OUGD505 - Product, Range, Distribution - Visual Style of Mobile Game Apps

My younger sister who's 9 years old, so is the target of the campaign. I asked her what her and her friends favourite games were and why. She said Angry Birds, Temple Run, Bouncing Slime and Hoppy Frog. She said that they were fun and "were different but the same".

When I questioned her on this I found that what she meant was that every time you played the game, or every time you had a new level, you automatically knew what you were doing, but the course or challenge was different.

Given that I'm 20, and still play angry birds from time to time, and when I was 18 everyone at my college was playing Temple Run, and the obsession that came with Flappy Birds (the concept that Hoppy Frog was stolen from) across people I know at uni a few months ago, it's fair to say that many people my age play the same sorts of games as 8-12 year olds.

On these grounds I did a survey asking people what games they play on their phones, how long they played the games for, and what they thought were important factors for successful phone games, and took note of the response where the games they play included Angry Birds, Temple Run or Flappy Birds. 

The 4 responses noted showed a great variation in both the amount of time they used their phones and played games. Of the 4, 3 of the responses said that Addictiveness was important, whereas the other 5 options on the list got one tick each. They were Challenging, Variation, Visually Appealing, Social Elements, and Competitiveness. People that played the above games, also said they played Unblock Me, Crossy Road and Hay Day.

All 7 of these games with the arguable exception of Unblock Me, are heavily based around illustration. Unblock me is very skeuomorphic, which is a feature of Bouncing Slime, Crossy Road and Hoppy Frog in terms of their pixelated illustration style.

On all the games navigation is simple, as any buttons are conveniently placed either in corners or in a grid, and are accompanied by clear vectors and/or text which makes clear what the buttons do.

Most of the games have ways of making money within them, weather it being buy allowing the user to buy extra coins or extra lives etc etc, and this eradicates the need for advertising within the app, which is shown in the fact that the only app that had adverts, Bouncing Slime, was the only app that didn't have in-app purchases. This can be applied to the WWF app through adding options for donations such as adoption packages.