From January 26 to February 23, an open Game Designer Challenge competition was held on the Internet. It was conducted by the Moscow company ZeptoLab, known for a series of mobile chatterboxes Cut the Rope about a cute animal Am-Nyama. Yesterday, the company officially summed up the results of the competition.

Mark Skaggs, author of Farmville and Empires & Allies, now works for the Indian studio Moonfrog Labs. The game designer is convinced that this country is waiting for a big boom in the mobile gaming industry.

Simon Newstead, CEO and game designer of the Hong Kong company Frenzoo, told how the team is testing game art and icons. We have translated the text and are sharing it.

At the end of last year, Supercell released one of the largest recent additions to the highest-grossing mobile game of 2015 – Clash of Clans. Despite the large number of innovations, the players met the update “with hostility”. What the Finnish company did “wrong”, – I understood App2Top.ru .

On February 2, Blizzard announced the introduction of two game formats to Hearthstone. The players met the news ambiguously. We tried to figure out what made the American company take unpopular measures.

What is the difference between games and toys, what is an honest free-to-play, whether a game designer should understand monetization – you can find out about this and much more in our transcript of the first issue of the podcast “Underground Game Design“.

The St. Petersburg studio Orc Work is currently working on its second game – the role-playing battler Evilibrium II. A closed alpha testing of the project has recently started. In this regard, we talked with the producer of the team about preparing the game for release.

The author of the Monkey Island series of games, the Grim Fandango quest and the Psychonauts platformer, Tim Schafer, shared tips on managing the game development team.

About what should (or should not) read if you decide to become a game designer, App2Top.ru told by Artur Ostapenko, Svyatoslav Torik, Andrey “Krank” Kuzmin, Leonid Sirotin, Ilya Yeremeev and Dmitry Nozhnin.

Head of the mobile direction My.com Alexander Enin shared with App2Top.ru their thoughts, including why mobile developers now need to take up the creation of MMORPGs.

Sergey Bruy , co-founder and Managing Partner of Vizor Interactive , told App2Top.ru about the state of the social games market and the company’s plans.

Executive Director of Nevosoft Pavel Ryakkonen shared with App2Top.ru he remembered the events of 2015.

Nekki CEO Dmitry Terekhin in his material for App2Top.ru he told not only about the trends of the outgoing year, but also brought news about the company’s physics engine, which may become available to everyone next year.

Andrey Pryakhin, CEO of Kefir, shared with App2Top.ru thoughts about the most important events of the year.

The former general producer of Game Insight Leonid Sirotin said App2Top.ru about what interested and disappointed him in the outgoing year.

Roman Menyakin, Director of Business Development at Unity in Russia, told App2Top about the past year.

Mentor of the “Games Market” category on vc.ru and Nekki Development Director Sergey Babaev shared with App2Top his thoughts about the outgoing year.

Ryan Cash from a small indie company Snowman talked to the resource 80.lv about the mobile game Alto’s Adventure. Cash spoke about how the project was created, about the choice of style and about the biggest problems of indie development.

Gaijin Entertainment CEO Anton Yudintsev summed up in a publication for App2Top.ru the results of the outgoing year.