be, the core responsibility of a producer is to ensure that the team works fast and efficiently by having everything they need to be successful.

Producers set milestones and help the team achieve them in a reasonable amount of time. This might involve coordinating communication through meetings and documentation, holding one-on-one conversations to get people what they need, and generally guiding and caring for the team through the grueling process of game creation.

Game directors

The game director is ultimately responsible for the success of the game, both in player reviews and revenue. What they will handle is broad: hiring, marketing, user acquisition, expenses, fundraising, etc. They maintain the game road map. They handle the budgets. They liaison with publishers as needed. The buck stops with the director.

Community Managers/Support

The community manager is responsible for spreading the word about your game, building a community of players, interacting with people on social media channels, and basically creating a buzz around the game both prior to and after launch.

After launch, they shift to handling support requests and making sure the team has access to the “voice of the players” as content is planned or improvements are scheduled. A game’s success is built on a strong foundation of excited and passionate players. Your community manager will help you build and maintain that.

Go out and build that game team!

Developing a game is an exciting artistic activity, especially because it involves so many creative pursuits. There are lots of talented people out there looking for a team where they can create something amazing. You might be able to put together a group for a game jam, or can hire people with talent off sites like Upwork and Fiverr.

If you’re just starting off, try picking the top 3 skills you’ll need the most depending on your type of game. Narrative heavy will need designers and writers. Multiplayer will require game devs and server engineers. Having a few people working with you will provide bandwidth and perspective!

Of course, there’s always Beamable! – We can simplify the building, testing, and scaling of your game from every aspect (UX, content, social, and more). If you need any help with your next project, reach out to us at https://beamable.com!

Whatever you decide to do, make games, have fun, and good luck!

Beamable’s CEO Jon Radoff gave a lightning talk sponsored by the Boston Indies & Women in Games Boston where he presented the rules for making a living as a small game studio. Check out the replay on Twitch!

Here are the rules:

1. Shift your mindset from making a game to providing an entertainment service — Think about how you will ship new content every day. Every week.
2. Break some rules — The games that stand out aren’t simply clones. Try merging genres!
3. Establish scarcity in your economy — It needs to take a long time and/or lots of money to acquire the best game items.
4. Don’t cap the size of your economy — The biggest design mistake is running out of things to buy or acquire.
5. Implement effective merchandising — Constantly experiment with price points, bundles, new content to buy.
6. Run events! Lots of events! — Tie your events to limited-time merchandising that aligns with the event.
7. Give players compelling and meaningful social interactions — They will talk about your game for decades.
8. Engage with your players — Become known for great community and customer support.
9. Focus your time and effort on making the stuff that stands out — Use platforms like Beamable.com to give you the business foundation for social, events and merchandising.
10. Go for it! — If you want to make a game then make a game! Give it everything you have. You can win because most people in this business aren’t going to put in the effort.

Watch the whole replay for the details!

There’s nothing more exciting than seeing your ideas come to life. Colors, fonts, design, flow–all of it as you had planned. This is precisely what’s offered by the hybrid field of game development.

Developing a game means working on many different creative dimensions, including storytelling, designing, programming, and more. And if you’re an indie developer, chances are you’ll be managing all of those outlets yourself (or with a selected few). As a result, there are a lot of opportunities for error (and therefore, improvement) during the entire game dev journey.

Through this article, let’s look at some common mistakes of indie game developers, and what you can do to avoid these mistakes. We’ve broadly categorized these mistakes of indie game developers to cover pretty much the entire game dev lifecycle (except marketing… that’s for another day!).

UI — Visuals and Audio

One of the key challenges of indie game developers is that you’ll often be working with your own or a friend’s art for the game (unless you’re a solo developer). Very few new developers have the resources to work with professional artists. Here are some things to avoid:

• Using multiple fonts: Set a hard limit for two or three fonts for the entire game. One heavier font for titles, slightly lighter font for subheadings, and one easily digestible font for slightly longer texts. Anything more will become a distraction.
• Having too much text: Too much text can often be overwhelming. Avoid having too much text on one screen. Keep all instructions, explanations, and set-ups only as long as they need to be.
• SHOUTING AT THE READERS: Refrain from using all-caps casually. Use it very sparingly, and only for titles, emphasis or single line instructions, never for longer text.
• Not being consistent: Regardless of whether you’re a visual artist or not, you should strive for consistency in the UI and art style. To put it simply, consistency can provide a professional look. Even a lo-fi art style that imitates scribbling can look intentional and amazing if you keep it consistent in terms of colors, line thickness, fonts, and style.
• Using too many colors: Minimalism in colors is always a conservative choice when rolling your own visuals. Make your colors matter, consider if an element really needs to be a different color or if it might look better with other elements. If you’re not too much into color theory, use a color schemer tool. Color palette generators are your friends. Use them and stick to them.
• Not taking care of the music: Music is extremely important in setting up the context and mood for your game. Prepare a soundtrack that evokes the exact mood you want players to feel when they first start your game. Consider your game’s setting in your selection. For instance, don’t use an epic orchestra theme for something mundane, or refrain from crossing genres by using electronic music for a fantasy game.

UX — Design and Usability

Often, mistakes are made around how a game feels. Many of these will just boil down to “keep your game understandable”, but all of them require reiteration because it is easy to get this wrong.

• Not providing a manual: Regardless of whether you send an unfinished prototype or submission for release, ALWAYS include instructions on how to play the game. Users won’t prefer your game if they don’t know how to play it. If a proper tutorial is out of scope, include a single screen of simple directions/instructions.
• Providing incomplete instructions: This is one of the classic game design mistakes! While creating instructions, make sure you’re not combining questions. “How to play?” and “What to do?” are two different questions that you should separately answer. For instance, in a platformer you would have to tell the player both “use the arrow keys to move and use space to evade enemies” and “reach the right end of the level before the time runs out.” Your instruction screen has to cover both aspects, separately. Give the player a goal and tell them how to reach it.
• Having long setup menus: Ideally you want your user to have as little interaction with the screen (in the form of checking boxes, clicking on “next”), as possible. So, avoid having long setup menus and asking the player to make a ton of decisions before they know what those mean. Customization is fine, but the player should first be given the time to see what it’s even for. A character selection screen is neat, but six separate screens for selecting game mode, control scheme, score system, character class, game length, etc. is too much.
• Not playtesting the game: Organizing playtesting sessions will save you a lot of eventual headache. But the important thing here is that you shouldn’t tell your testers what to do. Let your game speak for itself. Have testers think out loud and make notes where they struggle.
• Confusing understandability and accessibility with a low difficulty: Even the most complex games, if well explained, will be playable by even the casual user. Games can be incredibly difficult but super simple to understand. The point being — you don’t need to simplify the concept of your game for people to participate in it. Instead, you need to explain your games properly, and people will start participating. Accessible games don’t necessarily have to be low difficulty games.

Technical

• Waiting to test the game: Don’t wait too long to test your game; especially if you’re working with new tech. Test the export as soon as you have something playable, and then test it again several days before the deadline.
• Not testing the final build: This shouldn’t have to be said, but when you upload your game somewhere and you have to submit a link to the build, test that build. Test if it downloads, opens and plays properly. Submitting a non-functional game (to any sort of review or pitch, but especially to a contest) can get you disqualified instantly.

Conclusion

Building a game is hard! It is easy to make critical mistakes that can derail all your hard work. We hope that, by sharing some of the common game dev mistakes, you won’t have to learn some of these lessons the hard way!

At Beamable, we’ve lived the world of game development. We’ve created a whole set of tools to make building, testing, and scaling your game UI/UX, content, and social features much easier. If you want to avoid mistakes, contact us for help at https://beamable.com/contact-us!

We are excited to announce that today Daily POP Crosswords from PuzzleNation has launched on Beamable!

They came to us looking for a cross-platform login solution that could replace their reliance on Facebook as the exclusive account management system. They implemented the Beamable login flow that supports player aliases, an email + password flow, Apple sign in support, while maintaining the Facebook flow their players relied on.

They also implemented Beamable analytics to get a fresh look at their player behavior, as well as player stat tracking, purchase tracking & audit, while getting the advantage of the Beamable web portal for player administration.

Download Daily POP Crosswords for Apple or Google today and get your crossword fix!

We look forward to working with them on even more functionality in the coming months!

Learn how Beamable can help you rapidly add features to your game. Contact us today!

At Beamable, we are constantly working with our customers to improve our capabilities. That will be what we are doing for the rest of our lives!

Beamable offers many features for a variety of use-cases, but there will always be room for game-specific player state which is client-authoritative. Cloud Saves fills that need, by offering a streamlined interface to write complex objects (JSON, binary, or whatever else within a 5MB limit per file), and back them up to the Beamable cloud for that player.

This is great if you want the game client to be the authority on writing the data, but also want that data to be synced across all the player’s devices. Cloud Saving also allows the developer to write public data which other players can view. This is a great vector for player generated content, which is viewable and shareable across the player community.

Check out Cloud Saves and our other features. And let us know what you think!

Photo by Alex Machado on Unsplash

We’ve discovered that many of our customers value the ability to have their games continue to function without internet connectivity. As such, we’ve introduced Offline Mode in Beamable!

This is a new requirement that we’re baking into all of our feature development. Specifically, every Beamable feature is now offline-adaptive. User Interfaces will visually indicate the loss of internet connectivity, and which functionality is unavailable. A read-cache is maintained wherever possible so that players can still interact with Beamable features, while knowing that the data may be outdated until they restore connectivity.

This is just one more way we are using a UI-first approach to solve problems for game makers that they don’t even think about. It comes built right in to Beamable.

View our features page to learn about all the features Beamable offers to help make games faster!

Or contact us for a demo!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

MassDiGi is expanding their program to focus on the importance and impact of designing for LiveOps. Beamable will provide their Unity SDK to game teams in the program to rapidly build and experiment with social, commerce, and content features.

June 9, 2020 (Boston, MA) — Beamable announced today that it is working with the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI) to provide tools and services to expand the education of LiveOps for participants in the 2020 Summer Innovation Program and beyond. Students at MassDiGI will get full access to all the capabilities of Beamable as well as mentoring from senior game developers.

For years, Beamable’s tech has been at the center of many award winning mobile games like Game of Thrones Ascent and Star Trek Timelines, which have generated over $150 million in lifetime revenue. The lessons and design patterns learned creating those titles is now being offered through Beamable to game studios, individual game developers, and students.

“We want to arm the next generation of creators to build successful live game businesses,” said Beamable’s CEO Jon Radoff. “Building an engaging and fun game is hard enough, and then you have to spend huge amounts of time and effort building the social, commerce, and LiveOps content technology to make your game commercially successful. The ability to do that has been out of reach of many educational programs. With Beamable, we can provide students with drag-and-drop no-code tools to work with these LiveOps concepts. We are really excited to be a part of expanding what’s possible for educational programs.”

Monty Sharma, the Managing Director of MassDiGI conveyed his excitement. “Every year, we have 25 extremely talented game creators from all over the country join the MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program. We work hard to give them the fundamentals of game design and development, but also want to expose them to the dynamics of working on a cross-discipline game teams, and deeply understand the business of games as well. Beamable will let us work in real time with key LiveOps concepts that will give these students a chance to build a real business around their games.”

To learn more about MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program, visit https://www.massdigi.org/. For more information about Beamable and their mission to help game creators build a business around their game, visit https://beamable.com

About MassDiGI

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is the statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the Commonwealth’s games ecosystem. For more information, please visit www.massdigi.org.

About Beamable

Beamable fights for the game makers of the world by helping them turn their game ideas into sustainable, thriving businesses. Based on technology designed at Disruptor Beam that was previously used to deliver experiences to 20 million people through games such as Star Trek Timelines and Game of Thrones Ascent, Beamable is now a no-code solution that enabled Unity game-makers to do the same. Beamable is based in the Boston area, and led by a team of game-industry and enterprise-technology veterans, and backed by investors including GrandBanks Capital. For more information visit, beamable.com.

Media Contact

Jon Radoff

(978) 503-2861

jon@beamable.com

Joseph Kim from Deconstructor of Fun talked to our CEO, Jon Radoff, about the evolution of the market for Live Ops technologies and what the future holds. You can read the full article on Medium.

“Our vision is for live ops to become accessible to every game-maker, even the indie working solo on their dream, so that everyone willing to put in the hard work of creating a great game can aspire to earn a living at it. This requires a major paradigm shift towards making live ops a no-code/low-code service stack, just as we’ve seen in other categories you’ve identified such as ad monetization and data analysis. Once we get there, we’ll have opened up the market to a vastly expanded number of creators. Live ops will be the thing that levels the playing field, enabling highly creative people and studios to compete with incumbents that have survived to this point due to access to large pools of capital and aging homegrown technologies.”

Read the full interview

At Beamable, we’re driven by a passion to help more people make a living in the game industry. To that end, our CEO Jon Radoff shared 8 tips on how to crush it at your interviews or wow your future business partners during a talk with Gamerjibe.

Five Things Everyone Must Do

Understand that game-making is an obsession – This isn’t a 9-5 job, and few who seek a job in the industry will end up with a long-term career within it. You’re competing against a large number of people who want to work in games more than anything they can imagine. Be prepared for it and be willing to put in the work.

Make Games – Stop dreaming of being a designer or a game programmer. Game-making is a craft, which means you need to make lots of games. Your failures will teach you huge amounts; make sure you have a portfolio site on the Web that lets interviewers and screeners see the games you’ve made (with a clear focus on what YOU did on the games, and what you learned) along with ways to download and play.

Play Relevant Games – Interviewers don’t care that you spends hours a day playing Fortnite unless they’re making a Battle Royale game. Make sure you play the games that compete with the games you’ve made, and always play the games of the company you’re interviewing with–and not just through the tutorial. Play long enough to gain a real understanding of their design decisions. For bonus points that will likely make the difference in getting a job or not, make sure you play their competitors’ games as well.

Understand the business, economics and metrics – The game industry is a hard industry to work in, and players are demanding. Understand how both free-to-play and premium games are marketed, distributed and monetized. Have a working knowledge of key concepts like ARPDAU, LTV, retention metrics, etc. For premium games, understand the available channels, how to gain awareness, market and build networks of influential players. Better yet, build your own game and get just 100 or 1,000 people to play it, and then measure the metrics just like you would in a larger commercial game. Interviewers will be impressed that you can talk numbers and relate it back to the business.

Understand iterative development – Ideas are a dime a dozen in this industry. Every person who works in the industry has 1,000+ ideas and every player thinks all of their ideas makes them into a game designer. Execution is what matters: turning your ideas into something real, exposing the ideas to players, testing, comparing them against competing implementations and prioritizing where to invest time.

Three More Guidelines for Specific Careers

Coders: make sure you’re full-stack – Learn everything up and down the stack of game development. By training in dynamic web development within an MVC framework, you’ll learn a lot about the backend architecture used by many games. Learn network programming as well, and then learn front-end development. Training C# and C++ and learn the relative advantages of Unity and Unreal. Have lots of examples to point to. Understand graphics systems and how they work, and try your hand at shader programming. Challenge yourself to not only be a great game programmer, but an exceptional and well-rounded computer scientist.

Artists: get technical – Focus on in-engine art, because your pretty Maya and 3DS Max models probably won’t work in the engine. There are too many artists on the market that only know how to do one part of the art pipeline, so learn as many parts as possible: lighting systems, shader graphs, shader programming, hardware, modeling, textures, animation, environments, visual storytelling. Pick up some programming skills. Have a strong foundation in art using traditional media such as painting and illustration. All of this is a tall order, and some of it you won’t get to until you’re on the job; but the more you can cover, the more likely you’ll be to land an art job Today’s artists are increasingly technical and competing against amazingly talented people from all over the world.

Designers: model with business goals in mind – Everyone should know how games relate to business metrics and the market; but this is an order of magnitude more important for designers, who are increasingly responsible not only for making a game fun but making it financially and commercially viable. Learn as many technical skills as you can, especially spreadsheet wizardry, database querying, and statistics. Being able to go deep on either UI/UX design and/or monetization design will radically expand your potential opportunities.

Summary

Whether you’re an artist, coder, designer or another of the important roles in a game development team, learn everything you can about what everyone else does. You need to be able think about the whole system, not just your part in it. The game industry is a tough: but it rewards passion, curiosity, and resilience.

Today, it was exciting to have Amazon Web Services Game Tech team mention Beamable on their social media accounts as a solution for Unity game makers! We’ve been working with AWS for a long time! When you build on Beamable, you’ll take advantage of all this knowledge through our included managed hosting of all your live game features.

You can see the mentions of Beamable on the AWS Game Tech Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts!

Here is a little history:

Back in 2013, Beamable started working with AWS to build and scale AAA mobile games. After a migration off an early cloud provider, the team immediately noticed a huge difference in reliability and ease of use. RDS was a particular life-saver eliminating database performance issues and solving scalability challenges that plagued our early live games.

The analogy we use internally is, with AWS, we went from a deployment of “pets” (unique servers we had to individually manage) to a deployment of “cattle” — with virtually all our servers horizontally scalable, and automatically scaling thanks to AWS Auto-scaling rules.

We’ve turned our infrastructure into code using CloudFormation, allowing us to deploy new game environments and application stacks within minutes, and fully containerizing our application server stack with Elastic Container Service (ECS).

All told, Beamable has scaled to millions of daily active players performing rich functionality, and launched those games at scale without issue thanks to a combination of auto-scaling, cloud formation, container orchestration, and the AWS Storage technology underpinning Aurora (RDS).

So far, we’ve adopted a broad variety of AWS services that keep Beamable humming while maximizing cost efficiency. When you work with Beamable you are getting the experience to fearlessly run your live game on the top AWS technologies that include: EC2, ECS, CloudWatch, RDS, DynamoDB, Amazon MQ, Redshift, Athena, SNS, SQS, CloudFormation, S3, Glacier, Lambda, Code Deploy, VPC, SageMaker, CloudFront, ElastiCache, Route53, and many others.

We are excited to continue our partnership with Amazon as a platform for game creators. Learn more by contacting us about how Beamable can help you build and scale your live game.

(image by Taylor Vick on Unsplash)

Hey there!

My name is Justin LeFebvre and I’m a Senior Platform Engineer here at Beamable. My job is to primarily design, implement and maintain many of the backend services our product will be providing to enthusiastic game makers like yourself.

Today, I would like to talk with you about how I went about designing our leaderboard ranked scoring algorithm.

Why should you care about leaderboard design?

Imagine you are trying to create the world’s best competitive multiplayer mobile game. As an avid gamer, you are undoubtedly familiar with the many excellent examples we have today. Games such as, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Vainglory all have one thing in common. Very specifically, all of these games drive player engagement through the use of competitive leaderboards which assign players a rating relative to their opponents which changes over time. These ratings can also be used to drive effective and fair matchmaking, thus allowing your players to play against opponents of similar skill. Given that, you realize that your game will definitely need this feature but this begs the question, how would you go about writing this sort of thing? Fortunately for you, we at Beamable have already put in the legwork and would like to show you what we do.

A generalized leaderboard algorithm for you!

Some of the questions we will answer today are:

1. If given a set of players of varying skill levels, is it possible to assign each of them a numerical score which will reflect their overall skill relative to each other?
2. Is it possible to generalize the algorithm to determine that score to games of greater than 2 opposing sides?

I’m pretty happy to report that, through a bit of research and experimentation, I have come up with something that should work pretty well for most game makers out-of-the-box with some knobs to turn to tailor the solution to your specific game.

Typical options for tracking player ratings

Traditionally, when a game maker wants to implement a ranking system for his/her players, he/she typically has 3 options available.

Option 1: Implement Microsoft’s Trueskill(tm) algorithm or a variant.

Option 2: Implement the Elo algorithm or a variant.

Option 3: Write a custom algorithm.

While each option has its merits, for our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to go with a slight variant on Option 2 which accounts for games of greater than 2 opposing factions.

Writing the leaderboard algorithm

So, given that we’re providing an implementation of Elo’s algorithm, what is it? The crux of the math around how Elo actually works revolves around the following calculation provided here with little context!

(As an aside, this is actually a Python translation of the code we run in production since we use Scala as our production language for most of our services)

So what does this little Python function do for us? Essentially, this function is a direct translation of the expected score logistic function for the player represented by rating1 given the rating of the player he/she is playing against. Likewise, we should see the expected rating of the other player to be the inverse of the first player’s expected rating.

This score is crucial for scaling the amount of points granted to the winning player as well as the amount of points we should remove from the losing player. For example, if a higher rated player beats a lower rated one, we would expect that the players’ ratings relative to each other are “about correct” so the change to each should be minimal. However, if the lower rated player wins, we definitely want to bump that player’s rating higher and more drastically to reflect the fact that this player may actually be better at the game than the one with the current higher rating. Fortunately, this is exactly what our score function gets us.

Now that we have the player’s expected score based on the other player’s rating, what can we do with it? In order to calculate the necessary change to each player’s score, we use the following equation where `base` is configurable and `actual_score` will be 1.0 for wins and 0.0 for losses. For our test cases later on, we’ll assume a base of 30.

Now here’s the fun part. Elo, on its own, is an excellent way of determining player ratings for 1 v 1 matches but what do we do when we have a game that is a 4 or more person free-for-all? What’s even more interesting is that, due the mechanics of a free-for-all game, it likely means that at the time you want to calculate the rating for a particular player, the game itself may not actually be over yet. Therefore, it isn’t possible or desirable to get the full results of the match for all players at the time you wish to calculate the new ratings. More specifically, while calculating the score for each player, the results of players who did worse than the current player are known but anyone who did better will specifically not be known until the game is fully over.

Given that level of uncertainty, we will be updating our leaderboards with the following heuristic. For each player in the match, we will be calculating a delta against the player in the “unknown” set of rankings (players who beat us) with the minimum rating. Likewise, for balance, we will be calculating a delta against the player in the “known” set rankings (players we beat) with the maximum rating. This allows us to come up with a way to approximate the delta change to the ratings in a way that behaves similarly to if each player played 2 matches instead of 1.

Here’s the code for that:

Ensuring the accuracy of the leaderboard algorithm

Now that we have this fancy function to calculate the Elo delta for players, and a general method for updating player ratings, how can we go about testing that the algorithm is working as expected? For that, I applied a very similar strategy to this post by Tom Kerrigan. The idea is that you generate a list of “true” ratings for players to simulate having a number of players at different skill levels. The purpose of these ratings is to use them as a seed to generate a simulated score with some amount of “reasonable” deviation.

I then created a list of “base” ratings which I default to the midpoint of the “true” ratings as the initial condition to run the simulation. This allows me to test if the algorithm’s updates to the ratings are increasing the predictive ability of the ratings to determine the outcome of any individual match. I, then, enumerate the list of 4 player combinations of players to run game simulations. The theory is, if I can use the “true” ratings as a reasonable predictor for the outcome of the games, then after some N simulations, the updated ratings should be similarly predictive.

Here’s that code.

What’s interesting here is that if I run the code with a simulation size of 1 we end up with something around a 1% to 5% deficit in the ability to predict the outcome of any particular game.

However, when running the simulation 10 times we see that the deficit in predictive ability is all but reclaimed with the results being < .5% and often 0.

Now you may be asking yourself, but wait! Why are the calculated ratings for the lower players so much lower than their “true” ratings. The reason for that is mostly because the “true” ratings are merely just used to seed the scores being generated per game simulation. In this particular run, the “1100” ranked player actually had a string of rough luck and based on the way we’re generating the scores ends up doing more poorly in general. That said, the only thing we really care about, however, is whether or not a player who is generally “worse” is ranked lower than a player who is generally “better” and as you can see, this algorithm achieves that.

Last thing to note, if the deviation of the scores is greater, e.g. +-300 rather than +-200, we can observe that the scores are generally closer to where we’d expect them to be but the predictive ability is less accurate compared to the “true” ratings because the results of each individual match are more varied for the 2nd and 3rd spots.

I appreciate you making it this far and hope that you learned something. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback!

In the next installment, we’ll be talking about how you can use Beamable to implement this in your own games!

Additional resources

Games

• https://clashofclans.com/
• https://clashroyale.com/
• https://www.vainglorygame.com/

Scoring Algorithms

• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-ranking-system/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fprojects%2Ftrueskill
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
• http://www.tckerrigan.com/Misc/Multiplayer_Elo/

There is a ton of content on YouTube to increase your game making skills when it comes to Unity3d. The team at Beamable has put together this short list of five (5) great channels you can investigate to learn all sorts of things about game development. These aren’t ranked in any specific order so give them all a look!

1. Brackeys

The whole purpose of the channel is to learn how to make video games! A tutorial is uploaded every Sunday. Check it out

2. Jonas Tyroller

A collection of powerfully simple videos to get you started! Check it out

3. All Things Game Dev

This channel provides a tour of some of the best Unity Asset store packs you can get to jump start your game dev process. Check it out

4. Sebastian Lague

Records a variety of programming challenges and tutorials to help you broaden your game dev horizons. Check it out

5. Makin’ Stuff Look Good

 

A more advanced look at shaders and how to get the most out of your game. Check it out

BONUS: The GDC Channel

You should be following the Game Developers Conference channel by default because there is such a large collection of amazing talks. Check it out

There you have it! If you have suggestions for other channels, let us know!

Social media photo by Leon Bublitz on Unsplash

Beamable is a new business built upon Disruptor Beam technology that will ease the enabling of sophisticated commerce and social features for millions of game-makers around the world.

FRAMINGHAM, MA – April 21, 2020 – One of the greatest challenges faced by game-makers is balancing precious resources: it is the tension between creating what they and their players love, and the need to include complex business functionality. Launching today, Beamable is a new enterprise that enables game-makers to turn their products into scalable, sustainable businesses by incorporating best-of-class commerce and social functionality.

“Our team has a background creating games for millions of people that are known for their deep social ties and strong unit economics,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable. “Our passion is helping the game-making community benefit from what we’ve learned and built.”

Beamable consists of two main components:

1. A cloud-based service architecture (SaaS) that enables in-game storefronts, merchandising, content management, and rich social interactions for players—built to scale to as large a population of players as needed.
2. A front-end technology that bridges the gap between the backend services, the Unity 3D editor environment, and the live game experience—to make it easier to create, maintain and deliver sustainable games.

“Other products we’ve investigated are just middleware,” said Markus Weichselbaum, CEO of Tap Slots. “Beamable is fully-integrated with Unity, including user interfaces that work in both the Unity 3D editor and game clients. This saves us massive amounts of time we’d otherwise spend in the guts of the technology and rediscovering best practices, instead of doing what we need to do: designing great games.”

According to market research firm Newzoo, the game industry will approach $200 billion in revenue by 2022. Although games continue to thrive amidst the global crisis of 2020, game studios frequently struggle to meet the demands of their players while also investing in business systems that can support their growth. “Investors are currently looking for bright spots in a troubled economy,” said Tim Wright, general partner at GrandBanks Capital. “Games are going to do well no matter what the conditions, but the process of developing them has always suffered from costly reinvention. We see parallels between what Beamable has set out to accomplish in gaming, and what Shopify has done to transform e-commerce.”

Beamable is currently available via an “Early Access” program, and open to games that are live, or plan to launch in the next 12 months. Sign up at beamable.com.

Disruptor Beam had a long history turning the world’s greatest entertainment brands into hugely successful games loved by highly connected customers. Since 2011, we have published three critically acclaimed titles — GAME OF THRONES ASCENT, STAR TREK TIMELINES, and THE WALKING DEAD: MARCH TO WAR. During that journey, we learned what works and doesn’t work in game development.

We realized we could have a larger impact helping game makers than making our own games if we brought this tech out into the world. To that end, we are building Beamable to help game makers ship faster, and earn a living with their games.

If you are a game maker working in Unity, learn how the Beamable SDK can accelerate your game development and commercial success!

We are excited to announce another important technology partnership at Beamble: PubNub!

We’ve been working with them for a long time and know the technology inside and out after launching, Star Trek Timelines and The Walking Dead: March to War at full scale with PubNub.

Over the years we helped them create the Unity SDK for PubNub and continue to iterate with them closely on critical infrastructure and live operations components that power Beamable’s server-to-client messaging and chat functionality.

It’s been a great relationship with them actively engaged in our success by making regular suggestions on cost-efficiency optimizations. We are excited to continue partnering with them as Beamable grows!

In case you missed it, we also did a joint webinar with them on How Community Features Drive Player Engagement. Check it out!

Zelgor Announces Development of New Game: Noobs in Space; Partnership With Disruptor Beam

BOSTON, MA, Feb. 19, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — via NEWMEDIAWIRE — Zelgor Inc announced today the expansion of the Noobs Universe with their newest game in development: Noobs in Space. A hyper-casual game, Noobs in Space will be the world’s first introduction to the Noobs, a race of fun-loving, ambitious, and rambunctious aliens exploring the Universe in search of a new place to live. Players receive orders directly from their genius leader, Major Noob, as they fly around space exploring new planets and collecting new Noobs for their squad. In order to bring Noobs in Space to life, Zelgor Inc is partnering with Disruptor Beam. Based in Framingham, MA, Disruptor Beam is best known for working with major media franchises such as Game of Thrones and Star Trek, in order to make highly successful games. The Noobs will utilize the company’s Disruptor Engine, a platform consisting of UI tools, services, and best practices that will enable the Noobs to compete in an increasingly demanding and evolving Universe. Disruptor Engine will enable the Noobs to speed up production in a quality fashion that scales efficiently.

“We are thrilled to be working with Disruptor Beam, which has built an abundance of institutional knowledge around the development and live operations of free-to-play games,” said John Fanning, CEO of Zelgor Inc. “This is a major step forward for us, and access to Disruptor Engine will enable the Noobs to expand their operations across the Universe.”

“Zelgor is building an exciting portfolio of games, and we are delighted to be working with them on the launch of their latest mobile offering, Noobs in Space,” said Trapper Markelz Chief Product Officer of Disruptor Beam. “Together we will propel Zelgor to the next level.”

About Zelgor Zelgor is building mobile games that enable Noobs to control the Universe! Whether it’s utilizing cutting edge location technology, or building simple and sleek hyper-casual games, Zelgor aims to build an entire galaxy of interconnected games and content. To learn more about Zelgor, visit www.zelgor.com