Design tips for Free to Play Mobile Games

How to keep players returning to your freemium or ad supported game

What Will I Learn?

Why players play games, and how to satisfy their unique needs
Design a game session with a return trigger
What should you sell with IAP?
Get players to buy that first In App Purchase
Build core game loops, with sessioning, and return triggers
Understand premium currency and economics in F2P games
Understand game mechanics and why you need to think about them

Requirements
Interest in designing free to play (f2p) games for mobile game platforms
You should understand how free to play mobile games work on iOS and Android
You should have played some F2P mobile games
Want to understand Game Mechanics and why they work

Description
This course is designed for developers or game designers working on mobile games. You might be an indie game developer, or part of a professional AAA game team. All that you need is a desire to make your game better, and understand what makes your players return to the game over and over.

We are not going to go into any specific technology or game programming. This is a design course!

We will cover the following topics:

Player Types and what they want
Reward Systems
Core Game Loop, Wait Loop and Grind Loop
How to Keep Players Returning
Triggers - Return, Social, Events
Example Games with deconstructions on why they work (or don't!)
Premium currency
What should you sell using IAP?
How to earn that first purchase from the player
What Game Mechanics work for player retention?
Mobile Game Deconstructions:

Scale
BBTAN
and more depending upon student feedback

Who is the target audience?
Indie Game developers
Anyone who wants to know how freemium games work
Students building their first game
Hobyists wanting to build engaging free to play games