Inside InnoGames

The Four Pillars of Fun in Game Design – Part Three

This is the third and last part of the series “The Four Pillars of Fun in Game Design”. If you haven’t read the previous ones yet, check out number one and two.

The Three Supporting Pillars

Supplementing the four pillars of game fun are three components I would like to describe as “supporting pillars”. Although these supporting aspects are able to make a game more interesting, they behave like cream on a pie. Nearly no one would exclusively want the cream! What I want to say is this: do not solely rely on the supporting pillars. Your game concept should include some actual game fun at the heart of it.

The three supporting pillars are: rewards, progress and social pressure. Read more →

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Game Design, the Universe and Everything

Peer Kröger Game Designer

An Explanation by Game Designer Peer Kröger

People are curious. They like to ask questions, and they like to get answers they understand. So, when I get asked what I do for a living I tell them “I design games”. A short, easy to understand answer. They get the basic idea of what I am doing: “So, you invent games? Play games all day, scribble down a few notes and come up with a cool idea? Awesome!”

Usually, I don’t disagree at this point. If I would start telling people what I actually do, not only would I break their illusions, I would also start a long and confusing monologue. I would lose myself in explanations and examples, and in the end I would still not provide a satisfactory answer. Read more →

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The InnoGames Approach: How and Why We Strive for Employee Satisfaction

While there’s no denying that great employees pave the way for any company, talented personnel are not the only key to success. No, in fact the fundamental factor for a booming business is actually a motivated workforce.

There’s many benefits to keeping your employees happy

While it’s logical, research also supports the relationship between a company’s success and employee satisfaction.

Why Employee Satisfaction is Important to Firms

1. Positively Affects Accomplishments

The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies found that employees who were highly engaged had higher personal accomplishments. Which makes sense, the happier an employee is at work, the more likely they are willing to push to meet their goals and set more challenging ones. Read more →

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How the Treasure Hunt in Forge of Empires Works

Wondering how the treasure hunt in Forge of Empires works? Well you came to the right place, we break it down to the basics in this blog post.

You’ll be smiling too at all these treasures!

The first thing you need to know about “Treasure Hunt” is that it is only active after Cultivation is reached in your Technology Tree. Once it is open, the feature can be accessed via the quest icon on the left of your city screen. Read more →

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Unity 3D Tutorial: How to Improve Text Field Outlines

If you’ve ever used the “outline” component for Unity UI Text Fields, you might have noticed that the outlines are quite sharp and can lead to rendering errors when the outline size is too large. In this tutorial, I will show you how to minimize errors and improve the visual quality of outlines to increase readability. The idea is to create a shader that creates the effect by multi-sampling the texture that contains the text characters with an offset to have smooth outlines. The same technique is also used when creating outer glow effects or blur post processing of a whole image.

Making text outlines readable in Unity

UV Clipping

The challenge here is that to render batch text, Unity3D puts all characters of a particular font into an atlas texture. Meaning, that adding an offset to the UVs is not enough. As you can see from my first test below, adding an offset to the UVs makes neighboring characters that are part of the texture bleed into out rendering output: Read more →

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How St. Patrick’s Day is More Than Just a Party

First of all, this isn’t the first time we make the case for company parties. Nevertheless, St. Patrick’s Day is not generally a tradition most workplaces openly endorse unless… you work for us.

Parties as Part of Business Identity:

Since 2008 InnoGames has been passionately celebrating this Irish holiday with its workers. For us, this celebration goes beyond a few beers with the colleagues, it’s part of our tradition especially since one of our founders is a big fan of this party.

Scroll below to see pictures from the party

You see, people support things which they feel benefit their employee experience. From the very beginning it was important for InnoGames to set up a company culture where fun and cooperation were encouraged. While we do these through various processes, like team events and in-house workshops, parties are an important way we get people to mingle and interact. This year we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in both of our offices: Hamburg and Düsseldorf. Our fellow workers got to enjoy beer, cider and a tasty Irish stew. Read more →

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My InnoGames Story: Philip Bang

Every month we’ll bring you real life stories from our colleagues on how they came to work at InnoGames. We find that sharing their journey captures the liveliness of our company. Enjoy! You can find last month’s story here.

Philip Bang, Studio Director

My name is Philip Bang and I started in February 2016 as a Studio Director. Currently there are four games in my studio’s portfolio: Tribal Wars, Tribal Wars 2, Grepolis and The West. These games aren’t the youngest in the company but they are great games with very engaged players. This passion for YOUR game is the reason I joined the gaming industry in the first place. It is all about creating something meaningful:

Creating something that is more than just a product.

Creating something together with the players to make their game – our game – better with every release.

Creating something amazing with teams that are as passionate and devoted to their games as our players are. Read more →

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The Four Pillars of Fun in Game Design – Part Two

This is part two on the series “the four pillars of fun in Game Design”. If you haven´t read the first one yet, please do so HERE.

While it can be difficult to create a ‘Fun’ game, it is not impossible; if you have the right ingredients… As a game designer, my main goal is to understand the significance of actual “game fun” (or how entertaining a game is) and to actively focus on it. Yet, despite all my experience, I know it can be tricky for those just starting out.

How do you make a game fun?

This is why I created the “4 Pillars of Fun” blog series. In it I tell you exactly what you need to create a fun game through my four pillars: mastery, novelty, autonomy and community. I went over the first two pillars in the first blog post and will focus on the second two in this one. Read more →

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The Four Pillars of Fun in Game Design – Part One

‘Fun’ is a tricky thing in the gaming industry. There’s tons of games promising it but only a few can actually be seen as entertaining. As a game designer, my main goal is to understand the significance of actual “game fun” (or how entertaining a game is) and to actively focus on it. Yet, even I know it can be hard to put it into your game, so I created a blog series titled the “4 pillars of fun” to help you out.

How do you design fun into a game?

In this series you will find simple principles that – if you at least slightly take them into account – will guarantee that your game isn’t solely relying on manipulative psychology (as is the case for too many games on Facebook).
Read more →

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The Secrets Behind Player Portraits in Forge of Empires

In case you haven’t noticed, player portraits tend to top the list of player’s needs; after gameplay must-haves of course. In fact, games like Forge of Empires have huge quantities of them, with new ones coming with every age or event. Yet,even though players are used to seeing them, their aesthetic is usually a mystery (especially when it comes to how they look or who is represented). So, what influences them? I’ll let you in on a little secret: the setting and the team.

Forge of Empires player portraits from the future era