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These days people do almost everything with their smartphone: from groceries to banking, shopping for clothes to hailing a cab. Since our 2011 blog post on smartphone game development, the number of games on the iOS App Store has increased thirteenfold from 67,000 to over 900,000 in December 2019.
Don’t let the apparent simplicity of many of those games fool you though. The competitive nature of the mobile game market requires you to prototype your ideas in order to know whether you can really stand out from the crowd.
It has been a while since we wrote about our work on mobile game prototypes, even though this segment of prototyping lead us to one of our very first success stories – a game we prototyped that got released by Capcom Mobile. That’s why we decided to showcase three mobile video game prototypes we developed in the past couple of years – all of which prototypes we haven’t been able to show to the public until now.
1. Prototype for a Farming and Matching Hybrid
Seattle based Daily Magic Productions wanted to explore the possibilities for a free-to-play model with a prototype that has players farming crops and selling dishes at a local farmers market. Farming Matcher combines Boom Beach-style gameplay with Puzzle Trooper and Burger Rush-like elements as you grow various ingredients and research recipes. Through a dual-currency model, Farming Matcher looks for a balance between soft currency, which players can acquire through gameplay, and hard currency, which you can buy with real-world money. In-game currency can be used to plant trees or crop, or to upgrade buildings at your farm, which help you progress further and grow your collection of ingredients and recipes. Many of the ideas we experimented with in Farming Matcher later found their way into Daily Magic Productions’ Jelly Jamz, which you is available for iOS and Android devices.
In the Farming Matcher prototype you combine farming and matching - prototypes don't require complicated names.
2. A Mobile Board Game Adaptation
Miratus Ludus was looking for a way to adapt their board game concept Klikit to a digital format. He got in touch with us to work on a mobile prototype. In the Klikit prototype you play for the highest score as you try to make rows of at least three adjacent tiles on the game board. We developed a single player mode in which you play against AI opponents, an online multiplayer mode to play with anyone around the world, and a local multiplayer option to play on one device with friends. You can play Klikit now on iOS or Android.
The multiplayer mode of the Klikit prototype, played by four members of the PreviewLabs team.
3. Playing Around With the Elements in Mobile VR
For Seyenapse we built a prototype for their Samsung Gear VR game CREATE VR. In CREATE VR, you hold the power to play around with various elements like water and fire. By combining these elements you uncover new characteristics like steam and rain. You can play around with the result on the Samsung Gear VR if you request it through the Seyenapse website.
An overview of the gameplay of the Create prototype - an alchemy style game concept for mobile VR which we developed back in 2017.
Put your Mobile Game Ideas to the Test with a Prototype
Whether you’d like to test new gameplay mechanics for your mobile game, or an entirely new game altogether, we can help you by developing a prototype. Feel free to get in touch, or read some more about our mobile prototyping work on Famine Ties and Incarnate.