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The gameplay is an idle tap builder. you set in motion various buildings and enhancements to your colony and leave for a while. Upon return, your colony has grown and earned you money through exports. The money is used to grow your colony further. Outside of your base is a world of exploration. Using drones you can scan the surface and look for new zones to explore. Each zone has mountains, cliffs, craters, plains, and ravines to explore. Using a growing number of rovers you explore these regions to bring back minerals, rocks, and relics. As you collect certain elements you can terraform the local area turning it green and unlocking new and different elements.

The game is highly addictive and is very easy and generous, to begin with. Progress is quick and the game is quick to give you money and supplies. Adverts are non-intrusive and are entirely optional to increase the size of your haul or as extra goodies by your colonists.

The lack of any Martian army trying to destroy you is a welcome change as it’s good to simply grow your colony without the contrast need to battle an army every day. Growth is organic and stress-free.

The graphics are simplistic and use beautifully toned polygon graphics. The muted color tone is gentle on the eye and the menus are clear and simplistic with big buttons for my fat fingers. As clicking the various food, water, and power icons, there are satisfying bursts of animation, and each time your shuttle takes off or returns you are treated to fanfare and cut scene which is a nice touch. Sounds and music fit nicely and the usual ‘kerching’ is music to your ears.

My only niggles would be the inability to move buildings as the OCD in me would like to keep the farms, industrial and vehicle buildings in neat little neighborhoods. Another issue I found was sometimes the ads didn’t reward me and I even tried watching it three times. However, this was very rare.

Overall, Mars: Colony Survival is a fun and addictive game that is simple to pick up and play but has an extensive roadmap of growth that will take many hours to complete. The unobtrusive ads are amazing and should act as a benchmark to other games on managing ads in-game. It would be great to move buildings in the future but it is not a deal-breaker. I can see this living on my phone for a very long time.

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Let’s take a closer look at four benefits businesses can get out of this approach:

1) Increase User Engagement

Gamification works because humans have an innate need to play games. We’re hardwired for competition, exploration, and collaboration. Combining that need with an activity people are already engaged in makes them more likely to spend time with what you’re offering. Cisions new casino guide is a great example of this.

Also, look no further than fitness trackers like Fitbit and Shine to give you one great example of gamification in action. Whether they realize it or not, people using these wearable devices are constantly competing against themselves to try to meet their own goals. And according to The New York Times, this leads many users to do “a kind of virtuous circle dance… seeing the device as a coach.”

2) Encourage Personal Development

Gamification isn’t just about increasing engagement; it’s also about encouraging personal development by allowing your users to set specific goals. This involves creating compelling challenges based on user interests and motivations, rewarding action without interference or intrusion, and creating a “safe learning environment that allows them to try new things,” according to author Liz Ryan.

Lululemon understands this concept well. The company has been using an in-store yoga program called Digital Detox since 2013. It’s based on a philosophy of staying connected with your body, taking time away from screens every once in a while so you can visit and associate with yourself. That way, Lululemon argues, “you’ll leave with the right energy to go back out into the world.”

3) Create More Meaningful Customer Experiences

In business terms, customer experience is everything when getting repeat customers or attracting new ones. But what if you can’t afford to hire a dedicated content designer for your website? Here’s where gamification comes in. This approach doesn’t just get more people through the door or on your site; it creates meaningful connections that encourage customers to engage with each other and feel more connected to your business model as well.

One of the most compelling examples of this is at HGTV. Using user-generated contests offered up on its Facebook fan page, the company has managed to create thousands of “micro-fans” who are willing to design new rooms based on their favourite shows for a chance to win $500.

4) Build Customer Loyalty

Let’s be honest: every business wants loyal customers, but only some have cultivated them effectively. So what’s the secret? According to the author and futurist Amy Jo Kim, it all comes down to creating a “fun work environment that employees want to come back to.”

Of course, there are many ways you can accomplish this goal, but one of the easiest is by using gamification techniques in your business processes. This includes giving employees fun incentives like employee of the month awards or asking them to set specific goals and track their progress (for example, email response times).

By infusing play into everyday business processes,” writes Kim, “you create happier work environments and strengthen bonds between people in your company… making your culture more attractive and resilient.”

And that’s not even the best part about gamification. The real benefit is that it makes users more engaged with what you’re offering, which leads to better results overall. That’s good for everyone involved.

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Here, in this post we will give you some additional information as well as emerging Unity techniques to encourage you to share and count the best thing possible. Let us discuss the 3D unity or Unity3D. United is nothing but a cross-platform game engine that helps developers to embrace the Unity as well as Unity3D best practices and will help them make a better game developer. When you are using it, you must be thinking or think about the advantages or benefits of using it. Therefore we are concerned about big benefits of this approach and that help it enables you to differentiate the concerns:

• Think about the pooling and approach.
• The identification of what generally makes one or multiple materials are different from one another.
• The material and the generation for all of Unity 3D.
• The whole thing would be the great help for the developers.

You can easily replace each one or one after another of these sans worrying that much and about the others if you need for the purpose of 3D game development. Another benefits as well as advantages of this Unity approach is to follow and allow you just to query for the material from the pool without caring if it is generated a new thing. 

Another advantage of this approach is that it allows you just to query for a material from the pool without caring whether it will generate a new one or reuse an existing one.

Using a Material Pool to Give Up the Excessive Instancing

Here is another tip for you, a reliable source said that to customize the materials for the purpose of various game objects. This is not only a great practice that can save your time and energy and at the same time money but also helps you create the materials smoothly. Moreover, in such cases where your objects would be frequent and generated as well as destroyed later. This is some techniques that could lead to lead and unite the new things or the materials in each case. This is an useful pool of material. You can easily replace each one or one after another of these sans worrying that much and about the others if you need for the purpose of 3D game development.

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Who is Green Throttle Games?

Green Throttle Games produces a game controller that was designed to connect wirelessly to mobile devices by using Bluetooth technology. This can overcome the typical limitation of gaming on smart phones and tablets, by providing physical buttons for precision controls. Let’s hope that the Santa Clara Company that now belongs to Google will bring something new to the table sometime in the future.

Green Throttle Games came up with an Android app that demanded the use of its own “Atlas” controller, which by the way looked just like the Xbox 360 joystick, only it was connected to other Android phones via Bluetooth. The app was removed from Google Play at the end of 2013, and it looks like it only had a couple of thousands downloads. The company kept selling the Atlas controller in spite of the fact that gamers couldn’t download the app anymore. But all that is in the past right now.

This acquisition feeds industry speculation that Google is working on a TV set-top game box, which would enable customers to play Android games on the big screen. This is a hot technology area right now. Apple has a product on the market now, the Apple TV, and Amazon is expected to bring their set top box out within a month.

These big players became interested in this once they found how interested consumers are in their mobile games. In fact, both the iTunes store and Google Play have so many games on offer that they are virtual arcades. With sales like this, it is obvious the market is hot, and that the big companies are taking it seriously. Apple has their offering in position, and with Amazon hot on their heels, can Google be far behind?

We have high expectations from Google

Google has attempted similar products in the past, with little success, and industry insiders are speculating about what their next box will do. Their relatively new Chromecast dongle allows mobile content to be played on a television.

How will the new box operate? While it could be something as simple as a Chromecast-style connection to the internet, experts predict that it will be more capable than that, but still far short of the powerful mainstream gaming consoles that are already  on the market. Google does have money to invest, however, and they have proven their willingness to spend on new technologies before.

At the moment, it looks like the established consoles on the market, the Microsoft XBOX One and the Sony PS4 will retain their leadership positions. It doesn’t appear that the new boxes from Google, Apple, or Amazon will be powerful enough to take a bite out of their core market. However, this could be just the start. As hardware gets cheaper and cheaper every day, and cloud computing becomes more powerful, flexible, and integrated into our lives, things could change.

The public’s gaming tastes can and do shift, also. In a few years, these two powerhouses may be facing some serious competition. Years ago, people thought it was an odd choice for Microsoft to move into the gaming market from its traditional Windows and desktop software. They thought the same when Sony made their move into gaming consoles.

Google has some big advantages at this point – incredible financial clout and money to invest, teams of highly skilled engineers, and an Android platform with millions of users worldwide. They certainly have the potential to become a big player in this market, and the purchase of Green Throttle Games looks like a step in that direction.

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Q. How long have you been creating music for video games?

Hmmm, well my interest in composing music at all came from my days playing games on the ZX Spectrum in the late 80’s / early 90’s.  I actually started out as a programmer and whilst I became proficient in BASIC, assembler just went over my head for some reason.  Then one day via Your Sinclair I discovered Soundtracker on the ZX +2, became active in the demo scene of the day and the rest is history!  So in some respects you could say I have been composing for games since the early 90’s.  However, despite always being involved with music in one way or another, more recently I began writing for games again around 2010…Actually starting with SFX.

Q. Do you have a particular industry hero or someone who you look to (or listen to) for inspiration?

A band called Telefon Tel Aviv were a huge influence on me, a friend introduced me to their music at a time where I had all but stopped composing and hearing the way they manipulated sounds gave me a whole new perspective on both composition and sound design.  I’d also add Brad Fiedel to this list, his Terminator theme has always stayed with me as one of the greatest movie themes of all time.  Yuzo Koshiro is another who I admire and has absolutely influenced me, his Streets of Rage soundtrack was one of the first I recorded to cassette so I could listen whenever I wanted.  Also, not only was the music fantastic but it was written in a programming language he created for himself!

Q. Do you collect or listen to game and movie scores outside of work?

I do, though often I think not as much as I should.  I tend to listen to whatever reference material I have been given for the game I am working on whilst driving to and from the studio and I will also flick through the radio just to listen to what is out there, and to pick up on any current mix techniques.  I have quite a few movie soundtracks in my CD collection too, but probably the ones you’d expect (Hans Zimmer anyone?).

Q. What’s your favorite game track or the one your most proud of and why?

At this time, it would have to be the current work in progress music I am doing for Xiotex Studios’ Cyberstream Fugitive, but to be honest I think the piece of work you are most proud of it usually the one you’re currently working on or the one you’ve just finished!  Each soundtrack provides its own challenges and learning curve within those challenges, and it is meeting these that enables you to keep learning and bettering yourself.

Q. Do you approach a retro chip tune differently to a more modern piece?

This is a difficult one…I suppose the only difference in approach would be the obvious one of instrument choice a lot of the time, otherwise no.  Recently however, I was asked to create three chip tunes for Super Icon’s  ‘Life of Pixel’ on the PS Vita which definitely required a different approach; I had to stay within the exact spec of each sound chip involved, so the BBC Micro song for example had 3 channels and 1 channel of white noise only!  Thankfully my history in music meant I was used to the constraints and knew a few tricks!

Q. Do you have a preference of retro or modern?

Hmmm, I couldn’t write just one or the other I don’t think…I enjoy both in the right amounts, is that a good enough answer?

Q. What’s your favourite game soundtrack (that’s not yours)?

So many to chose from!  If I had to pick a couple instantly from my brain, I would have to say the aforementioned Streets of Rage soundtrack and also the music from The Legend of Zelda, Link’s Awakening on the Gameboy, that music completely encompassed me whilst playing.

Q. What been your most ambitious or biggest project?

Away from purely game audio, it has to be recording with the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra a track I composed called ‘Dream the Dream’, as published by Audio Network.  Within the game audio world I would have to say it is the current project Cyberstream Fugitive, though as I alluded to before the next project is always the most ambitious!

Q. What’s the average turn around time for a 5 track project?

That’s an easy one to answer, the average turn around is as quick as it is needed!

Q. In your experience, how many tracks does the average game need?

I don’t think it would be possible to specify an average number of tracks per game, clearly every game is different and I’d even say some could work better without music (thought don’t tell anyone I said that!).  To be honest, unfortunately no matter how many tracks a game needs audio is usually one of the first things to be cut to keep file sizes down so that can often determine things.  If pushed, I’d say you’d definitely need at least a menu track and one for in game if the game demands it!

Q. What kind of information would you need from a client in terms of a brief?

Good question!  Ideally I like to get some reference tracks and also a playable build of sorts, or even just some concept art or a video of gameplay.  Often I try and talk to the client and find out what has influenced them when creating the game and apply these influences to the audio too, but sometimes I haven’t been given anything other than the instruction to write a 2 minute piece of looping music!  For the game ‘Gunslugs’ by Orangepixel, I was given the instruction of 80’s action hero movie in the chip tune genre which was a great instruction, something as simple as that can be enough.  Ideally though a rough guide of how many tracks are needed, a general genre, if they need to be looping and a guideline to how long each track should be is a good starting point.  Of course it goes without saying that needs will change as the game progresses but everyone needs a start point.

Q. How do you cost for music creation?

I try and base my costs on a fee per minute of music created but will also work where appropriate for a project fee, this is usually best when asked to provide both music and SFX.  To be honest I try and be as flexible as possible when it comes to budgets!

Q. Do you use any special optimizing techniques when creating tracks for mobile games?

If you mean do I employ any techniques when supplying the music to help the code along then no, as I usually send the audio in mp3 format.  I would like to experiment more with adaptive audio and I suspect I’ll have to employ some optimisation for that.

Q. Would you ever be tempted to make a music based game?

Absolutely!

Q. Whats your favourite game (of all time)?

Ahhhh…I’d have to say if pushed Pilotwings on the N64!

For more information and to listen to some of his tracks please visit http://gavinharrisonsounds.com

[soundcloud params=”auto_play=true&show_comments=true&color=0ac4ff”]https://soundcloud.com/gavinharrison[/soundcloud]

[alert type=”yellow”]Source: http://www.debugdesign.com[/alert]

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