How long should an iPhone FPS last?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m making a FPS for the iPhone and I’m building 5 levels, I can make the levels as long as I want, but what is a good length? How long as far as game play should a level last? How long (play time) should the game be?

Thanks,
JL

2

Why not just make your game as per your vision, and not worry so much about duration. Most gamers aren’t concerned about spending more time in a game, rather than having fun throughout the whole experience, no matter the length.

For example, Metal Gear Solid, for PSX wasn’t the longest game I’ve ever played but it was so much fun to play.

3

I agree.

I plan on just making it as long as it logically should be. I just thought I’d get some other people’s thoughts on the matter.

Thanks for the reply.

4

The slidetoplay or toucharcade forums might be better for gamers’ perspectives, but the desire of consumers is endless so take their requests with a grain of salt.

5

My recommendation is to keep them as short as possible while stil l retaining your original vision. It should be as long as it needs to be, but considering the normal playing behavior of portable device users, I am of the mind that shorter is better.

6

Yeah, I’m not going to add stuff, just for the sake of adding it. I guess I’ll just build the game and see what the end result is.

7

Obviously the game should be long enough that players feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth, but this is difficult to gauge for an FPS as there are precious few examples of successful ones on the App Store. The only one that really comes to mind is Wolfenstein 3D, but the problem with that is that it’s a port of a classic PC game, which means it has a lot of content that comes ‘free’ to the developer. Looking at iD’s original iPhone offering, Doom Resurrection, it’s clearly a much shorter game, but the fact that it’s on rails means the developer can pace it out so players can’t just rush through the way they might in a free-form linear FPS.

I agree that the best approach is probably just to make the game as long as it feels it should be to you, and listen to any feedback from testers/early adopters. You also always have the option of making new levels and such for updates, which has the positive side effect of helping you to keep sales going over a longer period of time. If you make it clear from the start that you’ll be delivering new content in updates and actually deliver on that promise, you could gain a lot of loyalty and also potentially shorten the development time needed for your initial release (i.e. deliver a smaller amount of content initially and update consistently to flesh out your original vision).

Another great thing about doing it this way is it allows you to respond to your fans’ input in making updates. Some of the most consistently successful apps in the store are ones that started small and were fleshed out based on user feedback - for example Stick Wars and Pocket God. They have massive followings now, and it’s largely due to the responsiveness of the developer in delivering updates.