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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I’m interested in learning some of the techniques that make gaming more enticing. I’ve got some educational apps for iOS that I would like to make more engaging. I’ve noticed that after 5-7 days retention really trails off. Do people buy into badges, leveling up, daily streaks, etc?

Two of my apps:

Hundred Words: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237

Language Pairs: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language-pairs/id1438817614?...

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Most general advice I can give is to make sure your games have engaging core loops at three different temporal scales: moment to moment, minute to minute, and session to session.

Moment to moment is the really gamefeel stuff like how it feels good to make a line in Tetris or step on a goomba in Mario. While the player is playing your game they should constantly be experiencing these moments.

Minute to minute focuses on how engaging your game is within a session. If it's a level-based game does it have that "just one more round" feeling?

Session to session is all about having the player set something up before they stop playing, so that they look forward to the next time they can play. The most famous example is the plow-plant-harvest loop that made Zynga a billionaire. You came back to the game cuz you wanted to harvest all those crops for the rewards. But if you think about what the session to session is in Pokemon Go, the curiosity of what's in your immediate area, you can see that there's a lot of design space here.

5-7 days retention sounds like at least one of these loops is missing or broken. Don't be discouraged, getting all these things to overlap is hard.

Caveat: I know nothing about gamification. This is the observation of an uncle.

I agree with the commentators saying that FortNite is the newest, fastest growing social network. I spent a year watching my nephews play FortNite and Roblox. Their communication (voice & chat) with their friends is a HUGE factor. These MMORPGs are their social world.

Transposing with my own childhood, it'd be like if my friends and I had every Star Wars and GI Joe and Lego set AND awesome walkie talkies. Basically, crack for kids.

(FWIW, I spent much of the year dragging my nephews and their friends to museums, galleries, hiking, swimming, etc. They all pretended to hate it, but would nonetheless still enjoy themselves.)

> Do people buy into badges, leveling up, daily streaks, etc?

No (and yes). Some people who thrive off of tangible validation may, but you will not drive long-term engagement or real enjoyment from it. Badges/levels/streaks and other "meta-game" only add value to a strong game itself, and is just a small part of the more holistic art that is game design. Same with vibrant animations, cool sound effects, pretty particle effects. Another small part.

It's better than nothing, to be fair, but if you really want to make your apps enticing in the way games are, you should play and get into a few games, and then study the vast field of game design as you see fit - presenting a challenge with demonstrable mastery, balancing multiple viable strategies, social components, enjoyable mechanics, challenge pacing, providing flow state, etc.

Otherwise you will just end up with an app with badges, and we kind of have enough of those.

There are a lot of articles on gamasutra (also GDC videos on youtube) on different aspects of this, but the quality and exact applicability is going to vary a lot, here's a couple of short ones that call back to psychology 101 that may be useful. For me personally the core gameplay/learning experience would need to be interesting/useful for the the other 'gamification' features you are thinking about adding would contribute to my motivation, you might be thinking about cause and effect backwards here. I remember learning to type when I was a child because the game that taught it was so fun (standards were low back then) not because I really wanted to learn to type.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JosephKim/20140323/213728/Th...

https://gamasutra.com/blogs/SitaVriend/20170804/303075/Intri...

My son explained it to me (11 year old) - Basically if you are "default" you suck. I have 20+ gamedev experience, and I didn't know what it means. Basically if you have the "default" skins you suck. You need to get shiny new outfit, that would cost some v-bucks.

Wouldn't being constantly killed by the same default guy hurt more? If I would be a pro gamer I would do just that, just to troll them.

People are social creatures, and have a strong innate desire to stand out and express themselves. If a game successfully creates a social atmosphere, selling cosmetic items can be a lucrative business.

It's essentially the digital version of the fashion industry, which most people seem to viscerally understand-- aesthetics are the primary motivator for most people's clothing choices, and they are willing to pay a significant premium for some items on this basis.

There's a whole genre of Fortnite pros trolling as defaults on Youtube.

Feels like fortnite is the new addidas and Nike...

Exactly my thoughts. Growing up in Bulgaria in the 90s - that was the thing. I was (and still am) into heavy metal so did not care a bit, but could still "feel" the pressure...

I have the opposite experience (in LoL which I played for too long some time ago). If you encountered an enemy in default you knew you were in for a beating. Most probably a smurf (high level player on a fresh low level account).

Most of the really good players I knew couldn't care less about skins. People that did suck bought skins to feel better about themselves ("yeah, you won, but I have a $20 Udyr skin, noob!") Except one guy which was pretty good but had a gambling problem and liked the random aspect of buying chests.

What you describe is probably the social dynamics in your son's group of friends, which are probably kids and mostly suck, which makes buying skins the social signaling of their worth, for lack of a better metric.

Not related to games, but the stuff in this book is pretty informative, albeit disturbing. I listened to the audio book a couple years ago.

https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/

Very cool that you made these apps. I’ve wanted to make some educational apps for quite some time, but have been too lazy / indecisive about the whole thing.

If you don’t mind sharing, how are the apps doing? Are you seeing consistent downloads? How about pricing? I noticed both are free—are you planning to monetize at all?

You don’t have to answer anything you’re not comfortable with. This is just a space I’m interested in, and I wanted to see how your experience has been.

There are over 2 million apps in the store so it’s hard to get noticed.

Yeah that’s what I was thinking—that the store is so over saturated right now that it would be hard to make your app visible.

Not the person that created this thread, but I've had a bunch of music education apps in the App store for a couple of years. I get a decent amount of downloads, enough to make $60-$120 a month. I sell them outright for $3.99 (Canadian). I actually found I increased sales when I increased the price, I used to sell them for $2.99. I haven't checked recently, but there weren't many high quality music games there, mostly basic looking drills that weren't themed. I'm sure I could increase my sales if I was savvy at marketing and had the resources to commit to it.

Thanks for the response. That’s pretty cool to hear. So it sounds like you get anywhere from 15-30 downloads per month. That’s not bad for money earned while you sleep.

I’m thinking of getting into the space to see how I can do. My eventual goal is to earn $1000 / month without too much maintenance / time beyond the initial development.

It's really great for that to be honest: I don't have to worry about the games once I upload them (unless I decide to update them or make changes). I also run a site with music games for teachers that's subscription based and that takes up more mental bandwidth from day to day than the apps since I'm always trying to improve it to help keep customers subscribed. If you head into the App store with modest expectations, I think it can become a decent source of income. I talk to relatives and friends and they seem to think that having an app in the store means you'll get millions of downloads a month, but I think that skewed perception is created by the focus on the really big apps in the store (that seem to get a lot of help directly from Apple in how prominently they're placed in the store).

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