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EGD 017: Rapid Development and Validation with Riku Rakkola Co-Founder and CEO of Traplight

Riku Rakkola is the co-founder and CEO of Traplight, a mobile gaming studio from Tampere, Finland. Riku and his team where trying to find thier success for several years, until they finally got the approach to game development right and through months of prototyping different ideas, they came up with the right idea and started validation.

We discuss several topics, but the validation discussion with Riku is super valuable as they’ve really figured out the steps. Rapid development and validating early would consist of these steps:

  • Make sure your game team understands the business and market.
  • Go after an idea, only if you feel it can be quickly prototyped and played internally.
  • After playtesting, you should be able to figure out that you can apply a meta-game to the prototype.
  • Polish for three months and then do a soft launch to see the retention Day-1 numbers. Should be over 40%.
  • Improve game to have enough content for players to play, for at least four days. 
  • Get your Day-3 numbers and look at the ratio of Day-3 divided by Day-1, which should be over 75%.
  • If you aren’t there yet with 75% or over, start improving the first four days’ experience, update the game and measure the Day-3 / Day-1 ration, until you can hit 75%.

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