I am exhausted!

Why am I exhausted?  Because as it turns out, the creative process is much harder to define than it sounds. I’ve produced roughly 120 games and around 300 episodes of TV (not to mention two children), so I jumped at the opportunity to blog about being creative.  “No sweat, I’ll whip this right out” is what I thought… but as I sit down to explain how awesomely adept our studio is at the creative process, everything else seems more important.  As a creative executive at a games studio, coming up with engaging content is one of my super powers… or at the very least, it’s something that I’ve been lucky enough to do professionally for 14 plus years.  As I sit down to divulge the secrets of my creative process, the first thing I can think of is… I haven’t checked Words with Friends in a few hours.  I wonder if Elsbells has played her turn yet.

Reset!  Rule number 1 – Staying focused in the creative process is very important.  Creative work can be seriously taxing!  I mean –  it’s not hard work like working on a road crew in Death Valley or nuclear fusion, but the creative process requires a tremendous amount of time, focus, and… cookies.

I’ve ridden the unicycle of creativity, balanced the plates of writer’s block and juggled the flaming chainsaws of delivery deadlines many times.  Sometimes creativity comes very easily.  The sequel to Wedgie Toss http://www.urbaniacs.com/games/wedgietoss was conceived in about 5 minutes… and thus Wedgie Toss 2:  Back in the Crack was born.  http://www.urbaniacs.com/games/wedgietoss2    Sometimes it’s not that easy.  We work long hard hours, sweating over minute and what may seem like silly details until it feels right.  The character designs for Kuna Kettlebottom http://lunakettlebottom.com/ went through dozens of iterations.  In fact, we had 11 different designs before they became monsters!  Ultimately, all our work paid off.  In our focus test, kids love the characters. We don’t just sit around in fancy Aeron chairs coming up with awesome ideas that we toss into a Magic Cauldron, stir, and pull out a finished product.  No that’s not the way it works.  We don’t even have a real cauldron, or Aeron chairs!  We do a lot of typing and drawing, then we argue, scratch our heads, have some cookies, fight for what we believe in, go get coffee, accept input from others, and iterate until we have exactly what we need.

Where does it all start?  Inevitably you have to start with the most intimidating, scary, daunting element on this or any other planet.  No, I’m not talking about another Kardashian series, I’m talking about a blank piece of paper… or in most cases, a blank screen.  The blank screen, with all its menacing flickering, must be tamed, tamed like one of those warrior women who run with tigers… and spears!

It’s easy to lose your focus and get distracted in the creative process.  It’s OK to allow a little time for inspiration, but lets not kid ourselves.  Googling “Warrior Women” to try and find just the right image to help someone understand your vision, when you’re supposed to be writing a blog about being creative is purely a waste of time… I know this from experience.  Revert back to rule number 1 – stay focused.  (By the way “Elsbells,” if that is even your real name…  if you are reading this, it’s your turn!)

Rule number 2 – Dig in!  The most helpful tip I ever received on getting started is this: jump in and get started.  You may wind up throwing everything out, but that’s OK.  Bad ideas can quickly lead you to good ideas.  Stay at it and eventually you get rid of the lame and find your way to the good stuff.  Sometimes I create presentations with the full knowledge that my first, second, and eleventh pass may not be the one that is right, but with each draft I get closer and closer to realizing the concept, story, design, game… or even blog post.

Having ideas isn’t the same as being creative.  Most people have ideas.  Ideas are easy! (Although good ideas are a little harder to come by.) It’s the people who spend their time working and refining their ideas into detailed games or game concepts, scripts, artwork, presentations, products, etc. that are the real, hard-working, and generally successful creative people.  Nothing puts a twist in my britches worse than when someone says “I’m really creative, I just need someone else to write down and organize my ideas.” To me, that’s pure laziness… and now I need to stand up and adjust myself and wonder why I’m even wearing britches.  While I’m standing, I notice that my plant needs to be watered.  Maybe I’ll water it and while I’m up I can go get a coo—STOP!  Stay focused.  Don’t allow yourself to get distracted… remember rule number 1.

A tip that I find useful is “say the idea out loud.”  Sometimes just hearing an idea pitched out loud can help you decide if it’s a good idea or a bad one.  Try this out at home: “How about a game where you’re a bird, and some pigs have stolen your eggs, so you need to dive bomb the pigs in these structures and destroy them all!”  (then try an evil laugh afterwards.)  It sounds crazy, but crazy in a good way… it just might work.  Now try this one “You’re a lump of cheese and you have to sit in the back of the fridge until you grow hair.”  (no evil laugh)  See!  That one, when you say it out loud, is missing something… and it’s not just the evil laugh.  But maybe with a little work, a cheese lump game could grow and flourish into something AWESOME!  (or maybe not.)  All ideas are worth exploring.  I’ve found it extremely useful to dig in and explore any idea, even if it’s an idea that I didn’t like or don’t think works.  Approaching an idea from different angles helps it take shape…especially when you say it out loud first.

If you are just scrolling down to the bottom looking for a recap, here it is:  Being creative is hard work and it requires thick skin, maybe even some spears, and a warrior woman in a bikini… and cookies!   Once you accept the challenge to be creative or the blog assignment to be creative, don’t make excuses.  Throw some words and pictures at that evil blank page and see what sticks.  Warrior women, cookies, and Words with Friends will all be there when you are done.

Brandissimo! is in the middle of producing a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in HTML5, scheduled to launch this fall. This universe will have HTML5 games, a dynamic scoring system and virtual economy, chat, avatars, and just about everything else you can imagine. Our goal is to build a world that is accessible on desktops, tablets, and smartphones. We could not be more excited about it.

How does a team even begin to build such a thing? We didn’t wake up one day and suddenly become HTML5 game experts. While HTML5 at its core is simply markup language — just like HTML — creating HTML5 games and entertainment experiences is much more complicated than that. So we spoke to a lot of people and we read a lot of material and now we know just enough to be dangerous.

Here are five great resources that have helped us:

1. The Reality of HTML5 Game Development

   The best place to start is Rich Davey’s unparalleled treatise on HTML5, The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and Making Money from It. You can think of Davey’s essay as a sort of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy … of HTML5. (He really should put “Don’t Panic!” in large red letters at the beginning.) Rich explains everything — and I mean everything — you need to know about the current state of HTML5 game development. And he does so in plain English, so even your CEO will be able to understand. (That’s a huge bonus to us geeks.)

2. Slynk’s Revenge

   The article Beginning HTML5 Game Development – and its several sequels — are a good starting point for someone just trying to learn the basics. Slynk covers most of the basics, like using the <canvas> tag, adding sound, rudimentary drawing techniques, and how to bind simple events to functions for input handling. His clearly-written blog posts are very easy to follow and should be required reading before you start building the next great web app.

3. Speedy Sprites

   Bruce Rogers and Cory Ondrejka wrote HTML5 Games 0.1: Speedy Sprites, and in-depth analysis of the results of their HTML5 game benchmarking tool –JSGameBench – and the data they uncovered when comparing the various methods for high performance sprite-rendering in browsers.

4. SixRevisions

   Developer Alex Kessinger has written a fantastic step-by-step tutorial on How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App. Alex discusses all the key elements of creating an HTML5 game, including the application cache, notes about differences in available screen real estate in development mode, setting Apache headers, offline caching, and a slew of other important details you will encounter when building your first HTML5 game.

5. HTML5 Rocks

   The “gaming” section at HTML5 Rocks contains dozens of tutorials, articles, and case studies related specifically to building HTML5-based games. Some of the recent entries they’ve posted are:

   • Getting Started with Web Audio API
   • Improving HTML5 Canvas Performance
   • and Simple Asset Management for HTML5 Games

These five resources have been instrumental to us as we produce HTML5 games, and we frequently reference them still. Like any emerging technology, many of the specific details are going to evolve as more and more developers get involved. But the core concepts presented in these articles should remain fairly stable and useful for anyone looking to get started. If you have any favorites that you’d recommend, please drop us a note!

If you’ve ever been in a creative brainstorming meeting, invariably someone (hoping to inspire participation from the silent group of creative people) declares ‘there are no bad ideas.’ And you think: licking a frozen pole, alcoholic energy drinks, mullets. These are bad ideas. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and you know it. But, no one ever set out to create a bad idea.

So how can a creative company tell a good idea from a bad one?

It is tricky sometimes, and so if you’re not confident by just looking at what was created it’ll help to look at how it was created.

Good ideas grow on a good foundation. To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s the sort of foundation we’ve built many a good idea on:

When I look around our office, do I see creative people that follow the rules? Execute assignments to the letter? Universally accept and respect management’s ideas and direction? No way! Like many managers it makes me want to cry. But unlike most managers, mine will be tears of joy.

Here’s why. We hired these people because they good at what they do, so let them do that. Let them go a little. Let them enjoy the process and the work personally. So if that means letting them break a few rules, ok. Maybe you’ll even want to encourage your team to feel a little rebellious once in a while, to drive right past those guidelines you laid out. Because it’s those little side trips that often bring back really nice souvenirs … like good ideas.

Looking around the office again, did we hire all the best experts in the field? I’d have to say no. Again the tears of joy flow. We hire experts, but not necessarily in the field. We believe good ideas come from recombining existing ideas and people who see something differently—and the so-called experts sometimes are in a rut. If you want to create something people haven’t seen before, cross-pollinating with staff is a good idea.

Are you set on doing something completely new, without precedent and not contingent on any other work, people or idea? Yikes, I’m not sure I can help you. That’s risky business. But if you are doing something new with old ideas, that’s a good foundation to build on. In fact, that’s where the really great ideas come from.

And of course you need to know your audience better than they know themselves. It’s the only way you’ll be confident you’re delivering something meaningful to them. Think like your audience and if you are excited by it, given all you know about your audience will they be excited by it.

Do you share ideas with friends in the industry? Not the NDA breaking kind of chit-chat but a good healthy (and legal) exchange of ideas. That’ll you keep abreast of trends and shifts in the industry and may keep you from falling head of heels for your (bad) ideas.

A couple of cautions:

Don’t beat the idea to death. Don’t talk it into bland oblivion.

Avoid the knowing-doing bog of doom. At some point you know you have a good idea if you’ve done the above, so go do it. No more chit-chat: execute it, get ‘er done.

If you build a good foundation on which good ideas are encouraged and allowed to flourish, you’ll never have to wonder is ‘this a good idea?’–you’ll know it is.

There is a great classic SNL skit, starring Gilda Radner, Dan Akroyd and Chevy Chase, called “Shimmer.”  It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping: http://www.hulu.com/watch/61320/saturday-night-live-shimmer-floor-wax

In addition to simply being funny, “Shimmer” illustrates that the same thing can have different meanings to different people … and so can your brand.

Thus when you are distributing your brand across different media, keep in mind that it will mean different things to different people.  As such, your brand can be presented in a distinct manner, across each medium, in a way that is optimized for each medium.  The key is that your core brand essence remains consistent in each instance.

Brandissimo! built the NFLRUSH Zone brand, for the National Football League, from scratch.   We started off as an online virtual game world.  Here we utilized the NFL brand attributes of competition and teamwork to foster an environment where kids play video games, competing against one another and representing their team just as NFL players do.  That’s our floor wax.

NFLRUSH Zone has been a great success—over 150 million gameplays in four+ years—and is expanding into other media.  Season one of an animated NFLRUSH Zone television show—Guardians Of The Core—aired on NickToons last year. Guardians Of The Core follows a kid named Ish on an adventure where he battles the evil robotic Blitz Botz and helps return each NFL team’s shard—its power source—to the team’s home stadium.

Guardians Of The Core is about overcoming fear, fighting the good fight and being a hero—slightly different than the competition and teamwork attributes of the NFLRUSH Zone online virtual game world.  That’s our dessert topping.

Same brand, different medium, different brand attributes, same core brand essence.  What we did was tailor—optimize—the brand to each medium and each audience but we kept the core brand essence consistent across each.  Visually that was easy—the NFL and its teams have very distinctive marks.  Emotionally, that essence is team affinity.  Online, team affinity manifests by kids playing for their teams and wearing team gear.  On TV, team affinity is represented by celebrating team Rusherz (fictional guardians) and team stadiums.  It works and it works well.

Got more media?  Then we’ll have more—different—dessert toppings!  We brought NFLRUSH to the world of apps, producing the NFLRUSH Pick ‘Em app for iOS and Android.  Here fans are engaging in the real world NFL, guessing which NFL teams will win each week during the season.  Pick ‘Em utilizes the NFL brand attribute of competition—there’s a leader board, leagues and prizes—but in a different manner than in the NFLRUSH Zone virtual world and different than Guardians Of The Core.  Meanwhile, the app gives kids the chance to pick their own team, highlighting the brand essence of team affinity.

Same brand, different media, slightly different brand messages tailored to the medium, consistent brand essence across the board.  It’s a floor wax…AND a dessert topping.

I’m not saying that brand consistency should be abandoned…absolutely not!  But flexibility is sometimes required when you’re expanding your brand experience to different audiences in different media. You’ll wind up growing your brand, building your audience and ultimately increasing the value of your brand equity.  And like Gilda Radner, you too will look at your brand and say “look at that shine!”

Companies or people who develop technology products generally fall into three categories in terms of adoption of new technologies:

Mature Only – These are the folks who will only develop for technologies that have stabilized and been proven to work on multiple platforms exactly as the published standards require.

Emerging – These people take more risk – doing work using technologies and tools that are reasonably understood, deployed and supported – but are not fully mature yet.

Bleeding Edge – These are the renegades – the ones who look at a technology, don’t know exactly what the standard is going to look like or what the adoption rate is going to be – and they develop for it anyway.

That last one is where all the fun kids play.   But why?  Very simply, it’s to get a jump on the competition.  When the App Store for the iPhone was originally announced, nobody knew just how popular it was going to be – but that didn’t stop people from developing for it.  There were no standards yet, no idea of the reach really, and no metrics for how much money could be made.  Fast forward to 2012, and there are over half a million apps out there, and growing.  It was a good idea, and anyone with even a small amount of vision could see that.

Sounds dangerous you say?  Not really – assuming you play by the key rules:

1. Do your homework.  Understand where the pitfalls are, and don’t commit to developing heavily for a part of the standard that isn’t nearly complete.
2.  Talk to people.  Learn about what others have managed to do while staying within the already understood standards.
3. Be creative.  This is the time to figure out how to do something awesome with a technology that people haven’t yet seen.
4. Be smart.  Don’t implement a new technology for the sake of doing it.  Make sure it is solving a fundamental problem.
5. Create value.  It might be a game, or a utility, or a website for productivity or fun – but as long as it is something that people NEED, it will have an audience.

HTML5 is an excellent current example.  The standard isn’t done, the support isn’t there, and different browsers implement it differently.  Building a website or a game in HTML5 is absolutely a difficult task.  Is it impossible?  Definitely not.  There are plenty of examples, and those examples come from people who are looking to be EXPERTS with this technology just as soon as it becomes the standard for websites and applications across the web.  And that has value.  And that’s really the name of the game.  Over here at Brandissimo we’re jumping right in – building a massively multiplayer online game world, entirely in HTML5.  Crazy?  Biting off more than we can chew?  Taking too big a risk?

Do we sound nervous?

When Joey helped Ross make a list of pros and cons about dating Rachel, it was an epically bad decision… but of course we all watched.  We wanted to see the fallout.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583625/?

From a character saying “I’ll be right back” in Friday the 13^th to Nemo going to touch the big butt, making bad choices makes for great film and TV… but in a game it’s a little more tricky.

As a game designer, you want to encourage players to make the right choice, or at least make the right choice for the game (unfortunately, we have no control over who our players date or the hairstyle choices they make).  When designing casual games—whether it’s iOS, Facebook, or online—our job as game designers is to get our player to make the smart choice that leads to deeper engagement.  Let your character make a bad choice in a TV show and your ratings can soar; do the same in a game and it’s game over.  You gotta suck it up and purchase that power ring if you want to defeat the boss in Infinty Blade.  One medium rewards bad choices while another medium fails through bad choices.  That’s the big challenge with transmedia story-telling.

But all is not lost.  As developers, there are a few tools we can use when solving this unique problem.

Be creative.  Your end goal is user interaction. You want them to click the button, go down the path, fight the monster, nurture the egg.  The key is finding a good motivator that works for your particular story.  In our work with the National Football League, we rely on team affinity as a motivator.  “The Broncos are down by 1 and your team needs you!”  Find the right creative story that makes the user feel like it’s up to them to be the hero.  Turn the simple act of clicking the button into a satisfying experience. For the NFL’s game world, we wanted to encourage head to head social gameplay, so every Tuesday all our PvP games reward twice as much XP as single player games.  It’s really helped increase our PvP games.

What, you don’t have time to call your mother?  We all know that guilt can be a big motivator.  It’s also a key component when creating an emotional connection, and emotional connections are what keep players engaged. Give the user something to feel for. “If you don’t click this button, something bad is going to happen…”  Pressure works.  If your user is inactive, something negative will happen.  “You don’t want your baby zebra to go hungry… do you?” (Zynga’s Dream Zoo has nearly perfected driving engagement through little bits of guilt and encouragement.)

Time is on your side, yes it is.  (No, really, it is).  Offering a limited amount of time to complete an action drives a player to pay attention to the action.  If I have a ticking clock of 30 seconds in which to perform my action—no matter how mundane the action—I’m going to think twice about passing up that opportunity.  Use time as a way to help motive your players to prioritize their actions. Adding a ticking clock gets the heart pumping and causes players to lean forward and pay attention.  The countdown we have for NFLRZ Training games makes this one of the most popular games on the site.  http://nflrz.nflrush.com/play/game/training

While it’s not true for all games or all linear content, the common thread that runs through each medium is redemption.  For the most part, it’s our basic human nature to want a happy ending.  The reason we love watching our heroes fall is the delight we feel when they redeem themselves.  In a game, we want the opportunity to dig in, play hard and be rewarded for our efforts.  In games, we can have failures… as long as we are also rewarded for victories.  Losing makes winning all the more sweeter.  As game designers, it is up to us to find the right balance.  That’s all for me for now.  I have to run.  I only have 3 minutes left to click that button or something terrible is going to happen.

I am always playing games and therefore always thinking about what I like and dislike about them.  I’ve noticed three “likes” that have been popping up a lot lately.  The first is critical for almost all games while the other two are tailored to my specific game play needs…and therefore I decree that they must be implemented in all future games!

Like # 1: Rewards, rewards, rewards

World of Warcraft (the MMOG, I am not talking about their mobile apps at the moment) is the most profitable video game ever and took several years of my life from me.  If I had to pick a favorite game play mechanic from WoW, I would say it is the constant rewards.  You are running around killing everything in your path—and there are LOTS of things in your path—and every time you kill something, you get to loot it.  There’s huge anticipation there driving game play as every time you loot—ok, almost every time you loot—you get a reward.  Most times it’s a small reward, sometimes it’s an awesome reward, but you are always getting rewards!  This is, well, rewarding for the player.  Rewarding often is key.

Some mobile games do just this.  I started playing Zynga’s Dream Zoo last week and think that Dream Zoo does a nice job constantly rewarding players.  Zynga was able to take their timed-re-engagement mechanisms, that they have become so good at in Facebook games, and evolve those mechanisms for the mobile platform.  Instead of waiting hours or days to collect my rewards, which makes sense for Facebook games, in Dream Zoo I can collect basic rewards from my animals every four minutes.  In-between those 4 minutes, there are several other secondary game play mechanisms—visiting other zoos, building up my zoo—that also deliver rewards.

The net effects are that I) I play for long sessions—do basic gameplay for rewards, engage in secondary gameplay for rewards, and go back to basic gameplay for rewards and II) I play for multiple sessions per day because I am getting rewards every time I play.  It’s important to note that I do not have to play for longer sessions or more frequent sessions—there’s no penalty if I do quick infrequent sessions—but if I want, I can play often and reap the rewards.  Longer sessions and more of them…that’s great for any game.

Like #2: Multiple player accounts per game

I have two game-playing kids and they always want to play games on my iPhone and iPad, and I love to let them do so.  They love to play many of the games that I like to play, which is great.  The problem occurs when I play the game first.  Take Angry Birds for example.  By the time my kids started playing Angry Birds, I had finished most of the levels and finished them at 3 stars.  My kids had to play in the same account, meaning that almost all of the levels were already unlocked and had very difficult scores for them to beat.  My kids did not get the joys of a) advancing from level to level via their own achievement or b) going back to levels in order to get 3 stars.

The solution here—and it is not very difficult—is to allow multiple user accounts in your game.  This allows for parent and kids to all have full fun playing the game without anyone spoiling it for anyone else.  Peggle does this and it has been great for my kids and me.

Interestingly, having multiple accounts has increased Peggle’s lifespan on my iPhone as well.  When I finish a game, I often delete it from my phone in order to make room for other games.  But if I know my kids are working their way through the game at their own pace, I’ll keep it on my phone until they’re done.

So please…give us multiple accounts in your game.

Like #3: Single account for iPhone and iPad versions

I like playing games on both my iPhone and iPad, and I use each device at different times and circumstances.  I play on iPhone throughout the day, whenever I have a spare minute.  I play on iPad at night, sometimes while watching TV, often while going to bed.

What bums me out is when I have played a game for a few hours on my iPhone, switch to iPad to play the same game, and I have to start all over.  This is the way it happens in Dream Zoo and it effectively forces me to play the game on one platform or the other (no Dream Zoo at night for me).

Words With Friends, however, allows for one central account regardless of the platform.  Thus I can play WWF during the day on my iPhone and then continue the same games at night on my iPad.  I love it.  Another example where the same can be done is UniWar.

The difference between WWF/UniWar and Dream Zoo is that the former are multi-player games (where the gameplay data resides on a server) and the latter is a single player game (where the gameplay data is stored locally).  I’d like to see more single player games sync data to a server and allow players to pick-up the same game regardless of device.  The concern would be loading times, so it would be a balance—but something to try regardless.

At Brandissimo!, we are always batting around what we like and do not like in the games we’re playing.    It provides for great debate and without a doubt makes our games the best they can be.

When you are building a product – ANY product – there are a few items that are not negotiable:

On time – there’s always going to be a deadline – even if it is self imposed. Projects without deadlines always end up falling victim to other priorities – getting continually push down the to-do list until they are irrelevant.
On budget – there no such thing as a free lunch. Cost is a key component for any thinking company, and hitting a budget requires discipline and creativity.
Complete – is everything that was laid out in the spec (you do have a spec, don’t you?) completed? Getting things done on time and on budget aren’t going to do much good if you didn’t achieve your goals.

So this is the full list for every project, right? Make sure those three things are done, and you’ll be a success and everyone will be happy. Right?

Yes. As long as you aren’t talking about something that is supposed to be FUN.

Fun is a very nebulous, elusive term. Everyone knows what it is for the most part (some people find bungee jumping fun, but I’m not one of them), but sometimes it can be hard to describe. If you are building a game (or anything for kids, really), if MUST be fun. No fun – no product. So how do you build that into the process while still hitting the key points above.

It’s called creative cycles. We all understand that there is a point in time at which you are going to have a “playable” game. The first step is to be sure that is built into the schedule. If you wait until the thing is done before you start deciding if it is any fun, you’ve already lost. You need MORE THAN ONE pass at making sure a game PLAYS well, before you start to refine it for details like appropriate sounds, or voices, or interfaces, etc, etc.

The second step is understanding how to iterate. The key here is brutal honesty. If you think a game is “neat” or “interesting”, you need to seriously rethink it. It needs to be FUN. As in “I played it for an hour straight last night”, or “I had to yank it out of my kid’s hands this weekend”. Now is not the time to be tactful. People need to develop thick skin, and leave the defensiveness at home. Now is the time to create a GREAT product, not an OK product.

Once you have that, you can go through loops that look something like this:

Deploy test version
Allow exactly ONE DAY for testing and feedback
Compile all feedback into a single document for review
Meet to discuss all points. (If this meeting takes more than 2 hours, what you have built is likely garbage)
Make changes as required
Repeat

How many times do you iterate? Relax – it’s not “As many times as necessary”. Twice should be plenty, thrice is the absolute maximum. Any feedback coming in after that is from people who weren’t paying attention in the first place. Exclude them from the process in the future.

It’s clean, it’s tight, and it’s focused on your goals. Follow this plan, and you can’t fail.

Assuming you have good artists, that is….

Who can deny the appeal of making the world a better place?  Who wouldn’t want to change,  for the better,  the way kids learn?  In our business, lofty goals are abundent.  Here’s a list of worthy goals that walked through Brandissimo’s magnificent doors and into our studio this past month alone:   

• Improving how kids learn the three R’s
• Building better citizens through a mastery of civics
• Help kids face the challenges of the 21st century through improved critical thinking
• Help kids make better food choices
• Inspire kids to exercise    

It’s easy to get drawn in to worthy causes and projects that earnestly pursue ‘lofty goals’ for our audience, we all want to be making content that matters.  We love the ability to open up a dinner party conversation with a pithy “We’re making content that’s going to cure the teenage obesity epidemic!”    The key thing to remember when pursuing these goals is to NOT lose your audience because you’re so busy “improving their lives”!   We’re entertainers first and foremost.  We build entertainment for entertainment platforms – not education for entertainment Platforms.   In order get kids to engage in your content, you need to remember not to sacrifice entertainment while you’re pursing the ‘lofty goals’.  If this were a food blog, I’d suggest  four parts Entertainment to one part Education.      When you combine worthy goals with entertainment in equal measure,  it becomes a messy soup that more often than not feature the worthy goals negating the entertainment value and turning off the end user before they’ve even engaged in the content.   

Here’s four rules that we live by here in the hallowed halls of Brandissimo!

1. “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him watch your TV show or become instantly addicted to the game you just made”   Make sure the content is engaging,  interesting,  and fun before you start applying  your curriculum.  
2. “Kids don’t watch “eat your green vegetables television”  in fact they rarely eat their green vegetables period – and certainly don’t enjoy being told to.   Unless you’re creating a ‘homework helper’  kind of app, I’d recommend avoiding looking anything like school work or something you’d find in the waiting room of your doctors office.  Kids today are hyper scheduled and programmed and when they finally get spare moment to unwind with their choice of media, the last  thing that they’re looking for is more school.
3. “Never ever eat in a restaurant that advertises “Fine Food”  Kids will smell a rat faster than us “marketing experts” any day of the week.  Over-pitching the fun causes kids to look for the lesson plan.  Make the entertainment value real and engaging and you’ll be in a better position to capture them with your content.
4. Aim for small targets and know your audience.  There’s a difference between a 5 year old and a 6 year old and an even bigger difference between a 5 year old and a 7 year old.  A quick climb up the age ladder and differences expand and contract depending on when kids jump into larger age pools.  Moving from pre-school to Kindergarden may not be a huge step – but from Kindergarden to First Grade thrusts the youngster into a reality where he is the youngest, smallest, least dexterous member of this new food chain.   The jump from grade 6 to grade 7 can be a mind-boggling loss of innocence.  These changes deeply effect the media that these kids consume.  A 7th Grader may wear Phineas and Ferb pajamas at night but deny he even watches the show during the day.  Those media choices that were once so critical and dear to them are very quickly discarded when they are associated with the previous age pool.   When your targets are too broad you end up diluting the value of both the entertainment as well as the education.

So you’ve just developed the most amazing iOS game of all time. Good for you. Now you need to promote it.

Yes, you could spend marketing dollars on advertising. You could build a fantastic website and buy Google AdWords to push traffic there. You could spam every game review online magazine with your carefully-crafted press release. You could create a Facebook page and inundate your friends and family with links to it. But all of those paths rely primarily on crossed fingers and hope.

If your new game is really fun to play, there are five features you can implement directly in your app to nudge it towards becoming a viral hit. The best promotion is word-of-mouth, and if you build your app the right way its users will become your best evangelists.

1. Allow — But Don’t Force! — Facebook Connect

If you believe the six o’clock news, every single man, woman, and child on the planet has a Facebook account. (My friend’s dog has a Facebook account!) Facebook has certainly replaced the local coffee shop bulletin board — and maybe even the refrigerator — as the best place to learn about what is happening in your circle of friends and family. Allowing your users to publish their love of your game to their Facebook wall is an incredibly inexpensive way to spread the word.

You should be considerate, though, and not require users to authenticate with Facebook in order to play your game. Many people are wary of sharing their Facebook credentials with an app before learning exactly what it does and what it might publish to their walls. And, of course, some people simply don’t have Facebook accounts. Let them play your game and give them the option to connect with Facebook. If it’s really fun, and if you make it simple to discover how to connect to Facebook from within the app, they will.

2. Tweet Scores

Twitter is only slightly less popular than Facebook these days. The fact that Apple decided to bake Twitter integration right into the latest version of their mobile platform should be evidence enough of that. If you let your game’s users Tweet their high scores and / or achievements — but don’t harangue them about it — some percentage of them are going to do so. Let them add a hashtag, or a link to your app’s iTunes page, or your app’s website. Many of the most popular iOS games — including Canabalt, Flight Control, and Angry Birds — utilized Twitter word-of-mouth marketing to great success.

3. Challenge A Friend

Even if your app is single player only, allowing your customers to brag and challenge their friends to beat their scores directly from within it is a good move. An avid player may be too shy to post a link to your game on her Facebook wall, but not too shy to challenge her mom to beat her score. The simplest and most intuitive way to provide a “challenge a friend” feature is to let the user choose from her Facebook or Twitter friends, which is why connecting your app to those services are the first two points on this list.

4. Location-Based Leaderboards

Several iOS apps — including QRank and the wildly popular Flight Control — include leaderboards listing high scores of other players based on their relative location to the device. Why do they do this when it’s highly unlikely that a player is going to actually know any of the random users playing their game in the same city or state? They do this because players want to see themselves near the top of leaderboards, and it’s much simpler to achieve success in a smaller pool. If your app has even just a few hundred players it will quickly become exponentially more difficult to rank in the top ten out of all of them. It is, however, possible to vault into the top ten of your home town, or the nearest city. The positive reinforcement of seeing his own name at the top of the Anytown, USA leaderboards can be just the incentive he needs to keep playing, or, more importantly, to convince his friend to start playing.

5. Unicode Distribution

Distributing your game as a single version playable on the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone is a great way to keep it in front of your users at all times. The additional revenue potentially gained by forcing users to buy multiple copies for each of their devices won’t outweigh the negative feedback.

Epilogue:

There is no way to guarantee that an app will “go viral”, but including these five key features will at least give it the *potential* to become a viral hit.