Panel: IMGA Judges Panel

you good afternoon everybody thank you for coming today we're gonna talk about the IMG a who is familiar with the imj just a few people are just for a few people who are not familiar with the imj it's the International mobile gaming Awards we started this in 2004 and it's it's kind of an industry recognition for the best mobile game made in different regions so now we are running the fourth for the fourth year I am GA in Middle East North Africa we've been looking at 120 games these ladies and gentlemen have been playing the 63 nominated games yesterday so they did a great job so please give

them a warm applause for their hard work they will tell you how they how they did all that and what they learned from it and what kind of tips they're gonna give you to win an award next year because of course there will be a fifth I am Jamie now but before we getting into this we would like to introduce the jury members starting with my neighbor here on the Left I've met so far I'm Muhammad and co-founder from play Arabic we publish mobile games and I'm in the industry special main focus on MENA region for like ten years now hi everyone my name is Sonya Ganga Slava I'm P product lead at Zynga so I'm responsible for product and analytics I've done games for very

long time yeah as a in a small studio largest studios I've done like software development that unity I've been an investor I'm still I'm as well as a black board member and advisor for small studios for well at least 10 years Christian caldron CEO co-founder game jam previous is zero ketchapp makers of 2048 and I've held executive roles at dots and Kixeye which was acquired by the still front group and I'm also an investor and advisor at various game studios hello my name is Chris twin and I'm a level / content designer at King I've been at King for about a year now that candy crush guys and before that I was at out play entertainment a small Scottish company for about two years before that I did bits and bobs but I've been in the games industry for about four years now I talk at student events go to universities talk about how to get into the games industry infants about hello my name is Martina spawns

I am the owner of Tamil Aki publishing and incorporation with our partner FGL we published free-to-play games mainly mainly for an audience of women 40-plus it's like hidden-object match three time management puzzle games been doing that for about seven years now and I've been in the industry for about a total of 12 years you just met me new audience I'm I'm gonna pass your folks estudios it's a gaming company and publisher and also CEO of speak attacks and Academy to teach kids and teens video games I would add also I'm a university teacher and mom also or three little monsters I'm very pleased to be able to pronounce my name properly here in the UK i call myself shahid ahmed over here i can say a hamid and share head which is very

nice i've been in the industry since 1982 my resume is way too long to list but i'm currently running a small developer in the UK thank you I would like to ask the same question to everybody what are you looking for in a game when you feel you've played these 63 games at the IMG a judging what what were you looking for how do you manage the the you know the information you're getting from the game from from the team behind it the region the regional aspects what are you looking for young one wants to start I will basically I have two answers to that question because there's two different ways I look at games normally I look at games as a publisher for example tomorrow morning during the big inning pitch that's also what I'll be doing I'll be

looking at things like the commercial viability and do I think the retention is good and the monetization options cetera but yesterday during the imj judging I looked at games from a different perspective I look more at things like originality and with type of games that could sort of moved mobile games industry forwards by you're sort of pushing the boundaries and introducing and doing original things so yeah there's a bit of two different hats to to be worn there thank you yeah I'm at catch-up I was looking at thousands of games for the I am in totally different mindset for the IMG a I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the target demographic and then from that perspective I was looking at mainly three things on the technical side how it functioned technically or there bugs crashes on the art side visually how how did it feel also from

an audio perspective was there music sound effects and then lastly from a game design perspective could I put my shoes it could I put myself in the perspective of the game developer what challenges was I trying to solve was this game something that could retain get me to come back the next day the one thing I did not look at was how the games monetized or or the market like the the market commercial potential of the game mainly the three things that I mentioned technical visual and audio and then the game design itself thank you games are developed to you know create emotions so of course when when starting a game that's one thing I want to experience like you know what's the what's the

emotion a sensation that I got out of the the game the other is more about like user experience so user experience design considering things like you know is this do I understand what the developer is you know expecting me to do can I manage the interaction as that's of course one of the core elements of all types of digital games because I don't know let's move to another question because you know we've we've we've covered pretty much the issue of how we're going to how we are we evaluating the games that we're looking for so yeah I want as as a local developer I wanted I adding to the gameplay and a design the art music I was looking for a game to be really done from the region to be really appealing internationally and the scale is is it scalable can be appeared for everyone it can compete in the US Europe market as a

local game it was really important for me as a local developer and publisher to find this in these games thank you yeah so the the local aspect of the of the game how did you experience that maybe you you have a I've met you have a lot of experience in bringing Western games to the to the to the rabbit market but also the other way around how what kind of tension do you see in in doing these cross-cultural marketing efforts in general from the games that we had in general yes in general I think we have the potential but still we need the experience and sometimes I just try it if we talk about the Arabic developers we still need a lot of time and experience I'm talking here about

Mobile's I know there is a lot of console developer the way way advanced and there are a long time especially in Jordan they are stopped 2000 something they start to work so I'm not talking about that I'm talking about talking about mobile so we need still need time to develop ourselves if we take to the numbers neighbor reaches we are participating in the event as well as the Turkey and Iran they are more invest in that in that way but that also means that we can reach data as well we need to focus on what we do in the region the global will come after that yeah yeah we don't have to make it all localized Arabic we make general thing especially if it's casual games it's it will work everywhere Chris I wanna I have a question for you when you were looking at the games many of the of the

games that were submitted to I mean are you talking about diamonds in a rough you know a couple of times as if they were lacking something what are they actually lacking well I even approach this from two directions right like you can say what they're lacking or you can say what they have so I guess I want to yeah okay what they have first a few people have already mentioned that this isn't a competition based around commercial viability and I think that's really important whenever you submit your game to anything like this understand what makes the competition unique and that's what makes this one unique so we're recognizing design excellence audio excellence we're not worrying about it's going to make money so it's totally fine for a game to have a little bit of a little bit clunkiness and sometimes that can be a bit charming you know it's okay to be clunky it's okay to have some Jenkins tank and as long as you're doing something interesting and unique then there's still something to appreciate and that's kind of what I was trying to dig into when I was looking a lot of the games yesterday you could play some games and you could understand what they were going for what the what they were

implying if it was developed further and sometimes it's worth appreciating that as well especially for some of the awards like the best upcoming game you can just look at this is where they are but this is where they're aiming to be this is your the world that you're seeing they're employing so that's reward that that's recognize that as well thank you so yeah maybe you have something to add about that aspect of the of the games that they are lacking you know they they have to have something that is very unique and rich but they're also lacking something to make it yeah it's without now getting like you know sort of case by case but I can say like a few things one one is that I think unit is fantastic it's it's good it's a great tool to get started in games developments it's also I think like unity asset store is great and tutorials are great as well but and I also like I

like to start things with for example like you know replicated the tutorial game and you know going going going a bit further from there but I think one thing that I think was quite evident in some of the games where that the ideas didn't really go that much further from the latter tutorials so of course the like assets the scenes are different but still the thinking didn't really evil that much beyond this like sort of well basically yeah tutorials or templates that's one thing and also I think I already mentioned the user experience but that actually is it's critical especially when developing mobile games players really do not have a patience to try to figure out what the developer is trying for YouTube to do so if they don't understand the controls it might

be a bit tricky to deliver the story or the message you are you are trying to deliver so so thought those are always like again like I'm I think I was very impressed about the general quality of the games so it's more about sort of like rough rough diamonds than actually like you know that there wasn't something more sort of wrong in those but I think yeah few points to do consider as a developer thank you I have a question for Ren because she was the jury member last year and and she's again a jury member this year because he's such a great judge and a very knowledgeable about the region if you compare the entries or the nominees of last year to to this year what what are the differences I start with the

positive things yeah it's much better than last year I think the graphics are better this year the storytelling because I think because of the winner of last year so everyone was focusing on to have little story in the game the graphics should be a little little bit better so the graphics were really good the sounds and music better than last year I'm really happy with the graphics so we had a really big competition and the graphics section but I think the missing till now the learning curve she was talking about this learning curve some of the gains most of the games were really difficult to to play it from the beginning so it should not be really the learning curve should be really it's critical thing you know should be easy but not a long time and we can't start with a really hard you know hard level you know the

learning curve is still missing and the gameplay is really important so it should be fun the game should be fun so till now the comparing last year and this year also most of the games not most of the games yeah they're missing the fun factor and you know games should be fun even educational or PC games or hyper casual anything should be fun so I think because we're missing we don't have like I said before education gaming or expertise in the region to really help young people to have you know education and this and that's why we have this conference this year and last year and hopefully next year to have this communication or connections with expertise to have much better games next year yeah so it you have anything to to add to what Ren just said I I remember

you saying something very interesting that I found very intriguing you said it's important that we create characters from the region that our heroes our own heroes and that we are not trying to duplicate heroes that are already created there's certain cultural aspects that have according to what you what I understood from what you were saying have a huge potential in you know in the in the in the rest of the world yeah it's a very difficult and sensitive subject the issue of representation or should I say misrepresentation certainly in the West of anybody with an Arabic background or a Muslim background one which I struggled with personally I mean obviously living in the West you're exposed to this through your whole life more so recently and well I say recently

I'm in the last 15 years and it was very it's very easy given that we have grown up and been exposed to this for such a long time for us to make the mistake of just copying models that already exist because implicit in those models is the representation that casts people with my skin color your skin color many of you or your cultural or religious background in a negative light and when I say a negative light I mean an extremely negative light I the bad guy always the bad guy or in the case of females they're either overtly sexualized in an Orientalist manner or they're subjugated and oppressed now I come here to Jordan I look out in the audience in the auditorium this morning and there is a greater female representation in that audience than in any event and the West and I wonder why

that message doesn't get through back in the UK because all I ever see over there is Oh Arab countries backwards their women are oppressed and I sure didn't see much oppression today let me tell you you know these ladies can hold their own and nobody's telling them what to do I wouldn't be surprised it was very much the other way around certainly is in my house you know so the the serious point here is that we should fall into that mental trap we are all enculturated by the milieu that we have to live in whether we like it or not people might like myself are mentally colonized no matter how much we try and fight it because it just becomes routine it becomes your daily life you don't you're not even aware of it you know I'm people I'm very very close to who don't experience this don't even see it until I point it out to them yeah so I think it's really important that we don't just

copy the models that exist in the media right now and then cast the Arab or the Muslim or whatever as the good guy and then the white guys is about that's not right either I think what is much better is just to put people who are not normally in a positive frame in that positive frame the stories don't have to be completely different you don't have to revert to type you don't have to say oh we're gonna take stories from our background and our heritage you were going to push those out that's one way of doing it but it's a cliched way the other way is just to take the stories that are everywhere and the stories from this part of the world are as profound as any other if not more so in fact you could argue that much of the nevermind the stories but much of the moral code that the world exists under came from this part of the world right going right back to the old testament and perhaps further back still so I think that's really important take ownership of your

representation but don't necessarily be influenced by the representational archetypes that already exist thank you thank you very much I want to move to to the the end of this session first I want you to attend the awards tonight at six o'clock don't forget you're expected to be there we have a lot of surprises don't we but we're not gonna tell anybody right now so it's going to be fun it's going to be not very long it's going to be about an hour there are some I'm looking again at then there's a there's a big surprise huh yeah yeah use huge surprise yeah so so so that's that's all happening at 6 o'clock at the zinc building which is

very close by here and now I'd like to open for some questions that you may have anybody has a question basically anything you can yes a microphone is coming why don't you come over here okay and transact a bit in with the minute with every single maybe that's long enough trouble first of all our moderator here's the first question he asked what what was some things that you would like to see in games my question is what are

things that you don't want to see in games like cliches or like something that you hope people would avoid and making games [Music] exactly so so if you answer that question you have to give two answers you know one with the hat of a jury member of imj and the other one with like half an hour just to tell you what

we don't do for me because I see tons of games that are being copied all the time I mean it can obviously be successful business wise but for the games that we saw in the mga the ones that stood out we're not the games that were copying there were the games that just tried a different approach and I think for me those really stood out because they were unique and they caught my attention and they drew me into the game that drew me into the story where as opposed to a game where I kind of understood what they were doing it was a little less unique and I was able to spot faults a little more easier because I've seen it done before hundreds of times there is another interesting thing that we saw where there were fundamentally similar mechanics but they were mashed together slightly differently and I thought those were pretty unique as well taking a familiar core mechanic and then

combining it with a different meta game that you haven't seen before so that approach was I thought kind of unique the one thing that I did not that I saw a common mistake was there were some games that had a lot of content but it was still missing polish of like the first 1 to 2 seconds of gameplay so what are you doing every 1/2 seconds some slight polish was needed in the core controls of the application of the game and and that kind of made the whole experience a little bit worse so I would say like what are you doing every one to two seconds is really important to focus on really quick don't worry not as long as the last one just add what you were saying absolutely spot-on two mistakes to avoid number one make sure that it's not crashing and not running really really obvious right they ensure compatibility you saw a lot

of games that just didn't work very well across the number of devices and the second one it's even before the one or two seconds of gameplay which are absolutely critical the number of games that we judged based on just one or two seconds of gameplay because here are people on this board who played thousands and thousands and thousands of games so the other thing is make sure that the user flow from the second the game is launched to the first second of gameplay is smooth easy to understand there are too many where there were obstacles or it was hard to understand the flow or perhaps you saw a red arrow to progress for example not naming any names really basic UI errors if you avoid those so that your player is getting straight into the fun without obstacles as quickly as possible is to do that to make that possible even without language because we all seed the same way even though we don't read the same way yeah Thank You OMI yeah so my point was kind of similar but just generally

like you've done the really hard bit like making games is really hard and you've done that so then don't lose to the easy bits there's a lot of them a lot of the games which hadn't been optimized for different devices which is totally easy to do if you've just made it on one thing and test it on one thing or a few similar things and then we play it and the enemies are appearing off the edges of the screen things like that that's a really easy mistake to avoid and you're falling down to little silly things which is a shame because you've done the hard stuff and the ways to avoid these things and the way to avoid the youth and improve user experience flow is make sure you're testing games through different people don't just play it yourself I feel for the obvious but it's a really easy thing to do is just get inside your own head and if you're gonna send the game to a competition like the IMG a then get someone else to download it and make sure the thing you're sending works because so many times it sometimes just doesn't and yeah just make sure you're not falling prey to the silly things and one thing don't do simulation games only simulation you know I know there's no gameplay in it so

we had I think two or three games it's only simulation yeah they were not games yeah so it's really bad I don't know how they you know they okay they were in the list anyway and also I need to talk about education games we had a lot of Education games but no one we didn't had a winner and education games we had a section education games but we had no winner so they were cloning a game that won last year this is really bad so education is really important in our region to teach kids grown-ups anything so it should be fun also this is the problem so a lot of people did education games is not fun no so kids when they want to play a game they should should be fun and nowadays kids are playing a lot of games so they can survive this game so education plus fun is really important so yeah thank you thank you any more questions yeah I mean I was

gonna say I had like one more thing maybe to add there's not so much about the the finished project what about the process of making games taking feedbacks really hard I think it might be one of the most difficult things because you know you're putting so much passion into your projects and then you know someone's kind of like maybe say bad things about it so whatever feedback he gets I see a lot of people who immediately want to super jump on it and defend their game just take notes of it think about it sleep on it for one or two nights and then decide what you're gonna do with the feedback you might think I got actually that person had a good point or the more you think about it you go like no no I don't think they understood the game right how can I make sure that you know other players are yeah just testing and think about your feedback oh you have a question yeah so question about the geographic coverage of the awards I'm GA

yeah because as I understand this thing meaning you're including Turkey and Iran Amina right yes - huge countries have different languages and different capabilities from the region yeah so it kind of feels further out of developers for the level of the Arab game developer it kind of feels unfair especially for example if you take Turkey which is you know they they are much more advanced as an ecosystem in terms of games in terms of all kinds of you know online and digital content and they for example they have a voodoo studio opening there so what's your take on that yeah it it's it's true what you're saying is true being a small country I know everything about it because I'm Dutch so it's a very very small country and they're not a lot of games with some of the games are really good you can't really say that there's a big ecosystem in the Netherlands but we are competing with

the United States and and with others and sometimes very successfully so it doesn't mean very much I you know a hit or a successful game can emerge anywhere but it's true that it's more difficult in certain countries than in others like people from Iran they have a lot of problems at the moment to getting their games out of the country so if they and I think we you know if we see a good game we should support it and you know the the global competition is open for everybody for every country even people from Greenland you know they can they can submit or Africa we have a few entries from Africa sometimes very surprising games where they make they make a lot of real-world games so you you do things in the in it outside and you they integrate you you have the IMG

a the global one yeah then you have the regional one yeah we have two regional ones at the moment we've put put the Southeast Asian competition on pause for the time being but with Chris Calderon we're gonna push it push it again we have a Chinese competition which is very big we have about over a thousand entries each year and and then we have this this competition yeah my concern is that you know the Arabic tile the Arab Talent might be overshadowed you know or the games not much appreciated because they are compared to something of a different caliber if you have for example like a game like Audemars which is the Apple Design Award winner last year applying to the competition here we don't stand a chance to even be visible right so and you know like turkey Turkey from where we're looking at Europe but from where you guys are it's maybe the Middle East but it's a huge country it's

not yeah yeah to be in the first league to be the winner of the third league learn if we want sorry we won't learn if we won't compete with the best if we are still staying and doing me you and you will do the same game and we look at every time on it and we play it all together we'll do the same even after 10 years we have to play with the better and the bigger and see what they do how to learn from them I feel really sorry that as a event that we have not all the developers who made their games here so you can guys talk and learn from each other probably you should do that as a developer or special nd developers one thing for that I've learned from my career and business development that gaming industry is very friendly industry especially guys who have experience on bigger companies

tower the Indies they answer always patiently and have a lot of examples even here who answered even stupid questions patiently ins trying to help so make use of it and just one thing I would add to that you know 10 years ago nobody no investor would put money into any company in Finland and now look at where it is now if you look at the demographics of the top charts and how its evolved over the last 10 years it's changed a lot so I think it's just a matter of time but it does take competition it does take hard work to get there and Nokia ok well thank you very much for being here and see you all at 6 o'clock thank you you you