The usual challenges in Android Game Development

William Frederick Halsey, Jr. once said “There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet”. Every individual on this planet has responsibilities and functions to undertake and on their way they meet challenges and with every challenge they face and overcome, they grow. That being said, so do the team of game designers and developers in a game development company.

Android is the biggest and a leading OS platform on which various mobile applications are developed for diverse industries and all business verticals. Android game development is an intricate process and involves many stages. Thus, It has been saddling the developers with myriad challenges on every step of its way but it also fascinates them to craft creative and immersive games.

An analysis made by Statista gave information on the number of available gaming apps in the Google Play app store. As of September 2020, there were three million forty thousand apps on Google Play Store and approximately three hundred eighty five thousand five hundred and fifty one of them were mobile gaming apps that is a 5.6 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. 

With 2020, we witnessed the pandemic, the lockdown, and a time when people were working from home, staying at home, maintaining social distancing, and to curb boredom, they turned to gaming and other entertainment sources. This had a lashing impact on the popularity and growth of the gaming industry in all positive ways. Nevertheless, the developers have to face intimidating challenges in some or the other ways. Let’s talk about a few of them here.

1. Understanding the client’s perspective comes as a challenge for many developers. Providers of game development services try to understand the client’s requirement and deliver it at their best. This becomes difficult at times when some clients themselves are unsure about what they want.

2. With every year Google releasing a new version of Android makes it tough for developers to design apps that support the features of the latest versions of the Android operating system. Thus, making the adoption rate of the latest android versions slow.

3. Customer retention is indispensable for any game or app. Users landing on your game or app is fine but what if they leave and do not return. What’s the point of such customer engagement? Effective gamer engagement is when the gamers find a game interesting and engaging so they return to the game. The developers have to understand the reasons that make the gamers want to leave and work towards giving them reasons to stay.

Bugs, lack of gamification, complicated interface, better alternatives, etc. are the most probable reasons for withdrawal. Maintenance of the game by fixing bugs, improving load time, and launching new updates of the game with new levels, characters, design, elements, etc. has to be taken care of to keep the excitement going in the game. The user reviews can serve as guiding stones for obviating bugs and implementing ideas.

4. Marketing presents your game in their most valuable form to the audience. Having an Inadequate marketing budget when you have oodles of ideas and plans to execute can be discouraging. We know even if your game is the best, it would make you no money if no one plays it. Some of the most interesting games have failed due to bad marketing strategies. And, marketing, branding, and promotion with a good budget is a requirement to make any game go viral and acquire gamers.

5. Other than that, optimizing a game's title and description on the search engines is a task. To popularize a game online, it is absolutely necessary for a game to position as the first few results in the search engine. Press releases are one way to make gamers aware of the new game in the market. App Indexing by Google lets the app’s content or the game’s content appear in the search results in Chrome on mobile devices. These strategies can help obtain more downloads and new users for your game in order to establish a community. Customer loyalty must be promoted via gamification, notifications, rewards or the like, to get the users to try your game and these act as good reasons for gamers to return to the game.

6. Every user has millions of options of Android games on Google Play Store, most are free and some are paid. This makes it difficult for developers to make a game that stands out from the rest and attain more downloads. This is where app store optimization strategy plays a role in enhancing a games visibility. This strategy includes choosing the right name, a unique game icon, using the right keywords in the game’s description, with high quality pictures and videos for promotion. Aggressive promotion of the game can really make or break the deal for any game.

7. Android has a staggering global market presence and this makes it susceptible to security attacks. These security issues are fixed by the security updates released by Google but the other security problems that arise due to the changes made to stock android are not addressed by Google updates. It is crucial to protect the game and the user data on it and hence the developers have to keep in mind to build a game that has strong security and advanced encryption mechanism. Every game requires players to provide their information and it is the responsibility of the game development company to ensure the security of that information and data.

8. Any project without research and analysis will be incomplete with faults and loopholes. Hence, even though it is difficult for a game developer to produce a well-researched game, it is unquestionably necessary to make an intuitive and user-friendly game after good research so that it reaches maximum users.

9. Android gives us a variety of device ratios varying from 4:3 to 16:9. Then, the resolution for Android and iOS are very different from each other. Thus, cross-platform developers face the challenge to provide the same user experience to every user at different screen size devices, resolutions and aspect ratios.

Content scaling ensures that the game logic and mechanics are equal on different devices, so design your game first for the lowest resolution (called the logical resolution) that you want to support, and then scale it up as a whole on larger resolutions so that it perfectly fits in the device screen. Here, when the screen is scaled up there is a chance of images getting blurry. As for the blurred out images are concerned, big images could be used and effectively scaled down to lower resolution devices. This is called smart asset selection. In this case, a lot of memory is wasted and running out of it could be an issue so it is preferred to load a different version of the image, depending on the size that’s required for the current device.

10. It is arduous for a developer to make a game that truly fulfills its motive and is not complicated to understand and play. This might happen when there’s overspill of ideas and features in a game (Feature creep) as the focus gets veered. To avoid this, launching a game in phases is something that can help. And, beta release will assist in getting feedback that can be used to overcome the drawbacks of the game and ensuring that the core essence of the game is not lost and the experience for the gamer is user-friendly. 

With this in mind, Logic Simplified provides android game development services and helps clients create innovative android games and overcome emerging challenges and security threats. Our team understands that when an Android game is developed, it is crucial that it anticipates and supports different possible player experiences, and increases gameplay flexibility to reach maximum gamers. Game development is an intimidating task and with new innovations happening everyday, it demands time, money, patience, and the zeal to combat challenges. If you’re looking to hire the right team of game app developers for your game idea, Contact us or email at enquiry@logicsimplified.com and we will help you in the best possible way.