patrick_halina

Hey there’s also Canada! We don’t have San Francisco salaries but Toronto tech blows away the EU. With a job offer, you can get a visa in a few weeks.

If you can survive the cold, there’s lots of tech job openings in Toronto at top tier companies. You won’t make as much money as the US but you can buy a house in downtown Toronto for $1M US. Once you get a Canadian citizenship, it’s possible to work in the US whenever you want with a TN visa.

RL is a good theoretical solution for personalization: given a user state, select an action that maximizes a long term reward (eg. revenue/engagement.) It’s tricky building the implementations because unlike Go/Chess/Atari it’s hard to simulate humans. So you have to train the agents with batches of data offline (ie. using historic data from the agent’s past actions.) This is challenging because you don’t get as many chances to try different hyper parameters. It’s starting to be used more in industry though.

Absolutely. Art vs. business. If you're happy painting a masterpiece even if nobody sees it, then you only really need advice on how to make beautify art.

I think most artists want an audience, and that requires skills on the business side. Having a successful business also pays to create more art. I can't help you there!

If you look at the app store top 100, there aren't that many "fun" or original games up there. There's even a tonne of idle click games! I think one thing that's important to recognize is that most people playing mobile games don't see the experience as a 'game'. It's more of a passive ride to distract themselves for a few minutes. Idle click games aren't fun in a traditional sense, but they have isolated a reward feedback loop in your brain and serve some function to make its users enjoy the experience.

I didn't work at Zynga on game design, so I'm not here to defend corporate mobile game design. However, I don't want to knock the business side of things too much either. I learned there's a ton of creativity in creating new hooks and game modes to increase engagement/spending. Games constantly riff off each others game loops and it's a very quickly evolving field. There's also lots of room for creativity in making successful advertising campaigns.

I used to work for Zynga. My advice is to think about how you'll gain users. The mobile gaming world is basically user arbitrage. You buy users (via the ads market) for X, and if you make more than X, you print money. It's helpful to find a creative that gets clicks for cheaper than the rest of the market. Eg. if your ads have slots machines, then it costs $25 to acquire a user. If you find some niche, like cool cars in your ads, maybe you can spend a lot less to get users. I'd recommend testing your ads before even starting on coding a game, test out a few different branding concepts. Really successful mobile gaming companies have a tight loop between their ads and game development. It's important to get quick feedback and see how new game features affect user retention and spending habits. Note, all of this costs money! Do you have a marketing budget to acquire users.

What not to do: spend a year coding a game in your basement, then "release" it and hope it grows from word of mouth. Those days are long gone.