Today, the global gaming industry has grown exponentially since its inception, with high demand for both Android and iOS games. You probably have heard, seen, or even played games such as Angry Birds, FIFA, Clash of Clans, or Pokémon Go, to mention but a few. These popular games inspired many people to develop an interest in the mobile application industry and create their applications.
However, when outsourcing mobile game development services, not everything is as simple as it looks. There are many challenges associated with any form of IT outsourcing, especially with mobile gaming development. This post highlights some Mobile UX design challenges and issues. Understanding the lessonsandchallengeshere is essential for optimum gaming app development.
Overabundance of Ideas
Having too many ideas for your mobile game application may sound great, but it isnât. Incorporating multiple features in your app is usually irrelevant and can undermine the user experience. Additionally, this raises the cost of mobile game development (feature creep).
The best way to deal with feature creep is the addition of features as the app development progresses. This approach allows your developers to center their focus on vital aspects of the gaming app. Besides, user feedback will enable developers to make appropriate changes to the app.
Budget and Time Limitations
The mobile gaming application is greatly affected by time and budget. Your developer will produce low-quality applications when underpaid or allocated limited time. Unfortunately, most businesses tend to undervalue the designerâs input because they donât know what it takes to work on even the tiniest element of an app. Excellent designs have everything well-linked, and each element serves a unique purpose.
Understanding the Audience
Another significant challenge in mobile UX design is knowing the type of audience the game should be intended for. Some games will be suitable for specific audiences than others. Likewise, some gaming apps may attract attention from huge audiences, while others may be appealing to a particular gamers demographic. So, how do you identify the right gaming audience for your mobile games? Here is how:
- Create Personas these are potential gamers who will likely download and play your gaming application.
- Stats such as location, gender, age, occupation, etc. can help create personas. Use tools such as Google Trends and Quantcast to find this crucial information.
- Consider online surveys to collect essential data concerning your target audience. An excellent tool for this is SurveyMonkey to get broader access to the gaming databases.
These three methods can assist you in running a market analysis and identifying your target gaming audience.
Designing Cross-Platform Applications
Your gaming application must run on multiple devices, platforms, and operating systems. Most gamers prefer playing their favorite games on their smartphones, online, or their PCs and tablets. The main challenge here is syncing various features such as scores, game progress, game levels, and purchasing options across all available devices. The complexity is even more heightened with games such as scrabble, etc.
Your developer must understand how to create responsive mobile apps that are cross-platform. Many different design tools can assist in creating cross-platform gaming apps, including Whoop and PhoneGap.
Intellectual Right and Contracts
Contracts concerns turn out to be a game developers worst nightmare. There will always be several programmers involved in developing the game. Hence, it becomes challenging to deal with intellectual rights, monetization, and ownership of the mobile game.
The developer, therefore, must take ownership of all the rights of the gaming application to prevent any disputes. This way, there will be constant app monetization, and this allows for continuous revenue generation.
Operating System Fragmentation
Mobile gaming development is experiencing many changes in the design ecosystem. Newer operating systems and improved versions are continually being released. But the challenge is that with every OS release, there is a large section of gamers still using the older OS versions. Also, every operating system comes with its SDK and regulations.
Hence, this leaves developers stuck between designing games for each OS or one that works with all the operating systems. Your gaming application must support different operating systems. Today, there are various tools, such as Unity, that can assist in streamlining the program to work on multiple operating systems. Besides, this software can reduce the gaming app development time by 75%.
Access to Experienced developers
Another significant challenge when outsourcing mobile gaming developers is finding an experienced development team. For instance, when designing Android-based applications, you require an experienced team of Android coders and programmers. Additionally, youâll require an all-round designer to ensure the application is aesthetically defined. In this regard, you may need a marketing expert to market your gaming application as well.
Other concerns include optimizing the application on Google. You need to pay attention to aspects related to App Indexing, but if you have no clue about this, it can be a challenge too. Googleâs in-app purchases and ads should be defined within your gaming application. All these are challenges you must address, and having access to experienced developers is crucial to solving these issues.
Gaming App Maintenance
After app development is complete, you must ensure regular maintenance, which is not an easy task. Maintenance involves many things, such as new version releases, bug fixes, and upgrades, among others. Additionally, you must ensure regular content and database upgrades. All these will mean investing in more time and money.
The best recommendation for this is adopting end-user development. You can decide to release a smaller and lighter version of your game and allow it to grow depending on user adoption and feedback. Always keep it bug-free, while improving the app regularly over time. This way, you can spend less time and money on your gaming application.
Conclusion
Outsourcing a reliable mobile gaming developer can be challenging at times. As discussed above, there is a myriad of challenges you have to deal with in this process. Luckily, to every problem, there is a solution to allow you to design and develop your mobile gaming application successfully.