Our team is exhausted and excited over the work that we did at GameDaily Connect Asia this past few days in Shenzhen, China, a city near Hong Kong. It wasn’t only the great weather that made the event great, but the chance to have our team out there sharing Cocos Creator and great content to the developers that came to the event.
We want to thank everyone who came to our booth and came to discuss the growth in hyper-casual games and what makes Cocos Creator the perfect game engine for developing those games. We also met with a bunch of indie developers and others to learn more about what’s the new cool stuff coming out and what we need to do to help them in the future.
We had more than just a booth at the event as we also had a few people at the meeting giving talks and being the MC for the day. This included Luke Stapley, our Senior Marketing Manager, being an MC for the Growth and Market Navigation sessions.
Luke Stapley
But our main stars, Huabin Ling (aka Panda), our Technical Director, and Jiawei Guo (aka Jare), our product director for Cocos Creator, shared talks on the last day of the event.
If you weren’t able to attend, we’re very sad and disappointed with you. But don’t worry, we got a hold of their presentations and wanted to share some of the gems found in each of them.
Create Hyper-casual Games for New Markets with Cocos Creator w/ Panda
Huabin Ling
With the growth of mini-apps in WeChat, the growth of games inside these mini-apps is exploding as well, leading to a lot of new opportunities for developers. Panda talked about some of the ways WeChat has helped to bring games to bring in more traffic and social opportunities with their technology.
This has been a big hit with hyper-casual as most people playing games on WeChat with people preferring small, quick, and social games, compared to more robust games currently being made for standalone apps. 76% of the top 50 mini-app games are Casual or Hyper-Casual.
Other companies such as Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, Vivo, and apps like Facebook, Tiktok, and WeChat are seeing the success of Hyper-casual and building homes for these games. The great thing is that Cocos is helping most of these companies in assisting developers in making these games using Cocos Creator, as well as finding a home for them with our partnerships.
So why make hyper-casual? How good are they doing? Panda said that from WeChat’s own stats on mini-games, it’s a great new destination for games as the retention rates for these mini-games are impressive with these numbers.
Panda ended saying that that Cocos Creator is the best way to explore new opportunities for hyper-casual games, especially on all kinds of instant gaming platforms. We are also the best partner to help connecting tools and content apps with great hyper-casual content.
Make Game Development Easier w/ Jare
Jiawei Guo
Jare shared ways that developers can improve their use of Cocos Creator with a few tips and best practices that will help them in the future. He started by introducing why it’s the best for any JavaScript or Typescript developer due to it being a lightweight and open-source game engine.
Because of this, we can create an improved workflow for each part of the game development process by allowing each development team their own workflow that can easily be integrated together. So artists can build and test their work using Spine, Tiled, or Cocos Creator, while developers build components and scripts that can all be placed together in a scene and tested for the web and native devices.
Because we are component-based, it’s easy to edit and maintain behaviors in the game while they are being previewed, allowing for quicker bug testing and QA work.
Building Online Games That Are Serverless
When we say serverless, we’re talking about having Faas (Function as a service) support. With new cloud technologies, this makes it possible to no longer need to have one dedicated server for your games. We have been working to improve this so you can improve the speed and quality of online gaming for your players.
Thanks to companies like Tencent Cloud, this is going to be the future of mobile gaming as things start to move to the next generation of mobile gaming. We’re helping to make this simple for developers making online development work even easier to set up and maintain.
Adding more 3rd Party Services
Speaking of online development, we’re helping to add more support for your online services with services that also help improve your game, including voice chat, matchmaking, and analytics. All of these are integrated with Cocos Creator today or in the near future. This is something we continue to grow and happy to add more with the help of partners to make your games more enjoyable and build a deeper experience for your players.
Thank you, everyone, for coming and we hope to see you next year!
