Supercell's Clash of Clans was one of the most successful games of 2012, and it's one of the most discussed games on the international mobile conference scene.
A good opportunity then for product manager Michail Katkoff to kick off the Winter Nights conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Titled 'Clash of Clans: Secrets of Success' Katkoff - who previously worked at Digital Chocolate and Rovio before joining Supercell - described the interdependence of the game's economy.
"It only take 30 minutes to train a dragon, but to get to that stage it takes four days to upgrade your barracks," he said.
You also have up upgrade your town hall, and upgrade your gold storage in order to have enough gold to purchase these upgrades. Of course, with a lot of gold stored, you'll also have to build up your defences to stop enemies stealing it before you can spend it.
Hence the entire process take weeks, but player can always see that they are making progress Katkoff said.
"Providing them with visual progress is very important for us."
Behind the curtain
In terms of the game's development, Supercell spends a lot of time playing a wide variety of games on different platforms to gain creative inspiration. This is combined with a strong vision and theme for the game.
Five people worked for two months to create the first playable version of Clash of Clans.
Supercell keeps its development teams compact, and significantly, doesn't have dedicated game designers. That is something everyone in the team feeds into. Each team has a data scientist embedded, however.
And playing your game was one of Katkoff's key pieces of advice to developers.
"We play our games a lot," he said. "Before I joined Supercell, I didn't know people could play their games as much as we do."
Of course, Supercell also followed the usual process of soft-launching the game in Canada before the full global release.
"You need to test your infrastructure and analytics," Katkoff said. "No matter how much you've played your game, you will have to tweak your economy. It will shift a lot when consumer start playing."
News
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
Related Articles
Feature
May 17th, 2024
New release roundup: The best new mobile games from a battle royale to a console classic remake
Top Stories
Feature
May 17th, 2024
New release roundup: The best new mobile games from a battle royale to a console classic remake
Feature
May 16th, 2024
Behind the scenes: How adding sandwich offers to an idle merge game boosted three metrics at once
Events
Digital Dragons | Europe | May 19th |
GamesBeat Summit 2024 | North America | May 20th |
Mobidictum Meetup Tallinn May 2024 | Europe | May 21st |
Nordic Game Spring 2024 | Nordic | May 21st |
Impact 2024 - Indie Games | May 23rd | |
Morocco Gaming Expo | Africa | May 24th |
MomoCon 2024 | North America | May 24th |
Unreal Fest Gold Coast 2024 | Australasia | May 29th |
Popular Stories
Feature
May 14th, 2024
53 top mobile games in soft launch: Squad Busters, Battle Guys: Royale, Plants vs. Zombies 3, LEGO Hill Climb Adventures, and more
Feature
May 13th, 2024
Hot Five: Dubai's new Gaming Visa, April's mobile game charts, and Xbox studio closures
Interview
May 13th, 2024