Mobile game development is one of the most profitable IT-industries nowadays. Mobile games sector now represents almost half of the gaming industry revenue. And this value increases as android game development – along with iOS development – conquers the market. This creates an enormous wave of developers coming to the mobile gaming segment, which brings immense rivalry there.
Do you need to optimize your work to cope with such market conditions?
Do you need mobile game dev tools to accelerate your development process and achieve higher results in the same amount of time?
Taking this into account, let’s discover the most efficient tools that can significantly reduce your time to market and increase retention rate and user engagement, decrease your app development cost.
Best Mobile Development Tools You Should Use In Your Project
To make it as convenient as possible, we’ve divided all the useful mobile development tools into 4 categories, so you can jump right to the desired category, namely:
- Analytics and Performance Monitoring;
- Retention Rate and User Engagement;
- Design and Creativity;
- Promotion and Monetization.
Without further ado, let’s dig in.
Mobile Game Development: Analytics and Performance Monitoring Tools
Happy and loyal players cannot co-exist with mediocre app performance and numerous bugs in the user interface. You need to find a way to monitor your game figures and resolve issues in a timely manner.
Crashlytics: Real-Time Actionable Insights
Crashlytics is a free-of-charge monitoring tool. It allows you to improve player engagement by resolving players’ issues before they feel frustrated and downvote your app for bugs and poor performance. This mobile game development tool provides you with real-time statistics and bug reports, so you can fix the issues before the countless bug tickets overflow your mail.
Crashlytics works for both Android and iOS and now is part of Firebase. This tool is continually improving while remaining free.
GameRefinery
GameRefinery is a solution for mobile game development struggling to identify priority features, to find out what appeals to users the most. This tool discovers the most popular features of your game and compares your figures with the competitors. This way, you get not only your game analysis but also competitor research. Starting with $0 for base functionality, GameRefinery gives an opportunity to test out its outstanding features and decide for yourself.
Design and Creativity In Mobile Game Dev
Enhancing your mobile game with a nice design is integral to quality user experience. This is why you can’t ignore this aspect of your software product. At the same time, it may be a huge problem to come up with a cost-effective mobile app design solution, considering the price and time you have to spend on this objective. Let’s have a look at the most credible design and creativity tools for mobile game development.
GIMP: Free and Powerful
GIMP is a freely distributed graphics editor. This open source image manipulator is a cross-platform solution for mobile game developers. It supports all major platforms and provides all the functionality needed for creating and editing your game assets.
Adobe Photoshop: Professional And Functionality-Rich
Adobe Photoshop is the most iconic graphics editor out there. It’s considered the world’s most popular design software. Adobe Photoshop is a comprehensive tool for creating high-quality content. This software costs $20 – $74 depending on the paid plan you choose.
Piskel: Open Source and Intuitive
Piskel is a 2D pixel-art platform allowing developers of all levels to create simple sprites and animations in no time. It is an open source design platform. Its intuitive design and 2D-art capabilities make it a credible option for your creative toolkit.
Game Development for Mobile: Retention Rate and User Engagement
Players are social. They find communicating with others entertaining. It means you should pick a user engagement tool and interact with your target audience. This will keep them immersed in your game atmosphere and create a community of loyal and responsive players.
Twitch
Twitch is probably the most famous live streaming platform. Here are the Twitch features you can use to engage with your players more:
- Dynamic gifting. Whether you create Android game or iOS app, think through the rewarding system. Set rewards for user activity on Twitch and motivate players to take part in gaming events;
- Live stream commenting. We all love to chat. With Twitch, your players have this opportunity. Discussing the favorite game, while there is a live stream of it in on your screen is a fascinating feeling for the true player;
- Gaming broadcast overlay. Twitch allows you to display the in-game data on your streaming video. You can implement stats, kill counter, minimap, and many other game features directly into your stream.
Twitch supports all major platforms and offers several subscription plans starting from $4.99 for the base functionality.
Promotion and Monetization In Mobile Game Development
OK, your mobile game is really super cool. You upload it to Google Play and App Store, but for some reason just a few people download it. Not exactly what you’ve expected, right? Here’s the kicker: developers upload thousands of apps to these platforms on a daily basis. It means there is little chance users will notice your app without the proper advertising and marketing techniques.
Moreover, monetization is often also an issue in the free-software-driven market nowadays. Players got used to free games, and you have to put up with it. So, instead of trying to sell your game, let’s find out how to set up your marketing strategy and choose the monetization model that suits your software product the most.
Unity Ads: Strict Yet Generous
Unity Ads is a mobile ad platform. Its marketing model implies that a game developer gets paid – and gets paid well – for every sponsored game installation, not for the advertisement display. This means that quality games with the proper ad positioning benefit the most from Unity Ads services.
Mobvista: Advertise Globally
Mobvista is a mobile advertising services company offering a full suite of promotion tools. Their software products aim to unlock the full potential of your game and expand its coverage. Mobvista fuels the growth of your app and boosts your conversion rates in no time thanks to its sophisticated promotion approach.
Adjust: Know Your Figures
Adjust unifies your marketing activity and reports to you with your growth trend and player interaction charts. It provides quality advertising services and guarantees that you pay for genuine engagements only. One of the biggest strengths of Adjust is that they allow you to make smart decisions based on the full picture of your marketing impact, as they provide the infographics built on your figures. This is an indisputable edge over similar alternatives of Adjust.
The Bottom Line
Mobile game development tastes better with development tools. This is why you should implement the mentioned technologies in your workflow to increase the game development efficiency and boost your marketing figures.
If you are looking for app development companies or need a professional game development assistance, reach out to Melior Games. We have experience in mobile game development. Drop us a line and ensure your game success with quality services of Melior Games.
