Chapter 3
Developing Social Media Games
In this chapter, you’ll learn:
- The differences between social game, traditional game, and nongame software development
- The skills and team members you need for a social media game project
- The player-centered design process for managing your project
Social Media Game Development Is Different
One of the challenges of social media games is the unique set of skills and methodologies that they require. Social media games draw upon the experiences of both agile web development and traditional game development, sharing properties of both.
The average cost of developing a single-platform console game in 2010 was $10 million dollars, with multiplatform games costing more than double. It comes as no surprise that many traditional game developers have had difficulty adapting to the realities of social game development, which has had huge successes with small teams that create products in a matter of months. The approaches to project management in console and PC game releases, built in response to their long cycles and high production values, doesn’t scale-down to the frenetic pace of short-window, agile development employed within most social media game endeavors.
Website development teams often include the people most accustomed to smaller, more agile projects. However, many teams that have tried to tackle social games from a web-development mindset have run into a separate batch of problems, discovering that games are unlike any other type of project ...
