Kotagames’ Felix Ramli Shares his Recipe for Great Feature Phone Games

During the Startup Asia Bandung Hackathon, Felix Ramli, the director of feature phone game developer Kotagames and also the founder of Indonesian video game developer training center GameLevelOne.com, shared his insights into what makes a feature phone game great. He said that there are three main elements to look out for:

1. Fun Factor

You need to consider a number of different factors to make the games fun.

• You need to ensure a fast loading time between pages. Felix said it is recommended to keep each page’s size to 50Kb tops. In developing countries where there are lots of feature phone users, there are often problems with the 2G/GPRS data reception – and it’s not that fast to begin with. If a game page is bigger than 50Kb, it’ll take longer to proceed in the game and you will lose users.

• Make sure to have interesting storylines to let the users feel more engaged in the game. Users love to project themselves into fun games.

• You also have to create special in-game events from time to time such as a tournament or bazaar. It is recommended that the events have some special graphics in it, and can reward users with special prizes such as double experience points [1] or rare virtual items.

• Don’t make any endings for the game. You want the users to play them as long as possible and earn money.

• The fifth and final tip for injecting more fun is the social factor. Your games must be able to let users interact with other people inside the game. (More on this below).

2. Social Interactions

To make the games more interesting, engaging, and dynamic, the game must have social interaction. You can do this by enabling features such as finding friends, giving virtual presents, teaming up, special competitions, or leaderboards.

3. User Interface (UI)

There are three main considerations, Felix says, for making a good UI. The first is the afore-mentioned fast loading time. The second is to adapt the game’s UI according to its target audience. If your audience is female, then you should put more cute icons and have some pink colors on it. If the audience is male, maybe you can add stronger colors and use more macho-style graphics.

The third is the phone’s limitations. Remember that we’re talking about feature phones here, so don’t use huge animated artwork that can’t be played on the phone. Also, you want to make your game available on as many feature phone brands as possible, so it is recommended to use PHP and HTML rather than Javascript and CSS3, which have limited compatibility.

In the end, if you can tackle all that factors above, there is good chance that users will love your game and you can earn money from them.

Related

• Andy Zain Explains Why the Indonesian Feature Phone Market is Awesome
• Alvin Yap Talks about Monetizing the Feature Phone Industry [Interview]

Disclosure: Kotagames is an occasional advertiser on the site. Read more on our ethics page.

The post Kotagames’ Felix Ramli Shares his Recipe for Great Feature Phone Games appeared first on Tech in Asia.